Tag Archives: Consistency

Do we really need deadlines?

At the end of a brutal interval running session I was thinking, “I should set myself some deadlines for getting X done.” I thought to myself, why, if doing X is something I enjoy, should I set myself a deadline if there is no external reason it needs to be done at a certain time. This whole idea goes against my whole notion of productivity and I thought I’d challenge myself to write a blog post essentially playing the devils advocate against myself.

There are a few assumptions I’m going to spell out first, I’m assuming that the task you’re doing is not an assignment or any other task which is ‘due’ at a certain date. This automatically disqualifies a lot of scenarios, this post is about work we tell ourselves we ‘want’ to be doing. If we want to do something, it should get done in our free time, it should be something we enjoy doing, therefore, doesn’t need a deadline.

What does having a deadline do to something we enjoy? First of all, I think deadlines create pressure on ourselves, which can be a very good thing, challenging us to get things done more efficiently, so we have more time to do other things we enjoy blah blah blah, you’ve heard the spiel a thousand times. Deadlines create pressure which can turn things we genuinely enjoy, into tasks we have to do and I’ve never met anyone who loves to HAVE to do something. Furthermore, if it is a creative task we are doing, deadlines create a very end-product focussed lens at which colours the way we see our work. Anything that we enjoy doing, creative or otherwise, should be enjoyed for the love of undertaking the task, not completing it. The endpoint is not the goal, the endpoint is merely a consequence of the goal, enjoy doing the task. Simply having a deadline inevitably makes the endpoint the goal.

Deadlines can mean ironically nothing gets finished. Many times I’m sure we’ve all not done something because it wasn’t quite right in the end and we weren’t happy with it, or that we didn’t think we would be able to produce something perfect, so we produce nothing at all. This is so common, especially when we are attempting new things, we must learn by trial and error. Our first 100 of anything will be bad, it is only after that we begin to get good at whatever it is we’re doing. This is precisely the reason why I’ve challenged myself to post a blog every day, because it forces me to get the first 100 out of the way without trying to make each post perfect. It’s an unreasonable expectation to be able to produce something perfect without practicing. Imagine you’re in a pottery class and there are two groups of people, one group who get told they have a month to work on one pot, and they can spend as much time as they want on it, the other group is forced to make many pots, at least a pot each day, who do you think will produce a better pot in the end? I know I would learn so much by making many many pots, much more than if I were to make one ‘perfect’ pot. The same applies to any skill, by setting deadlines, you create the internal expectation that something needs to be perfected by a certain time, lending itself to group one, spending a lot of time on one pot, not learning through trial and error.

So what is the solution? I believe rather than setting deadlines, you should simply set time goals for doing the thing. This shouldn’t be too much of a shift, rather than saying, “I want to have written an essay on X in 2 weeks time”, tell yourself you want to spend 20mins writing, every day. You can always spend more time if you’re in the zone, but 20 minutes is something we can all find somewhere in our days.

Writing this was an interesting experience and I’m sure that reading this back you can see me convincing myself that this was the right way to be, and I came out with a conclusion of what I actually do, even though at the start I thought this was going against my beliefs. It is interesting to pick a counterpoint to a belief or set of beliefs you hold closely and try to fight for it, it solidifies your understanding of where you really stand on the view. Give it a try, I really enjoyed doing it.

Keep on turning up

I’m really beginning to understand how people can say “I don’t have time to exercise”. This afternoon I got home from a day at placement, my legs were heavy and I was just drained. The last thing I wanted to do was go out for a run. I did it anyway. Just after starting Garmin told me I was in -3 performance condition and I felt every bit of that. I didn’t have any expectations about times or enjoyment, I just wanted to get through it.

I think a common thing I forget is that people dont enjoy exercising all the time, nor should they. Sometimes it’s just about turning up and getting through it. I was completely unmotivated and said to my mum before I left, “the hardest part is putting the shoes on,” and it totally is, nobody has ever backed out of doing a run after putting their runners on.

I’m sure this is where the idea of getting your workout clothes out the night before comes from, because preparing to go is the hardest part. If there are no barriers to preparing to go, you’re going to do it. Even if you just say, I’ll put my runners on, that is going to be enough to get out the door, even for a bit.

Sometimes it’s not about being motivated, it’s just about doing the best you can. When you’re exhausted, that’s not much, but it’s infinitely better than nothing.

Cognitive Dissonance

Have you ever done something which proved to be a bad idea, then proceeded to find a million different ways to justify why you did it? I know I do this quite often, not even realising, until I came across the theory of cognitive dissonance. A nice example of cognitive dissonance is if you were someone who smoked cigarette’s, knowing the severe health impact they had on you. Many people I know justify this by saying, oh yes but i’ll quite before I have kids, or I’ll quite in a few years. This shows that they are justifying their habit by giving themselves a hall pass because they are going to quit.

This isn’t a post to bash people who smoke, you do you. I believe smoking is a great example of cognitive dissonance, people who are addicted will find ways to make themselves feel better about their actions, and that is cognitive dissonance. Another example may be if you were furious at someone for something they did to you, you hated them; fair enough. Weeks later you find out that it wasn’t actually them who wronged you, rather than go back on your hatred and apologise, you double down and invent another reason to justify your anger at them.

Cognitive dissonance is the state of having inconsistent or conflicting beliefs on something, usually relating to behaviours. It can arise when you are provided with new evidence for something which contradicts your previous actions or beliefs. This can be a very uncomfortable state of mind and can result in a heightened level of stress.

So what can I do about it?

Getting yourself out of a state of cognitive dissonance can be very easy or very difficult. Fundamentally all it requires is for you to identify the mismatch between your beliefs (or the new evidence) and your actions, then change them. In the case of being angry at someone, reflecting on the new information and accepting that there is no reason to continue to be angry (and maybe even apologising). That isn’t too hard. When it comes to longstanding behaviours or addictions such as smoking it gets harder because you must break your addiction (the current best evidence suggests nicotine patches are likely the best to assist with this. Just so everyone knows).

Ultimately, the only way to solve cognitive dissonance is to bring your beliefs and actions into alignment, which can be done by either changing your behaviour, or change your beliefs. The former is usually the hardest to do as it is normally ingrained in us but sometimes beliefs can be just as hard, due to social reasons. Maybe you’ve been a massive proponent of the paleo diet for years, only to realise that it has very little evidence going for it *cough* Pete Evans *cough*.

An example for me was realising that I’d made a bad purchase, but rather than admit that, I began fabricating all these reasons it was actually a good purchase, which I told myself and my family. Now this isn’t a huge issue but it did make me feel uncomfortable, and in hindsight, makes me feel really silly.

I hope that having an understanding of what cognitive dissonance is will help you identify it in your life, helping you live more consistently.

I was inspired to write this after listening to ‘The Drive’ podcast by Peter Attia, he had an episode with Carol Tarvis and Eliot Aronson who are both social psychologists. This was an excellent listen where they discussed the concept of cognitive dissonance, the theory and how it affects our lives. Check it out if you’re interested to learn more.