I had a solid habit stack. Things were going well. So I added more habits.
Each new habit felt low-cost on its own. But habits pile like grains of sand. Add enough of them and the pile collapses under its own weight.
I’d miss one habit. Then two. Then the system collapsed.
I restarted. Added carefully. Got to the same place. Broke it again.
I solved this problem by placing a cap on the number of habits I am allowed to have at any given time. Once I picked the number and defended it, my habits stopped collapsing.
Then I ran into a new problem.
I was rejecting habits I was pretty sure would improve my life. Small ones with big downstream effects. The kind I’d normally jump on. I had already maxed out the count, so I kept turning them down.
So I looked closer at what the cap was actually measuring.
I realized I was tracking two kinds of habits.
Commitment habits require you to do something.
- Go for a run.
- Do four hours of deep work.
- Read for 30 minutes.
Abstention habits require you to avoid doing something.
- Phone off until 10am.
- Eating stops at 8pm.
- Caffeine cuts off at 2pm.
Both kinds cost willpower. Both kinds cost attention. The difference is what else they cost.
A commitment habit claims time. I stop what I’m doing, switch context, execute, switch back. That block of time is spent.
An abstention habit runs alongside everything else. It skips the context switch that commitment habits demand. Skipping the 3pm sugar gives me back the 4pm slump.
A slot in the day is finite.
I had been counting both like a single resource. That was my mistake.
So I split the cap. Tight ceiling on commitment habits, because time is fixed and context switching is real. Looser ceiling on abstention habits, because they sometimes pay themselves back.
A recent example: a late-eating cutoff. I was wrecking my sleep with food after 8pm. The old version of me would have hesitated because I had already maxed out the count. The new version realized that this is an abstention habit. My commitment count stayed the same.
I added the cutoff. I slept better. I kept everything else running.
🛑
What’s one thing you could stop doing that would improve your life?
