Chapter 2 Habits
What is habit? Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment. Therefore, habits are our answers to problems raised by life. When we face the problem that our teeth become weaker and weaker through our life, we come up with the answer of brushing our teeth everyday. Habits are learned, not what we created. Brushing the teeth is not our original solution, but a solution comes from other people. Therefore, if anyone says they have their own habits, that is an excuse. Almost all of our habits originate from others, there is no habit that is really our own.
2.1 My working system
I work in the university as a lecturer. This work is very elastic. I am not required to check everyday. I can choose when, where and how much effort I use to finish my work. This kind of freedom sounds very desirable for many people, and also for me before I chose this work. But after so many years, I find that freedom comes at high cost. Many times, you can do it all by yourself means you can choose not to do it. I feel I waste a lot of time wandering. Therefore, I start to build a working system to keep myself moving. Without the supervision of the boss, I need to find something outside myself pushing me when I am reluctant to do anything.
A working system is a habit of working that could save the energy spent on choosing and wandering and fighting against procrastination. But what is it? Before answering this question, I need to review how I spend a day. Normally I get up, attend a meeting and the rest of day is all under my will. Sometimes I choose to have a nap at noon, or I go to the cafe to work. It sounds like a random choice, but by retrospect, I find that the driving force of a day is the inertia of event. Life is a series of events, that an event will lead to another event. Normally we have the willpower to choose this event instead of that event, but later the driving force of events will go out of our control and we find this day either productive or wasted. The function of the working system is to form a set of events regularly happen everyday that will lead to a productive day. We can not change the direction of the river, what we can change is to what branch we put the boat.
The next question for this working system is what events will lead to a productive day? Brush teeth? Drinking a cup of coffee? I need to find the key event that if I only need to make one choice, this day will be productive. But for me, what is this event? If I don’t have a regular meeting each morning, the event would be leave for the university after I get up, instantly. But after the meeting, I need to wait to have the lunch. After the lunch, I will be sleepy and take a nap. After the nap, the time will be around 1 p.m and I normally feel that I have wasted my whole day. Therefore, the key event is to leave for the university just after the meeting and have lunch in the school.
Then the technique of WOOP comes. It has four steps: wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. My WOOP of this key event will be this. - Your Wish: Finish the experiment of SUMOylation. - Your best Outcome: I have a good IP result of SUMOylation. - Your inner Obstacle: I don’t want to go to the lab early. - Your Plan: If “I don’t want to go to the lab early.” then I will “take my bag and go out.”
2.2 Deep Work
I learned this concept of Deep Work from the book Deep Work written by Cal Newport. It’s a gamechanger for me because since then I keep putting this principle into practice. And it works. It is related with another topic called attention management. We are living in a world filled with attractive things, that are made to intentionally distract us. Social app, TV series, movies, ads, we are trained to be distracted and this will lead us to shallow work, an opposite status to deep work. Our internal state will keep changing. And we will unconsciously check the social app many times each day. We will watch short videos for several hours. And very seriously, we lose the ability to deal with hard questions and focus for a long period. That’s why it’s even harder for us to be efficient and productive. In order to have some achievements under such circumstances, we need to solve these problems.
2.2.1 Reduce distractions and avoid interruptions
Principles of using WeChat
WeChat, as a representative of instant messenger, has a great impact on our lives in today’s era of mobile internet. From writing letters, to writing emails, to sending WeChat today, the boundaries of personal life and work are constantly broken by technology. Every day I have to check my OA once, check my personal email several times, check my pinned and QQ notifications multiple times, and open WeChat countless times. The cost of such contact is high, but the benefit is very low. Things that are really urgent are usually notified by phone; things that are really important will even be said in person. Only things that are not important to you will be pushed through these IM tools to put pressure on others. There are even some punitive measures added to prevent others from avoiding these pressures.
In my opinion, the real value of WeChat is to maintain a weak relationship. We all have people who are very close to us, and these relationships are relatively strong. Because we live together or have family ties, we don’t need to purposely maintain relationships with each other. However, there are many classmates, friends, and people we have met on one side. In the era without WeChat, once these relationships are broken, it is possible that they are broken forever. However, with WeChat, through the WeChat group’s blessings on New Year’s Day, the circle of friends from time to time to send a status, so that this weak relationship can continue to maintain. When one day suddenly something to contact these people, each other will not seem too abrupt. After all, you have been living in my circle of friends for years!
Since you can’t do without WeChat at all, you need to set up some principles for your use of WeChat.
When to look at WeChat, how often to look at WeChat?
My current habit is to look at WeChat as soon as I’m free. If I record the number of times I look at WeChat every day, the number must be very scary. So what benefits do I get from checking WeChat so many times? In fact, the benefits are not that great. There are not so many new messages in a day, especially important new messages. Often, for important or urgent matters, people will usually contact me directly by phone. Instead, sometimes I receive some less important tasks, but I have to deal with them because I see them. So, you can go to check WeChat at a specific time every day, and try to keep your phone away from you at all other times.
