The last block to good organization according to Morgenstern is Psychological Obstacles.  Again, I think that this applies more broadly to habit building in general.  This can be heavy stuff, but extremely rewarding.  I’m not sure that these obstacles can be easily categorized, but I’d like to focus on one category where I think a lot of people might have a block- alignment of goals & habits with personal vision & values.  A wordy title for sure, but I cannot come up with anything snappier at the moment.

Our goals, habits & resolutions paint a picture of who we think we should be.  However, in some cases this isn’t the same as who we want to be.  We put down goals that don’t actually resonate with our values or personal vision.  We put these goals down because something external is telling us we should.  Or we put down a goal that does align with our values or ideal self-image, but actually has no resonance with us.

Let me give you an example.  For years “Learn a second language” has been a goal of mine.  I work in a multi-cultural environment and I’d say at least 80% of my colleagues speak at least 2 languages, and a sizable fraction of them speak three or more.  I’d like to show my non-native English speaking friend and colleagues respect by talking to them in their native language.  I think that would deepen our relationship & friendship.  In my mind, learning another language would make me more worldly and sophisticated as well.   This would suddenly turn me in to one of those adventurous people who backpack across the globe staying in the homes of people they met while chatting at the local market.  Knowing a second language (in my mind) is also a signal that I’m not closed minded- I’m not an ugly American.   There is a lot of stuff behind this simple goal!

Yet, I still don’t speak a second language.  This resolution has been broken more times than I can count.  I’d buy CDs or download programs, commit to a practice schedule, start building the habit of practice, and break it within a month.  Why?  Because I don’t like learning languages.  It is a horrible, horrible slog for me.  I took years of French in school, and worked hard to get good grades, but it was my least favorite subject.  I also don’t like travel.  I’m not a spontaneous person, and backpacking across the world sounds horrible to me.  The underlying values (multi-multiculturalism, open-mindedness, respect, relationship building, sophistication)  are important to me, which is why this goal re-appeared on my list for so many years.  To not learn a second language seems like a refutation of values that are important to me.  But, there are other ways to live in alignment with those values that fit better with my life, my personality, & my preferences.  And now, this goal doesn’t appear on my list.  Occasionally, I think “I should learn a second language”, but a few moments reflection convinces me that this goal is still not something I actually want to do.

The converse could be true as well.  Upon thinking about a goal and seeing the deep connection to your values and your ideal self, you may realize that it is a much higher priority than you thought.  As an example, keeping up with household chores may not be the funnest thing for most of us,  and might seem like it is dictated mostly by outside expectations.  However, when I thought about how I felt when I walked in to a clean room, I realized that house-cleaning enabled tranquility.  For me, I experience increased calm in a neat and clean room and increased anxiety walking in to a messy one.  Housekeeping is something that I struggled with fitting in my schedule.  It seemed cleaning took too much energy.  I either didn’t have that energy, or I preferred to spend it elsewhere.  The last year I lived pretty chaotically.  However, as I started reflect on my values, and ways to reduce my stress and anxiety levels, I realized that housework was actually a really simple and important path towards calm.  And since I’ve starting thinking about these benefits of housework, it has been easier to do the habit of doing some cleaning & tidying up every night.

So, is there a Zombie goal on your list?  A goal that you’ve never managed to accomplish, but yet keeps coming back year after year?  Perhaps taking a few minutes to think about why you want to accomplish the goal, and if it is really something you want to do, will finally slay the Zombie goal- one way or another.

In Julia Morgenstern’s framework, the second level of difficulties with organization are those she dubs “External Realities.”  These are things beyond your control such as unrealistic workload or uncooperative partners.

This is a tricky category, despite the fact that there are really only two options- acceptance of the external reality and mitigation of the external reality.

Mitigation of the external reality is commonly suggested strategy.  For example, if you want to take a gym class at 6:30 pm, but your boss frequently wanders in to your office at 5:45 pm to have a long brainstorming session, then signing up for a 6:30 am class instead is a work around.  For those of you with understanding bosses and no fear about setting boundaries, go ahead and tell your boss you have to leave at 6 pm exactly.  Then sign up for the 6:30 am class after being late for class 3 times running due to traffic.  🙂

Mitigation of external realities can be empowering.  You manage to accomplish your goals or habits despite the huge obstacle.  Go you!

On the other hand, sometimes it just isn’t possible to mitigate the issue.  You have to accept the external reality and perhaps abandon the goal.  This is a horrible feeling since it feels like admitting defeat.  But it is so corrosive to continually “fail” at something.  Better to accept the reality and focus your attentions on something you can accomplish.  Treat yourself with kindness and compassion and let go of the habit or goal.

