Spring Cleaning

Composite’s approach to health is largely built around habits. That’s because habits, once built, are easy to maintain. They are, by definition, what you do by default.

For most people, energy, willpower, and commitment to a goal wax and wane over time. You have days when you’re psyched up and ready to go, and others when you’re barely dragging through. That’s why we tend to favor building systems – something you can plan out and implement when you’re at your best, to keep you on the rails when you’re at your worst.

One system that we’ve found extremely effective is the Refrigerator Rule: in short, you’re eventually going to eat anything you keep in your refrigerator or cabinets. So you should probably only keep on hand food that passes muster with your best, most psyched-up, goal-committed self.

When we review food journals with clients, we’ll frequently find that they ate crappy afternoon snacks a few times during the past week. At which point, we always ask the same question: did you eat that cookie / candy bar / entire stack of Pringles because you really wanted it, or because it was there? And, about 95% of the time, people tell us they ate that specific unhealthy snack because it was the easy thing to do.

Life is short, and pleasure is important. If you really want a doughnut, go out and buy one (or three) fresh, and enjoy the hell out of it.

But if you don’t want one badly enough to head to the doughnut shop for it, I’d argue you don’t really want one all that much. You’re just stuffing down the semi-stale Entenmann’s because that’s what’s in your office kitchen.

So, today, on the first day of spring, take a moment and do your health a favor: spring clean the crap – the cookies, candy, chips, crackers, etc. – out of your home and office. Perhaps even go out and pick up some pistachios and walnuts, apples and oranges, beef jerky or string cheese to replace it.

If you want to eat something less healthful at some point, again, you’re an adult; go buy it and enjoy it. But in the meantime, make fitness easy for yourself. Get rid of the tempting garbage that’s just sitting there, and don’t let your future self make bad choices by default.

Just Tell Me

As I’ve mentioned before, over the past year, I’ve been testing out workout programming from a number of sources I respect, to see what good ideas and inspiration I can gather for Composite’s programming. After each stretch of trying someone else’s programming, I then spend a month or so doing programming I lay out for myself, incorporating what I’ve learned.

Looking back at my logs over the past year, a clear pattern emerges: when I’m following someone else’s programming, my compliance is very high, and I make it to the gym with great regularity; when I’m following my own, I start getting lax, taking days off, and routinely need ten or twelve days to cycle through what I’d laid out as workouts for a single week.

Given that I’m a compulsive self-tracker, that led me to look at other spheres of my life. And, indeed, when it comes to playing the trumpet, for example, I tend to practice more regularly and rigorously if I’m getting assignments from a teacher, rather than laying out (often very similar) sessions for myself.

In large part, I suspect the trumpet teacher effect is due to accountability: if I have to come back and play in front of someone, I don’t want to look like an idiot, so I’m more likely to get down to work. But, interestingly, that same effect holds even if the teacher is virtual, doesn’t know I exist.

When I first picked up the meditation habit, for example, I was using the great Headspace app. Over time, feeling more comfortable with things, I shifted to doing vipasana sessions on my own with a timer. And, there too, I found that my morning meditations were getting shorter, sometimes getting skipped entirely. So I went back to Headspace, and started following one of the app’s thirty-day cycles. Lo and behold, I was suddenly back to longer sessions, and hitting them almost every day.

I’m not sure entirely why that’s the case, though I do have a theory: when someone tells me what to do, I don’t have to think much about the reasoning behind what I’m told; I can simply assume that there’s method to the madness. So, when the time comes, my ‘doing self’ can just focus on the doing. Whereas when I’ve laid the work out for myself, I end up facing it as both my ‘doing self’ and my ‘assigning self.’ While the first is willing to get to it, the second can give me all kinds of reasons why I don’t need to, can rationalize a way out.

So, with that in mind, I’ve been giving new thought to other kinds of ‘bosses’ that might be useful in my life – business coach, relationship coach, financial advisor, etc. In the past, I’ve been dubious of the value that those people might provide, reasoning that I’d often be able to come to the same conclusions myself as they were likely to hand out. But now, I’m beginning to think that the value comes from that handing, rather than the conclusions themselves. I suspect there might be value in finding more people and places where I can have someone outside my own head just tell me what to do.

Dealing with Disaster

I'm a long-standing fan of British time-management guru Mark Forster, and particularly his book Do It Tomorrow.

At the crux of that book is a simple observation: you develop backlogs of work because the amount that comes in each day exceeds what you can get done in that day. Thus, preventing backlogs requires figuring out how to get a day’s worth of work done daily. That usually requires pruning commitments, reducing the flow of incoming work. ‘Time management’ alone won’t fix the problem; if there’s just more work than time allows, you won’t get it all done, regardless of how you prioritize your list.

Forster also recommends starting out by declaring a backlog: taking all tasks, emails, paper piles, etc., and moving them into a separate place – a dedicated to-do list, email folder, stack of papers, etc. You can then start each day by chipping away at the backlog. But, following that, you spend the rest of the day making sure you don’t once again fall behind. (FWIW, more specifically, Forster recommends batching all of today’s incoming work, emails, etc., and completing it tomorrow, so that you can see in its entirety what a full day of inbound commitments entails. Hence the name of the book.)

Recently, I’ve been trying to clean up a bunch of messes I’ve made in life – on the personal and business fronts. And the sheer weight of it all, the number of things I need to make right, has been a bit overwhelming.

Today, however, I realized that those messes are simply a different sort of backlog. So, this morning, I tried to list out everything I want to fix – people to whom I need to apologize or make amends, work that I need to do to feel good about where everything stands. Going forward, then, I’m focused primarily on the day before me: can I live and work today without screwing up anything new?

Sure, my life mess backlog is large. But it’s also finite. It’s a list I can chip away, piece by piece, over time. One that won’t grow any larger so long as I can keep up with living the way I want, day in and day out. And, oddly enough, just by thinking about things in that new way, it suddenly feels like I might be up to the task.