KNOWING WHEN (AND WHEN NOT) TO TRACK A HABIT

KNOWING WHEN (AND WHEN NOT) TO TRACK A HABIT
Say you’re running a restaurant and you want to know if your chef is doing
a good job. One way to measure success is to track how many customers
pay for a meal each day. If more customers come in, the food must be good.
If fewer customers come in, something must be wrong.
However, this one measurement—daily revenue—only gives a limited
picture of what’s really going on. Just because someone pays for a meal
doesn’t mean they enjoy the meal. Even dissatisfied customers are unlikely
to dine and dash. In fact, if you’re only measuring revenue, the food might
be getting worse but you’re making up for it with marketing or discounts or
some other method. Instead, it may be more effective to track how many
customers finish their meal or perhaps the percentage of customers who
leave a generous tip.
The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven
by the number rather than the purpose behind it. If your success is measured
by quarterly earnings, you will optimize sales, revenue, and accounting for
quarterly earnings. If your success is measured by a lower number on the
scale, you will optimize for a lower number on the scale, even if that means
embracing crash diets, juice cleanses, and fat-loss pills. The human mind
wants to “win” whatever game is being played.
This pitfall is evident in many areas of life. We focus on working long
hours instead of getting meaningful work done. We care more about getting
ten thousand steps than we do about being healthy. We teach for
standardized tests instead of emphasizing learning, curiosity, and critical
thinking. In short, we optimize for what we measure. When we choose the
wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.
This is sometimes referred to as Goodhart’s Law. Named after the
economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure
becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Measurement is only
useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it
consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall
system.
In our data-driven world, we tend to overvalue numbers and undervalue
anything ephemeral, soft, and difficult to quantify. We mistakenly think the
factors we can measure are the only factors that exist. But just because you
can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing. And just
because you can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not important at all.
All of this to say, it’s crucial to keep habit tracking in its proper place. It
can feel satisfying to record a habit and track your progress, but the
measurement is not the only thing that matters. Furthermore, there are many
ways to measure progress, and sometimes it helps to shift your focus to
something entirely different.
This is why nonscale victories can be effective for weight loss. The
number on the scale may be stubborn, so if you focus solely on that number,
your motivation will sag. But you may notice that your skin looks better or
you wake up earlier or your sex drive got a boost. All of these are valid
ways to track your improvement. If you’re not feeling motivated by the
number on the scale, perhaps it’s time to focus on a different measurement
—one that gives you more signals of progress.
No matter how you measure your improvement, habit tracking offers a
simple way to make your habits more satisfying. Each measurement
provides a little bit of evidence that you’re moving in the right direction and
a brief moment of immediate pleasure for a job well done.
Chapter Summary
One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress.
A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit—
like marking an X on a calendar.
Habit trackers and other visual forms of measurement can make your
habits satisfying by providing clear evidence of your progress.
Don’t break the chain. Try to keep your habit streak alive.
Never miss twice. If you miss one day, try to get back on track as
quickly as possible.
Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most
important thing.
A
17
How an Accountability Partner Can
Change Everything
FTER SERVING AS
a pilot in World War II, Roger Fisher attended Harvard
Law School and spent thirty-four years specializing in negotiation and
conflict management. He founded the Harvard Negotiation Project and
worked with numerous countries and world leaders on peace resolutions,
hostage crises, and diplomatic compromises. But it was in the 1970s and
1980s, as the threat of nuclear war escalated, that Fisher developed perhaps
his most interesting idea.
At the time, Fisher was focused on designing strategies that could
prevent nuclear war, and he had noticed a troubling fact. Any sitting
president would have access to launch codes that could kill millions of
people but would never actually see anyone die because he would always
be thousands of miles away.
“My suggestion was quite simple,” he wrote in 1981. “Put that [nuclear]
code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to
the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy
butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted
to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first,
with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, ‘George,
I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.’ He has to look at someone and
realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House
carpet. It’s reality brought home.
“When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, ‘My God,
that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s
judgment. He might never push the button.’”
Throughout our discussion of the 4th Law of Behavior Change we have
covered the importance of making good habits immediately satisfying.
Fisher’s proposal is an inversion of the 4th Law: Make it immediately
unsatisfying.
Just as we are more likely to repeat an experience when the ending is
satisfying, we are also more likely to avoid an experience when the ending
is painful. Pain is an effective teacher. If a failure is painful, it gets fixed. If
a failure is relatively painless, it gets ignored. The more immediate and
more costly a mistake is, the faster you will learn from it. The threat of a
bad review forces a plumber to be good at his job. The possibility of a
customer never returning makes restaurants create good food. The cost of
cutting the wrong blood vessel makes a surgeon master human anatomy and
cut carefully. When the consequences are severe, people learn quickly.
The more immediate the pain, the less likely the behavior. If you want to
prevent bad habits and eliminate unhealthy behaviors, then adding an
instant cost to the action is a great way to reduce their odds.
We repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, and that makes
them hard to abandon. The best way I know to overcome this predicament
is to increase the speed of the punishment associated with the behavior.
There can’t be a gap between the action and the consequences.
As soon as actions incur an immediate consequence, behavior begins to
change. Customers pay their bills on time when they are charged a late fee.
Students show up to class when their grade is linked to attendance. We’ll
jump through a lot of hoops to avoid a little bit of immediate pain.
There is, of course, a limit to this. If you’re going to rely on punishment
to change behavior, then the strength of the punishment must match the
relative strength of the behavior it is trying to correct. To be productive, the
cost of procrastination must be greater than the cost of action. To be
healthy, the cost of laziness must be greater than the cost of exercise.
Getting fined for smoking in a restaurant or failing to recycle adds
consequence to an action. Behavior only shifts if the punishment is painful
enough and reliably enforced.
In general, the more local, tangible, concrete, and immediate the
consequence, the more likely it is to influence individual behavior. The
more global, intangible, vague, and delayed the consequence, the less likely
it is to influence individual behavior.
Thankfully, there is a straightforward way to add an immediate cost to
any bad habit: create a habit contract.
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