Do One New Thing A Day To Solve Your Problems
45Taylor G. Lunt
24Luiza
7Dave Banerjee
6rambip
5Algon
1curvise
17romeostevensit
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14Atlas Aristotle
12Reogine
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9Alex Churchill
7RobertM
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6Yeonwoo Kim
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4Austin Weisgrau
3Broever101
3PoignardAzur
3Amin Sennour
3Kolody Ekaterina
3Crazy philosopher
2Algon
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3Algon
2Jasnah Kholin
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1Philip Niewold
New Comment
Something appeals to me far more about the wobbly chair story than the dopamine addiction story. In the wobbly chair story, you spent 1 minute improving your life and didn't have to think about it again. In the other story, it was a constant battle that required diligence for a while. You can only do so many of those kinds of things at once.
It's good advice still. When things aren't working, thinking them through and trying things out is a good move. I just wonder if people have any advice that's more like the wobbly chair story. Quick, cheap, semi-permanent wins that don't require willpower.
One of these quick, cheap & semi-permanent wins for me was to uninstall the apps I didn't want to use (e.g. instagram) & make it difficult to access the ones I sort of wanted to use (e.g. youtube).
Examples I can relate to:
- Fixing this keyboard issue that would lead to type the wrong accent each time, or any kind of quick software fix.
- buying a bigger cupboard / a pan
- setting up a whiteboard in your room
- unsubscribe from this spammy mailing-list
But while I agree they are satisfying and fun to look into, I don't think they are the main point of the article, far from it. First, they DO require willpower. While fixing your wobbly chair or unsubscribing from your mailing list does not take you a lot of energy and time, you first need to a) notice this is a problem b) decide to fix it and c) create a plan to actually fix it. These 3 phases require a lot of willpower. As evidence, they are phases of my life (when I am rested, motivated and in a good social environment) where I can fix multiple such problems in a single day. But they are phases where I can't do once, It's just too tiring intellectually.
Second, such low-hanging fruits are pretty rare. Most problems are hard to fix, and require careful planning and try/error. The reason why they are important though, is that fixing these "easy problems" set the right dynamic to try fix more challenging ones.
And last, focusing on the cheap wins in this way underplays the importance of habits. The number one reason why it is hard to fix your chair is that you took the habit of using it anyway. The reason why you won't buy this cupboard is that you are used to the smaller impracticable one. When I analyze all the examples the author cites with this glance (breaking habits -> new dynamic), I see that they are very similar. And very often, a series of "cheap wins" adds up to a full transformation.
Yeah, the wobbly chair story is a better example. Somehow, I feel more satisfied with it. Perhaps because it is a basically complete solution, for so little work?
But you fix the wobbly chairs so you can build up momentum to fix the dopamine addiction. And I'm not sure if I made this clear, but the stuff I tried for fixing my dopamine addiction did each help a bit, and now I know that if I really want to, I can stack them together to reset my dopamine system. Once done, it is a lot easier to continue to pause it.
So in that sense, these are permanent wins which have reduced the total amount of willpower I need to exert to partially fix my dopamine addictions.
I've been tackling many "wobbly chair" problems in my life in the last few years due in large part to adopting just such a mindset: by removing annoyances/distractions, removing friction, and developing new abilities via these types of efforts, I'm able to take on bigger problems and goals. It has been very good for me, in that the scope of my hobbies has grown... but it's also surprisingly easy to feel like I've made no progress against the big issues on days where I'm unwell and struggle to concentrate. These "wobbly chair" type problems, once fixed, become invisible achievements, and I still often get trapped thinking I'm helpless against the big problems.
Consistency is super important for wicked problems that sap the motivational power needed to engage with them, like chronic pain or fatigue.
Sure, agreed. I had severe chronic migraines for well over a decade, which required a lot of little patchwork solutions and some random dugs. I eventually figured these things out. But if I had tried one new thing a day to solve them, then I would've saved myself a lot of pain.
