Something to critique
Some years back, I uploaded code and example videos for a side project to help me learn Java and physics at the same time. It wasn't long before I got a comment on one of the videos mocking how long it had taken me to get things working. When Dropbox was first announced, a famous (infamous?) comment on Hacker News was quick to point out flaws in the idea.
"Criticizing is fast and easy. Creating is slow and difficult," as Adam Grant says. It's much easier to find things you don't like about something than to build the thing itself.
But what if you could flip the script and turn the ease of critiquing something into a productivity superpower? It's easy to form an opinion on something that already exists. In fact, you probably know how you feel about it within seconds of seeing it. What if the best way to break through on that habit you can't seem to set in motion is to start with something, even if it is not quite right, and let that inform what you actually want to be doing?
This effect is what makes AI so effective at unblocking us on hard-to-start tasks like writing a long document, updating a resume, putting together a PowerPoint presentation, etc. Even if what AI produces is utter trash and you have to throw it out and start over, it has still given you a starting point: something to critique. And it was only about a week ago that I stumbled into the realization of just how powerful this is as a general tactic for setting up good habits and systems.
I've historically had a lot of trouble with meal planning. For whatever reason, it feels so overwhelming to think about sitting down and planning out every possible thing I'm going to eat for the next day/week/whatever. Instead, the best I could manage (on high-motivation days) was to log meals on the fly in my meal-tracking app as I consumed them. This is quite a bit of cognitive overhead. It requires fiddling with my nutrition app all day while trying to make sure that I steer myself in the direction of good food choices.
About a week ago, after a really good day regarding my calorie and protein targets, I decided to use my meal-tracking app's copy previous day feature to simply pre-fill the next day with the exact same entries as the current day. I felt full at the end of the day, and I had enjoyed the meals I ate. Why not just do it again the next day?
The result? Hitting my nutrition targets the next day was an absolute breeze compared to my previous approach of logging on the fly. I had a meal plan for the day that was hyper-customized to meet my exact nutrition targets and personal preferences.
I did end up making tweaks to the plan throughout the day as I decided to eat slightly different things. But because the baseline plan was already established, I could see exactly the impact of those choices on my overall nutrition targets for the whole day. If I were to replace a chicken salad with a doughnut, for example, my calorie numbers would go up and my protein numbers would go down. This instant feedback based on the established plan made it plainly and viscerally obvious when I was about to mess up an otherwise great day of nutrition.
Some takeaways, as I've continued to leverage this effect:
- I can lower the barrier to entry on hard-to-start habits by finding the shortest path to having something in front of me that I can critique and modify.
- I must have a clear and timely feedback mechanism. The faster I am able to get feedback, the better. Immediate feedback is best. The shorter the delay between making a choice and seeing how it affects the outcome, the more I can tap into my desire for the positive outcome to help me make a good choice in the moment.