Hello, Habits

by Fumio Sasaki

—Saul Bellow (attributed)

  A typical trigger is time. Most people probably set their alarm clocks to wake up in the morning, and the sound of the alarm serves as a trigger for the action of getting up

  Classes at school follow a timetable. The bell is a trigger for class to begin. These timetables are just as effective for adults. I let my alarm go off, not only when I get up in the morning but also when I go to bed at night. People often struggle to get up in the morning because they don’t get enough sleep. Many of them enjoy entertainment before bed, but their bedtime will get later and later if they enjoy it too much. There’s a need to have someone, or something, give them a little shove.

  When I first started acquiring habits, I charted the bulk of my day on a timetable. I go to the library at half past nine. I have lunch at 11:30 a.m. My alarm goes off at 9:30 p.m. when I go to bed, and it goes off again at 5:30 the next morning.

  B. F. Skinner, the founder of behavior analysis, lived his life like it was an experiment. He would begin and end his writing according to his alarm. He used a clock that could measure the total time he spent at his desk, and entered the number of words he wrote every twelve hours into a graph to try to gain an accurate understanding of his productivity per hour.

  One day, he noticed that he usually awakened at midnight, which he then started using an alarm clock to control, so that he could use that time for his writing.

  Is it stupid to act according to a timetable?

  I’m single, I live alone, and I love my freedom. Naturally, I used to think it was stupid to create a timetable and to do things according my schedule. A timetable is something that a grade schooler creates before the summer holidays. And I don’t recall ever being able to follow my timetable as planned. What if I suddenly thought of something that I wanted to do? I would hate to limit my freedom with time—or so I thought.

  However, if I don’t decide on a time to get up, I’ll end up staying in bed thinking about whether I should get up at that moment or if it’s okay to continue to sleep. If I don’t decide on a time to go to bed at night, there are bound to be times when I get engrossed in a TV drama or a manga and keep telling myself, “Just one more episode.” The psychology of hyperbolic discounting is when one chooses the reward in front of them despite inevitable regrets the next morning, so that’s to be expected.

  Deciding on a time to surf the Internet

  I check the news online and look at social media, but I make it a rule to decide on a time to quit. This is because the Internet is too compatible with the human brain. Friends of mine were tweeting:

  “I was looking up the meaning of an English word I didn’t understand and before I realized it, I spent ten minutes watching a video of a volcano erupting.”

  “I was searching for simple lighting equipment. When I realized what I was doing, I was watching a video on outdoor survival.”

  The brain likes to flirt. It keeps getting interested in different things, and it jumps to other matters without context. From an English word to a volcano, from lighting to survival. The Internet provides answers to these transitions in what your brain is interested in, so you won’t be able to quit unless you have a predetermined time to stop.

  Authors and artists mostly work regularly

  As I mentioned earlier, many of the geniuses who are introduced in the book Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work have regular routines. Most of them are morning people who spend their mornings doing creative work.

  For example, those of you who are familiar with the artist Francis Bacon may have seen his atelier so crammed with paints and art supplies that there’s barely any room left. Judging by the atelier and his passionate style, you would imagine that he led quite an uninhibited lifestyle, but his work hours were precisely predetermined. He woke up at dawn and worked until noon. He drank the rest of the time, which might seem uninhibited, but he had a set time to work every day.

  In the beginning of this book, I spoke about the pain of having too much freedom since going freelance. I feel that it’s necessary, to a certain degree, to discipline ourselves with time. Geniuses aren’t people who have worked in a spur-of-the-moment style. They’re people who have diligently decided on and set aside the time to work at their jobs.

  The effects of a deadline

  A deadline is a kind of timetable that you see over an extended period of time. As an editor, I was sick of being chased by deadlines and decided not to set up a deadline for completing this book. It was a nice dream, to decide on a launch date and to publish once I finished the manuscript.

  Although I believed that deadlines were evil, I’ve since had a bit of a change of heart. Depending on how you use it, a deadline can either be an angel or a devil. It’s like a superior who reprimands you when you need it. Come to think of it, our very lives have a deadline. Because of it, we don’t want to spend our days idly.

  Using a timetable to understand our limitations

  There are many other advantages to creating and maintaining a timetable. One of them is that it allows you to gain an accurate grasp of the amount of work that you can do in a day.

  According to research, people are said to spend 1.5 times the amount of time doing something that they thought they’d need to do to achieve their objective. In other words, we overestimate our capacity. It actually takes us two weeks to do work we were planning to do in ten days. This is another example of an illusion that we can be Superman. It’s tough to acknowledge.

