Tag Archives: writing

self-development

Tiny habits for writing

It’s not easy to become a productive writer. Using the tiny habits approach has much to offer.

A common problem for writers is procrastination, often linked to excess perfectionism: “I don’t feel like writing today. I’ll wait until I feel the inspiration.” Delay follows delay. Sometimes, when sitting down to write, a perfectionist keeps rewriting the first paragraph or even the first sentence, because it’s never quite right.

            Finally, after an interminable delay, pressure builds up, often due to a deadline, and this triggers a surge of writing lasting hours or even days. It’s a binge. It generates lots of words but it’s exhausting mentally. Not wanting to do it again soon leads to procrastination, and the cycle goes on.

In 2008, I read Tara Gray’s book Publish & Flourish. It is a short, easy-to-read and inspiring guide to becoming a productive scholarly writer. The core of her approach is writing daily — a practical way to overcome procrastination and bingeing. Gray was inspired by research, carried out in the 1980s, by psychologist and education researcher Robert Boice. He observed that most new academics were overwhelmed by the demands of teaching, but noticed a small number who were less stressed and more productive. Boice thought the techniques used by these more productive junior academics could be taught to others and set out to show how. He found that a practice of daily writing, in short periods and with accountability, could work wonders.

Since 2008, I’ve used the Boice-Gray approach myself, offered it to my PhD students and coordinated a writing programme for academics and research students. I’m always on the lookout for ideas to make the process easier and more effective. It was with this background that I came to BJ Fogg’s book Tiny Habits.

            Fogg developed his programme for building habits a decade ago and has been using it to help thousands of people. Tiny Habits is a straightforward presentation of the programme, with lots of exercises, diagrams, lists and — most revealing of all — stories about habit development. Some of the stories are about people Fogg knows, and some are his own personal experiences.

Here I’m going to point to a few of the ideas in Tiny Habits and say how they relate to the Boice-Gray writing programme.

Start small

A key idea in Tiny Habits is to start small — very small. The purpose is to make it as easy as possible to start a new behaviour. Once it becomes a regular part of your routine, it can be built up. Fogg repeatedly uses one example from his own experience: after he has a pee, he does two push-ups. And to start with, the push-ups can be against the wall. Easy! Fogg wanted to become fitter, and he wanted to develop habits that would help in this quest. He didn’t start by going to the gym for a workout. He started with the two-push-up routine.

            In the writing programme, we have something similar. Rather than procrastinating and then going on a writing binge, the goal is to write a relatively small amount each day, an amount small enough to feel unthreatening, small enough to feel doable.

When I started the Boice-Gray method, I aimed at about 15 minutes per day, which felt like a breeze compared to my previous methods, and easy to maintain week after week. However, I soon learned that for many of my colleagues, even to sit down and write for 15 minutes was too daunting to contemplate. They couldn’t do it. Some couldn’t write anything at all. So, for those who join our group and started out writing many hundreds of words each day, I say, “Cut back. Don’t write for so long each day. Think of doing five or ten minutes. Do this until you create a sustainable habit.”

This advice worked for some, but others dropped away after starting the programme, returning to their usual pattern of procrastination and bingeing. If I had known about the tiny habits approach, I would have offered something simpler: start by writing just one minute each day. Or even simpler: start by picking up a pen and looking at a sheet of paper. Do this every day for a week. If you feel like writing a sentence, do that.

Tiny habit indeed! Picking up your pen — or putting your fingers on a keyboard — and thinking about writing seems pretty easy. That’s the point! It’s so easy that it’s hard to rationalise not doing it. It’s hard to say, “I’m too busy to pick up a pen and look at a sheet of paper for a few seconds.” It’s so easy that excuses are too obviously just that, excuses.

Don’t rely on motivation

Many people, when they want to start a new behaviour, rely on motivation. They want to lose weight, so they rely on their willpower to eat less or eat differently. This sounds obvious, but it hardly ever works.

Fogg devotes pages of text telling about motivation and why it’s an unreliable road to change. He tells about “behaviour design” as a way of getting around the “motivation monkey.” The idea is to discover what you really want to do, and develop a way to turn that into a routine.

The Boice-Gray writing programme is also based on a distrust of relying on motivation. The bad habit of procrastination is driven by an assumption, or rationalisation, that you need to be inspired to write, so if you don’t feel like it, then you should wait until you do. For quite a few scholars, the result is very little writing.

Here comes a delicate issue. Fogg provides a detailed set of steps for figuring out what you really want to do. The writing programme assumes you really want to write, or at least to be an author. But perhaps some scholars don’t really want to write. Maybe they don’t really want to be authors because they fear putting out their work for others to read.

Make it easy enough

Fogg provides an illuminating diagram showing the areas where action will be taken, with the axes being motivation and ability. If your motivation is too low, you won’t act; if you lack ability, you won’t act. Doing 20 push-ups might be too hard; doing two push-ups against the wall probably won’t be.

Everyone in the writing programme has the ability to write. Most of us are either doing PhDs or already have PhDs. But sometimes it seems that writing on a challenging topic for an article or thesis chapter feels too hard. Because it’s important to write regularly, we sometimes suggest easier options, such as writing a diary entry, a letter to a friend, or just whatever comes into your head, so-called free writing. Options like these help keep up the daily writing habit, and maintain or improve our capacity to turn thoughts into words on a page.

