Habits and the hierarchy of needs

If you are anything like me, you will have a vision of where you want to go in your life. Some aspects of this vision will be very specific, others will be only rough ideas or intuitions. One piece of advice you might have heard to realise this vision is to set SMART¹ goals. I don't think this advice is particularly helpful.

Don't get me wrong, SMART goals have their time and place. If you want to complete a project, getting specific about it will give you a reference for when you're done and what not to do. Setting a tight deadline will help you to overcome your anxieties around the project and get to work. But for long-term planning, the time-bound constraint looses its meaning. Even for goals that are due two months from now the deadline becomes too abstract. And if SMART goals don't work for a two-months timeframe, how are they supposed to help you plan your life five years from now?

Instead of setting long-term goals, it is more useful to think in terms of habits. Don't ask "What do I want to achieve?" Ask "What am I going to do on a daily basis?" Don't say you want to write a novel in the next year. Just write 500 words per day. Focusing on habits removes much of the decision process of outcome-based planning and is more resilient. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating how long something will take. If you have been working on your novel for a year and are still not finished, you might get discouraged and give up. If you write daily on the other hand, it is much easier to keep going until you are done. Only focusing on habits, however, doesn't work either. Since habits are focused on a single day, it is easy to loose sight of the bigger picture. The challenge, then, is to pick the right habits to move towards your long-term vision. One framing I find useful for this is inspired by the hierarchy of needs.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a model developed in the 1940s used to classify and understand the relationship between psychological needs. The hierarchy is usually depicted as a pyramid. Each layer of the pyramid refers to one need. Each need is independent from every other and only becomes relevant once all the needs of the layers below are met. For example, it doesn't make sense to think about your living environment (i.e. your aestatic needs) if you don't have enough money to feed yourself (i.e. your physiological needs aren't met).

Thinking about your habits in layers can be equally helpful. Each layer is contains a specific set of behaviours that will enable the next layer. These behaviours don't necessarily have something to do with each other. For example, one of the lower levels can be to work out. Working out will give you more energy, and by that enable you to spend more time to work on harder projects. This hierarchy will change when you progress. Once you reach the top, you'll add new layers. And when live happens, as it inevitably will, and you have to start from the bottom again, you can use your pyramid to backtrack.

Here is how my pyramid currently looks like:

Layer 1: The basics
If I'm not doing those, my state of mind will deteriorate I won't even be able to decide which toothpaste to buy.

• Cook for myself. Avoid processed food. Eating a marzipan cake I baked myself is better than eating processed meatballs.

• Go out and move my body. Even if it's just taking a walk.

• Be creative. Don't think about finishing it yet. Just work on something. Anything

• Reset in the evening. Leave an cleaned up desk behind to make starting in the next day effortless.

• Prioritise sleep. No project, however fun is worth doing until late at night to ruin the entire next day.

Layer 2: Eat the frog
For everything I am doing on level one, there is a version that is slightly less fun, but much more effective.

• Eat the frog. Of all the creative things you can do, there's a high-impact one that doesn't feel comfortable. Start the day by working on it.

• When cooking, avoid carbs. Veggie slow carb as a general guideline.

• Exercise: Think about specific things I want to train and create a workout plan.

• Reflect on the day, write down a few bullet points what happened today and what I will do tomorrow.

• Read in the evening.

Layer 3: Bets and Systematising
The daily routine works now. Time for longer term-optimisation

• Start to think about and implement systems to optimise the day. An example that comes to mind are productivity meditations

• Start to create projects in 6 week bets.

Layer 4: Long-term planning
When bets are working, start to think even longer term. What are projects I want to do or steps I want to take in the next 3-5 years? How can I break them down into smaller experiments, one bet at a time?

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