Quantifiability
I really like running.
It's not the sort of thing I should like, really. Of all the popular forms of exercise, it may be the least interesting: you go outside, you move as fast as you can manage for as long as you can manage, and then you go home. Sticky.
But that simplicity is one of the joys. If you've grasped a few basic rules for comfortable running - don't look at your feet, keep your body straight, don't wear clogs - you barely have to worry about form, or skill, or any kind of practical applicability.
Despite this, I found running very hard to stick to. I would run regularly for a couple of weeks, and then decide the time was better spent scrambling eggs and buttering muffins. The fact is that the quantifiable rewards of going for runs are a long way off. As always, Charlie Brooker has it spot on:
Take joggers. They weren't born with a pre-programmed desire to jog. No. One day they decided they'd like to get fit, and chose to sacrifice their immediate comfort in favour of delayed gratification: they got off the sofa and jogged themselves slim. Every jogger is essentially a clairvoyant. They've transcended the shackles of contemporary subsistence and risen above the likes of you and me, to witness a vision of the future so captivating it blocks out the pain of the present, so enticing, they're literally compelled to run towards it.
There is more joy to running than that, but only if you can muster the motivation to do it in the first place. Luckily, I played far too many computer games as a child, so if there's a number somewhere that measures my performance I have the irrepressible need to make it increase.
I downloaded an Android app called RunStar (other apps are available) to convert my qualitative jogger's smugness into hard numerical fact, and the motivational gains are enormous. My phone knows if I've gone running. It knows how long I ran for. It knows how fast I went. It counts of the miles I've run against an entirely arbitrary goal. It probably knows whether I exchanged awkward/smug smiles with the other joggers I passed. These are little electronic feathers tickling the part of my brain that used to strive for cheat-earning times on Goldeneye.
I'm sure it's important to keep in mind why you want to do something. But I'm increasingly finding that raw, untwistable quantifiable data is the best possible motivation. I haven't yet worked out if that's because my mind wasn't evolved for smartphones and assumes anything with that much knowledge must be judging me, or if it's because I'm childishly in thrall to high-score tables. But either way, I get to enjoy runs through the park during the golden hour, so I'm happy to surrender myself to the numbers. And I'm sure there are other places grim cyber-counting could improve me, too.
April 11th, 2010 - 15:17
I find the motivation that comes with objective numbers has a fairly limited lifespan.
I may or may not have mentioned this before, but I once took part in a psychology experiment where I was required at all times to wear a wristwatch, which would beep at random throughout the day. When it did, I was to remove a small book from my jacket pocket and jot down precisely how I felt at that moment, as well as what I was doing. I felt I worked harder during that fortnight because I knew at any moment it could beep and I’d have to diligently write ‘slacking off’ in the totally anonymous book that didn’t matter.
After it was over I wrote a program to ask me at random intervals what I was up to, and plot graphs of my answers. I’ve no idea if this helped but it felt a lot like it did. After a while I started to ignore its output, so I tried the automatic time logger at http://www.rescuetime.com which is harder to lie to and whose emailed judgements are deliberately harder to ignore. But I found I didn’t trust its numbers, and getting an email on a Friday afternoon saying ‘you weren’t very productive on Tuesday morning, were you?’ isn’t as discouraging as being heckled on Tuesday morning.
I try to use good, old-fashioned work ethic at the moment but I still feel sure there’s a better system. Possibly constantly changing the tool I use to motivate myself would help.
April 12th, 2010 - 18:51
RescueTime looks pretty neat, even if I can’t run it, but perversely its no-data-entry sales pitch just reminds me of how much I hate timesheets.
April 12th, 2010 - 09:16
I guess there’s a difference between running and working productively, as things you have to motivate yourself to do. The measure of success in running is how much time you’ve spent running, whereas being productive requires a specific kind of time sat at a desk.
How long did it take you to write the program? That kind of thing is sometimes helpful, as long as you’re aware whether or not you’re only setting it up to waste time. I’ve spent endless hours writing to-do lists and calendars to improve my productivity.
I agree that changing tactics is helpful. My approach changes every so often. There’s loads of advice out there for dealing with procrastination and unproductiveness, and the more of it you read, the more different things you can do until they stop working.
Currently, I have it set up so that my homepage on my uni computer is Gmail, and no other timewasting websites are accessible on Firefox, using LeechBlock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476). I have also uninstalled IE and Chrome. And Safari is there, but it’s not in the Start menu. The password for LeechBlock, if I want to unblock any websites, is ‘youshouldbeworking’. Anything I want to access (twitter, facebook, youtube etc) I can do when I get home, and I always check my internets in the morning before I leave. It’s kind of working at the minute.
Still haven’t managed to get myself to go running very often, though.
April 12th, 2010 - 18:44
That difference is a massive difference, because you can really measure your going-running success by how often you run, how far you go and how long it takes, and those are all easy things to measure. The kind of work we do at desks doesn’t break down into numbers so easily.
I deal with work productivity using an arcane system of interconnected Remember the Milk lists. I think the advantage there is that I don’t think of myself as “doing work”; I think about the particular task I’m doing. That means I can’t easily lie to myself about how long I’ve been working for if I’ve actually just been checking Outlook and doing hazily-defined research. The problem is that when I don’t have so many pressing tasks, it’s harder to find proactive ways to use my time.