Principle 1: Check WeChat at lunch and dinner every day.
Use phone communication instead of WeChat voice chat
Unfortunately, WeChat is now being used as an office software. It was originally intended to be used for life-like communication, much like QQ. No one expected that it would now include QQ, email, phone, Facebook, and almost every other usage scenario. The good side is that everything can be solved through one portal. The bad side is that WeChat is a natural distraction and not suitable as office software. For this reason, many companies are unified with a different office communication software to replace WeChat. For me, I want to gradually divide WeChat’s usage scenario and refocus it on the maintenance of weak relationships. And some obvious work communication, re-use telephone communication instead.
Principle 2: Call when you have something to do.
2.2.2 Rebuild the ability to focus
Developing a work rhythm
A university teacher is considered a freelancer. Apart from classes, I spend a lot of my time on my own schedule. When I first chose this career, I also valued this. But after so many years of freelance work, I have learned that freelancing involves a lot of challenges. I often work from home, and I encounter a lot of problems such as being disturbed by people and not being able to switch to work. Until recently, I have slowly developed my own way to maintain my work pace.
Live according to the work schedule
One of the most important points, or artificially to divide the properties of time, the daily division of work time and life time. Especially during work time, make sure to keep your promise to do only work-related things.
When I first started practicing this routine, I ran into a lot of problems. For example, naps. I would often get sleepy in the afternoon, and when I slept, I might sleep for 2 hours. When I got up, I would feel especially tired. So later I changed to try not to sleep during the day, even if the sleepy try to stay up. In order to solve the problem of daytime sleepiness, I changed my habits in two ways, one is diet, one is exercise.
Diet, in order to avoid sleepy lunch, I will eat less at noon, find ways to use vegetables and fruits instead of meals, especially to reduce meat intake. Exercise, I will find time to run or walk during the day to increase the time in the sun every day to achieve better sleep quality.
Principle 3: No sleep during the day.
2.2.3 Dishabituation of Phone
Don’t put your cell phone on your body
Usually used to take the phone with you, as soon as you have free time, you will take the phone out, look at novels, brush the shake, wasting a lot of time. It seems that the phone makes their time is stuffed, but stuffed in are garbage, not wealth. Since this is the case, simply do not take the phone with you, create a sense of vacancy, and see what in the end will come to fill the vacancy. I believe the end result is at least not worse than playing with the phone, whether it is dull or thinking.
2.3 Fitness
Fitness is concerned with many aspects of life. At work, we wanna keep a fit status to deal with every challenge. After work, we need to be energized to play and be happy. It seems that fitness is
2.3.1 Why should we go to the gym?
Gym is just one of many choices for us to achieve fitness. However, gym is a very good place to weave the field of training. Each time I go to the gym, I can easily have this feeling of training. There are people lifting weights, shouting, the sound of iron hitting iron. My heart gets excited and my muscles desire the burden of weights. That’s why I finally choose to go to the gym, after trying swimming and running. It has a strong context for habit formation.
2.3.2 How to start physical training and go to the gym regularly?
My success in regular physical training owes to a book called Tiny Habits. Actually, this inspiration of fitness is from this book. The fundamental principle of forming any habit is to start it tiny. Many people normally start a habit like this: Man, today you should go to the gym today and have a harsh training.
2.3.4 The implications of fitness?
After I do bodybuilding regularly, I often have sudden insights about the implications of fitness for my daily life.
One thing is that bodybuilding is quite similar with working. When we undergo training, we can not always train very intensely. If we use colors to indicate the intensity of training. Green zone stands for a comfortable intensity for us, yellow zone challenging and red zone hard. We need to train in the yellow zone, while expanding our green zone and reduce the red zone. These are incremental changes. This is also applicable for working. If we always work in red zone, we will be easily worn out and quite. But if we keep working in the green zone, we don’t make enough progress. At work, we need to find the boundary of yellow zone and try to work under reasonable pressure.
2.4 Writing
Writing is a way to think. I write not because I want to be a writer, but to be a thinker. Why is writing so important for thinking? Maybe it’s because our brain has a limited capacity for information processing. But with the help of characters and an external media, the capacity could be broadly expanded. When I see a graduate thesis, I am always amazed by the scale of information inside. But for a graduate to write this thesis, he builds it inch by inch. It is the magic of writing that maintains the fruits of our thinking. And more amazing is that we can transfer these fruits from generation to generation, and one day it contributes to the revolution of human intelligence.
Back to our personal view, writing is a good booster for the evolution of our thoughts. For most people, their thoughts upgrade slowly, because they don’t intentionally lead this evolution. But we can see some people progress very fast, and what they have in common is that most of them write.