  Back when I was a busy editor, I thought I could make a lot of progress if I went to the office on the weekends when nobody was around to bother me, but in reality, things often didn’t go as expected. When traveling, I pack numerous books to prevent running out, but it sometimes turns out that I can’t finish even one of them. I end up creating piles of unread books because I underestimate my reading volume and overestimate the duration of time that my interest can be maintained.

  Making clear the things that we can’t do

  By creating a timetable and following it precisely, we start to see the amount of effort a task requires, the amount of exhaustion it produces, and the amount of rest we need to recover. We see the level of habits at which we need to practice to feel a sense of satisfaction.

  We can also see that as the timetable fills up, in order to add something else, our only choice is to pull back. Though I’m the type who likes to gradually increase my areas of interest, I’m not doing that much at the moment. There was a time when I tried to build a DIY mobile home at the back of a light pickup truck until I realized that it wouldn’t fit into my timetable. In the past, I would have blamed myself for being useless. But because I was already working on a timetable, I could see clearly that this project didn’t fit into my timetable, and I could prioritize other things.

  Working on a timetable means you’re making visible the total amount of energy that you have and the things that you’re able to do in a day. In the same way that you need to check how much money you have in order to shop wisely, there’s great meaning in knowing your limitations. It’s helpful to create a timetable over the weekend and to take action whether you’re a busy student or member of the working world. In fact, it can even be fun to view your timetable like a child before his summer break.

  Deciding when to worry

  Timetables play another big role. When your day isn’t divided into hours, the time you spend worrying and the times that you’re uncertain aren’t divided, either.

  If you act according to a timetable, you’ve already decided what you’re going to do within that time. If you haven’t already decided the time that you’ll spend working, you’ll end up worrying all day long about your work.

  If you go by a timetable, you physically have little time to worry. This is because thinking and worrying are things that you do not when you’re acting but rather when you’re idle. It’s necessary to worry appropriately, but thanks to timetables, I now spend less time being negative and worrying about th
e same thing over and over again.

  There are probably many habits that you can’t accomplish due to various factors. When that happens, you can consider that you’re prioritizing X rather than being unable to do something else because of X. Rather than being prevented from doing one thing, you’re making the active choice to prioritize another. For example, many people prioritize their children, which leads them to relinquish other tasks or obligations. Thinking that you can’t do something because of X will lead to emotional distress, and emotions are what are most important to you.

  Step 25: Realize that no one has the power to concentrate

  During the process of writing this book, I once tried to measure how long my concentration could last. I checked the amount of time that had passed since I started writing to when my concentration broke and my fingers moved away from the keyboard. The average time was twenty minutes, and I thought to myself that I was lacking in concentration, but that may not necessarily be the case.

  A TED Talk is capped at eighteen minutes. This rule is based on the assumption that no matter how interesting a topic may be, people will only listen attentively for eighteen minutes.

  In the Pomodoro Technique, a concentration method, the duration is basically the same. You set your timer for twenty-five minutes, and you concentrate on doing something within that period. Once you’ve finished, you take a short break, around five minutes long. You repeat that four times and take a longer break every two hours.

  Although I try not to think while I meditate, my awareness will inevitably start to wander. That’s what our awareness is like, so it’s hard to focus for long periods.

  Even taking into account the challenges of concentrating, using a timetable will still be effective. Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, sits at a desk for eight to ten hours each day. “I sit at my desk for a very long time, no matter how happy or unhappy it makes me, and eventually, the work spools out.” You first decide on a time to sit at your desk, and you don’t think about whether it’s fun. As long as you’re sitting at your desk during that time, you’ll eventually return to the task at hand, whether your concentration breaks or you start to yawn.

  I decided to not take on the reckless challenge of boosting my ability to concentrate. Of course one’s ability to concentrate can be improved, and there may be differences between individuals’ abilities. But I’ve started to think that it’s more beneficial to work based on the belief that people don’t have the power to concentrate to begin with.

  Like Charles Duhigg, detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler also resolved to sit at his desk even if he couldn’t write. Your concentration may continue to break at various intervals, but at the end of your workday, you’ll tend to gain results, even if they’re just bits and pieces.

  Step 26: Take action according to the date

  Taking action according to the date is a variation of taking action based on a timetable. Every month, I set aside a day to handle miscellaneous things. While I may have few possessions, I do need to clean up once or twice a month, and this is when I do a medium-level job of housekeeping. On these days, I also sort through my receipts, organize the bookmarks on my PC, and sometimes scan documents. While they don’t need to be done every day, chores like these will become a hassle if left aside for a while, making you think, “Ahh, I don’t want to do this …”

  While tasks may not be interesting when looked at individually, they can give you a sense of achievement when taken care of all together. Doing so will eliminate the mild irritation that you normally experience by putting them aside, and it will become an act that supports your usual habits.

