This post describes a systematic way of making decisions taken from the book Smart Choices which I encourage you to read. I have been using this method for a few months now and it has served me well. It consists of a total of 9 steps and it’s easy to remember through its acronym, PrOACT URL, which stands for:

Problem

What is precisely the problem that you are trying to solve? You should clearly define your decision problem and you should make sure it’s a root cause and not a symptom. Don’t try to decide on the problem “How to spend less money on my dishwasher maintenance that frequently breaks” when the real problem is that you bought a cheap and low quality dishwasher that requires significant maintenance. If you have an ill-defined problem you can spend a lifetime trying to solve it without getting anywhere. Techniques that work well for getting clarity on problems are rephrasing them and making them more specific or more general.

Objectives

What are your values? What things are you trying to improve? You can think of objectives as your ends, as the ultimate answers to “why” you want to do something. For example, if your decision problem is whether you want to buy a car or not when you ask yourself “Why do I want a car?” you may hear yourself saying: for convenience, to save money, to have more freedom and to save time. If you get a car you expect to get more of those things. By clearly stating your values you give your mind more material to come up with good alternatives that you may not consider if you don’t ask yourself “Why?”.

Alternatives

What alternatives do you have? Alternatives are the various solutions to your decision problem. You should try to come up with as many and as varied alternatives as possible. This is the best place to use your lateral thinking skills and creativity. Don’t limit yourself to the default, safest, most popular or to the first idea that comes to your mind. If you have decided that your decision problem is whether to get a car or not your alternatives could be “buying a new car”, “buying a used car”, “renting a car for the weekends and commute by bike to work”, “using a friend’s car”, “buying a motorbike” or “monitor used car deals websites periodically and buy a car once I find an offer that meets my criteria”. I find it useful to set a minimum alternatives quota and force myself to come up with at least X alternatives depending on the decision.

Consequences

What are the consequences of each of your alternatives? A good exercise is to imagine yourself in the future of each of your alternatives and take a honest look at the consequences of your actions. In the car example you may imagine yourself with a big great car driving to many places and enjoying it. But you should also imagine yourself paying car insurance, having the ocasional (lethal or non-lethal) accident, having to look for and pay for a parking spot, bringing the car to maintenance the morning you had a meeting at 9, getting stuck in traffic, etc. The goal of this step is to give you a complete view of what each alternative entails and resist the urge to focus only on the benefits.

Tradeoffs

Alternatives differ from each other in the specific tradeoffs that they make between the objectives involved. You can think of each alternative as a mix of your objectives with different proportions. A powerful technique to analyze tradeoffs is to translate how much you get of each objetive into a common unit like money. For example, if you have two alternatives with varying proportions of “time saved” and “money saved” you could translate time to money by determining how much money you would pay for a given amount of time and then apply the resulting conversion rate to eliminate the “time” objective and, as a consequence, be able to rank the alternatives by a single unit.

Uncertainty

Each alternative has some uncertainty associated with it because we can’t predict the future and we can’t measure with perfect precision every factor involved. However we can quantify uncertainty, that is how likely various events are, and use that information to help us decide. For example: if your decision problem is how to get from A to B, your two alternatives are to do so by plane or by car and the only thing you care about is risk of death then you could check what’s the likelihood of a car accident and a plane accident and decide that a plane is the best choice for you.

Risks

What risks are associated with each of your alternatives? As we just saw each alternative has varying amounts of uncertainty associated with them and each alternative has a different amount of utility or happiness that it will bring you spread over different values. You can calculate risk by taking each alternative’s total utility to you, after converting all the values of a single alternative to a single unit, and multiply that utility by the probability of the alternative’s positive consequences. Then you will be able to decide between alternative A with probability 5% of giving you $100,000 of utility and with probability 95% giving you $1,000 of utility is more or less preferable than alternative B which with 50% probability will give you $50,000 and with 50% probability will give you $500. There is no right or wrong risk threshold. The only wrong thing you can do is ignore your risk tolerance, go for alternative A and later realize that with those odds you shouldn’t really have made the decision. Every person is comfortable with a different level of risk and even the same person will have a different risk tolerance depending on the circumstances. When we are young we are more risk-seeking, useful for hunting and mating, than when we are 80 years old and when we are hungry we are far more risk-seeking than when we have just finished meditating for similar reasons. Determining what level of risk is right for you will help you choose the alternative with the right level of risk for you.

Linked decisions

For each of your current alternatives what decisions will you face in the future? Alternative A to your current decision problem, eg: buy that expensive house you like so much, may sound very appealing today but it will severely limit your options in 20 years when you want to send your kids to university and you are still paying debt.

