The Importance of Consolidating Change
I was reading a post on Jason Cohen’s blog A Smart Bear where he refers to another blog which talked about improving our productivity by 1% every day, and in so doing, by the end of the year, being 37 times more productive.
Jason voiced disagreement over whether it’s possible in reality to become 37 times more productive, even if it’s mathematically possible.
Jason used an example:
“You get in your car at home and head out towards your mother’s house 60 miles away. You hit traffic during the first half of the trip, so after 30 miles you’ve averaged only 30 miles per hour.
Now the traffic opens up and you can go as fast as you want. The question is: How fast do you have to go during the second half of the trip such that you’ve averaged 60 mph over the entire trip?
If you’re not using pen and paper, maybe you guessed 90? 120?
Actually it’s impossible! To average 60 mph you need to travel the whole 60 miles in a single hour. But it’s already been an hour! Even if you went 1000 mph during the second half, it would have taken just over an hour to complete the 60 miles, therefore your average is still less than 60 mph.”
I agree with Jason. It’s not possible to be 37 times better at any or all aspects of your life in one year. But I disagree as to why. According to Jason’s example, the reason is that if you mess up on one of the days, it’s impossible to catch up. But life isn’t just one day or one year long, so over time, it is actually possible to catch up to your goal.
You might never catch up to the level you could have been at if you never fell behind in the first place, but if you have a specific target, then over time, you can still make that specific target you set for yourself.
You can’t make up the 60 mph target in that specific hour, but travelling faster will bring your overall average up over time.
I do agree though that it’s not possible to improve 1% a day every single day, but here’s my reason: Change needs to be consolidated, and consolidation, almost by definition, takes time.
Without consolidation, you might improve 1% a day, but by the end of the year most of your earlier improvements will have been lost because you were focusing on the current area of improvement and gradually neglecting the earlier improvements.
The key is to consolidate the change. You first have to make it a habit, or second nature, and that takes a few days or weeks or months, depending on how big a departure your new behaviour is from your old behaviour.
It is indeed important to improve in the various areas of your life, but little by little. As Tony Robbins says “CANEI, Constant And Never Ending Improvement.” By how much you’re improving is largely irrelevant as long as you’re going up and not down.
If you tried to make a new improvement every day, you would soon burn out and stop trying. So my advice, if you were to adopt a habitual self-improvement program (as many have done with the 1%-a-day concept) is as follows:
On paper…
… Decide what must change in your life and make a list.
… Prioritise those changes according to how desperate you are to change in that area.
… Break the changes into smaller chunks.
So if you want to become a better family man, then your chunk might be “spend more time with my wife and kids”.
… Break those chunks into even smaller chunks (let’s call them microchunks) until you’ve reached the smallest chunks you can think of for each item.
So for example
1. “spend more time with my wife and kids”
…will be micro-chunked into…
1.a “hug and kiss my wife every time I haven’t seen her for more than three hours”
1.b “as soon as I’ve had some coffee, take 15 minutes to play games with my children”
1.c “spend one full day together as a family on the first Saturday of every month”
The more micro your chunk is the more important it is to be very specific and detailed so that you know without a doubt when you’re succeeding and when you’re screwing up. For example, notice that I didn’t just say “spend one full day together as a family once a month.”
… Write down or schedule the micro-chunks that you’re focusing on and put it in a place where you will see it every day.
… Focus only on one or two chunks at a time, until you can feel they are consolidated.
You might be wondering why I suggest you prioritise the changes according to how desperate you are to change in that area. Simply because you will likely find that the more desperate you are the more likely you are to make the changes stick.
That amazing feeling of effecting and maintaining positive change in the most important areas of your life will build momentum which leaves you with a good chance of becoming a change addict – feeding off your successes – and from that basis you are more likely to succeed in changing things which you are less-desperate about.
The most powerful way I have found to effect and maintain changes in my life is, whenever possible, to schedule the specific actions (micro-chunks) I need to take.
You’ll notice ‘and maintain’ is in bold. Anyone can change for a minute, a day, a month, but it takes something special to maintain that change forever, and if you don’t maintain the change, what’s the point really!
But that’s a whole ‘nother topic which I will post about in the future.