Habit Reflection

[ysabetwordsmith]

This study explored many different ways to reinforce a new habit, and found habit reflection the most successful. 

I looked at it and ... meh.  Writing out an analysis just seems like extra work.  What I learn from past experiences just naturally goes into setting up new ones: my current goal list looks a lot different from the early ones I made.  I know that short-term rewards work well for me: I'll finish this task, then go read something fun.  I know that having a lot of goals helps me accomplish more things.  I'm a lot more comfortable failing to complete a big list, but meeting half of it, than I am failing at just one goal.  And I definitely do better when I set reminders for myself to keep doing things.

Study notwithstanding, my observations indicate that different things work for different people, and if your current methods haven't worked then try new ones.  If you haven't tried habit reflection, its robust performance seems worthy of consideration.

Comments

[wyld_dandelyon]

My experience (admittedly long distance) of you is that you do that kind of reflection reflexively as you go. Ritualizing and therefore slowing down a thing someone is already doing isn't likely to be helpful.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

That's pretty much it.

People talk about revising their writing like they do it on paper. You know what happens if I do that? It triples the time for doing it. 0_o Revising in my head is so much faster. But then, I've been at this for decades.

Learning from experience, learning to apply previous experiences to current challenges, I've also been doing forever. As in, farmemory means I come with preloaded examples. If something doesn't work as well as I had hoped, then I try to find other similar cases that could help me figure out why and how to make it better.

I only tend to write things out if they're too complicated to track in my head. So for instance, I have a page of goals, a wishlist in progress, my crowdfunding activities for the year, and so on. Troubleshooting rarely takes that much detail for me. But over time, my goals list has changed a lot as I've figured out what works and what doesn't.

Re: Yes ...

[wyld_dandelyon]

Yeah. These articles tend to be aimed at people approaching the problem at the most basic level, and for someone who's been doing the thing (whatever thing) for decades, a basic approach rarely provides new insight or new useful techniques.