  The day that you “settle down” will never come

  Like keeping house, we tend to think that we’ll do something “someday” or when things settle down, imagining a less busy time when we will somehow have little to do. Having lived for thirty-eight years, I have never once thought, “Oh, I’m settled down now. This is it, this has to be the time I imagined back then.” A time like that isn’t likely to ever come. That’s why it’s important to set a date ahead of time if there’s something that you have to accomplish.

  For example, take the carefully decided schedule of a Zen priest:

  •Days that contain a four or a nine are for head-shaving and careful cleaning.

  •Days that contain a one, a three, a six, or an eight are for begging.

  If your responsibilities and tasks are determined by date, there’s no need to think, for example, “My hair’s starting to grow. What should I do? Should I cut it tomorrow, or can it wait till next week?,” and you can act without conscious thought. It’s also good to jot down in your diary ahead of time the day you’ll start going to the gym or when you’re doing something special. (As I write this, I have also noted in my pocketbook: “Go to the dentist.”)

  It’s also helpful to base your actions on the days of the week. A friend of mine does work he doesn’t like on Fridays. On Mondays, such work appears difficult to get through. So he takes care of uninteresting matters when he’s in a buoyant mood, anticipating the weekend.

  Cherish appointments with yourself

  In scheduling your tasks and responsibilities, it is of the upmost importance to give top priority to appointments with yourself. I recommend making an advance entry in your diary (it’s easy to repeat your monthly entries if you use an app).

  We should consider appointments with ourselves as plans with our most important friend. Unless a truly special circumstance occurs, we must think carefully about breaking a promise with the most important friend that we have when faced with invitations or distractions. You’re full of motivation, and you’re setting out to do things that you can’t normally do. There’s no chance that an appointment with yourself, when you’re a person you seldom “meet,” would not be important.

  Step 27: Set up a temporary reward

  The wise men stated: “Let a man always study the Torah whether for its own sake or not; even if it is not at first for its own sake, the study leads on to that.”

  —Maimonides

  Just as with exercise and dieting, when you’re trying to acquire a habit, you don’t see the results right away, which can be discouraging. Therefore, I believe it’s effective to set up a temporary reward.

  When I moved, I had to switch gyms. The new gym was open twenty-four hours a day; that meant I had more opportunities to go. In reality, I started going less frequently. For some reason, I just wasn’t inclined to go. As I tried to figure out why, the answer suddenly occurred to me. The new gym only had showers, while the gym I used to go to had a big, open-air bath. Without realizing it, I had made it my reward to soak in the big bath after exercising.

  Examples of temporary rewards

  On my days dedicated to handling miscellaneous things, I sometimes go to the movies as a reward. The author Mitsuyo Kakuta completed a marathon at forty-three and has since been tackling various sports. In an essay, she writes about the importance of a reward:

  “Drinking events, high-calorie delicacies, esthetics, massage. I think that thing that’s ‘waiting for you once this suffering has ended’ is considerably important.”

  •An ice-cold beer after exercise

  •A delicious pastry for breakfast as a reward for getting up early in the morning

  The effects of these types of temporary rewards can’t be taken lightly. And as Maimonides recounted, as we continue to pursue our reward, making something a habit in itself will seem like a reward. Then, we’ll be able to maintain our habit, even without a reward.

  GOOD HABIT INHIBITOR: Giving yourself a conflicting reward

  The tricky thing about rewards is that the more you’ve gained a sense of the results you’ve obtained, the more likely you are to relax your efforts. In a certain study, people who had been dieting were split into two groups and made to choose between an apple and a chocolate bar. The first group was weighed, and 85 percent of those people, seeing results from their diets, chose chocolate ba
rs. Conversely, only 58 percent of the unweighed group, not knowing their progress, chose the chocolate bars.

  This story hits a sore spot. I, too, am more lax with what I eat if I sense I’ve lost weight. People give themselves rewards that conflict with their objective when they succeed.

  It’s probably better to give yourself a reward in a category different from your objective. When I was trying to stop drinking, I would sometimes buy myself ice cream if I was able to hold off from buying liquor at a store. It’s like coating bitter medicine in sugar; you combine the habit that you’re aiming to acquire with your reward.

  While I feel that temporary rewards are effective at the beginning, it’s important to consider them strictly as a temporary measure until you feel the actual rewards of your newly developed habit.

  Step 28: Make good use of people’s attention

  You make me wanna be a better man.

  —As Good as It Gets

  It’s important to do what you want to do without worrying about how others see you. As I began thinking about habits, I started to realize that the attention of others wasn’t something to worry about. Instead, it’s something that should be used well. This is the most effective step for acquiring habits.

  People tend to judge the rewards in front of them instead of the rewards that await them in the future. This is basic human instinct, but we can counter it by making good use of people’s attention.