Habit KPIs and Models to work and learn.
Habit System that I turn into Data Structure, just makes me better each month.
When I start to do new activities or learning it always has been the same mechanism in the brain, chunking bit bits of information and strengthening those neural connections over time and so I remember things that I need and be able to develop in a creative way to use it or implemented it.
Simply put I wasn’t aware of how habits can affect me in the long run, bear in mind
that habits are powerful because they create a neurological craving that drives our daily life. so in other words sometimes, we are driven by the habit that we develop throughout time.
There were days we weren’t aware that our reaction and response towards daily activities by engaging in any given task are affected our creativity, for example, what we do when we deal with these things; stuck, errors, boredom, burnout, stress, distraction, progress, motivation, achievements, innovations, success. how we react and respond to these situations are has a strong relationship that shapes our creative state on and off.
Please Be careful to take notes.
The most insignificant thing that we take for granted as a learner is taking notes while at the same time trying to chunk information(concepts, ideas,) or even worse taking notes when you are in deep attention this notation is very straightforward in neuroscience and cognitive psychology about learning, is that when the brain is engaging with activities it has two modes of thinking; Diffuse mode and Focus mode. the main idea about this is the two modes are mainly about the relationship between a task and how the brain communicates with that task, but keep in mind it’s a highly subjective thing to recognize in practice.
If you’re not familiar with this concept this is a good article that discusses hyper-focus attention and deep focus attention; how to navigate your focus better.
When we focus on only a task what happened in the brain is simply limiting our mind to other stimuli that are unrelated to the requirements of the task itself because when the brain is in the focused mode we are driven by the objective of the task(problem) that needed to be completed.
What is it mean, is that the changes in our frontal lobe the part of your brain that controls the sense of reward are lead you to deep focus attention; it makes you engage and have a high tolerance of boredom during this time. You may find a certain task so rewarding that it’s so hard to move on to something else.
A typical scenario is we forgot to eat and do other things outside of the parameter of that task, also you may have trouble controlling how much attention you pay to something else.
If you working on a problem you may find yourself don’t think very creatively when the problem just occurring, most of the time it leads us easily to stuck from founding the solutions or a way to resolve those problems, interestingly the brain at that moment is not typically productive to solving a problem instead it simply try to get familiar with the problem at hand and need huge stimuli of information or it needs to step away to incubate that information.
When we are stuck on a complex problem(errors) it’s better if we decide to go and do something else instead of forcing ourselves to keep working and sit down bounce our heads to figure out what's gone wrong.
Giving some distance from that situation is a key component to solving that problem effectively.
Our attention started to shift into the diffused mode from a focus mode which is the mode of thinking.
In neuroscience and cognitive psychology, they explain that our brain has two modes of thinking; diffused mode and focused mode, which essentially governs the relationship between the brain and real-life activities.
The diffused mode by definition is relaxing your mind from thinking about something specific, in fact, you still thinking but you are just not deliberate thinks in this mode. Mike Townsend explains this different mode of thinking very straightforwardly in this article he said that the Diffuse mode happens when you let your mind wonders freely, making connections at random!. The diffuse mode of thinking does not happen in any one area of the brain, but rather all over.
Now I believe that your start to understand that taking notes while learning(pay attention to a material) it’s not the best way to use your mind effectively it’s very counter-productive if you understand which mode of thinking that works best for which tasks. what is best is taking notes in your rest time just after you finish learning like a brainstorming session for your learning section, it strengthens your neural pathways and neural connections also given to your working memory and long-term memory simultaneously.
Let’s Test your habit for 3 months and then reevaluate.
Habit can be optimized and the most interesting thing is that we can also modify habit directly. let me explain for a moment, now just think that when you doing a habit it seems like it happened automatically by default, so the most challenging part is to reevaluate, repurpose, and importantly optimize it in reality.
When a habit is in the early stages it becomes something that incubates in the background of your mind waiting for its times to be ready to be performed independently. it is the same as thinking, learning, and behavior in our daily life.
Habit in technical terms is a behavior that becomes automatic run without any conscious decisions because it has passed certain repetitions and reinforcement until it becomes a behavior, it interacts with particular micro perceptions individually. although the domain of these 3 is very typical in practice it’s worth to mentions if the objects are to optimize habits by reevaluating them comprehensively.
Countless study has shown that habits and Behaviors are strongly integrated when they collide into a neurological pattern. a simple concept to explain this especially if you already read “Atomic Habit” by James Clear(If you don’t. no need to worry I would explain it in detail, just bear with me.), the concept are called a habit loop or other people also call it habit formation.