You should go through this list in the order presented and, as soon as you have a clear winner you don’t need to continue with the remaining steps. I personally found it very useful at the beginning to go through all the steps anyways to get comfortable with them and to make sure I had the right calibration for when to stop. Nowadays I only reach the end of the list for really important or difficult decisions.

We cannot possibly apply this process to every one of the hundreds of decisions we make every day because it would take too much mental energy and time but not all of the decisions we face are equally important. What you want to do is strike a balance: identify the decisions whose consequences will affect you more, apply this method on them and then let cavemen Joe and Jane’s gut handle the rest. With practice this process will become second nature and you will be able to be systematic with a wider range of decisions.

A well known way of integrating new habits into our lives is to do 30 day challenges: you decide what habit you want to acquire, for example running every day, and then you commit yourself to do it for 30 days. If at the end of that time running has become automatic you’re done and you can move on to the next habit. If by the end of the 30 days you are still in the sofa when you should be running you start again the challenge for another 30 days.

Some habits require a lot of willpower, like quitting smoking. For those you are better off focusing on one habit at a time because they are so ingrained that replacing them will drain most of your daily allocation of willpower. However if what you want is to make several smaller adjustments then one habit every 30 days is too limiting and will leave you with willpower at the end of the day. Besides that some people seem to embrace change more than others and are more likely to succeed when trying to change several habits at once.

Learning through spaced repetitions consists on reviewing material that you want to commit to long term memory right before you forget it and at increasing time intervals. For example, if you are learning Spanish and you are using flash cards to memorize vocabulary you might have foreign words as questions in your cards and translations as answers. What you do then is to revise those cards periodically. Cards that are easy to remember will be reviewed less often and cards that are more difficult will be reviewed more often. This method works really well because it mimics how the brain strengthens neural connections when transferring information from short term memory to long term memory.

What I have been doing lately is create flash cards with habits I want to acquire and rely on spaced repetitions to make them permanent. I use Mnemosyne for this but any other program will work. All my habit cards go into a category called “Habits’ and each card is phrased as follows:

Question: “When this happens…”
Answer: “…I do this”.

When I review habit cards instead of marking them as remembered or forgotten when I can’t remember the answer, which rarely happens, I mark them as forgotten when I haven’t acquired the habit yet. For example, one of my cards is:

Q: “When choosing how much food I am going to eat..”
A: “..I stop for a second, I breathe, I determine how hungry I am, I remember that I want to live long and I pick as little food as I think is reasonable.”

Now when I see the question I first visualize myself acting like the answer describes. Then if I have been choosing food in a conscious way for the past several days I mark the card as “Remembered” but if I have been eating like it’s the end of the world I mark the card as “Forgotten” so that Menosyme will ask me about that habit tomorrow. I didn’t expect this to work but now when I’m going to the cafe at the office for food the picture I visualized automatically pops up. And the same thing happens with the other card habits.

Another issue I have with 30 day challenges is that the method is not sufficient to maintain existing habits. Good old habits might suddenly disappear because changes in my life have removed what triggers those good habits. With the spaced repetitions approach you are leaving all the bookkeeping to your flash card program which will make sure that old learned habits don’t suddenly disappear by asking you about them from time to time.

More habit card examples from my deck:

Q: “When the morning alarm rings..”
A: “..I turn it off, stretch and get out of bed feeling excited about the day.”

Q: “When my mind is starting to drift away at my desk..”
A: “..I get up, go refill my water bottle and do some exercise.”

Q: “Whenever I feel stressed or anxious..”
A: “..I slowly inhale as much air as I can by pushing my diafragm down and I slowly relax.”
A: “..I remind myself that I’m good enough and that people including myself will have to accept me for who I am.”

Q: “Whenever I feel the urge to check my email..”
A: “..I imagine myself opening my inbox later and feeling in control and rewarded for my patience.”

If you want to learn more about habits I recommend reading “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg.

Have you tried this method? How is it working for you?

deliberate_practice_letter.pdf (53Kb)

These days I keep a printed copy with me at home and at work.

Feedback strongly welcome.

Do you have email under control? Do you use any other technique?

Cal Newport

Cal is the author of Study Hacks, an inspiring blog full of tips about how to study more efficiently, the value of focus and preparing since college to lead a balanced and fulfilling life. He is an MIT Computer Science postdoc and he has written 3 books about his blog’s topic. I love his treatment of the importance of focus.

Chris Guillebeau

Chris has travelled to over 150 countries (and is now travelling to an average of 20 countries per year) and lives and writes about the art of non-conformity which he defines as “the refusal to accept established customs, attitudes, or ideas”. His blog, 3×5 is full of tips and life hacks.

