Negative Tracking
Posted: Fri Oct 06, 2006 2:31 pm
When you first start out trying to turn a new behavior into a habit, every successful day is "information" and worth noting. The behavior is novel, and by default, you wouldn't have been doing it. This is positive tracking.
But tracking takes effort, even if it's only a minimal "days on habit," and after a while, once you've successfully established your habit, it's no longer very informative. The default has changed. The default is now success. Keeping explicit track of this default takes effort and doesn't tell you much. Failures now become the interesting, unusual, newsworthy thing. You can now switch to just recording these, saving effort and clutter and without losing information. I call this negative tracking. It's basically all I do in my daily check-in anymore.
It's not just a good value over positive tracking, you don't just get the same thing for less, you get more. Since keeping track is a pain, good behavior is rewarded by not having to keep track, bad behavior is punished by having to. So negative tracking gives you an additional incentive to behave. This is magnified since because you're now only keeping track of the bad, it stands out more, it is more obvious and shaming (especially if you confess it publicly here on the bulletin board). It's also an act of generosity, if you post publicly, because it lets other people see that you are still with it. That's inspiring. Yes, they're seeing this only negatively, through a fumble, but when their default is a fumble, the occasional fumble of the generally successful makes success seem more accessible.
I've been negatively tracking behaviors I am not at all worried about for myself at this point: like "no-s." I am utterly confident that no-s will continue to work for me and that I will not backslide, even if some funny stuff crops up now and then. So why do I still track? Because it's very cheap, because it's sociable, because the discipline rubs off on other less well established behaviors, and because the strictness it encourages actually makes the behavior even easier and more natural and pleasurable.
As I mentioned above, positive tracking is best when your habit is young. But for most of our lives, hopefully, we'll be maintaining established habits rather than struggling with new ones. For that, negative tracking is the way to go. It's almost as cheap as no tracking, and provides even more benefits than positive tracking.
Reinhard
But tracking takes effort, even if it's only a minimal "days on habit," and after a while, once you've successfully established your habit, it's no longer very informative. The default has changed. The default is now success. Keeping explicit track of this default takes effort and doesn't tell you much. Failures now become the interesting, unusual, newsworthy thing. You can now switch to just recording these, saving effort and clutter and without losing information. I call this negative tracking. It's basically all I do in my daily check-in anymore.
It's not just a good value over positive tracking, you don't just get the same thing for less, you get more. Since keeping track is a pain, good behavior is rewarded by not having to keep track, bad behavior is punished by having to. So negative tracking gives you an additional incentive to behave. This is magnified since because you're now only keeping track of the bad, it stands out more, it is more obvious and shaming (especially if you confess it publicly here on the bulletin board). It's also an act of generosity, if you post publicly, because it lets other people see that you are still with it. That's inspiring. Yes, they're seeing this only negatively, through a fumble, but when their default is a fumble, the occasional fumble of the generally successful makes success seem more accessible.
I've been negatively tracking behaviors I am not at all worried about for myself at this point: like "no-s." I am utterly confident that no-s will continue to work for me and that I will not backslide, even if some funny stuff crops up now and then. So why do I still track? Because it's very cheap, because it's sociable, because the discipline rubs off on other less well established behaviors, and because the strictness it encourages actually makes the behavior even easier and more natural and pleasurable.
As I mentioned above, positive tracking is best when your habit is young. But for most of our lives, hopefully, we'll be maintaining established habits rather than struggling with new ones. For that, negative tracking is the way to go. It's almost as cheap as no tracking, and provides even more benefits than positive tracking.
Reinhard
Deb