1This is a bitter lesson for human improvement -> most gains come from experimentation not thinking
I sort of tried the same thing this month, yet with a different approach. My approach is the first week was to log the things that I do within the day and the feelings they gave me. For example, I would wake up in the morning and check my phone. Before I check my phone, I ask myself why I would check my phone. The answer is to respond to my gf text from yesterday, or to any messages that I didn't respond to yesterday before I went to bed. And then in the second week, when you log those things about how do you spend your day and what triggers your bad habits, you start making Hypotheses to try and experience something like if i did'nt have an unfinished convo from yesterday i will not check my phone in the morning or what you did with blocking the first hour of the day with no electronics, and then again you log the feedback from that experience and form a new hypothesis, and so on.
I've found great benefit in using the times when I have high willpower and problem-solving energy to put things in place that will help me when willpower is low. The biggest win I think is noticing that I was staying up too late reading/playing on my phone, and so installed an app that locks my phone after a certain time at night. ("Digital Detox Challenge" is the most effective app I found for this on Android.)
I've also found that modern LLM chatbots are surprisingly good at helping find solutions to problems you might not expect.
People don't explore enough.
I think this is true for almost everyone, on the current margin. Different frames and techniques help different people. And so, curated! Let us have our ~annual reminder to actually try to solve our problems, instead of simply suffering with them.
1 minute and 10 turns of an allen key later, it was fixed.
Also important to remember that some problems can literally be solved in one minute. (You, the person reading this - is there something you keep forgetting to buy on Amazon to solve a problem you're dealing with?)
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1I’m not really sure. I’m a high school student, and since I go to a boarding school, I left all my electronic devices at home before going back to school for the summer term. Because of that, I ended up spending most of my time in the library, borrowing books that kind of serve as ‘shorts,’ as well as some pretty deep ones. I also made a good friend and even went to the beach — without a smartphone, of course. I guess sometimes doing things you normally wouldn’t can actually help.
How come you're not really sure? The results you got from leaving electronic devices at home sound pretty sweet. Is it just that you're not sure whether the counterfactual would've been worse?
For trivial problems, remembering you have them and that they are solvable is most of the magic here. My friend got me doing this on simple fix problems specifically and within a few weeks I had fixed a variety of super annoying things that had bothered me for years and each required about $2 to fix. A broken drain catch, no good bottle to water my plants, not having hair ties, missing a gasket. Problem solving has escalated from there.
Personally, a fuzzy adherence to the UNIX philosophy has helped me cut out the "distraction demons" of the internet. I used to use social media a lot, and I questioned why I do that; turns out I had only two reasons: 1) To post and 2) Stay up to date on industry trends. I realized I could do the posting without having to scroll and I could keep up with industry trends via .. forums instead. Which are not infinite-scroll and hence not dopamine-hacking.
The "one use-case per device/tool" rule is awfully helpful in cutting out distractions without becoming a luddite.
Is there a name for this "I changed things in my life and you can too" genre of articles? Agency porn?
I think in general, telling people they should do more hard things more often is ineffective at helping them. This article isn't quite that, but it's pretty close. I'm skeptical that "Do one new thing a day" is a secret recipe for overcoming akrasia or dopamine addiction.
There’s also something like “always be looking for and open to improvements” - be willing to spend the time tinkering.
The way I take notes started as “everything I read gets a file” and has slowly evolved into something much more powerful simply by me noticing when I’m experiencing friction and tinkering with stuff to try and reduce that friction.
It’s interesting how the things that give us dopamine even when they’re destructive are often the hardest to control. The typical way to manage them seems to be avoiding them altogether, but that can feel like fighting (and fighting always lead to war with yourself) an addiction, you keep getting pulled back in.
Instead, it might be a question about what’s driving the behavior. Are you bored? Trying to avoid uncomfortable thoughts? Or simply filling your time with something easy and stimulating?
If I imagine that I can always talk to my friends, play football, dance, or go for a walk, then I probably wouldn’t need to doomscroll. Because dopamine is tied to positive emotions, it keeps you hooked — it’s hard to let go. But I agree that sometimes, just blocking that source of stimulation for a day can help you reconnect with your own feelings. However may not solve it completely as the roots my be much deeper down.
I implemented this two days ago, and I’m already seeing incredible results in some areas! Not much progress in productivity, since I had already tried most of these ideas before, but I did experiment with buying different products for my lunch, found something better, and also made progress on something that takes a lot of context to explain.
