As anyone who knows me might be aware, I'm into Tim Ferriss's books. I read the Four-Hour Workweek every year, and have the Four-Hour Body, Four-Hour Chef and Tools of Titans on my Kindle app on my iPad. I listen to his podcast regularly, though not religiously, and like catching him on other podcasts - his chats with Chris Hardwick on the Nerdist and Marc Maron on WTF are particularly good.
I also listen (sporadically) to a podcast called the Side Hustle Show. It's hosted by Nick Loper, and features people who have turned their hobbies or whatever into paying side businesses. He references Tim Ferriss from time to time, though to my knowledge hasn't had Tim on his own show.
The reason I mention both here is that there was an interesting confluence of ideas between them, which I've been thinking about ever since. Because Nick Loper expressed it in the most digestible form, I'll call it by the name he uses, though with the understanding that Tim Ferriss also advocates it. Specifically, it's in the Side Hustle episode called "Too Small to Fail", and Nick Loper refers to it as micro-habits.
Micro-habits are too small to fail because, ideally, they are binary - you either accomplish them or you don't. The time investment is small, which means the attention investment is also small, and therefore the habit is easy to create. It can be drawing a single line of a picture per day, writing a single line of your novel, or doing a single pushup per day.
That last one comes from Tim Ferriss, via his chapter on Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress founder) in Tools of Titans. Mullenweg apparently does a single pushup before bed every night, which has helped him get in shape. It is, in fact, so easy to stick with that I've been doing it for a few months, and have seen a great improvement in my pushup form (though on occasions where I've tried to work out my max number of reps, the best I can do with good form is eleven).
Tim Ferriss mentions other micro-habits and ice-breakers in his books, including the fact that IBM sales people used to have a target of one call per day. He notes that keeping the habit small is intentional, because it means it's easy to say you've accomplished what you wanted to do, and because surmounting that initial hurdle makes it easier to pick up the phone again, or finish your picture, or whatever. It's not necessarily better for your pushups, but let's leave that aside for a moment.
Any big endeavor requires a significant investment of time, energy, attention, or whatever you want to call it. Breaking it down into its smallest component parts reduces the complexity and makes it less daunting to just begin, and when you begin you find that momentum carries you on over a long time.
I've made reference before to methodical ways of writing, so this is probably not a surprise to any readers out there. But I suspect it's not obvious to everybody - even Tim Ferriss sometimes blabs about how you need blocks of hours and hours for creative endeavors. Three hour blocks of productivity are probably great, but at least with micro-habits I've been able to check off the box of writing and doing pushups almost every day for several months, and if I don't always write for a full hour, or have the ability to do more than eleven pushups with good form (yet), at least I know I'm getting things done.
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