Balancing Act: Work, Play, and Pixie Dust

My alarm clock went off at 12 pm on a random weekday. Disgruntled, I turned it off and faced a window that let in weak sunlight. My eyes stung a bit – I had only gotten into bed around 5 am and felt restless throughout the night for no particular reason. These nights weren’t unusual; in the past months of my idle existence, I had developed a destructive habit of staying up deep into the night even when I had nothing to do. You might mistake this for depression, but in all honesty, I just had no reason to wake up before midday. I didn’t have a job that required me to be in the office at 9 am sharp. I didn’t have a seminar or a lecture to attend in the morning. I was a small vessel without an anchor, forced to float wherever the waves pushed. Somehow, unbeknown to me, I was pushed for so long and so far that I had forgotten how to row. Dissatisfied with myself that day, I decided to change course and document my yearlong self-development journey, with this article being the first of a monthly series. Life, without doubt, is a tough balancing act, but if you sprinkle pixie dust here and there, you might, brick by brick, build a sturdy tower.

While self-development is a wide-ranging subject, my goal for the year is quite focused and conservative – wake up at 10 am or earlier and be out of bed by 10:15 the latest. The targets are not bendable and require strict discipline, as failure to wake up or leave the bed on time will reset my yearly progress. For the majority adult population, this goal might seem comical because 10 am is neither early nor impressive. I could have lied and said an earlier time, but I would rather explain why 10 am makes perfect sense.

1) I want my target to be realistic and constant for the next 365 days. Following the advice of sleep experts, it is of paramount importance for me to wake up at the same time everyday. This means that I have to account for weekend social activities such as concerts, birthday parties, or simply dinners and drinks that tend to go well past midnight. Aiming for a healthy eight hours of sleep, a 10 am wakeup is sustainable within my current lifestyle and allows me to live life while also changing my habit at the root.

2) As I am currently funemployed and focusing on personal projects, I don’t have an actual reason to wake up at a certain time. Of course, in the case of me finding full-time employment, I will shift my schedule to accommodate the typical work day of 8-4 or 9-5. In the meantime, I want to take baby steps to finding the natural rhythm of my body.

3) I want my target to improve naturally over time rather than shocking myself with an overambitious goal that would likely result in failure.

I must also mention that my self-development mission, which began with a single goal, caused a domino effect and quickly spilled over to other aspects of my life. As we will see later, a well-formulated target may very well be the catalyst of great change regardless of its seemingly minute nature.

The first month was a work in progress. This was the month when I fine-tuned my yearly goal by incorporating more targets – working out thrice weekly, applying for jobs, reading one book a month, and publishing four articles on Ripe Reflections (hey, no need to judge; I know this was an overly ambitious goal born out of optimistic fervour). There was also failure – I was a minute late and woke up at 10:01 am – which is why the month was roughly a month and a half, as demonstrated in the dates above. Lastly, this was the month where I observed my habits more closely and distinguished both negative and positive patterns. I now know that I should start winding down at least 30 minutes before bed to fall asleep easily. I also know that listening to an audiobook as I get ready for sleep is a great way to calm down while simultaneously working on another monthly goal. Despite the initial frustrations, I managed to stay on track for one month starting the 1st of June. These are the main takeaways from that period:

Coincidentally, the first book I picked up during this period was The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The book explores the science of habit formation and introduces the concept of keystone habits. These habits are catalysts that set off other behaviours and can influence our work, diet, and spending activities, among others. As described by Duhigg, keystone habits “have the power to start a chain reaction... a process that over time transforms everything” (2012, p. 100). Although significant in nature, these habits rely on “small wins” which are successes that “have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves” (ibid:112).

Without realizing the depth of my decision at the time, I established a keystone habit by choosing to wake up earlier than usual. This brought confidence to tackle other seemingly unrelated goals such as reading and working out. Waking up at ten in the morning did not exactly give me more time to do other activities – I slept for roughly eight hours regardless of the time I went to bed – but rather spurred motivation to attempt other changes. Subsequent wins added more motivation and desire to be better and to do even more. If the keystone habit is the central stone of your life, these small wins are the bricks with which you further build yourself. If you have a negative keystone habit, your bricks will similarly be of lower quality, resulting in a shaky structure ready to topple with the slightest breeze.

