Nicollet.Net

« Nobody’s perfect », they say. We all wish for improving ourselves in some areas. Want to lose some weight? Become a better dancer? Spend less time debugging your code? Sound smart in meetings?

There are three exceedingly simple steps to improving yourself. These are, in order:

1. Identify what you are doing, precisely, that you would rather not do anymore.
2. Find a way to stop doing whatever you identified in step 1.
3. Gather enough willpower to follow the way you found in step 2 until you succeed.

Now go forth and conquer!

—

What?

Fine. I said those steps were simple, not that they were easy. They can still be helpful, though: even if you cannot seem to improve, at least you can find out which of these steps is giving you a hard time, and concentrate on that specific area.

You need to stop

There are always two ways of looking at any given improvement. You either see it as “I started doing something“, or you see it as “I stopped doing something“. Improvement is change, and change means something ends and something else begins. You start being a good dancer, you stop trampling your partner’s feet. You stop writing buggy code, you start spending less time debugging.

We bloggers love splitting people into groups: you are either a can’t-start person, or a can’t-stop person. If you want to quit smoking, but always end up lighting another one, you are acting as a can’t-stop person. If you want to exercise daily, but always find a good excuse not to run your laps, you are acting as a can’t-start person. And you had better find out which group you are in.

Because if you are a can’t start person, and you think of potential improvements in terms of starting doing things, trouble is coming your way.

Step one is all about looking at your problem from the other side. To start doing things right, you need to stop doing them wrong. As you stop making mistakes, what is left usually counts as improvement.

Ask and accept

Some humans are blessed with the ability to see, in a clear and unmistakable fashion, what went wrong about something. Enlightenment comes in a slap-your-forehead moment where the root cause of your problems is discovered.

Most of us experience trouble as a hazy and painful feeling that seems to come from everywhere at once, with no clear cause and no clear idea of how things ended up the way they did. If you cannot really understand what you are doing wrong or why you end up in trouble, consider asking someone else.Whether an expert opinion, a different angle on the situation, or the act of putting your issues in words and sentences, you will get something out of it.

This reminds me of Bob. When I was still a young intern, without much experience in the ways of men, an older developer joined my team. Despite his reasonable technical skills, Bob had a conflictual relationship with our manager, and this had a negative impact on team morale. I had been told our manager disliked it when people were late for work, even though he did not insist on the matter too much, and my experience with him confirmed that information. Since Bob was at least fifteen minutes late every morning, I decided to share that information after a quite gruesome clash, thinking it would help :

“You know, he gets angry when people are late. If you can’t come in earlier, you really should tell him about it.”

“What do you mean? I’m not late.”

“You came in at 9:25 am this morning.”

“No way, I came in at 9:00 am!“

I suspected that Bob, out of pride, would deny being late in the morning, but that he would mull over the notion and come in on time the next day. I was wrong, and he was thirty minutes late the next morning.

It is very important to carefully examine any criticism before rejecting it. When someone you know takes the time to explain that you’re doing something wrong, the least you could do is wonder if they are right, or why they thought they were right. Criticism is free advice, carefully selected to apply to whatever you do that annoys others most.

Even if Bob really was on time every morning, my advice was still worth considering because it indicated that some people thought he was late, which is quite important in a corporate environment.

Mental triggers

Once you have identified what you need to stop doing, you can move on to step two: find a way to prevent it from happening. Since you cannot keep thinking about it all the time (and even if you did, it would reduce the efficiency of whatever else you were doing), you need to find a way to remember about your decision when it actually matters.

If you experience a feeling when you perform the unwanted action, you happen to be in luck, because it is far easier to associate your decision to stop with that feeling.

While I have always been comfortable in one-on-one conversations, I used to have a lot of trouble speaking up in groups, because I tend to take a short time to think before I speak, and this means someone else in the group is going to start speaking before I can gather my thoughts. If there were pauses in the conversation, I could certainly pass off as the wise experienced guy in the corner who only speaks up when nobody knows what to do anymore, but most of the time I looked like the shy silent guy in the corner who has nothing to contribute to the discussion.

I noticed that most people who spoke up in group discussions said things that were mostly irrelevant and generally only served as an anchor to remind others of what the position and motives of that person were. A precious few people, however, seemed to always grab the attention of others and say something interesting and relevant. Among these was Jamie, a nice lady in her mid-thirties. After observing her for a while, I noticed a pattern in her way of speaking up: she would repeat the last sentence that was said.

“…and we should test if the government servers can handle the load.”

“Test if they can handle the load, yes. I just received a report about…“

By repeating the sentence, she was able to start speaking faster than anyone else, and she used that time to think about what she was about to say next. Not to mention that repeating someone’s sentence implies some level of agreement, which is always good to have in a meeting.

So I started training. Whenever I missed my turn in a conversation, I felt frustrated, which reminded me of my decision to use Jamie’s technique. So, on the next try during the same conversation, I did not think silently about what I had to say and instead repeated the last part of what the speaker said. After a while, I did not have to think consciously about it anymore.

Without a feeling to anchor your reminder to, you will have to find something else.

One trick is to artificially increase the time before you can take the unwanted action. For instance, I live in a flat in Paris and my fridge is a ten-second walk away from my desk, so it’s easy for me to stand up and fetch a quick snack without thinking. I once spent my holidays with a friend who lives in a large house in the countryside, where the fridge was two floors below my appointed room and it took a full minute of navigating slippery stairs and cold, narrow corridors before I could get to said snack, which means I never got to eat without thinking. The longer it takes you to start an activity, the greater the chances that you notice “Hey, I’m about to do this, and I decided I wouldn’t do it anymore!” and desist from doing it.

If the activity is continuous (such as “not washing the dishes“) you can try to make the consequences of that activity as obvious as possible. If the house (or source code) is a mess, then adding small amounts of messy laisser-aller are unnoticeable. If the house (or source code) is cleanly arranged and organized, any amount of mess is going to stand out and be very obvious. It is easier to keep a house or project clean, than it is to clean it up later on.

The will to go on

Finding enough willpower to enforce your decisions can be hard. A good strategy is to know your weaknesses and exploit them. For example, if you hate mediocrity and often think that “I’m worth better than that“, then thinking of unwanted activities as shameful and worthless can give you that little boost you need.

You can even shame yourself into respecting your decisions by telling other people about it. Ask other people to look over your source code daily, even if it’s not an actual code review, and you will often be too ashamed to leave undocumented methods and badly named variables around.