It’s a pattern that regulates how habits are formed and interact with each other that making them strong and make them weak. The Cue is simply a particular trigger in which that gives us the urge to behave in any given moment according to the perception that we’ve just experienced then it follows the actions which is the Routine itself that is associated with that situation as a behavior pattern due to the responses.
The reason why we experience this is that our body and brain crave endorphin and dopamine exclusively to maintain and increase the whole sense of well-being in our life.
That being said, now you understand that testing a habit is simply trying to extract information on how our body and mind interact with that habit given to this notion of the habit loop.
Then we can optimize a habit and align them with a goal or an objective that we try to achieve in the long run.
It’s important to know the before and after sensation that you've experienced when you perform a habit. because this is the important part which is reflecting.
Reflecting on all your habit that you do regularly is the key element to making your habit serve you instead of consuming you. thereby 3 months period it’s a great time to strengthen the neurons and synapsis to see the performance of a habit.
Now you get all the fundamental concepts and understand the mechanism of habit, how to design a habit that would give you the best experience on the daily basis.
That being said If you do all of this procedure it would pay you a lot of benefits.
note: look for the mechanism and the effect post and pre between endorphin and dopamine are released during activities. (comment if you want me to discuss this more.
Modeling Habits
This is the most exciting part which is Modeling habits, it’s simply a process to turn your habits into data that can be tracked, stored, and importantly analyzed to define what success is in terms of math facts and what is the reinforcement to navigate and identify failure better.
Yes, it is so fun but also challenging at the same time. it requires deep reasoning and logic due to the best use of them in any case possible.
In most cases, I found there is a consistency within the dataset that lately it sorted and reveal all of the math facts within the parameters of habit seeking and avoiding that I've been doing on the daily basis.
This is where the modeling concept is come in handy to give you all the tools you need and get the job done!.
First of all let’s talk about the requirements to do this and the KPI’s variables, the end to the endpoint that enables you to create a system by yourself.
The state of mind that you need to establish is to understand that the utility of habits is to solve a problem, if’s you fail to recognize what problem is to solve the habit itself would consume you rather than served you (I repeat this statement because it’s a pattern recognition to classify a habit).
that being said, being clear about your habit objectives is the first start.
The question that would help you figure out what problem to solve using a habit model is; “What are the most time-consuming task in your day that you can’t avoid ?”. and then “What task take most of your mental energy?”.
The answer would provide you with the ground truth of your functionality as a person. which is the measurement to define what success is according to the math fact that detaches from your assumption and perception.
Write down all the habits that you do in a day. and how much does habit cost in time? afterward, it’s great momentum for you to create a visualization to see how many states in a day you’ve experienced regarding time spent.
Fundamental insight that you need is:
- Where and When is the peak? and valley occur?
- What are the values of high highs and low lows?
- On which habit do they occur?
- How much transition of the downtrend to the uptrend? and vice versa.
Give it some time to consider your whole habits very carefully. after that, I strongly believe that now you can come up with a final list of all habits variables that you need.
This is mine! feel free to take a look :
Please spend time on this process because it would be used as a success metric. and eventually, we are going to build KPIs and dashboards as an end product to implement what you learn in real life, and so it would help your progress and process.
In addition, now you can grasp the crystal clear visualization to see how you function relative to the habit in times.
How much does each one of your habits cost? does it return the investment of your time and energy? the ROI of your habit is the first thing you need to identify.
Habits are always get accumulated and build up each time in motion, it gives us experiences and the sense of living throughout time
“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Meaning in large the reality that we experience is strongly influenced by habits that we do! doesn't matter how mindless we are or mindful we are towards it, eventually, the endpoint of habits affects how we see realities. it’s an inevitable thing.
This is my detailed percentage of how much my habit costs in percentage. to keep in mind this version is already passed years of improvements until I can come up with these habit variables, most people are simplifying this but switching tasks is not easy as you think. it has scientific research of how we can switch tasks effectively and perform tasks optimally in a day (morning, afternoon, night) because our biology strongly plays a bigger role in how well we perform those tasks.
You can see the peak state is just a view within my day is just about 3 times, meaning in a day I just have a few peak windows to give my best work and hours. and set that as a mental model to be more mindful of what works that I do in a day.
Interestingly our biology has 3 phase in a day to interact with tasks and any sort of things that we do basically, in the morning are the best time for analytical and important work because cortisol is released and help you to achieve alertness to attend and have a deep focus attention sate to engaging with that type of work.
And In the afternoon from 3–6 PM is the best time to do brain-storming work because serotonin is released and allows you to think and function socially relative to the work that you do.
It’s so interesting because I don’t need to beat myself up to think that what I need to do is hard and get overwhelmed by it instead It’s a fair deal personally because, in my lowest days where my energy and mood, and drive have downside I can just redirect all I got to this 3 peak area exclusively relatively how my body and mind sate at! and ignore other things that I needed to do, these insights are life savior to my work! it makes me keep putting the important work done! when I feel down.
