Ok, I think I now have enough evidence to say I have been maligning Thursday for far too long. Wednesday is the culprit, and I think I have it pinned down as to why even though I don’t have an answer as to how to fix it. Long story short, I burn out on any intensity level after 3 days. No really, I am that squishy it turns out. In fact, I would not be surprised if I analysed my data in the BuJo if I found my good streaks only lasted for 2-3 days on average, a hypothesis I will probably try to test at some point, though I am not sure how best to test the theory. Might need to do some digging on existing experiments that aren’t compromised by the subject – me – knowing what’s up.
‘Substantial edits’ being encouraged even if not mandatory under the character sheet system seems to be working well for me, as does the write by 5pm now having a tangible reward attached. There’s just one small problem: when I failed to hit target by 5pm yesterday, the evening fell apart. It’s not the fault of the character sheet, but of the ‘screw it’ effect, or whatever the actual scientific name for it is. It’s a phenomenon observed in willpower behavioural science where, when a goal becomes impossible, say, you’re meant to not eat more than a certain amount and you go over, you go ‘screw it’ and go overboard because today is already a write off. It’s one of the most infuriating parts of altering your bad behaviours because one ‘screw it’ tends to domino into more.
Still working on fixing that one, but for now, I’m just gonna take comfort that today ended up pretty good, in spite of the deck being stacked against it. I just hope post-half-term doesn’t end up ramping up to triple intensity overnight.
samshuttleworth.com 