Habit Forming by Anticipation

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Academic types like to use jargon, and often, made up jargon. They also write books. Those books have some of the best ideas and I must read them! Even though I liked coming across new ideas, I found myself detesting the unnecessary use of large words and convoluted sentences in these books written by professors, researchers and law people.

Consider the topic: Prefactual Thinking Prefactual is Pre and Fact. Before the fact. Prefactual Thinking is thinking before the fact. Or as the rest of us call it: anticipation.

The going got smoother after I unwound the jargon.

The original idea appears to come from Lawrence J. Sanna in 1998. The gist of the idea is if you anticipate many outcomes from your decision, then it gives you a better chance to succeed. Jeremy Dean explores this concept in habit forming.

Say, I want eat healthy, then I must use Prefactual Thinking, or anticipate the times I eat unhealthy foods such as snacks. By anticipating my habit to reach for snacks, say in the afternoon, I can do the following:

  • keep cut fruit in the fridge that is ready to eat
  • keep the pantry stocked with nuts instead of chips
  • remind myself how much I love apples

I expanded the use of anticipation to overcome dissatisfaction as I build new habits. More on that another day.

Choice Blindness

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When you ordered the hamburger instead of the salad, were you intentional?

After you have already ordered, you may say it was intentional.

“I’ve been going for daily walks”

“I ate a salad earlier this week”

“I’m going to the gym tomorrow”

“One burger isn’t going to hurt my health”

It is our nature to stand behind our choices, even if it is the wrong choice. I am not saying an occasional burger is a wrong choice, that is for you to decide.

We do this with work all the time.

“I thrive in meetings all day”

“It’s normal to get so many emails over a weekend”

“Everyone works on Sunday evenings to catch up”

“60 hour weeks are normal in my career”

Brad Stulburg calls this Motivated Reasoning in his book Practice of Groundedness

The first step to better is to recognize this blindspot. We can not effectively fix the blindspot and bridge the gap if we don’t know what the gap is.

Footnote: I first head of the idea of Choice Blindness from the book, Making Habits Break Habits. This book is a gold-mine of ideas! Read more about understanding Choice Blindness to break bad habits in this book. There is more via study by Johansson, P., L. Hall, S. Sikstrom, and A. Olsson 2005 "Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task"

My Reading Habit

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Cal Newport says on his podcast that he reads 5 to 6 books a month by making reading his default activity.

Cal has three kids, teaches in Georgetown and runs a growing media empire! He still manages 5 to 6 books a month — this adds up to 60 to 72 books a year!

Cal said look at your phone’s Screen-Time report, so I did. I was using my phone 2 to 3 hours a day. That is almost 20 hours a week! A part time job of looking at my phone on top of a full-time job on my computer.

If you ask people, they will say they want to read more but can’t find the time. I found some time to read one book a month. So I decided to make more time.

Here is what I did:

  • Deleted all social media apps
  • Deleted YouTube app, signed out of YouTube on my browser
  • Put the TV in the house where it is not too comfortable to watch it for long
  • Read in the morning before the world wakes up — I read between 6 AM and 7:30 AM
  • Make reading intentional by taking Fleeting Notes and Literature Notes
  • Made reading my default activity as I wait between tasks — so I may get 30 mins during lunch, 15 mins while dinner is cooking and maybe another 30 mins before bedtime

One last but important technique on reading more is to add variety. I sorted my unread books into four stacks.

  1. Easy Fiction — less than 300 pages, easy to read. Leguin, Grace Paley, Ian McEwan are in this stack.
  2. Short and Hard (fiction or non-fiction) — less than 300 pages, academic or classics where the language or subject matter make it harder to read. Virginia Wolf, Jane Jacobs, Michael Oakeshott are on this stack.
  3. Short and Easy Non-Fiction — these are less than 300 pages and are typically not written by academic types, so the language is easy.
  4. Long or Hard Non-Fiction — these are over 300 pages, typically 500 or more pages. Zuboff, Dalio, Ian McGilcrist and Nassim Nicholas Taleb are in this stack

I alternate between each stack. When one stack makes me think hard, another replenishes my brain. When one book takes over two weeks to read, I finish another in a few days.

I finished four books in October, five in November and six in December. The variety surely helped. Removing the habit of phone and TV helped the most!