Hi,
“Don’t waste of good crisis” -Winston Churchill
I don't want to waste this pandemic; it's an opportunity to replace bad habits with good. I have spent a large part of September learning about and experimenting with behavior change and habit formation with myself, my family, and my clients. Behavior change is the theme of the ideas below. I hope you find them useful and thought-provoking:
0 MENTAL MODEL WORTH ADOPTING
1 SAY NO TO ZOOM
1 ORGANIZATIONAL REFACTORING
2 HOW I STOPPED EATING 1,000 CALORIES AT NIGHT
3 WATCH THE SOCIAL DILEMMA ON NETFLIX
5 NO SAX NOVEMBER
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0 MENTAL MODEL WORTH ADOPTING:
ADDITION THROUGH SUBTRACTION
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"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" -Fred Brooks
The “addition mindset” seems to be part of our DNA: More people, more features, more budget, more roles. Perhaps a relic of when we needed to hoard bison meat to survive. More usually, this translates into exponential growth in complexity. Instead, consciously consider adopting the addition through subtraction mental model:
-Less features in your product
-Less roles in your organization
-Less lines of code
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1 SAY NO TO ZOOM
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Three months ago, we all had a love affair with Zoom. That has now been replaced with Zoom fatigue. Techniques to reduce zoom fatigue are all over LinkedIn. Rather than eliminating Zoom fatigue through hacks, why not eliminate Zoom all together? Why are we on zoom calls all day? Does a 9-5 workday even make sense in a distributed modality?
We have simply taken the in-office ways of working and are replicating them using distributed tools. It’s time to rethink how remote work is done and look to those who have been doing it for decades: the open source community and companies like Automattic for inspiration. All of which, say no to Zoom.
https://www.ahmadfahmy.com/blog/2020/7/6/all-day-zoom-meetings-and-cd-roms
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1 ORGANIZATIONAL REFACTORING
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Charles Duhigg, author of the Power of Habit, describes the habit loop as: Trigger -> Routine -> Reward
This is the loop that turns behaviors into habits. He asserts that the key to changing a habit is not changing either the trigger or the reward but the routine. For example, the trigger could be work-related stress, the routine undeserved (etc. a cigarette, snacking), and the reward, a dopamine hit. Duhigg suggests only changing the routine, not the trigger or reward. Over time, that new routine will become a habit. For example, walking 1k steps.
There is a similar idea in programming. Refactoring modifies the code of a function or subroutine without changing the inputs or outputs, to avoid regression impact on the larger system. This is a laborious process, often overlooked due to the fact the eliminated technical debt is very difficult and is easier left ignored.
Can organizational behavior be refactored? How about when the triggers are a large production outage?
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2 HOW I STOPPED EATING 1,000 HEALTHY CALORIES AT NIGHT
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One side effect of spending so much time at home is the constant snacking and the subsequent weight gain. My problem is the nights. As my willpower wanes, my calories increase. This resulted in the addition/gain/etc.of a stubborn 10 pounds - Until this month, when I finally conquered it as I studied behaviors and habits.
https://www.ahmadfahmy.com/blog/2020/9/27/how-i-stopped-eating-1000-calories-at-night
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3 WATCH THE SOCIAL DILEMMA ON NETFLIX
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“There are only two industries that refer to customers as ‘users’, one is IT, the other is the illegal drugs trade.”
This documentary impacted me in a visceral way. While we are looking to the future concerned with SkyNet equivalent or Elon Musk's Neural link. AI is already here and it’s waging war on our attention.
This documentary, my addiction to phones and Leanord Sax’s book “The Collapse of parenting” have pushed me to introduce no sAx November.
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5 NO SAX NOVEMBER
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For November:
-All electronics off by 9 pm
-No Social media
-Dinner together
-No screen time outside of work/classes/homework
Would you consider Joining me? https://www.ahmadfahmy.com/blog/2020/9/13/no-sax-october
Warm Regards,
Ahmad
http://www.ahmadfahmy.com
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