Quality Over Quantity
Sometimes we try to start new habits in a cluster.
This makes sense since some habits can reinforce one another. Maybe you started seeing a therapist at the same time that you practiced establishing boundaries, which felt easier to do with a therapist’s guidance. Or maybe you started going for more walks when you decided to listen to more audiobooks about topics that interest you.
But sometimes we go into habit hyperdrive, hoping to change our lives through measurable benchmarks: pages written, kilograms deadlifted, applications submitted, etc. Gamifying tasks on our to-do list—or creating a challenge for ourselves that we can “win”—can make aversive tasks feel easier to accomplish. For example, when I taught writing to college students, I would gamify commenting on drafts to see if I could complete a certain number of essays in an hour. The benefit there was that I could estimate how many total hours the full task would take and I would limit overworking on any particular essay in order to hit my hourly goal.
Gamifying can be great when you’re trying to check aversive tasks off your to-do list, but quantifying your productivity isn’t the only or best way to make progress. Here are a few approaches that can help you shift your approach from measuring your success by a number to reframing success based on the quality it brings to your life.
Approach 1: Differentiate a goal from a stretch goal
When you set a goal for yourself, pause to check in. Is your goal actionable and achievable, meaning you know what actions to take, the order to complete them in, and it’s feasible for you to complete these tasks with your personal resources? If your goal feels daunting, check if you can scale down your approach and identify a smaller, more achievable version of that goal. This new goal becomes your actual goal, and your original goal shifts to become a “stretch goal,” which you can choose to complete (or not!) once you achieve your more accessible, completely appropriate goal.
Approach 2: Check if you’re trending in the right direction
If you’re trying to start a new habit, you might feel disheartened if you don’t check off the box on your to-do list every day. You might feel like you’re backsliding, like you’re letting yourself down, or you might compare yourself to others who seemed to have more success with their version of the same goal. When this happens, it can be helpful to zoom out a bit and contextualize your progress. Even though you missed some days, are you trending in the direction you’d like to go? Can you shift your conception of what counts as “successful” to aim for good enough instead, particularly if you’re in a season of heightened personal and community challenges?
Approach 3: Focus on what you want to get out of the task
My third suggestion for shifting from a quantity-approach to a quality-approach is to focus your attention on what you’d like to receive from completing your task. Once you’ve identified how the goal or task might positively improve your life, try using that benefit as your motivation and scale your approach up or down to make it feel more accessible to you. Let’s say you want to start writing morning pages in the morning because you want to get your creativity moving but writing three pages in a row hurts your hand. To still engage with your creativity, you might shift your approach to write only one page. If you want to exercise and you crave playfulness instead of competition, consider doing stretches in bed, dancing to a pop song, or jumping on a trampoline.
xo,
Dr. Kate
For Your Consideration
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