In a recent essay, I argued that most people try to do too many things. They need to make more progress in trying to do everything that interests them.
A reader pointed out a problem to me. Doesn’t this view of having a few projects in a row contradict the idea of creating good habits? Isn’t the idea of making slow and steady progress on all your goals rather than working in spurts?
This tension has come up before. After the publication of my book, I received angry mail arguing that the intense projects I had documented in Ultralearning were contrary to the habit-centred philosophy of my friend and preface author, James Clear, as laid out in Atomic Habits.
So what about slow and steady habits or intensive projects?
As always, the answer is both. Both habits and projects are valuable tools. They address different types of problems and have other limitations. Whether a practice or a project is the right tool depends on the nature of the goal you are trying to achieve.
The philosophy of habit creation
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Habit formation, the process by which a behaviour becomes increasingly automatic, has a long history.
William James, the father of scientific psychology, made habits a centrepiece of his magnum opus: The Principles of Psychology. According to him, habit is the fundamental principle of the mind. Behaviours are chained together until they become automatic and completely escape consciousness.
For more than a century, automaticity has been a dominant theme in our understanding of the mind. Early behaviourists defined the stimulus-response relationship as the basis of human action. More contemporary theories of skill acquisition focus on the shift from controlled, laborious processing to automatic behaviour as a central feature of mental life.
The philosophy of habit formation builds on these observations and relates them to our goals. If an effort is the main obstacle to action and repeated and rewarded measures become more automatic, then creating better habits is an essential tool.
Habits VS Projects
There are a few ingredients necessary for habits to work well:
The behaviour can become routine. If it requires complex thought or planning, it is not a habit, by definition. Sitting down to write every morning can become a habit, but not the act of writing itself.
The behaviour must be rewarding and enjoyable. In my essay on the meta stability of habits, I point out that many behaviours we want to make into habits need to be more satisfying. Although they may become more accessible and automatic, they will never fully transform into mind-numbing routines.
The goal requires patience rather than intensity. Many plans have diminishing returns: the first hour of weekly exercise counts more than the fifteenth. Not all projects are like this. Getting a new job, launching a start-up or passing an exam have thresholds. Below a specific point, the return on effort is zero.
This means that simple, complex and intense goals can benefit from habits. If I’m writing a book, I could use a routine of sitting down to write every day. Habit-based tools can make writing more automatic, even if the goal needs to fit the habit better.
However, this is essential; more than having a habit is needed. Writing a book is more complex than writing a page a day. Writing a book is not just about typing words; it’s also about editing, getting feedback, researching, and obsessing too much about something you consider essential. Many terrible books have been written mistakenly, believing that achieving a daily word count is the hardest part of writing.
So writing a book is a project. It takes mental charge to cope with the complexity and concentration to overcome frustration. It requires thoughtful, planned activities that can only be made partially automatic.
Projects can be used to manage these difficulties, especially those involving serial effort.
Habits AND projects
As tools, habits and projects coexist nicely. If your goal is to write a book, the daily rituals associated with writing can become routine. But it would be helpful for you to recognize that the deep thought and planning necessary to write well cannot be automated. Good writers learn to combine both. They regularly spend time writing. And they don’t fool themselves into thinking that writing a book is effortless, that they can do it without much thought.
Habits are enough for some goals, but others will need projects. I can set a goal to exercise daily, and if I stick with it long enough, it may become automatic behaviour. But if I decide to run a marathon for the first time, I’ll need more than my daily jog. If I want to win the marathon, I need more than a habit.
The continuum of effort
You invest three resources in an activity: time, effort, and attention.
Time is the most obvious factor: only a few hours in the day. So even if it doesn’t require much effort or thought, a time-consuming habit can clash with other activities. Even if you could use every minute of the day productively, you may need more time to do everything you’d like to do.
The effort comes next. Habits can become less demanding with careful conditioning, but the action is rarely zero. This non-zero effort has two effects. First, combined with the inevitable nudges of life, it can lead to the need to rebuild old habits semi-regularly. Second, while it may be conceivable to fit all the desired patterns into your schedule, it may take more effort to do them all.
Attention is the most limited of all. If a project requires planning, thinking and obsessing, you are simultaneously limited to one or two efforts. Any additional action will significantly reduce your performance.
The number of activities you can undertake at any given time depends on your position on this continuum. Creating habits can reduce the effort and attention required, but rarely to zero.
The goal is for each activity to try to make the regular investment of effort required more habitual. However, projects have a certain degree of fundamental difficulty that requires concentration. For the first-time author, writing a book would benefit from a daily writing habit. But it’s not just the installed model; you would also have to learn French, practice guitar, set up a business and take on a new role simultaneously.
My project experience and Habits
I’ve spent most of my adult life pursuing a combination of projects and better habits. I’ve tried just about every strategy out there. While this doesn’t reach the rigour of a controlled experiment, I’d like to reflect on my experiences.
Exercise works well as a habit. Although the time remains constant and the effort rarely goes to zero (recreational sports are often an exception), the attention required can go to zero. Get enough exercise, and you can think about other projects while training.
Exercise is also a paradigmatic goal that requires patience rather than intensity. You can’t store fitness, and staying active throughout your life has enormous long-term benefits.
Writing articles works well as a habit as long as my goal is regularity. I’ve written over 1,500 reports in the last fifteen years. That’s two million words of published material. Few say I don’t have good writing habits.
However, this habit only sometimes leads to improvement. Every time I want to start writing something new, I have to put a lot of effort into it. Often this practice works against progress rather than in favour of it because I have such ingrained writing behaviours that are difficult to dislodge.
Working on books, courses, or ultra-learning efforts are all intensive projects. These areas have little been accomplished through blind repetition of easy work. But even here, habits often underpin my efforts. For example, one of my first steps in the MIT Challenge was establishing a study routine. It was far from easy, but consistency made it doable.
This mix of habits and projects has been a theme throughout my life. That’s part of why I need clarification when I see the opposing approaches as being one or the other. But if you understand how each work and their respective limitations, you can make more progress than dogmatically sticking to one or the other.
