It's the last week of Baby Steps Month, and I've got an easy one for you this time. Well, I hope it's easy. It depends on how your days typically go.
The first three Tuesdays this month concerned specific actions you can take:
- Deleting something
- Reconsidering whether to keep (or make) new pieces of information
- Unfollowing sources that send you noise
This time, instead of a specific action, we're looking at a trick to help you keep doing those things repeatedly, eventually without even trying.
Baby Steps Week 4: Pavlov's Trick
Some of you may be familiar with the story of Ivan Pavlov, who discovered some exciting details about conditioned and unconditioned responses of dogs to outside stimuli. His discoveries would become the basis of behavioral psychology. Today, I encourage you to use one of the tricks on yourself.
In short, you can use classical conditioning to train yourself to clean up some small piece of your messy data whenever some common but unrelated stimulus occurs. Initially, it requires conscious effort, but this gradually transitions into unconscious action.
For example, many of you pull out your phone and open up some social media app whenever you find yourself in a restroom. It wasn't always this way, and not just because we didn't always have smartphones. When you first got one, you probably had different habits. Maybe the bathroom-social-media-break process began originally from boredom and discovering what was now possible with the magic glowing rectangle in your pocket. But now, after multiple years of accidentally honing that process of Enter -> Sit -> Phone out -> Instagram, you might be six videos deep before you even realize what happened.
This is an example of a habit formed via classical conditioning. Bathroom breaks have nothing to do with social media. But now they're intertwined in your brain, even though you probably couldn't say precisely when or why that happened.
(I know not everyone succumbs to this particular habit; bear with me if you managed to escape it.)
It's hard to start a new habit from scratch, and one of the more effective tricks is to intentionally leverage this kind of existing action and add the new desired behavior (e.g., deleting an email) on top of it.
Bathroom breaks and mealtimes are two great options since they're biological imperatives for every human. You are absolutely going to be doing them regularly every day already. Other good options are:
- The beginning or end of a workday
- Brushing your teeth
- Getting ready for bed (though being on a screen right before bedtime is generally not recommended)
As an extra bonus, if you find a trigger activity that requires almost no mental effort (again, bathroom breaks win!), it's a perfect time to engage your brain by doing something else that would otherwise be distracting.
So, once you've chosen some existing regular activity to "hijack" with a new task, you have to pick the data clean-up you want to do. It doesn't have to be the same every time, though it will be easier to form the habit if it's so predictable that you can do it almost automatically. For example:
- Open your email client and delete at least five message
- Open your photos app and cull at least five sub-par photos
- Quickly scan through your smartphone apps to see if you can uninstall something
- Search through your notes app (if you have one) to see if there's something you can take action on in two minutes
It's up to you. Personally, I've learned to combine bathroom breaks with email clean-up. No joke: I find myself not on Facebook (which happened in the past) but reflexively opening my email app instead. It takes me all of 15 seconds to swipe everything (or almost everything) away. It's one of the reasons that my inbox stays manageable.
Depending on the previous behavior you're layering the new habit on top of, you might do it before, during, or after the original action. For example, right after a meal, during a bathroom break, or before leaving work to head home.
Can you think of anything you usually do throughout your day that you could build a simple tech clean-up habit into? Let me know! I'd love to hear about it.
Enjoy the last few days of August, and happy data-taming!