(2021-01-07) Maciver The Habit Cycle

David R. MacIver: The Habit Cycle. I think there’s an explore/exploit trade off. Early on in a habit you’re in explore mode, so it’s reasonable to value the habit based on how good it could be, but once you’re in exploit mode you’re valuing it based on how good it actually is.

I am very bad at maintaining habits.

This is, as you can imagine, quite frustrating, especially when everything I said in the advocacy was true: Often these are great habits which were bringing a lot of benefit to my life, and yet I drop them and I can’t bring myself to do them any more and I lose those benefits.

For example, I’m a morning pages advocate.

I’ve come to view the problem through a lens of costs and benefits.

I think very often habits fail because the cost-benefit analysis changes: A habit that was once worth it no longer is. In this view, dropping the habit is actually entirely the rational thing to do, and there’s no reason to feel bad about it.

I think there’s an explore/exploit trade off. Early on in a habit you’re in explore mode, so it’s reasonable to value the habit based on how good it could be, but once you’re in exploit mode you’re valuing it based on how good it actually is.

But I think as well as our knowledge of the habits getting better, sometimes the habits actually do get worse.

Early on in a habit, the habit has a novelty value

I think there’s definitely an element of this with morning pages for me.

If the habit is solving some problem for you, you may well pick all of the low-hanging fruit pretty quickly.

Often habits are started during a high energy period and dropped in a low energy period, so the cost doesn’t exactly go up, but the cost relative to you budget goes up.

Often habits are in some way creating “debt” that builds up over time - e.g. taking up a time slot you would use for other things - and that gets progressively more apparent the longer the habit goes on. (I see this more as Opportunity Cost.)

Often the fact of a habit failing itself creates increased cost, because we acquire an ugh field.

One way to do that would be to embrace the novelty and switch to a different habit that retains some of the strengths of the old ones but lets you explore it from a different angle. e.g. I’ve not resumed morning pages, but I’ve started a Google doc with a beeminder word for a word count and a more narrow focus on personal development.