Orbital Velocity

Day 2: An Unexpected Benefit

Upon sitting down at my computer to write this, I opened a web browser... and reflexively went to Facebook.

This is a morning ritual, so ingrained that I didn't notice myself doing it. It's how I start off when I open a browser. It's often the first thing I do when I return to my computer from a work break. If it's not Facebook, it's Twitter, or the New York Times. I work from home and bill by the hour, so it's easier to justify such behavior: I just won't start the timer until I'm done catching up on social media and the news. As a result, a sizeable chunk of each days slips away from me. Don't get me wrong -- I'm very much a fan of social media, and I believe in an informed democracy, which in turn demands some effort on the part of citizens to be cognizant of what's going on in their local area, their state, their country, and the world. But willpower is best thought of as a limited resource. I sink too much time into consuming information, and I need all the help I can get breaking out of that cycle.

Today, however, I quickly remembered that I had opened my browser with a sense of purpose. This gave my willpower a little boost, and I was able to stop what I was doing and shift my attention here.

From this, I'm taking away two lessons. The first is that I need a way to get to this page without being tempted by info-junkie websites along the way. The second is that this project has successfully added a sense of direction strong enough to help me shift my focus away from unwanted distractions. I can't say how long that will last, but right now it's working. And I suspect that reaching orbital velocity, i.e., getting this good habit so deeply ingrained in me that I can sustain it with little draw on my limited willpower, is going to depend on my keeping that sense of direction, consciously and creatively refreshing it each time it wanes as the days, weeks, and months go by.

In order to bypass the info-junkie temptations, I have a simple trick. I use a keyboard-based launcher to take me straight to the target website. If you're not familiar with this concept, read on -- I'll tell you about it below. But first, why does this help? As I mentioned above, willpower is best thought of as a limited resource. If you leave a candy dish out where you can see it, every time you walk past it and manage to resist it, you make a small withdrawal from your willpower account. Walk past it enough times, and you no longer have enough will to say no. In this case, the candy dish is the UI elements within the web browser that draw me toward my info-junkie websites. In my case, I use Firefox, and I dip into the "Most Visited" drop-down menu almost every time I open the browser. I developed this habit because it made it quick and easy for me to check on the websites I'm most interested in. But then it became one of those "muscle memory" habits -- I now do it without explicitly deciding to do it. It's like I'm on autopilot, and those autopilot habits are hard to break.

To cut the candy dish out of my route, I've configured a simple tool that allows me to avoid the distracting UI elements at the top of the Firefox window. Here is what I now do when I want to add a new part to this ongoing story: I sit down at my laptop; I type Alt+Q to launch a little Windows program called SlickRun; and I start typing the keyword I just added, "orbitalvelocity". SlickRun's auto-complete feature makes it so I usually only have to type one or two letters, and it offers to fill in the rest for me. I hit Enter, and Firefox pops up with the correct Wattpad page. No need to shift my focus away from my go-to websites, because I jumped straight to my intended destination. This slight change to my workflow can easily save me thirty minutes of diving down rabbit holes.

"Wait," you might say. "Why am I reading about computer shortcuts in a story that's supposedly about getting fit? Shouldn't this guy be doing pull-ups or yoga or something?"

I already did the pull-ups and yoga! I decided to do some exercise before I started writing, in the spirit of keeping first things first. I did two pull-ups. This wouldn't sound impressive to my friend who's training to become an FBI agent, but for the past couple weeks I could do only one. It's greater than zero, and it's better than I was able to do yesterday, so I'm pretty excited about those two pull-ups. I also did fifteen minutes of yoga, in my living room. No time spent going to a yoga studio, which is in line with the "keep it fast" rule I established for myself yesterday.

More to the point, understanding your willpower and mindfully working around its limitations is a key part of avoiding bad habits and establishing good ones. If you don't recognize how much your bad habits eat away at your limited resources -- time, money, and willpower -- you can't leave yourself enough open space for the good ones.

Now, I find myself feeling great. I got a little exercise, I stretched my writing muscles, and maybe I inspired you to recognize the candy dishes in your own life and come up with ways to avoid them?