This is similar to what I’ve always said about diets. The truth is that they all work, and they all work the same way — once you start paying attention to what you’re stuffing in your face, you’ll stop eating the crap and start losing weight. Everything else is just trivial implementation details.

Boofus, you just said exactly what I had wanted to say—using about 1/100th the number of words I did. :)

Well summarized.

In my experience, the most elegant statement of this insight is something I’ve heard floating around the Special Ops community, and nowhere else: “Control follows awareness.”

I think Boofus has summed it up precisely wrong (sorry!) and that it’s a poor analogy.

Some diets are better at making you pay attention than others and, some require less attention than others. (Not to mention some are extremely nutritionally unsound, but that’s unfairly stretching the metaphor).

Thus the implementation details are exactly the opposite of trivial - they are what make or break the system. If they are onerous, unrewarding, and don’t provide feedback, then the system is likely doomed.

GTD versus other systems: it’s easy, really easy, and it provides immediate positive feedback, in the form of the little buzz you get from ticking off each next action.

You are right on target. As I read your post, the software developer side of me kept thinking, XP is a self-improvement system for programmers! Your four immutable principles are central to the aso-called agile methods.

@Stephen: I think the implementation details are actually what keep people interested (the MacGuffin), but the act of self-awareness is the critical piece to making any patch stick.

Regardless of the diet or plan, you have to have an awareness that you want to be doing something differently from before. You can hack on that by throwing out “bad foods” and avoiding situations where you might “break your diet,” but ultimately it comes down to remembering what you want to change and correcting your behavior accordingly at the times you need to make choices. That’s true no matter what, I suspect.

Can you say more about “planning is crucial; even if you don’t follow a given plan” or provide a link to something that explains it?

Best post since I started coming here.

May I? “planning is crucial; even if you don’t follow a given plan”

it’s more important to think out a plan than it is to follow it to the exact letter… don’t stress out if circumstances make changes in the plan necessary midway through….. for instance, I’m a list-maker. Is it tantamount that the list be fulfilled by a certain time? No. It’s more important to me to get it all organized in my head (via paper and pen) and gives me a plan of action- leading right back to the other 3 excellent bullet points.

Yeah, Alison, I’m basically ripping off Dwight Eisenhower, who became a thought leader in the field of project management the moment he said: “The plan is nothing; planning is everything.”

The idea is that it’s valuable to layout all the risks and possibilities for a project as early as possible and to identify the stress points, dependencies, and critical paths. Still, having done all of that thinking and planning, it can be very challenging for even the best PM to develop a Unified Field Theory that accounts for every variable—especially days, weeks, and months into the unknown. After all, we’re not Kreskin, right? ;-)

The notion, ultimately, is to manage action by understanding the rules and constraints of reaching the goal. Making a plan is not hard; anyone can build a GANTT chart that has nothing to do with reality. But making sure that the most important touchpoints of a project don’t get neglected during the inevitable bloodbath is a good deal harder. That’s where the real art of project management lives, IMHO.

Make sense?

Awareness is precisely what’s important for self-improvement, no doubt about that. But unawareness is what’s important about self-maintenance.

The goal of all these self improvement programs should be to keep people aware of their actions until they become good habits. It’s very Aristotelian. We are what we do, if we focus on doing good, we become habituated towards doing good, and become good. And once we’re good, we don’t have to be aware of our good actions, we’re on goodness autopilot.

I think the failure of most self improvement programs is that they require so much work and conscious effort that people tire of them; they never really become habits. The difference between a dieter and someone at their ideal weight is that the dieter needs to work to eat healthy, but the other person does it naturally.

Change “self-aware” to “aware” and you’re on to something. Any time you increase awareness, not just of yourself but of everything in and around you, there’s going to be a significant shift. ” … framing a problem and making yourself think about solutions in an ordered way” Or opening your eyes to a solution that’s already there.

Great post!

I think a lot of systems work by directing attention.

Look at feng shui: the actual rules vary from the obvious and commonsensical to the laugably arbitrary. Nonetheless homes arranged by people who take feng shui seriously turn out genuinely more welcoming and attractive. Why? Because the owners spent a hell of a lot more than the average amount of time looking thoughtfully and considering options. Real estate agents claim that many home buyers decide within thirty seconds of entering, whether they will buy a particular house; they make superficial snap decisions. Your feng shui believer won’t, and that makes all the difference.

A few years back, a company sold ‘fertilizer rocks’ via ads in the back pages of Popular Mechanics and such. You put the rock in a bucket, filled it with tap water, left it overnight, and watered your plants. Supposedly the rock didn’t dissolve away or wear out; it just made your water magically better for plants. Well, yes, nonsense, but damned if the thing didn’t work. Not because the rock enhanced the water, but because letting the water sit overnight did. It comes to room temperature, which avoids shocking plants, and it loses any chlorine residue from purification; hence, it helps for your plants. Essentially the company was selling one sentence of advice (‘Let water stand overnight before pouring it on your plants.’) for $5.99 – you can sell magic rocks, but you can’t sell such a tiny bit of advice.

So:

Do private schools teach better than public ones? Or do parents just get a lot more involved when spending thousands a year on schooling their kids?

Do self-help books really give good advice? Or do people just get ahead more from reading and thinking than from turning on the TV yet again?

Really this is just a standard scientific lesson – correlation does not equal causation – in a new guise. Worth thinking about, though.

Great post, and a great site, Merlin. Keep it up.

Merlin,

Yes that did help, thank you.

One of your best posts.

I think the actual Eisenhower quote is:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/dwightdei164720.html

Also, supposedly:

Plans are nothing; planning is everything. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/dwightdei149111.html

My other favorite Eisenhower quote is: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog”.

Thanks David—for the kinds words and especially for the clarification on a favorite quote.

I’ve always heard the ‘dog’ quote attributed to Truman.

In any case, it’s universally true.

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If I hadn’t already sold Chr…

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The 43 Folders guy really sums up exactly what I’m talking about in my podcasts. I wish I could have written what he said, as eloquently as he said it.

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