That being said, now I have a high spend habit is about 8.6% in a day with unit time between 1–2 hours. and using my low time to rest, meditate, or self-hypnosis just to get the recover I need to get back into the deep work again this is just how to reinforce your brain state as best if you notice these are the moment where focus mode and diffused mode are implemented.
To wrap up all these key points I would say, in contrast, the primary key is you can recognize what is your high and low time in a day and learn how to navigate them better over time and state-related model that you have.
This is just the implementation of time blocking methods, where you block your time for doing just one task at hand with another science support and tools I develop and test by myself.
It is worth mentioning that I’ve been doing this and using this for 2 years now and I track everything of my habits. so it means I got 2 years’ worth of data that I can rely on when I needed.
Scale up your habit!
Alright! Thanks to all of you that reading this far.
Now let’s wrap this all with the dashboard section. the dashboard section has primary(daily) and secondary(monthly) because habits have occurred on the daily basis but it forms on monthly basis, so you would track your daily progress and monthly progress as well.
The primary dashboard mainly focuses on what you should do mins by mins by confirming the intersection that happening in your daily activities through visualization.
It would look like this:
The feature of this dashboard is to reinforce the bottom-up processing at scale, what It means is you can directly access the facts and track record of your perceptions that are strongly related to your experience toward task and state of mind.
It’s very rare to be perfect in execution, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot be better daily at execution. The situation that caught most of us in this spot is the idea of “perfect plan leads to perfect results” and yeah it’s a very hypothetical concept to have when you try to work and learn independently(Unsupervised or Supervised by yourself).
It’s very obvious that these concepts are against the reality that when I try to build a perfect plan I already lose the probability of experiencing the real application side of reality which is testing the plan itself; because when you have a perfect plan you are fooling yourself to expecting the plan would works.
Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
This is why rather than focus on what you should focus on how you can systemize what you do! and testing whether your idea is correct or wrong.
That’s the reason the secondary dashboard is important
You can see the accurate information of how you doing in months bit for years period.
But guess what most of the time there are always two sides of the outcome that you need to anticipate. because you would have that in times whether you like it or not, thus the perfect plan acts origin of a stupid plan and if you execute the stupid plan and expose all the energy in the process you would become better on the daily basis! because you allow the experience to play its role of testing and strategizing the micro-moment of your progress.
Create a graph that shows your habit in 2 years and how it evolved relative to its performance.
typically that what we think and feel sometimes costs a loss. What it means is the illusion of competence that is very difficult to spot when your eyes are blindly by expectations. I was procrastinating to deliver the work because I was blind to the idea of delivering the perfect work. good work would eventually come if I keep doing even when I feel it’s telling me to stop.
I do understand that the amount of time that I put away my attention is the time I probably lose the good quality of work. keep in mind that when I say put away my attention does not refer to rest, it’s referring to the situation in which I feel not satisfied with how I feel and thereby make me stop putting the work in.
How to make me feel better. It’s not caused by stopping working but it would be achieved by keeping the work still but changing my perception towards imperfections that I experience.
It means allowing the space for new solutions and new approaches to come into play directly practicing myself to keep going, which I can achieve more when most people stop because they are overwhelmed.
When you govern your mind by practicing it every day, you do not prepare yourself to win, instead, you prepare yourself to keep continuing to be adapted by avoiding things that put you down emotionally. Either way, winning or losing is not a big deal anymore because you are ready to govern your mind to keep working on the next thing just like that, the key is not about scores but it’s about the ability to show up and put in the work deliberately.
If we rely on how we feel to navigate our day we are already losing a day that we had in our lifespan. Now it’s all might be compensated for inactions, understanding these notions would put all of us in a better place anytime and make a day matter.
Make reflections as a routine.
I get better and I can measure how I get better? it’s the main scope when I start to write reports and reflections for myself.
The realization that I learn a hard way when I try to reflect on myself is that; it’s not about how you see things but it’s about the awareness to understand what you use to see things.
Because what I see sometimes can be wrong simply because of the scope that I use to see wrong things. most of the time are we not aware of it whether we are about the scope that we used to see things in our life.
It’s like you have a loop system that maintains your progress deliberately. but also you have another loop system that runs in parallels to make sense of what it’s doing.
If you were interested to get full access email me: Clifferttreven@gmail.com.
Hi, I'm Cliffert a Machine-Learning Student and Work as a front-end Developer.
I wrote code and wrote articles about the expression of growth against reality with the combination of science and consciousness. you would find the infinite perspective