Garr Reynolds

Garr is an American living in Japan who loves good design, good presentations and jazz. His blog, PresentationZen, is one of the first blogs that I started reading and that is still on my RSS reader.

Ken Robinson

Ken is a very inspiring speaker passionate about the value of creativity and education. He was knighted by the British and has written several books about the topic. I have written about him before and I recommend his books: The Element and Out of Our Minds.

Mark Sisson

Mark is a big proponent of primal living, that is, living like our ancestors did. He is 57 years old and looks like this. If you’re interested in knowing more you can check out his Primal Blueprint 101 or his health and fitness blog: Mark’s Daily Apple.

And you, what are the most interesting people that you have found recently?

What
Be prepared to spend time understanding and think that you are stupid.

Why
I wasn’t born with an engineering mind. I still probably don’t have a full one but I am more engineer than before. And I’m probably not the only one. A big part of what you get from an engineering major is a mindset and that is not something that you achieve by studying the night before. The more time and focus you put in the more you get out of it. When I was studying it was typical to spend about 4h to 8h on a problem and still not get it and that’s frustrating. I am happy with what I have got from and I appreciate it but I swore many times when I still had looming exams and other deadlines what was I thinking when I decided to get into college.

What
Fully understand the concepts you see.

Why
Anything else is memorizing and you won’t be able to apply the concept or technique to unseen areas. Besides that it’s easier to lose data with a more limited field of application than a way of thinking which is more applicable to other areas. Also depending on your university and your major it won’t be possible to pass a course unless you really understand what’s there.

What
Plan your study time, do the 20% that results in the 80% and, for best results, get rest, exercise and fun.

Why
You won’t probably be able to fully understand everything in any case. Life is too short and spending 5 years delaying happiness is a bad precedent. Something that worked for me was to do timeboxing with my courses: allocate for example 1h to each course per day and once that hour is gone go to the next course. When you finish if you need to finish something from any of the courses do it now. Failing to plan in this case is definitely planning to fail, you will spend the whole afternoon on one course or problem, you will neglect the rest of the courses, do them harshly, deprive yourself of essential sleep and it will become a difficult habit to get rid of.

What
Once you understand concepts revise them periodically.

Why
Once you have mastered a concept it is a very valuable possession. If you input those concepts into a flash-card program like Mnemosyne it will take you maybe 15min a week to revise them and they will solidify in your memory. This is also a strategy that worked for me when trying to tackle difficult courses: memorize the definition of a concept even if you still don’t understand it and then later, with the definition in your mind your subconscious will work with it and many times I was able to understand something after having memorized it and let my subconscious work on it.

If you are interested about learning more about efficient and pleasurable college years I recommend you to take a look at Study Hacks from Cal Newport.

Assuming that you are already prioritizing in a more or less sane way by not allowing other people’s urgencies to take precedence over necessary tasks, pruning really unnecessary tasks and doing the necessary but not urgent tasks like backing up data this method will let the natural urgency of a task or lack of thereof do the hard job for you.

Alternative method: just set a maximum length for your TODO list. For example: 20 tasks. When the 21st task comes in go over your list and, if you can’t drop any existing task, don’t add the new task and forget about it.

A long time ago I used to play as a DM in a roleplaying game called Dungeons & Dragons. I played it during weekends with my high school friends. I loved it. We created stories together that transported us to fantastic worlds for hours, my friends and I were using our creativity to the maximum, we had such surrealistic and fun situations that we ended up laughing so long as to get muscle aches. But years passed, our other interests shifted and we parted ways ending the campaign.

During the last 8 years or so I yearned for playing again but I always had that little guy sitting by my ears telling me things like: “you don’t have time to play, it’s a lot of time, you’re not in a Spanish speaking country, with your heavy accent and your lack of medieval vocabulary in a foreign language how are you supposed to do it? It won’t work, it won’t be perfect, bla bla bla.” And he kept hammering me and keeping me from trying to play again.

But enough was enough, a few months ago, after moving to Dublin I decided I would give it a try. This Stoicism 101 post by Tim Ferriss as well as his The 4-Hour Workweek book and the “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” question inside it helped me overcome that little guy. And boy did I like playing again! It was not comparable to my teenager times but it was at least as fun as in the old times. If you are curious about how it went it’s all more or less recorded on our campaign’s blog: Zhymballa.