Use prompts

When it comes to building a habit, a crucial factor is having a prompt: something that will remind you of what you want to do. Fogg gives many examples of prompts and how to find one that is reliable and effective.


This is probably not a good prompt.

            In the writing programme, we recommend finding a regular time and place for writing, so it becomes part of a routine. For me, it’s soon after getting up in the morning. Others time their writing after specific activities. We could do more to help each other find prompts.

Over the years, many participants in the programme say that it’s important to do their writing before checking emails or social media. It’s easy to get sucked into hours of online browsing, and before long writing seems too hard. One tip is to turn off notifications, so there’s less temptation to see what’s come in. For those who find it easy to be distracted, we’ve suggested various tricks, for example leaving a sheet of paper on top of the computer, to be seen at the next visit, saying “WRITE”. The problem of overcoming distractions can be thought of as breaking an undesired habit. Fogg tells about this too.

Celebrate

Fogg recommends celebrating immediately after every single success in carrying out a tiny habit, even just doing two wall push-ups. He goes to great lengths to encourage you to find the most effective way. It might be a fist-pump, shouting “Yes!” or doing a little dance. Fogg says it’s worth experimenting to see what actually brings out a positive feeling. It’s the positive emotion that’s important: it helps wire in the habit.

            In the writing programme, we encourage people to reward themselves after finishing a writing session, for example by having a favourite drink, taking a walk or checking social media. That’s fine, and is compatible with a tiny habits approach, but I think Fogg would recommend something more immediate and emotionally powerful right after writing the last word in a session.

What else?

There is far more detail in Tiny Habits than I can indicate here, and it would be fascinating to explore many possible applications to writing. There is one other connection, a general one, worth mentioning here: experimentation. Fogg says it’s worth trying out different techniques to find what works best for building a desired habit, or ending an undesired one. In our writing group meetings, I often say that finding the most effective approach to writing is a matter of trial and error. What works for one person may not work for another. Each of us listens to others describe techniques they’ve tried and thus get ideas about what we might try ourselves, so in a sense we’re experimenting both individually and collectively.

Tiny Habits is remarkably detailed in its guidelines. There’s one thing I missed: comparison with other works on habits. Fogg gives no references. I would have liked to see a discussion of Charles Duhigg’s best-selling book The Power of Habit or of research on expert performance such as Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. Perhaps this is just a scholarly quibble. The test for each individual is whether learning the tiny-habits approach is worthwhile.


BJ Fogg

            Are you going to get a copy of Tiny Habits? Maybe you need some incentive to order it. Then, are you going to read it? Start small: just open the book once a day. Then aim to read just one page each day — and celebrate just after you do. Before long, you’ll have perfected a habit of regular reading.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Tonya Agostini, Paula Arvela, Monica O’Dwyer and Bec Watt for useful feedback on drafts, and to all members of the high-output writing programme for sharing experiences.

emotions, self-development

The voice in your head

Is there a voice in your head? What does it say? Does it encourage you or does it tell you that you’re no good?

 

Did you ever stay up late during high school with last-minute cramming for an exam or writing an essay due the next day? If so, you have experience with procrastination followed by binges of studying and writing.

I coordinate a writing programme for academics and research students based on a different approach: moderation. It’s inspired by research by Robert Boice and Tara Gray about how researchers can be more productive. The foundation of the programme is brief daily writing sessions. This is quite a contrast with the far more common approach of procrastination and bingeing.

Why do writers procrastinate? One of the factors is the voice in your head that says you’re not ready, you’re not good enough, you’ll never finish, and anyway you might as well wait until you’re in a better mood. Basically, the voice is telling you to give up, which leads to procrastination.

            Gradually I learned that most writers have to deal with this sort of negative self-talk. Boice and Gray each tell about it. In some of our writing group meetings, we’d talk about the voice. Once the question was asked — “Do you have a voice that discourages you?” — people would open up telling about their own experiences. It was reassuring to find out that others have the same obstacle.

To deal with the voice, I have recommended either ignoring it or challenging it, for example telling it that it’s wrong or just to go away. Somewhere along the line I obtained a tiny rubber duck that would squeak when squeezed. Putting it on your shoulder represented the voice in your head. Then there was accompanying note paper that said “Shut the duck up!”

Chatter

If there’s a voice in your head and it’s causing problems for writers, what should be done about it? Ever since learning about this problem, I’ve been on the lookout for insights and practical solutions. Then recently I obtained the wonderful book Chatter by Ethan Kross. Suddenly, there are answers.

            Kross is a researcher, and his special interest is self-talk. He writes that “we all have a voice in our head in some shape or form” (page xxi). Chatter has many pages of references to scientific studies, but the main text is a model of engaging story-telling. Kross tells about his own embarrassing experience when his inner voice took over his behaviour, turning him into a nervous wreck as he irrationally prepared for a threat — and this was despite all he knew about how the inner voice operates.

Kross’s message is that the inner voice, in other words the conversations in our head, can be valuable but can also cause distress and worse.

