Many of my clients are neurodivergent and, like me, are autistic or have ADHD. Our systems must consider and support our authentic selves, not shoehorn us into who we think we should be. Part of the solution was to use spaces: when we’re in the office around the board table, we will trust that we’ve all got our director hats on and speak only with those voices. Sometimes we outgrow our productivity systems or they’ve never comfortably fit. One of my consulting gigs was with a failing partnership where it turned out that the three partners had never sorted out their relationships: best friends, business partners, lovers, etc. Otherwise I’ll just get really good at putting a book on my pillow when I make my bed, and moving it to the bedside table when I get in… I’m perfectly capable of ignoring a fruit bowl, and that guitar that you don’t actually practice will become just another thing that you step around… in short, I need what David called a trigger-action plan. I put a book that I want to read on my pillow (obvious).īut the physical thing in your environment has to be treated like a trigger, or it becomes just part of the environment. We plot your progress on a yellow brick road to your goal and if you go off track we take your money The Beeminder app also allows you to sync goals with your Apple Health. Have tackled this both ways: the iPad now lives on a shelf on the other side of the room, rather than on the bedside table (invisible). Keep track of your Beeminder goals, add data, and get push notifications before derailing with the Beeminder iPhone app. Recently I’ve got into the habit of playing iPad games when I get into bed instead of, say, sleeping. I’m a big fan of physical reminders in the environment. The sum of these stored behaviors is an object’s habit field, and merely being around it compels our bodies and minds to act in certain ways. But these things don’t just store our memories they store our behaviors too. The desk, the computer on top of it, the chair you sit in, and the space they comprise are all repositories for memory. The chapter on designing your environment to prompt your habits reminded me of Jack Cheng’s article “Habit Fields” in A List Apart, where he writes about the way objects trigger our memories of what we do with them: I need to not just block the “bad” behavior, but replace it with something that more effectively satisfies the same need, with fewer negative consequences. I’m writing enough for now to explain a support issue that occurred recently but I’ll add more later. I suspect this is something I don’t spend enough time doing when I think about behaviors I’d like to change. All habits serve you in some way- even the bad ones-which is why you repeat them. This is a reiteration of a point made earlier, but worth calling out again: Has anyone come up with a method for using Beeminder to enforce a trigger-action plan? The best thing I’ve come up with (but haven’t tried) is to set a goal for rehearsing the TAP while you are installing the behavior. Habit stacking sounds very much like trigger-action plans, which I’ve ever heard dreev mention around here before.
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