How to Use Your Quarantine Time to Quickly and Permanently Improve Your Life

Well, here I am. I told myself I’d make the change (whatever it is) if I had the time — I have nothing but time now. I don’t want to look back on self-isolation as the experience that proved a lack of time was not the issue, but something more profound was.

In order to change you need a system — James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits” he proposes a simple framework for improving your life by building good habits:

1. Make it obvious
2. Make it attractive
3. Make it easy
4. Make it satisfying

This system can be reversed for a habit that you want to lose:

1. Make it invisible
2. Make it unattractive
3. Make it hard
4. Make it unsatisfying

So if you want to build a writing habit, you would make it obvious by putting your laptop in the kitchen table with your notebook beside it ready go every morning; “attractive” by putting a fiver in a jar for your new shoes every time you finish a page; “easy” by using a laptop with no internet connection, so no distractions; and “satisfying” by keeping a chart in your kitchen showing your progress on each section of your book, gamifying the task in a rewarding way.

Here is a paradox of change, in two parts. Part one is that change is hard, and self-directed change fails more often than not. Part two is that self-directed change succeeds often *enough*, and is important enough, that you need to believe you can do it, because without that the limited amount of essential change that can occur would be impossible. If you are going to keep trying you need a framework, and Clear’s framework is as good as any. Pick a simple target and try it: you have nothing but time now. A summary of the book is here, and my twitter thread on it is here.

Personal change is the thing I think about more than anything else. This has been sharpened by Covid 19 which is reinforcing at both personal and national level that all we have is us, no one is coming to rescue us and that self-reliance is paramount in all things — so we need to be able to change when we absolutely have to. The rest of this article will be three additional points on this topic — I will continue to use James Clear’s book as a reference point since it inspired some of these thoughts.

Your bad habit (let’s say biting your nails) is not the same as an addiction, but it exists on the same behavioural continuum as addiction, so it can be helpful to think it as being in the same category. An addicted person will not change until they have felt themselves hit rock bottom because until then the comfort of the addiction does not outweigh the pain losing that comfort would cause. You will never change that thing you want to change until you become the sort of person who doesn’t do that kind of thing. True change is identity change and that will be psychologically painful.

“Self-help” as a concept operates at the lowest level of enlightenment. There is definitely something enlightened about a person who recognises that smoking is killing them, and that that is wrong, and decides to stop. But there is something unenlightened about wanting to become more productive and proactive within a life framework that is devoid of larger meaning. Do you need to become more proficient at leading a directionless and mundane life? Mindfulness, in it’s corporate incarnations, suffers from the same problem. Change is pointless unless you have something outside yourself to change for.

Clear’s book is full of useful aphorisms. One that he cites early on is “you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” “Systems” here means processes, and includes environment. Separately, he spends a lot of time talking about constructing an environment which helps produces the desired behaviours by making them very easy and obvious. If I could summarise this it would be to say that — in order to change, it helps to admit that you are a very lazy and careless person and, in order to give change the greatest chance to take root, you need it approach yourself that spirit. In order to achieve change, treat yourself like an idiot or distracted child, give yourself the minimal possible credit or room to manoeuvre.

The paradox of change mentioned above is that you mostly don’t change, but you need to believe you can so that you don’t pre-emptively surrender in the face of an essential change. Changing in the manner James Clear suggests requires leading yourself to good habits by using less good habits as a motivator (at least some of the time); it also requires you to simultaneously be the rat in the maze and the scientist that doles out the rat out his treats. These things can’t be neatly reconciled. But you have to change, which will mean pretending they can. That’s the challenge.