Every time I’d sit down for a work-session, it would derail into a binge of distraction. Things changed once I implemented a method aimed at uncovering exactly WHY and what I could to do to prevent
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Intentions.
You sit down for your work-sessions with the absolute best of intentions.
It’s simple. You know what you need to do; you know what the consequences are if you don’t, you know how great you’ll feel when you finish.
Yet, intentions are like lighting bunched up newspapers under some wet logs. You’ll get a good flame and a burst of light and heat, but odds are it won’t lead to a sustained fire.
So it goes with your work sessions: a burst of intension fueled motivation before it all fizzles out and goes to shit.
Why is that?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for the past year or so. And I mean really asking, like from scratch with a concerted effort to set aside all my assumptions and pre-conceived ideas and theories.
In other words, I’ve been seeking the objective truth, aiming at challenging my—and in all likelihood our—habitual reasoning that goes,
oh of course, my work sessions go to shit because I’m a slacker. 100% because I have no self-control. I lack discipline. I don’t learn my lessons. I’m a stupid procrastinator and an idiot wasting away my life on apps, sites and games I don’t even like anymore…
This is the sort of story we tell ourselves on instinct, yet we do have a choice to hold off on accepting it as truth. You can—in the aftermath of a completely derailed work session and an evening of bingeing on your vices—take a cold, impartial look and come to a different conclusion.
And it’s not only that you can do this; I’d stress that you must get in the habit of doing it. Being able to scrutinize your failures is the only way out of your rut. It’s the only way to figure out what you actually need to do to cultivate self-discipline over time.
More on the why in the second, first a little on the how.
I call it sending in the Mustached Officer.
Imagine you’re a bi-stander at a car crash site. Now picture the arrival of a middle-aged, mustached, windbreaker wearing highway-patrol officer, tasked to inspect the wreckage.
Having done this job for decades, the officer would go through the process with zero emotion. He’d be detached and objective, there with his clipboard and pen, ready to report on nothing but cold-hard-data.
He wouldn’t be interested so much in the rantings of the emotionally charged parties—although he’d take note of each side’s story—he’d be keen on documenting subtle but crucial details: tire tracks indicating braking distances, velocities and reaction times… debris and dents revealing impact angles, forces, trajectories… traffic light sequences, intersection distances, blind spots… he’d look at everything—again emotionlessly, indifferently, almost coldly in the face of twisted metal and blood splashes—and come to simple, objective conclusions about what happened and why.
…
For the past year, I’ve gotten into the habit of sending the mental equivalent of the Mustached Officer to inspect and audit my 30-car-pileup crash sites of my failed work sessions.
What he found was unexpected, informative and, more importantly, useful AF.
I could share with you his many discoveries, but what’s crucial—the key take-away I want you to mull over for a minute and consider implementing—is the game-changing benefit of starting a habit of sending the Mustached Officer to inspect your own failures.
You see, we’re all different. The crash scenes of our failed work-sessions are also going to be different. The outcome may be the same—wasted time, stress, anxiety, regret, poor work quality, under-achievement—yet the tiny intricate details… what set everything off, what sparked the chain reaction which snowballed into a binge, what generated an amplifying compulsion to grab at vices, what sort of neat rationalizations were used to lubricate the process… all that stuff, all those discreet subtle details we neglect, forget or reject while we are busy chastising ourselves… that’s what’s important for you to discover and record on your own.
Send the officer with his clipboard each time you fail. Have him listen to the emotionally charged ramblings of you mind—I fucked up again… have I no self-control? It’s all hopeless—but then allow him to move onto other, more objective pieces of information.
What did you do the second you sat down to work? What was going through your mind? How did that make you feel? Was it an angel-and-devil-on-the-shoulders-temptation sort of situation, or did it seem like wasting a little time was an entirely justified idea, so you did without hesitating?
Collect as much data as possible.
The key word here is patterns. You need to establish the patterns; the tiny, almost imperceptible things that normally go under the radar of your loud emotional brain, that happen again and again and always result in the slow but steady dismantling and crashing of your work sessions.
…
The aim, once again, is to challenge your habitual assumptions about why you tend to slack off and procrastinate.
Why is this important? Well, like me, you’ve been obsessing over fixing things, which is fine. But it hasn’t been working because you don’t know the real reasons why you’re seemingly all broken.
You can’t find the solution, if your assumptions about the cause of the problem is way off…. which it is. Trust me on that.
You made up your mind around age 13, right after you were given homework for the first time that was due in a few weeks, after which you ended up waiting to the last minute to get it done.
This event—you popping your procrastination cherry—lead to the nucleus of the idea that you are fundamentally flawed. I’m an idiot procrastinator became your mental refrain, I am deficient in self-control, strength and character.
These ideas were reinforced into core beliefs through years of repeated experiences; years of you trying to rein in the control, years of failures; years of you telling yourself the same assumed stories, shoring up your certainty and biases.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the thing you came here looking for—some perfected method, some hack, or app or whatever that’ll get you to change and somehow become more disciplined—it doesn’t exist.
It can’t exist, because they (the people writing self-help stuff, me included) and more importantly you, don’t know the whole picture. You haven’t collected all the data points yet; the hows and whys and whens and other truths about your compulsive behaviors and derailed works-sessions. You haven’t picked out the patterns yet.
Figuring all that out requires 2 things: real experiences of failure (which you’ll have plenty of), then objective, calm and dispassionate reflection (which you never do, but you can start doing today).
This was a HUGE breakthrough for me. Sorry if that’s tacky self-help speak, but it’s true.
It meant that now my derailed work sessions had meaning. They were useful. They were filled with crucial information—information I would need to better manage my actions and achieve my goals.
I released the expectation that I was going to be perfect "from now on", and I instead baked the idea of failing right into my self-improvement system (this is at the core of the Habit Reframe Method, btw).
Now, whenever I sit down to work, there are only two possibilities:
→ Either I do it right and end up being productive and the world is all peachy—which is only a possibility because I implemented a bunch of hyper-specific-to-Simon fail-safes, routines and methods. This I patched together after dozens and dozens of failures, pattern recognition, talking to my therapist about said patterns, research and trial and error.
→ or… things derail, in which case I let it play out. I let myself get emotional. I’ll get mindful of all the frustration or dejection I feel and self-flagellating thoughts—my emotional brain will do what it always does—then, I’ll breathe it out slowly, offering myself little doses of compassion.
When I’m cooled off and ready, I’ll dispatch the Moustached Officer. I’ll get him to look back at what happened objectively. He’ll assess what didn’t work, what step of my routine I ignored out of complacency; what were the tricky rationalizations that I should reject next time; how should I modify my environment, or which new little process I should try.
The next time I sit down to work, I’ll try to make it work again. But I’ll be better armed; better trained with vital clues about myself; better equipped with an improved method.
If it works out… great. If it doesn’t, I rinse and repeat.
I suggest you do the same. If you do, well best of luck, and remember that I and others in this sub are going through similar journeys and will be around if you ever need some help.
In all this, the key tool is self-compassion. It’s only through kindness and understanding that you’ll be able to quiet the mind enough to be able to look back and collect the crucial data needed to figure out what’s happening and how to fix it up. Officer Moustache can’t do his job if a vehicle is still on fire and everyone around him is yelling.
All the best,
- Simon ㋛
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