Anthony Panozzo's Blog

According to the Wikipedia article on this subject, the failure rate of New Year's resolutions is 88%. In this article I'll give you solid reasons why most New Year's Resolutions don't work, and how to make adding, changing, or removing any habit easier.

Limited executive function

Everyone from judges to dieters to engaged couples make worse decisions as the day goes on. (I have been feeling the "engaged couples" one lately.) As the article states, this is because we use glucose when making decisions and do not replenish it. After a certain amount of glucose loss, the brain stops trying to think of tradeoffs, and instead does whatever is easy. For the purposes of this blog post, consider glucose to be equivalent to willpower or executive function. I use executive function and willpower somewhat interchangeably.

I think that managing habits with willpower is a very effective way to improve personal and organizational performance.

Capacity for change in behavior is like a muscle, and it can be exercised by applying willpower. Using willpower effectively is a skill. The capacity for change can be expanded by stressing the system and letting it recover. Too much stress and not enough recovery leads to poor results. See The Power of Full Engagement for more along these lines. Especially insightful is the idea of managing energy, not time. More on this in a bit.

Willpower as it relates to habits

The way most people try to change is to list about twenty things that they want to change and make them ambiguous. They try really hard for a couple of weeks, and then say that this whole "change thing" isn't really what they are into. Maybe they don't have enough willpower, they think…

I think willpower in and of itself is mostly overrated. Willpower is good for getting you to start something, but not usually very useful for following through. I think of it like adrenaline. It's good for fight or flight and pulling trapped babies out from under cars, but you cannot sustain that level of effort for a very long time. Willpower depletes quickly. To try to will yourself to write every day is difficult. To instead set up a habit based on a routine makes it far simpler. So I use the willpower to think about and create the routine that I want and begin forming the habit, and when the habit is formed it does the rest.

Consider brushing your teeth. Most people in the modern world brush their teeth at least once a day without needing to think much about it. They normally have a routine of "after I eat breakfast, I brush my teeth", or "after I get dressed, I brush my teeth", or "before I go to bed, I brush my teeth." This habit has been practiced regularly for a long time, and they do it every day. The associations are very strong. It takes basically no executive function to be able to do this. Brushing my teeth is the gold standard of habits, as far as I can tell. I can be half drunk and tired and still want to brush my teeth.

Routine lowers the need to use willpower. You don't want to have to will yourself to brush your teeth. If you have to think about it much, you've already lost. Eventually you will lose interest or forget or just not want to do it.

Applying willpower for useful things

Taking this realization to more concrete or useful areas…

There are many books out there on effecting change in an organization. But what if effecting change is not the most effective strategy?

A Story

Imagine for a moment that you have recently heard about a new recursive development technique called "DDD Driven Development." The proponents of DDD (a recursive acronym) claim that it speeds up your development cycles by increasing feedback, but only anecdotal data exists so far. Some groups have claimed it led to higher system reliability and development speed, others the opposite.

As team lead, you pick up the premier DDD book and read through it. The arguments, while not airtight, seem to indicate that at least some aspects of the approach would be useful in your organization.

You play around with the techniques in a personal project, and then pitch using DDD on a pilot project. The project goes mostly smoothly, and most of the team members agree that it was useful. A couple dissent, and you can see that it might be difficult to get buy-in from other engineers in the organization who are not as open to change.

At one of the Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle meetups, someone asked questions along the following lines (paraphrased):

Won't using lean startup techniques reduce my commitment to an idea? If I can just walk away from something because I have not invested much in it, how do I know that I won't give up too early?

I had a bit of cognitive dissonance about the question. At first, I thought the line of thinking was silly. After all, the whole reason I was there was to ensure that I didn't go "all-in" on an idea with no validation. I responded intelligently at the time, but the question kind of gnawed at me.

I brought up RailsThemes in an earlier post, and figured I'd post an update about how we are working on it and what I have learned so far.

RailsThemes is a project that I'm working on with Eliza Brock and Luke Flener. It is like WordPress themes, but for Ruby on Rails applications. Basically you purchase a theme on our website, and then you can install it on the command-line and have a site that is easy on the eyes in a matter of minutes. Traditionally, you would have to spend a lot of time and money to get a good looking theme.

What day of the week is it again?

Eliza lives in Nashville. I live in Indianapolis. Yet we were able to spend about two weeks together in the same location working on the project over the course of a couple of months due to some creative scheduling.

The benefits of working in close physical proximity are fairly well documented (see Peopleware). For me it is speed of getting feedback, better design sessions, and general morale boosts.

In this article, I argue that today will always be the best day to try or learn something new.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks (well you can, but it's hard)

Neuroplasticity is the brain's way of reprogramming itself based on what it does. Your brain actually changes structure with new experiences. Brains also change based on what you think about. So giving energy to the kinds of thoughts you want to have, makes them form more easily the next time. This is one of the advantages of writing (it's a form of caching thoughts).

Someone who starts playing piano for one year at age seven will likely be much better than someone who starts playing piano at age seventy for one year. Generally, the younger someone is, the less hard-wired and the more open to change their brain is. The seventy-year-old might have a better strategy for learning or more discipline, but learning is going to be harder. Neurons die every day, and they are the things gray matter is made of.

Useful versus true beliefs

There are several kinds of beliefs: