James Barry

Commitment Devices That Don’t Suck

by | Feb 25, 2021 | Time Allocation

In the 1519s, six hundred men arrived by boat at the Yucatan Peninsula determined to explore the New World and its riches. First though, they did one thing: sunk their ships so there was no possibility of returning home.

This action, ordered by their captain Hernán Cortés, made it clear that their only option was to continue on their path forward and it’s an extreme version of what is known as a “Commitment Device”.

Commitment devices, at their core, are a method which allows you to make a current decision that either encourages, or discourages, a future action. If you’re lucky, the first commitment device you had in your life was your parents. Growing up in their household committed you to living by their rules and expectations.

Once you grow up though and enter the world, you’re on your own. Without commitment devices, it can become hard to make progress on goals because you need to rely completely on willpower, which can be HARD. You don’t have an infinite amount of it and willpower varies day-to-day, which in the end can lead to inconsistent results when it comes to your goals

That’s where commitment devices come in. There are many different commitment devices out there, but they usually fall into three distinct categories: Restrictive, Public, and Sunk Cost.

Restrictive Commitment Devices

Restrictive commitment devices are ones that stop you from doing something in the future and they are most effective at removing bad habits. Usually they do this by increasing the friction of a bad habit (i.e. unplugging your TV to make it harder to watch) or they make it completely impossible (completely getting rid of your TV).

Common restrictive commitment devices:

  1. Internet blocking apps. I use StayFocusd to set my surfing limit on Reddit to 30 minutes each day.
  2. Deleting apps off the phone. I haven’t had Facebook on my phone in years.
  3. Avoiding buying unhealthy food. If you don’t have junk food, you can’t eat junk food.

Restrictive commitment devices are far and away my favorite approach to stopping bad habits. They are easy to create and if you implement them correctly, you’ll be able to benefit from them for a long-time.

Pros: Incredibly easy to implement 

Cons: Hard to undo (by design).

Great For: Stopping bad habits

Public Commitment Devices

A public commitment device is one that uses social pressure to encourage or discourage a certain behavior. While many people have seen success with these, the downside is they rely on fear for motivation. They can be effective in the short-term, but it’s hard to make changes stick for the long-term unless there’s another underlying motivation.

Common public commitment devices:

  1. Announcing your New Year’s resolution to your family.
  2. Posting an announcement online that you’re going to start a business.
  3. Telling a group of friends you’re going to stop drinking.
  4. Committing to working out with a gym buddy.

For me, I’ve done all of the above (except for #3) and they have all failed at one point or another. The only public commitment device I’ve seen real success with is this blog. The key differentiator for me was that I wrote on my own for a few months before publishing the blog. Then, only after I had published articles for over a month, did I finally make a small public announcement.

The commitment device in this instance is really just an addition to another goal that I have, which was to start writing more. That goal came first, and the fact that I turned this into a public commitment device provided additional positive reinforcement.

Good for: Building selective new habits.

Pros: Highly binding, especially in the short-term.

Cons: Not as effective as you’d like them to be. High potential for public embarrassment which can damage your mindset and goal setting.

Sunk Cost Commitment Devices

These are the worst type of commitment devices. They rely on the idea that once you pay money for something, you’re more likely to do it. Avoid these at all costs. Common sunk cost devices:

  1. Buying a year long gym membership
  2. Purchasing an annual subscription to a wellness app 
  3. Getting that sweet, sweet Peloton you always wanted

Now that is not to say, don’t buy a gym membership or a Peloton. Just don’t go and buy those if the primary goal of your purchase is to develop a new habit. If you go into it with that goal, you’ll likely join the one extremely large group of others who make up the $1.8 billion of unused gym memberships each year.

Good For: Nothing

Pros: These make you feel good in the short-term.

Cons: Ineffective. Prone to the fallacy of sunk cost.

Contractual and Financial Commitment Devices

Contracts are not normally referred to as commitment devices, but at their core that is what they are.

When you enter into any type of contract, whether it’s with your employer, the bank, or the government, you are committing to fulfill your side of the contract. However, this post is not about contracts. This post is about improving yourself.

Some people do use these though to reinforce specific types of behaviors. Examples that I have seen:

  1. Signing contracts with trainers to hit certain goals (or pay them money).
  2. Creating a curse jar so you stop using swear words.
  3. Joining the army to get in better shape.

Good for: Financial decisions

Pros: Legally binding. There will be consequences.

