Finding a new approach to new year resolutions

I always make new year resolutions, and they are usually quite generic. That approach works so long as you come up with a specific way of implementing it. Two years ago I decided to join a badminton club and I’m still going and still enjoying it. In hindsight I don’t even identify it as a resolution fulfilled, just something I did. Try and make your resolutions like this – a generic goal (get fit) turned in to a specific action (join badminton club). If I had just stuck to the generic resolution I would have gone jogging for a couple of weeks and then given up. Instead, I look forward to badminton evening every week and have a whole new bunch of friends.

For this year I decided that I want to take up a team sport and go back to studying. I’ve found a local cricket team  - Kings Heath CC – that have a good training set up and will take on beginners; and I’ve signed up for an economics course (in the Austrian tradition, naturally).

The strange thing is that I know I will thoroughly enjoy both of these things, but I needed the impetus of “making resolutions” to get into gear and actually make them happen. Why is this? Some people are blessed with an inexhaustible supply of energy and enthusiasm, but I could procrastinate for my country and I think many people are the same. This means I need all the help I can get with resolutions, so I’m trying to go for resolutions that will be “good for me” but that I will also enjoy.

One resolution I make time and again is a negative one – to stop wasting so much time on the internet, reading newspapers, and generally filling up my life with activities that don’t actually inspire or enthuse me (addictive as they are). This resolution never works. Instead I’m going to try and make a conscious effort to fill my time with things I love and this should squeeze the time for time wasting out of my day. Barbara Winter has a good take on this at Joyfully Jobless.

A typical negative resolution might be to eat more healthily. It is easy to approach that by deciding to cut out junk food. But if you eat junk food it is because you like junk food, so that probably won’t stick. A better approach might be to take a cookery course, so you can feel positive and confident about making good food choices rather than feeling like you are just depriving yourself of your treats.

Looking back at last year, I did make some changes but they weren’t new year resolutions as such. Still, it’s useful to look back and see how I did:

• Four day week – This didn’t work out how I planned but nonetheless has been a good learning experience, about myself and my motivations as much as anything else.
• Swimming – I took swimming lessons (quite a few actually), and although I improved a lot I never quite nailed it. I also wasn’t able to fit it in to my week outside of lessons. I started going to the pool before badminton but my badminton suffered, and I decided I didn’t want to go the leisure centre on another evening just for swimming. However. I do have a much better grounding should I need/want to take it up again.
• Cycling to work – Love it, saves money, gets me out in the fresh(ish) air

Looking back at these (and the badminton) gave me the confidence of knowing that I can make changes to my life that do stick, even if they don’t all work out as I expected.

Guest post

Hello.

I am Pete’s computer and he has asked me to write this blog post for him because he is busy. By busy, I mean he has been out this evening and was too lazy to write a post in advance over the weekend. He wastes too much of his time on the internet you see.

If you see Pete in the real world, tell him to stop being a lazy arse and get on with something productive.

What are you moaning about this week?

I was asked the other day what I had been moaning about in the last week. It took me a moment to realise I was being asked what I had been blogging about (this was an off-line, real world conversation).

I was going to call this post “Reasons to be cheerful”, and highlight the blog posts in which I am optimistic and of a sunny disposition. Turns out there aren’t many of them, so that’s that plan scratched.

But I don’t FEEL like a moany old git. I know it may not sound like it sometimes but I am actually optimistic about the big things – just like Matt Ridley. You need to think about the bad stuff in order to work out how to solve it – just like Frank. Having dreams and aspirations requires you to think about how you want your life to be, and hence how it isn’t as good as can be – just like me, here.

New Politics – New You?

Daniel Finkelstein in The Times is discussing the idea of “new politics”, in the light of the very new (well, very hasn’t-happened-for-a-while) political situation in the UK – coalition government.  How can we have new politics when politicians are still just people and are still responding to the same incentives?

But the most useful thing that studying evolutionary psychology has taught me is humility about how much politics can really change us. So much of human behaviour is innate, hard-wired, the result of adaptations made thousands of years ago. It is, in a twisted sort of a way, almost amusing to watch us try to change human nature with a government scheme or the banning of fatty food adverts during Jackanory.

The trick is not to will a change in behaviour, but to change the incentives so as to make it inevitable.  For example, in a flush of post-election enthusiasm the coalition are committing to publishing far more details of government expenditure.  This should remove the incentive for politicians to dissemble and be evasive about how our money is spent – because the information will already be out there.  Therefore there will be more incentive to be frank and admit when their are problems, and address how the problems will be solved.  If information is not in the public domain, with the best will in the world politicians will still find it easier to dissemble and evade.  Change the incentives, change the behaviour.

As with politics, so with you and me.  Do you wish to change your behaviour, how you approach life?  I do.  Have you tried to do this just by willing your self to do do?  I have.  Has it worked?  It hasn’t worked for me.

I’ve changed my incentives.  I’ve given up a day of earning a week and this has forced me to start being productive because otherwise I have reduced my income for nothing.  So I’m writing blogs, writing articles, looking for the next opportunity because if I don’t do this I am losing out for no gain.  I could do these things in my spare time, in the evening and at weekends.  But I have tried this, and for me this does not work.  If you keep trying and it doesn’t work – don’t try the same thing again.  Same situation, same result.  Change your incentives.

Learning Curve

In this post I described how I had reduced my hours to a 4-day week, to allow me to have a day a week in which to pursue various projects, paid or otherwise.  I haven’t been quite as productive as I would have hoped, but it is still early days.  My major accomplishment so far has been a sudden dollop of self-knowledge.

I consider myself a reliable person.  At university, I always got work in on time and to an appropriate standard (not always great, but good enough).  My salaried work is in project-based consultancy – specific deliverables by a specific deadline.  Sure, things get held up sometimes, but that is just the way it goes.

I thought that this would stand me in good stead for working independently.  So far it hasn’t worked out quite as well as I would have hoped but I have worked out why.

I am reliable when other people rely on me.  If I haven’t made a promise to someone else, it may well not get done.

This isn’t as bad as it sounds for someone with aspirations to work independently.  Firstly, if I have clients then they are relying on me so that is not a problem.  It gets tricky around “development” projects, when I am doing something for its own sake or with an indeterminate timescale or uncertain pay-off.  Like this blog!  Now that I have realised this about myself, how do I respond to this new information?  I need a strategy that goes with the grain of my character.  Thinking to myself “Just get on with it” doesn’t work.  I need to make rash promises and commitments to as many people as possible, so that I feel that I would be letting them down (or at least making myself look stupid) if I didn’t deliver.

To this end I promise you, dear reader, to post three times a week here.  If I don’t, tell me how disappointed you are…