Dan's Notes / Issue 8: Morning rituals • Habit stacking • Psychological engineering

Hi friends,

In issue #1 I shared a link about the science of waking up and declared an experiment of going for a walk every morning shortly after waking up. I had some fun conversations with friends after that email and many of you seemed interested in the concept, so here's a short update about that, 8 weeks later.

The morning walks only lasted for about two weeks. Eventually I returned to reading + writing with my usual cup of coffee shortly after waking up. Ultimately I didn't feel like going for a walk matched my usual headspace in the mornings. I'm more of a Morning Pages guy - what I need in the morning is not 30 minutes alone with my brain; I need a notes app and a computer keyboard.

What did stick was some changes prompted by a link I shared in issue #3 about rituals. Rituals are the key to doing things consistently. When motivation and discipline fall short, rituals help nudge you towards action.

One way to create rituals is by habit stacking, which is simply chaining new behaviors on to existing ones. Something I do every morning without exception is wake up and go to the bathroom. It's an automatic behavior. So for the past few months I've been stacking new habits on top of that:

• Step on the scale

• Take allergy medicine

• Put lotion on my hands

• Drink a full glass of water

• Eat something small

• Water plants

• Write Morning Pages

• Project review

It's the most consistent part of my day. And it's so easy! I don't need to summon willpower or motivation or discipline to do these things; by now they're almost automatic, and they have positive effects on my goals.

Project Review is something I added last week, and it's the best addition yet. I have a "Projects" file in my notes app that I look at every morning. All of my ongoing projects are listed there, and for each one I update the status of each one along with today's date. No fancy system here, just a text file. Roughly half of the list is work projects, followed by life projects: a project Chessa and I are working on, planning our wedding, Coachella prep, upcoming trips, designing drink coasters for my dad. The list also gets updated during the day, but simply looking at this list each morning is anchoring and has helped me feel more present.

Habit stacking is a simple tool I've used for a long time with great success. James Clear has a great overview of how it works here.

Links from this week:

Seth Godin Hates Being Organized

Organizing is like building a case to hold your tools. You don’t get points for making it fancy, you get points for doing the work. [...]

Being productive and being organized are not always the same thing. The trap with organizing is that it can sometimes be an excuse not to ship things.

​

You should not open a door and...

Superior technology tends to displace inferior technology, which is why nobody commutes to work via zeppelin, steam engine, or penny farthing. So how come we can ditch silly airships but we can’t ditch dumb doors? [...]

The answer, I think, is that design involves both technological engineering and psychological engineering, and psychological engineering is harder.

aside: I would totally visit this hypothetical "Museum of Psychological Engineering":

In the MuPE, every door shows you exactly how you should interact with it. Queues are perfectly designed so waiting in line is painless. You get to interact with tons of bad designs––remote controls, office chairs, moving vans––and then you get to see the versions that have solved the psychological engineering problems and go “ahh that’s so much better." There should be a room where you can design something in real time and watch people interact with it, just to see how hard psychological engineering is. And yes, going to the bathroom would be a dream, and nobody would ever walk in on someone pooping.

​

The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done

Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.

See you next week!

-Dan