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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair
I tried a habit of launching one product a day and burned out 17 days in.
For the next two weeks I didn’t launch anything.
An Output Habit counts what you finish.
An Input Habit counts the time you put in.
Writing 1,000 words a day is an Output Habit. Each word moves the count, so it may reward being verbose.
Writing for 1 hour a day is an Input Habit. Each hour counts whether or not you finish an essay.
So it rewards showing up, even if the post is still sitting in your drafts.
Publishing an essay each day is a different type of Output Habit. A short essay is worth the same as a long one, so it rewards getting the essay out the door.
Lines of code reward length the same way words do.
In 1982 Apple’s engineers were building the Lisa computer. Each week their managers had them fill in a form with the number of lines of code they wrote.
Bill Atkinson spent one of those weeks rewriting the code that drew shapes on the Lisa’s screen. His version ran faster and came out 2,000 lines shorter. On the form he wrote -2000.
Andy Hertzfeld tells the story in his book Revolution in the Valley.
His best week scored below zero.
Jonathan Coulton counted songs released. In 2005 he left his software job and started releasing a new song each week for a year. Since any song would do, some weeks he released a cover.
Other weeks he wrote his own. Code Monkey was about a programmer stuck in a dead-end job.
That song passed a million downloads.
I time my runs instead of measuring the distance. When I measure how far I’ve run, I think only about the finish line and stop enjoying the run.
Ed Whitlock ran up to three hours a day in five-minute loops of a cemetery near his Ontario home.
To keep from racing himself, he ran the laps uncounted and untimed. “I just concentrate on running for a long time,” he said. His running was an Input Habit.
At 72 he became the first man over 70 to run a marathon in under three hours.
Do you enjoy the habit itself? If yes, make it an Input Habit, the way I time my runs.
Does your habit have a clear finish line? If yes, make it an Output Habit.
Processing my email, preparing the team meeting document and setting next week’s priorities each have a clear finish line.
Do you tend to procrastinate on your habit? If yes, make it an Output Habit.
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Which of your habits should you base on inputs and which on outputs?