Would you like to try something new or something exciting and your fears are keeping you from doing it? I invite you to imagine the worst case scenario. Now imagine yourself in your death bed lamenting never having had the guts to try it. Rate from 1 (just a little bit happy) to 10 (nirvana) how well do you think you will feel by doing it and rate from 1 (just a minor inconvenience) to 10 (you risk dying if you fail doing it) how bad the worst case scenario is. Compare both numbers and decide by yourself. In my case I had at least a potential 7 or 8 happiness against feeling embarrassed in front of some strangers and myself (something I would rate as 1 or 2).

Right after I moved into my current apartment I started doing a new morning routine. Based on my experience the best moment to put habits into practice is when you have big changes in your life. Your subconscious is in unknown territory and it’s really easy to imprint new habits.

Back on topic this is what I’m doing every morning:

1. Green Drink

What
Prepare my green drink of the day which contains:
- 500ml of filtered or mineral water
- a spoon of a food supplement that contains pulverized wheat grass, barley grass and alfalfa.
- a squeezed lemon (59 cents lemon by the way, fruits are as cheap here as in Japan)

I will then drink it drink through the following exercises.

Why
I will devote a whole post to this topic but the idea is to lower your acidic level and become more alkaline so that you lose fat, your stamina, energy and strength increases and your immune system becomes stronger.

Effect
It is difficult to measure the impact of this alone because it’s not the only thing I do to make my body more alkaline but the fact is that my body fat composition has gone down from 14% in June 2010 to 7.2% today. What I do have noticed since I started doing it is that my brain is more sharp in the morning.

2. Exercise to awaken the digestive system

What
Uddiyana Bandha

Why
After 8h of rest there is nothing like a good gentle massage to your digestive system to get it moving.

Effect
What many ads promise: regularity.

3. Pranayama (breathing) exercises

What
- 3 sets of Kapalabhati with 60 repetitions, 120 repetitions and 180 repetitions.
- 3 sets of Anuloma Viloma (only during weekends as they require more time).

All done while siting in padmasana.

Why
We are breathing all the time. We get a lot of energy out of air. Kapalabhati helps you awaken faster due to its fast cycle of inhalations and exhalations and it alsobrings a lot of oxygen into the body and, specially to the brain.

Effect
Having more oxygen in the body and in the brain means a better functioning system and more effective. It also cleanses the respiratory system but throwing away mucus and other substances that might have accumulated during the night. And finally it feels to your brain like washing your face with refreshing cold water in the morning.

4. Short yoga session

What
- Full body muscle contraction/relax cycles from the toes to the neck.
- Sirsasana for about 2 to 4 minutes followed by a few seconds of Balasana.
- Matsyāsana.
- Paschimottanasana.
- Half Spinal Twist (first animation).
- Bridge pose.

Why
Again, we are waking up. Besides the nice feeling of stretching in the morning some of the exercises have additional benefits that I won’t go into detail here. I try to cover all major muscles with these exercises but during weekends I practice more asanas.

Effect
Standing on your head gets a lot of blood flowing through your brain. The whole body feels lighter after having it stretched, the risk of injuries from fast movements is decreased throughout the day and as I mentioned before it each pose has additional specific benefits. Although the session is not as beneficial as it would be if I spent more time on the exercises it’s better than not doing any stretching at all.

5. Abdominal and pilates super sets

What
I do 3 sets of the following 2 different routines. I do routine 1 even days and routine 2 odd days and I only rest after doing a complete set of each exercise. E.g. I will do 1 set of oblique crunches, another of crunches, another of side planks, another of elbow bridge plank and then rest for 1min or so (excellent moments to iron your trousers or to make your bed but whatever happens don’t turn on the computer and for God’s sake don’t check your email!).

Routine 1
Oblique crunches: 25 repetitions per side
Crunches: 50 repetitions.
Side plank: 15 repetitions per side
Elbow bridge plank: 15 repetitions.

Routine 2
Legs lift: 25 repetitions.
Crunches: 50 repetitions.
Side plank: hold for as long as you can.
Elbow bridge plank: hold for as long as you can.

Why
The abs exercises because: 1) we have a lot of organs after the abdominal exercises and there is no protection from the front, 2) it helps me to detach from my body (it’s hard), 3) after getting through the whole thing breakfast feels like a godsend and there is nothing like a godsend to start the day. The plank exercises because the effect they have on my back is incredible. After doing them it feels like my center of gravity is strongly set on my waist. Compared to how I feel when I don’t do the plank exercises it is like comparing a strawman with ironman.

Effect
Feeling like ironman early in the morning, feeling like I have done something impossible before breakfast (5 more impossible things to go) and looks nice on the mirror.

And some people look at me in awe when I tell them that I don’t drink coffee. Who needs coffee with this?

The whole routine takes me about 40min.

Do you have a morning routine?