you are watching fun fun function ah I
have to fix the microphone there we go I
am so hungover today oh I guess it kind
of makes me seem like an alcoholic
because there are so many episodes now
where I / I know I say good Monday
morning at the beginning of the episode
but I actually record these on Sundays
in order to release them on Monday
morning and sometimes there are
celebrations on on the Saturdays that I
want to attend and a fruit sauce in
episodes like this where I want to make
an episode but I let me do this with my
hair so that it act will accurately
reflect my inner space that’s such a day
the title of this video is
self-discipline is a fraud perhaps
left-click spacey title would be
self-control sucks for me self-control
yes doesn’t work what does work for me
in habitual timeboxing so today I want
to talk about a habitual timeboxing as
an alternative to self-control there is
a lot of people in my midst who are
impressed that I make these videos every
single week and may say like a while you
have amazing self-discipline to do that
every every week I have the worst
self-discipline I have no self-control
for instance I am trying to cut down on
coffee because I drink too much coffee
and I also go to work and I oh this is
the only cup I’m going to have today and
then I just find myself drinking my
sixth cup and yes tomorrow I should
probably not drink more coffee and then
I observe myself going to the coffee
machine and drinking another getting
another cup of coffee and I just can’t
help myself I just do it I am the
absolute worst at telling myself what to
do it seems like if I
tell myself what to do I have an even
less chance of doing it than if I didn’t
tell myself what to do and this is
something that I struggle with all my
life really I didn’t do well in school
I’m one of those people who always
procrastinate doing taxes and
historically before a fun fun function I
also had a very hard time of
consistently creatively producing stuff
I would start a lot of stuff but I
wouldn’t end up actually producing it
consistently enough so that I could
actually release stuff to the world but
then something happened in my life and
could tell you a story about something
called 8:00 a.m. sharp
so 8:00 a.m. sharp was a movie
production maybe you don’t know this
about me but I come from I don’t come
originally from a programming background
I have background in theater movie
production and stuff like that and I was
hanging around in this crowd who we had
been producing movies as a team for it
for a long time and people were
discovering that hey movie production
this is fun this is what I wanna do so
people went to school got better at it
good your proper gear and overtime
people got a lot better at it more
professional and we discovered that as
we as we became more professional more
people around me at least discovered
that we were doing less things not more
to a large degree this was simply
because we now understood how hard
things were to do when you’re starting
out with something you had no idea how
long things are gonna take so you’re
like oh hey let’s make this movie
how long is it going to take well one
week a top-three and the thing
ends up taking like four months and at
the end of the project you’re like oh
why did we get into this but since
you’re in the project and you’ve
committed to doing it you end up
finishing it and getting it outdoor and
after you’ve done this mistake for a
couple of times
you you get slicer and you start getting
a better realistic feel for how long
things take but that also means that you
you are less likely to get into them
because you you know how hard they they
are going to be so easily just found
ourselves in this situation where we
were just not doing a whole lot even
though we were now more capable than
ever thus was born the 8 a.m. short
project 8 a.m. sharp was not a project
per Sade was a process where we gathered
at 8 a.m. sharp every other Saturday
morning we were not allowed to have any
type of script or even an idea but at
the end of that day we were supposed to
have a complete and finished movie
uploaded on YouTube
and this was just amazing we produced a
lot of movies during that that period
and anyone was allowed to show up it was
not just our team so sometimes we had we
only had 2 people who didn’t know
anything about movie production and a
cellphone camera and some Saturdays we
had a team of 14 people a Irish director
two professional-grade cameras which was
$20,000 a pop and we split into two
teams and had a pretty high production
thing it was just amazing because it was
this process that just glorified getting
things out not every individual video
turned out great but considering the
whole process and the fact that they
were produced in a day I think
some of them turned out to be pretty
decent and it was 8 a.m. sharp that got
me thinking in these lines like the
lines of this habitual timeboxing
because I found that I was an order of
magnitude more productive with this
method rather than everything else I’ve
tried in my life and since then I read a
lot about self control and how it works
and it
if you look at research it indicates
that self-control behaves sort of like a
muscle it’s definitely a muscle in the
sense that it can be trained and you can
become better at it but it also is a
muscle in the sense that when you use it
it gets tired and you cannot use it
indefinitely during a day I’ll put a
link in the episode description above it
you can repeat this in experiments where
people that had to resist a resist
eating a cookie compared to a group that
didn’t actually perform worse at
intellectual tasks afterwards using
self-control seems to somehow deplete
something in you but when we did a tame