First consider the advantages in having silent conversations in our heads. Kross provides evidence that the inner voice aids working memory, enables self-control and helps evaluate progress towards goals. Sounds good.

Then there are all the negatives. A basic problem with the inner voice is that it sabotages your focus on tasks. You want to write but the voice is telling you that you’re no good. Even if you can overcome the negativity and start writing, the voice occupies some of your mental capacity so you’re not fully engaged.

            One of the ways to try to address the problem is to tell others about your distress. This seems to help but can push others away. In Chatter, Kross reports on studies showing that ruminating on our difficulties is linked to both aggression and unhealthy stress. This is sounding very bad indeed. So what can you do about it?

One helpful method is to create psychological distance. Have you ever imagined yourself up in the sky looking down on the world, and there you are sitting on a chair, walking along outside, or staring at your screen? Imagining yourself from the outside reduces destructive chatter. You may feel that your problems are not as overwhelming as they seem up close.

            You can also gain distance by imagining yourself from the perspective of five or ten years from now, looking back at what’s going on right now. In this imagined hindsight, what is upsetting or distracting now seems like a triviality in the scheme of things. The point of temporal distancing is to escape being fully immersed in your current reality.

Another way gain distance is to think of yourself in the second or third person. Rather than thinking or saying, “I need to relax”, I should tell myself “Brian needs to relax” or “You need to relax.” This reduces the self-critic. So get out of “I” and talk to yourself with “you.”

This sounds too simple. Does it work? Kross describes experiments in which individuals preparing for a stressful task — speaking to an audience on an assigned topic with little preparation — are less stressed when they speak to themselves beforehand using “you.” Furthermore, independent observers say their speeches are better. How could something like this be so effective? Easy. By using “you,” you reduce the chatter in your head that takes up mental space and undermines confidence.


Ethan Kross

Helping others

I was talking with Alice, who is going through a stressful time. She tells me about her difficulties and I sympathise, and ask for more details. This goes on for some time. Alice feels better for having shared her feelings.

Whoops. Kross says this is not the best way to help. Indeed, when you and your friend commiserate, this “co-rumination” concentrates attention on the details that are linked to distress, so in the longer term this continues the stress by encouraging ever more thinking about the issues.

It’s more useful for me to offer practical help to Alice. Rather than rehashing the events, I can suggest ways forward or other things to think about. Even better, I can offer what Kross calls “invisible support.”

            Alice is preparing for a crucial performance. If I give her unsolicited advice on what to do, the advice might be useful but the giving of advice might reduce her self-belief. More useful is to do some shopping or cleaning. Those who can most readily offer invisible support are people who live in the same household or have regular contact.

There’s another option. I could send Alice some pictures of nature, perhaps of forests or streams. Kross reports fascinating research showing that being in nature has many health benefits, including calming inner conversations. Furthermore, it’s not even necessary to be among trees. Just seeing pictures of them is beneficial.

Another thing that helps is rituals, either personal or social. Most of us in the writing programme have found that it works better to schedule daily writing in the same location and at the same time of day. After a while, it becomes both a habit and a sort of personal ritual, perhaps with the accompaniment of a specific drink, certain music or following a predictable set of steps in preparation.

A social ritual for writing? That’s not so obvious. If you are part of a group of writers, you can schedule a particular time and process.

Another thing you can do is clean up your office so that it looks neat and, more importantly, ordered. Kross offers evidence that order in the external world — such as a neat desk — can foster internal order, including less chatter.

Chatter is engaging to read because of the stories that Kross tells about himself and others, and his attractive style of writing. At the end of the book, he helpfully includes a list of the main methods for reducing chatter, many of which I’ve mentioned above.

The voice in your head is not going to change quickly. If you struggle with self-talk that undermines rather than helps you do what you want to do, reading Chatter should be valuable, and so is a systematic effort to implement Kross’s suggestions.

How does chatter manifest?

One thing intrigues me. Kross says everyone has a voice in their head, but how does it speak? I’ve asked several friends about this. Their answers vary. Some people hear a voice. If so, whose voice is it? Their own? A parent’s? Some people have conversations in their mind. They don’t hear anything but they know what’s being said. Who are the conversationalists? Two sides of themselves? I don’t hear a voice and don’t have mental conversations, so what’s wrong with me?

If I’m reading Kross’s book and concentrating on what he’s written, I’m thinking, but presumably this isn’t chatter. Only, perhaps, if extraneous thoughts intrude, such as thinking about someone I need to contact or about some grievance from decades ago, would that be unproductive thinking. But what if I suddenly have an inspiration about how to address a research puzzle I’ve been working on? That would be welcome.

Experienced on the inside, there are many commonalities in people’s minds but also some important differences. I know some aspects of my own mind, up close, but continue to find it difficult to fully appreciate the diversity of other people’s inner worlds.

Thanks to Tonya Agostini, Aloysia Brooks, Kelly Gates, Tara Gray, Olga Kuchinskaya, Dalilah Shemia-Goeke, Melinda Waterman and Qinqing Xu for useful feedback, and all those who have shared with me their experiences with their inner voices.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au