Cons: Legally binding. There will be consequences.

In Summary…

Commitment devices often fail because they were not built on a strong foundation. People make big announcements about how they’re going to change (New Year’s Resolutions come to mind?), but after that initial burst of enthusiasm fades, so does your commitment.

With enough effort, any commitment device can be undone. So before you put them in place, think long and hard about why you are doing it.

Follow The 20 Hour Rule, Not The 10,000 Hour Rule

by | Jan 21, 2021 | Favorites, Time Allocation

You likely know, or have at least heard of, Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule popularized in his book Outliers: If you put 10,000 hours of deliberate practice into any skill, you too can become a master.

This rule explains the Beatles success. They performed live in Hamburg 1,200 times from 1960 – 1964 before they became the most well known rock band in history. Their first album stayed at the top of UK charts for 30 weeks, and all but one of their first twelve albums hit #1 on national charts.

10,000 hours explains the wild success of Bill Gates. He began putting nights of coding practice in on the local high school computer starting at 13 allowing him to hit 10,000 hours of practice before co-founding Microsoft at the age of 20.

This rule is so well known that famous artists like Macklemore & Ryan Lewis have attributed their success and written songs about it:

Ten thousand hours I’m so damn close I can taste it

On some Malcolm Gladwell, David Bowie meets Kanye shit

This is dedication

A life lived for art is never a life wasted

Ten thousand

– Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

10,000 hours has become so popular because its simple: If you work hard at anything you can be successful. While a few research papers have debated whether this rule is true, that’s not what I’ve decided to write about.

I’m focusing on why the 10,000 rule can actually lead you in the wrong direction.

What does 10,000 hours cost you?

This rule, at its core, glorifies the sheer volume of work you need to put in to be the best, to be a “master” at a skill. It takes 0.1% of high-achievers and puts them on a pedestal and shouts “they worked hard and that’s why they were so successful, you can be successful if you work hard too!”.

This thinking completely leaves out the much larger portion of people who also put their 10,000 hours in, but did not make it. Think of the failed entrepreneurs, Olympic hopefuls (athletes who didn’t make the games), or unknown artists who never made it big. This group is vastly larger than the small group who “made it”.

A singular focus on achievement in one field may be worth it for some, but many others realize, often too late, that they would have rather spent their time somewhere else. I have put 10,000 hours into achieving my own athletic dreams and while it got me far, it did not get me as far enough to make me happy.

Few people take into account what 10,000 hours truly costs: 10,000 hours of your life. They only think about what you can achieve.

If you devoted that time elsewhere, how many other skills do you think you might be able to develop in 10,000 hours?

According to another fun (and likely over simplistic) rule, the number is right around 500.

Welcome To The 20 Hour Rule

Recently popularized by the author Josh Kaufman the 20 hour rule states you can learn any skill with 20 hours of deliberate practice. Any skill at all, just takes 20 hours learn. For many of us, that’s 20 hours well spent.

Want to learn how to play the guitar? – 20 Hours.

Ride a unicycle? – 20 Hours.

Repair your car? – 20 Hours.

Learn photoshop? – 20 Hours.

While you will not end up being the best in the world after 20 hours or even come close to mastering the skill, you will develop a better sense of what you’re good at and enjoy. You’ll also become a more well rounded person overall.

Many societal pressures currently force us to specialize. Whether or not it’s to get a good education, make it in that important career, or just so you can say you’re the best at something, specialization has its advantages. It’s not the only way to approach life though, and sometimes it can be important to take a step back and consciously understand the different ways you can allocate your time.

The majority of us will not follow the path of Bill Gates or The Beatles and discover early on we truly enjoy doing in life. It will take many years of learning and exploring new skills until we finally get to the point where it will be worth it to put those 10,000 hours in.

It’s always important to strive for excellence, but life is long.

It’s equally important to try a lot of things and figure out what we enjoy.

Creation vs. Consumption: 4 Ways We Allocate Time

by | Jan 14, 2021 | Favorites, Time Allocation

The clock just hit 6pm.

You’re wrapping up work for the day and now you have a choice to make.

Do you give into your desire open your phone and mindlessly consume, or do you go create something?

Creation, simply, is the act of adding something to the world. Shooting a video, baking cookies, writing a blog post, volunteering at a local non-profit, going to the gym (adding muscles to the world), etc.

Consumption is the act of taking something from the world. Watching TV, reading a book, eating food, scrolling through social media, mindlessly gambling, etc.