(This comment doesn’t share any new important information about the technique, but it’s still important to write comments like this to support the authors. It’s hard to keep creating when all you hear is criticism.
I think of comments like this as a kind of reward for good behavior. In behavioral style)
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1How do you ensure that something is "new" or different enough from your previous attempts while avoiding quot-filling of being "weird and novel for the sake of weird and novel".
In my case, my most persistent and annoying problem is getting commissions (I make music videos). Most of my previous attempts to solicit commissions involved Instagram in one way or another (posting reels of my portfolio, doing to-camera analysis of music videos, posting inspiration/moodboard videos, posting previous work, running advertisements).
There came a certain point where trying to think of relevant content I could produce once a week (forget every day) was just untenable. I ran out of ideas for reels which served the core goal (i.e. I went from discussing Spark's appearances on 1970's French Variety Shows to a reel about the history of the Pierrot Clown - aren't I trying to get music video commissions?[1])
So what could I try different every day? I've already tried chasing up people the old fashioned way - asking them if they want a video.
Should I download TikTok and try that? Or is that just another cached thought where "Instgaram" is replaced by "TikTok"
My knree jerk reaction is to try something really new and weird, like, yell at the full moon. Or post something so incendiary it goes viral - like approving something everyone hates. Or to directly email Taylor Swift's agency and ask them if she's looking for a new music video director (I don't know any of her songs, hence why it is radically novel). None of that is likely to work though, it's just quota-filling, being new for the sake of being new.
- ^
The tenuous connection was I did a video about David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes, where he wears a costume inspired by Pierrot (And Ingmar Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel) - so that was a sequel to that. But it shows you how hard it is to come up with "new" things on a theme.
My knree jerk reaction is to try something really new and weird, like, yell at the full moon. Or post something so incendiary it goes viral - like approving something everyone hates. Or to directly email Taylor Swift's agency and ask them if she's looking for a new music video director (I don't know any of her songs, hence why it is radically novel). None of that is likely to work though, it's just quota-filling, being new for the sake of being new.
In my experience, it is mostly quota filling for big, persistent problems. Most of the things I tried for my migraines and procrastination worked partially at best. But if you do enough of them, you will stumble on a solution. (Maybe multiple solutions you need to stack, but if it works, it works.) You couldn't have guessed beforehand that it would work. If you could, your problem would have been solved long ago.
And if you keep trying one new thing a day, let alone for a particular problem, you will go through so many ideas that you'll hit on a success even if the odds are 1 in a hundred.
Also, if you can't come up with any ideas that look good to you, but you can't just quit, then it is time to lower your filters and do something weird. Babble more and prune less.
EDIT: That said, a lot of my problems aren't something I've seriously tried to solve before. Either because they're new or because I'm lazy. These problems are often resolved on the first serious try.
maybe i took all the low hanging fruit or something, but doing entire new thing every day is A LOT. like, the things i have to do and didn't, it's because they are hard and take more then 5 minutes. also, i can't even check if it worked, and i don't actually have so many things to do!
like, do you really expect to have 365 small things to do? because that suggestion sounds like applause lights to me - designed to be hard to say "actually, that's insane!", while being totally unrealistic.
also, i agree with Taylor. there are things like fixing small problem, and there are things that are constant energy expenditure, and equivocating them create only confusion, and the ability to pretend that hard things are easy, and then be confused when they actually hard.
Just do one new thing a day to solve one of your problems.
I feel like the word "learn" has to be in this sentence.
Yea electronic (screens?) have some weird neurological effect on me. I wish I learned to be satisfied with books and note taking.
Our exploration system is very useful, but it takes a lot of energy (and anxiety), because of the inherent cost of failure which genetics baked into our brain. Hence, doing something new everyday in a society as complex and everchanging as our own is very useful, but very hard with our outdated brain hardware and software.
Add to that the distractions that hijack our outdated brain mechanisms: we have gotten better and better and such hijacking, creating an additional barrier. Doing this is comparably difficult to keeping to a strict diet and exercise regime while mouthwatering delicacies and relaxed convenciences are offered to you at every turn.
You are trying to break patterns (habits), but it is extremely hard to create a habit/pattern of newness, for habits/patterns are fundamentally opposed to doing things in a novel way.
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