sharp it’s getting up in the morning it
didn’t for some reason feel in the same
way that when you’re depriving yourself
from getting a pizza or a cookie you
know what is it at first but once we got
into it it felt like something that we
just you know had to do it’s Saturday we
go and make a movie we brain somehow
started accepting that this is just how
it works it turns out that
psychologically habits or extremely
powerful things there’s a book by
Charles Duhigg that is the power of
habit of link to that in the episode
description that isn’t just an amazing
book it turns out that habits they live
in a completely separate part of the
brain from memory and all our other
cognitive functions there are actually
people who have due to accidents lost
part of their part of the brain the part
of their brain that contains a short
term memory so these people can’t form
memories just like the guy in the movie
memento so they can’t form new memories
but here’s the funky part they can form
new habits so they ran an experiment
where a person were supposed to pick
like there were cards and they were
supposed to pick which one had a cat
behind it they did this experiments
hundreds of times over but since they
didn’t have any short-term memory they
could not know so the first few times
they just failed they just basically
guessed but over time they started
picking the right one somehow the brain
started like connecting this getting the
right card with the reward that comes
from from the success and just learned
habitually to pick the right card and it
turns out that habits can be quickly
damn complicated you can for instance
these people could just habitually get
into a very complicated route around
their neighborhood and walk that
completely on their own but they they
really couldn’t if they were asked to
draw that route or remember even that
they have ever taken that route they
were not able to do it and in that same
thing like I can find myself just almost
unconsciously walking all the way over
to the copy machine do performing all
the steps of making coffee and then just
suddenly finally myself with a coffee in
hand even though I had committed that
day to not making coffee habits have
ludicrous power over you it’s very bad
in the case of of the coffee case but if
you manage to use these habits for good
it’s really good wow I’m so insightful
so how does a habit work have it has
three components the first one is a Q so
Q can be very different might be might
be tied to time for instance I always
get a cup of coffee when I arrived in
the office might also be a feeling I
tend to get a cup of coffee when I’m
bored
for instance or you
might be that you brush your teeth
before you go to bed the point is that
the Q is something it’s a trigger it’s
something that happens inside you or
outside you it’s something that triggers
the habit starts it off in the case of
the fun fun function production it’s
simply that it’s Sunday the second
component of a habit is a routine this
is the thing that you actually do like
brushing your teeth or producing an
episode of fun fun function or drinking
a cup of coffee something triggers you
to do a routine and that leads to a
reward this is actually the most tricky
thing to understand about habits in my
experience with coffee it’s it’s often
hard to identify what I get out of it I
think it’s different from time to time
sometimes it’s a bitter taste that I
like sometimes when I have a boring task
to do I just go get a cup of coffee and
the reward is that I skate I escape the
boredom of the task in the sum function
cases it’s probably yes the satisfaction
of uploading a completed episode or
perhaps the likes and comments from new
people that I get I’m not not completely
sure it varies a lot from person to
person and a situation situation but
this this is basically the gist of what
a habit is it’s a trigger that causes
you to do a routine which gives you a
reward of some kind so habitual
timeboxing it’s basically a a habit that
is intentionally designed around the
time box on Friday evenings I write on
my book this is very different from my
my own mentality where which was more
like I’m going to complete writing a
book or like my next task on this list
is to write one chapter the problem with
that is that there is no trigger like
this it I cannot build like this this
flywheel kind of thing from that
it cannot become a habit but if you make
your work like a routine that you do at
a certain time or when some a certain
thing happens it can be chemical habit
and that is so much more powerful than a
goal with tons of function it just
doesn’t matter if I’m hungover or if I’m
tired when even if I’m sick I just do it
because it’s such a powerful habit it’s
not always a super smart programming
video sometimes it’s episodes like this
but I always do want and if you do
something you almost always learn
something which means that you are
improving that’s my tired hungover
thought or the day self-control sucks
for me at least and I found that
habitual timeboxing is a much better
alternative to that it’s basically the
only way I get things done and it’s
because of this like how a habit is
structured there’s a cue that figures to
have it which makes you do some kind of
task in a routine something that you do
which leads to a reward of some kind and
that if you’re very strong in the human
psyche you have just watched an episode
of fun fun a function I release I
release these every Monday morning
always on the GMT sign what you will
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like these these new things you can
check out a playlist of them there or
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I am mpj until next Monday morning thank you