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PeterMBall

Peter M. Ball is a speculative fiction writer, small press publisher, and writing mentor from Brisbane, Austraila. He publishes his own work through Eclectic Projects and works as the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press.

Romance at MWF & Habit Hacking

I was catching up on twitter and noticed my friend Kate Cuthbert posting about Romance at MWF. It’s…rather good news:

For those who can’t see the image in the quoted tweet, it features a shot of the Day of Romance program that looks something like this:

And, oh god, that looks good. It’s the 8th of September, and you can grab the full details for each event over on the Melbourne Writers Festival website, and it’s a rather spectacular program in terms of content and talent.

I’m frankly jealous of all the folks in Melbourne who get to go to this. And you really should.

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When I first read Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, a book about the way our brain transfers certain tasks become encoded as routine tasks in our brain, one of the things that stood out was the hypothesis that bad habits never really go away. Once a certain sequence of tasks is encoded in the basal ganglia, it’s there for good.

Sure, you can force the routine into the background and override it with new sequences. And you can kick your conscious brain into gear and tell the basal ganglia it’s not needed for this particular task. These are great, but given the same, familiar circumstances and no particular overriding conflict, the old code sneaks back into your life and you find yourself doing things you had hoped to leave behind.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday engaged in a little habit-hacking as a result, setting up obstacles to prevent me from falling into old, less-productive morning routines. The first cab off the rank was setting up a Freedom Schedule every morning, curbing my access to certain websites and programs on my phone and computer.

This includes some of the usual suspects–Facebook, Twitter, a handful of web forums I frequent–but it also includes tools like Photoshop and Vellum, which can eat the bulk of my day if I put my focus on publishing rather than writing.

(Case in point: I just paused to figure out what to say next, and automatically typed the web address for Facebook out of habit. Freedom cheerfully brought up the green butterfly screen informing me that I’ve blocked this site for the morning, and so I’m back here finishing this post).

What’s really working for me, with regards to Freedom, is the ability to spread a block across multiple devices, which means my morning moratorium is in effect on my work PC, my play PC, my phone, and the old phone that serves as our media centre.

No matter which I reach for, the block is in effect.

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