The act of creating and consuming are parts of our everyday lives. As a general rule, the more time you spend putting time into the creation bucket, the more you will accomplish overall in life.

Ideal allocation to each bucket will differ for each person and many of us (including myself) struggle to spend enough time on the creation bucket. The late Anthony Bourdain describes his own struggle in a highly relatable way:

“I understand there’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.”

– Anthony Bourdain 

In one way or another, we are all Anthony.

Constantly trying to outwit that person inside our heads who want us to give into our vices.

The best way to win any battle, internal or external, is to understand who you’re up against…

Which conveniently leads us to the 4 different types of creations & consumptions: Great Creation, Experimental Creation, Good Consumption, and Mindless Consumption.

Great Creation

Great creation is simply that, producing something that is truly great.

This happens when you’ve learned the one thing that you’re great at, and you continue spending the majority of your free time doing it.

Few examples:

  1. Ed Sheeran writing and singing his music.
  2. Pablo Picccaso creating art (50,000+ pieces).
  3. Richard Branson building new companies.
  4. Joe Rogan interviewing on his Podcast (1582 podcasts and counting at time this article was published).

The common thread in for all the creators above is that they found something they were great at early on in life. They are part of the lucky 1% of humanity who found their niche early on.

For 99% of other humans, we are still looking for that niche. So that brings us onto the next bucket of creation: Experimental Creation.

Experimental Creation

Experimental creation occurs when you are producing something new that you’ve never done before. With the proper mindset, this can be one of the most rewarding ways to spend your time in life.

Common examples of experimental creation include:

  1. Learning any new instrument (such as a guitar).
  2. Volunteering at your local soup kitchen.
  3. Painting for the first time in your life.
  4. Learning to speak in public.
  5. Starting a blog.

Experimental creation is something that you will spend the majority of your time doing when you’re younger, before you know what you’re good at and what you love.

It’s important to not try anything new just once, but to stay at it until you can say “I know I can do this, but I don’t want to spend any more time on it”. In fact, it only takes you 20 hours to get to this level (based on Josh Kaufman’s research).

No matter how old you are, you should devote some time to experimental creation every week. Without it, you’ll never get the opportunity to try new things that you may love and be great at.

Good Consumption

We are constantly consuming throughout our lives.

Whether it’s literal consumption (food), information consumption (news / books), or entertainment consumption (TV, video games, podcasts, etc.), consumption is a constant. The differences in the quality of what we consume will have a direct impact on us in both the short-term and long-term.

Just think of the consumption we all do on a day-to-day basis: food.

If you choose a donuts instead of oatmeal for breakfast everyday, your health will suffer.

The same goes with the news you consume and the entertainment you watch. Unless whatever you’re consuming provides long-term benefits or if you’re actively enjoying it in the moment, then your consumption falls into last category: Mindless Consumption.

Mindless Consumption

This is the consumption bucket that I try to avoid 100%, yet I still find myself occasionally falling back into it.

Mindless consumption is simply what you do when you have nothing better to do with your time.

100 years ago, it was hard to mindlessly consume anything because consumption items were scare. In our current society though, our ability to create infinite duplicates of digital media such as videos, social media, and videogames, has made mindless consumption a part of our daily lives.

While most of us know we should avoid this, the tricky thing with mindless consumption is usually hidden behind good consumption.

If you scroll social media for 5 minutes, you will find information, updates on your friends lives, and maybe even learn something new. If you continue scrolling for another hour, you gain little more.

If you finish your favorite Netflix series and then decide to start a new show, you will likely pick a show that you never set out to watch. You’re not deliberately deciding to watch it and while it could be one of the best shows you’ve ever seen, chances are it’s not and it will just be a waste of time.

It’s incredibly easy to switch from good consumption, where we place a high value our leisure time, to mindless consumption, when we have nothing better to do with our time. The key is to know when this switch happens.

In summary

Think about where you are in your life and how much you should be allocating to each bucket.

Great Creation happens when you know you can produce something amazing. This is one of the easiest stages to spend time on, but one of the hardest to get to.

Experimental Creation is where you should be spending the majority of your time, especially earlier on in your life. The more you experiment and create, the more opportunities you will get to discover what you will be great at.

Good Consumption: This is a bucket where you make a conscious decision to devote your time. Everybody needs to put some time into this bucket because we all need leisure, and we all need to learn from others.

Mindless Consumption: Avoid this bucket at all costs. It will make you unhappy.