No. 16Lifelong learning Productivity tools

Stop waiting for willpower

The people who look disciplined aren’t resisting more temptation. They’ve arranged to meet less of it. I didn’t know that for years. I thought I was unmotivated: things didn’t get done, I took it as a flaw in my character, and I’d sit waiting for the willpower to turn up so I could start.

A Healthy Gamer video on motivation and willpower changed that for me, and it was a genuine moment. About three minutes in, Dr Alok Kanojia says motivation is not actually willpower. Motivation is a desire your brain produces, which you don’t really control, and whether you act on it also depends on what’s available to you. It isn’t something you wait for, and if you’re waiting, you’ll wait a long time. Lots of people feel this guilt, and it’s misplaced.

The tank that wobbled

The popular idea is that willpower is a fuel tank that drains through the day. Every temptation resisted leaves a little less, so by evening there’s nothing left for the small extra effort a decent meal takes, and the ready meal or the takeaway wins. I believed it, and it felt true.

Then the science had a rough decade. In 2016, a replication across 23 labs put 2,141 people through the same preregistered test and found an effect close to zero. The theory’s defenders said that test used the wrong task, so in 2021 researchers who had championed the idea ran their own across 36 labs and 3,531 people. Their data came out about four times more likely under no effect than under the one they expected.

That doesn’t mean tiredness isn’t real. The same study found, in an exploratory look, that the effect may be larger for people who said they were tired, and across everyone it tested, a tiny effect on evidence that could go either way. It means the tank is a weaker explanation than it looked.

Fewer fights, not better fighters

What the research does support is better than the tank. In a week of beeper reports from 205 adults, people high in self-control didn’t win more fights against temptation. They reported weaker desires and fewer of the problematic ones, and the authors’ own reading is that they did not have to use self-control as often. Galla and Duckworth found, across six studies, that the good outcomes of self-control run through habits rather than effortful resistance. Both are observational, so neither proves cause, but they point the same way. Whether or not willpower runs out, the people who look disciplined aren’t using much of it.

None of this says self-control doesn’t exist. It says the people who have it spend it somewhere else: once, in the shop, or the night before, rather than every evening in front of the cupboard.

Don’t rely on willpower not to eat the chocolate. Don’t have the chocolate in the house. BJ Fogg, whose book comes in below, does his own version of this: faced with a hotel room’s basket of crisps and snacks he knew he’d cave to, he didn’t try to resist. He put the basket in the TV cabinet and shut the door, which removed the prompt. He says outright that motivation and willpower are unreliable, and that tiny behaviours are how you design around them.

What I learned from Fogg

I read Fogg’s Tiny Habits. Everyone’s heard of Atomic Habits, but this is the one that stuck for me. His model is that a behaviour happens when motivation, ability and a prompt meet at the same moment. Draw it as a chart, motivation up the side and ability along the bottom, with a curved action line across it. If you badly want to do something, it can be quite hard and still happen. If you barely want to, it has to be very easy. And above the line or below it, nothing happens without a prompt.

His example is from 2010. He was on the elliptical at the gym when, as he tells it, a text arrived from the Red Cross after the Haiti earthquake, asking him to text back to donate. His wallet was in the car, so a phone call asking for card details would have failed on ability, and a letter would probably have gone in the bin as junk, failing on the prompt. He wanted to help, replying was trivially easy, and the text was the prompt. No website, no form, no card details. Fogg reports the campaign raised more than $3 million in its first twenty-four hours and more than $21 million by the end of the week.

The part I’d underline is his order for fixing a behaviour that isn’t happening: check the prompt first, then ability, and only then motivation. Most people start with motivation, which is why they end up blaming themselves. That fits what Dr K said: motivation is the one you can’t dial, so it’s the one you touch last.

Fogg says the way to learn his model is to draw the chart, so here it is, with my own life plotted on it.

Fig. 1 · Above the line, below the line

Below the line, no prompt works however guilty you feel; move a thing right, towards easy, and the same prompt starts working.

My old to-do list, diagnosed

I had tasks sitting on a list for years that never got done. On the chart they fail every way at once. Motivation was low, because they were horrible jobs. Ability was low, because they’d been there so long I couldn’t remember how to start them. And there was no prompt at all: they sat at the bottom of a list with no system and no date, and something more important always came along.

A task without a date is just a wish. When I started giving tasks dates so they appeared in my calendar, they started being shown to me, and they started getting done. Nothing about my willpower changed. The prompt did.

Prompts can be anything

On Wednesday mornings before work, an Alexa alarm tells me, out loud, to put the laundry on, and another at lunchtime tells me to take it out. I do want clean washing before the weekend, and without the prompt it doesn’t happen. Leaving my gym gear out the night before does the other job: it raises ability, so the morning doesn’t need a debate. Habits should almost happen without thinking.

A task without a date is just a wish.

Rules beat resolve

I’ve found that when I set myself rules, I’m good at following them, and a rule means making the decision once instead of every evening. While I was writing my book I set up small habits: a daily maintenance slot, a five-minute timer, little challenges, all scheduled rather than waited for.

Fig. 2 · Two ways not to eat the chocolate

The top path needs willpower every evening and only has to fail once; the bottom one needs a single decision, made in the shop.

More recently I’ve gamified parts of life with a points system on Home Assistant, with buttons I press when I’ve done something I shouldn’t have, partly because one too many oat milk lattes had crept in. Counting is what actually works for me. That’s the next build note, the Virtue Score, coming soon.

None of this came from school. It came from a book and a YouTuber, picked up in my forties, and it changed how I run every week. The most useful things I know about how to live, I taught myself after the timetable ran out. The video clock has the longer version of that argument.

Book links go to Bookshop.org, which pays me a small commission and gives the same again to independent bookshops.