In general, things that require other people to change fall in this category (unless there is a clear way to mitigate, per our chatty boss example).  You have no control over others, so let it go.  Easier said than done, but inability to change others is probably something that experience tells you is a truth.  Other external factors that may fail in this category are poor health or limited time.  These can be really hard to recognize and accept, since there is a cultural narrative of ‘gutting through it’.  Just because Thomas Edison worked 20 hour days doesn’t mean that work pattern is healthy for you.  If you are ill, if you are tired, if you cannot do it right now, accept that and move on.  In this case, prioritizing the goals and habits that are essential and letting everything else go is a perfectly sane and healthy approach.

Habit building is hard.  It is frustrating as you struggle through the process.  There is a growing body of research about building habits out there, which I’ll review in another post, but sometimes despite following the recipes, the habit doesn’t stick.  Or a habit you had before suddenly becomes broken.

A useful framework I found for diagnosing problems with habit formation came from the book “Organizing from the inside out” by Julie Morgenstern.  She claims that organizational problems stem from three different causes- Technical Errors, External Realities, and Psychological Obstacles.    Keeping one’s space organized is a habit itself, so this applying this schema to habits perhaps isn’t a revolutionary leap.  But I’ve not seen it presented in this way before, so I thought it would be useful to share it.  Today, I am going to focus on technical errors.

Technical errors in the context of Morgenstern’s work are “simple, mechanical mistakes” and are thus the easiest to fix.   For example, a house filled with cluttered stacks of books might be easily organized by buying more bookcases.

So let’s apply some easy fixes to our habits!  Our habits are frequently sabotaged by simple technical errors.  These often appear to defy logic, so you’ll need to pay attention as you do your habits, rather that just thinking through it in the abstract.  I’ll give a few examples that I’ve found in my own life.

Habit 1: Taking my laundry out of the dryer and folding it
When I moved in to my new apartment, I had a hard time remembering to complete the laundry.   I’ve always been diligent about completing laundry and folding/ironing/ putting stuff away promptly, so I was a little confused about why this habit was broken.

Here is the sequence of the habit:
A) Get basket (for clean laundry) from bedroom
B) Go to laundry room & get Laundry
C) Take laundry to bedroom
D) Fold laundry on bed & put away clothes
E) Put basket back in the proper place in the bedroom

This is apparently impossible to do.  My mind could not get behind this (logical!) sequence.  Nothing I did worked.  I spent more days that I would like to admit dressing out of the dryer because I had no clean clothes in my closet.  This led to other problems, like dirty laundry piling up & wet laundry mildewing in the washer because the dryer was filled with clean clothes from a week ago.

However, the following sequence is a piece of cake for my mind.  Habit firmly in place and effortless.  Other problems related to laundry disappeared once the dryer bottleneck was fixed.

A) Get basket (for clean laundry) from bedroom
B) Go to laundry room & Get Laundry
C) Take laundry to bedroom
D) Fold laundry & put away
E) Put basket back in the proper place in the  bedroom laundry room

Why did this work?  I’m guessing getting the basket was just too much effort to overcome to do a chore, but moving the basket to the laundry room at the end of folding was just a continuation of  “laundry flow”.  Who knows?  (Applying some introspection to why the changes worked might be useful for fixing other problems, but for now I’m happy with leaving with a (yet untested) hypothesis.)

Habit 2: Drinking water at work
Impossible approach:  Keeping a glass on my desk and periodically walking 6 feet to the water cooler to fill it.

Magic approach:  Keeping a 1 L bottle and a glass on my desk.  Filling the glass from the bottle, and periodically walking 6 feet to the water cooler to fill the bottle.

The way that is effortless involves more steps.  Why should that be easier?  In this case, I think this is actually the ghost of habits past.  🙂  I never worked in an office close to water before, so I always brought water bottles/ thermos to work.  So drinking by pouring water in a glass from a bottle is the “right way” to do this.  I suppose I could choose to try and deprogram the leftovers of the old habit, but making the small change of having a bottle and a glass is a small enough inefficiency that I don’t think it is worth the effort to break the old habit.    There are cases where the cost-benefit analysis will lead to the opposite conclusion, but for now, focus on _simple_ tweaks that make a habit work.

Probably, the best approach to find these easy to fix habits is to look at habits that fall in the following categories:

1) Habits that you had before, and are now broken.  Frequently it is a small mechanical difference between before and now.

2) Feelings of frustration when trying to do the habit.  For me, going to the dryer and then remembering I needed to get the basket was very frustrating.  I think this frequently comes at the start of the habit sequence and that it is fairly common, which is why there is a lot of advice along the lines of “pack your gym bag the night before”.

I’d love to hear if you’ve ever experienced technical errors with habit building.  Do they fit the categories above?  Or is there another place we can be looking for easy to fix habits?  Let me know in the comments!