Establishing a keystone habit is surprisingly easy once you consciously observe your routine. If you engage in negative behaviour such as smoking, your positive keystone habit should be focused on eliminating the negative behaviour. Chances are that for most people, the negative behaviour is a keystone habit in itself – if you smoke, you most likely drink; if you eat junk food, you most likely live a sedentary lifestyle; if you wake up late, you most likely aren’t valuing your time wisely. Replacing the negative keystone habit invariably causes a ripple effect – if you replace smoking with jogging, you replace alcohol with water and electrolytes; if you start eating healthy, you will feel better and be more active; if you wake up at a reasonable time, you manage to seize the day and be productive.

For people who can’t point to a specific negative behaviour, establishing a positive keystone habit is in some ways easier as there is no need to battle a present negative habit. If your goal is to read more, you could make it a habit to read right before bed for fifteen minutes. This will also help you unwind, ensuring better sleep. Better sleep will then result in more energy the following day. More energy will result in better emotion regulation and productivity. In essence, keystone habits should be easy to introduce – they should not be too complex or time-consuming – and should also have direct, somewhat measurable or noticeable results that boost motivation.

Altering any behaviour carries a risk of initial failure. The risk of failure is doubled when the behaviour is a daily habit such as staying up every night. The change of sleep patterns is especially prone to failure given that sleep is largely regulated by our circadian rhythms which can only be reset with slow, consistent efforts. This set-in-stone characteristic, although less intense, is true for other habits as well, such as craving dessert after dinner or seeking quick dopamine from social media. Given our limited mental bandwidth, patterns emerge inconspicuously. As a result, we live a large chunk of our lives on autopilot – we eat at x o’clock, exercise at y o’clock, and go to bed at z o’clock. While autopilot decisions can be quite beneficial, they are also the reason why we often first fail before we can change our behaviour. Our bodies are used to doing certain activities at certain times, making failure an expected factor in our equations of change. However, being bound to fail does not mean that you should abandon your goal. Think of toddlers who are just learning to walk – they fall and fail a thousand times before they can take their first confident steps. We are born with the remarkable instinct to persevere, meaning that failure should only be treated as a minor inconvenience on our road to success.

We have established that we have an instinct to persevere in the face of hardship. However, that instinct seems to decline as we grow older, and to reignite the same determination, we need to employ our rational minds. Goals need to have stakes. Unfortunately, a lot of goal-setting frameworks seem to miss this key element. There is consensus that goals need to be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound – but while this framework provides good guidance, it fails to address motivation. Goals can be SMART and yet remain unfulfilled simply because motivation is a finite resource. We usually set goals while we are inspired, but that inspiration lasts a week at most.

To counter this fickle behaviour, we need to assign stakes to our goals. This acts as an agreement between yourself and your higher self – a contract to hold yourself accountable even when you are low on motivation. The beauty of this approach lies in its versatility – the stakes can be extreme and have immediate effects, or they can be mild and only matter in the future. Similarly, the stakes can be directly related to your goal or be in a completely different domain of your life. For instance, if you are an avid gamer and your goal is weight loss, the stakes at play could be that the moment you give in to temptation and eat junk food, you lose the right to play video games for the week. Alternatively, the stakes could be that you can’t play video games unless you go to the gym that day. Making the situation more extreme, we can say that if you don’t lose an x amount of weight by such and such date, you will not buy that upcoming video game that you are excited to play until you lose the excess weight.

This approach to goal setting is direct and simple but relies on one condition – accountability. This system will only work if you approach it responsibly, meaning that you can’t bend the rules or pity yourself when you fail. You simply cannot cheat your higher self and come up with excuses. In very simple terms, goals can only be achieved if there is a cost to not achieving them. You are free to determine your own cost, but you must make the perceived cost of not achieving your goal so large that you have no choice but to achieve it.

My journey is long, but having completed the first chapter, I am now confident to march on toward my goal. I hope you found something useful in my ramblings, and I encourage you to tackle your own goals with the same determination. Come back soon for the next monthly update (which will happen very soon since I am publishing this a month later than intended). In the meantime, stay in touch and explore more articles.

Duhigg, C. (2012) The Power of Habit, Random House Trade Paperbacks, Canada.