Do You Buy From A Slob?
Everything feels overwhelming when you aren't locked into maintenance mode.
The Teardown
Tuesday :: November 14th, 2023
I hope the title caught your eyes. It’s a question that fascinates me. Someone is selling you something. But they don’t look like they put much effort into getting out of bed. Maybe their hair is disheveled, or clothes wrinkled. Perhaps, in analyzing their background environment, you notice too much stuff. You say to yourself: this person should not have a row of Teletubbies lined up behind their video, and what about that half-eaten pizza?
Now, of course, I’m writing in a way that suggests the person is selling you remotely via Zoom or collaborative platform of your choice. But the same dynamics exist in-person too. Whether you intend to or not, you’re probably judging that person based on their overall presentation. That lens on the person primes your capacity to consider the offer.
The messy salesperson probably needs to work harder to get your business, right? A clean and professional look helps set the table so to speak.
You might have flashbacks to setting the table as a kid. Your parents made you artfully fold napkins, surgically deliver utensils to the table, and lay out place-mats if they were the sort of people that believed in those. Those napkins came, possibly, from a napkin holder. Utensils rested at night in a drawer. Forks didn’t sleep with knives as that would be cheating, but you might have had forks of different sizes cuddling together. I won’t judge you.
To a certain degree, all of this order and process is about maintenance. And maintenance requires some sense of recurrence, some discipline, and some sense of a penalty or reward. After all, we all like incentives. But if you want to maintain something, where do you start?
A Reminder? A To Do? What Is It?
My brother recently suggested I read Atomic Habits aptly written by James Clear. The book focuses on habit formation and much of the psychological and practical structure around implementing (or not) habits.
We all hear habit anecdotes like this: you coalesce a habit through some combination of time and repetitive action. A habit, once the foundation is poured, happens autonomously in some sense. You’re used to doing it and don’t have to work hard or even think at all about doing it again.
When you connect the words care and nurture to the habit concept, you might flash to a beautifully-designed parental routine that keeps each morning and evening on the rails. As a parent or caretaker, you’re supposed to look after the well-being of that kid. Repetitive attention compounds over time, ideally leading to a healthy and happy kid that’s also well-fed and well-rested. These are all the table stakes for kids of course.
But whether you’re a parent or not, what are the table stakes for you? Do you care for yourself by showering every day? Do you nurture yourself with a little bit of yoga, mediation, or some other soothing activity? And let’s be more serious, do you find a place to work out your feelings? To express your emotions?
And here’s my last question: are you equipped to invoke maintenance mode?
Some folks kick-start the process with a reminder. Hear ye, hear ye, make sure you pay the contractor that fixed your boiler. That reminder might come as an email, or maybe through an app, or maybe through a nag from a significant other. With another lens, there’s a to-do list that helps track everything you want to do. Methodically ticking through the list soothes your anxiety and reduces your work for the day.
The more you tick through that list, the more you habitually accomplish whatever it was you set out to do. In my mind, to-do lists contain things that fall into two categories:
Things you want to do
Things you have to do
You can’t always achieve everything in those lists with your exact expected process in mind. Life sometimes gets in the way, or the particular item morphs into something that requires another approach. So you need to find another way - a system perhaps - to either cross the finish line or disqualify that item from your list.
Lately, I’m looking at these sorts of systems not as things that overwhelm or force me into arduous routines, but instead, as care, nurture, and maintenance. Hold your eye rolls.
Technology Is Just One Component
We’ve all used the paper to-do list at some point. It’s satisfying to start your day with an achievable list and systematically cross things out when they’re done. The paper list is time-honored because it’s simple.
But what’s on that list? Is it just your work? Or is it anything else you need to do?
I tend to mix work and personal items because I look at them very similarly these days. There are numerous things I have to do on some recurring basis - daily, weekly, etc. - along with whatever that day requires. Focusing on just one side of life tends to distort the other. I can be really busy with work and seemingly forget everything else.
That conclusion probably seems obvious. Of course, if you spend all your time on work, you don’t have time for other things. But the tangible difference is real. I can effectively forget to get groceries. Did I really forget? No. But I was so busy that I simply didn’t get to it.
Does modern technology solve this problem? It helps.
Maintenance Mode: Polite Confrontation
What technology can do is put something in front of you via an obvious tool or device you frequently use. A list on your work laptop is, in theory, easily accessible. A to-do app on your phone is almost always with you, and it can push a variety of notifications to your eyes and ears.
I’ve recently been working on my own habits with a concept I describe as polite confrontation.
The basic idea is this: no matter how motivated you are, how type-A you might be, you need something to politely tell you things like this:
You said you would do X, are you actually going to do X?
You’re stalling on X, why?
Let’s make a plan for you to do X
We tend to view these sorts of inquiries - perhaps from a boss or a spouse - as something that they’re really not: nags. In a professional setting, you might otherwise call it micromanaging. Merriam Webster defines the verb form of nag as:
Nag [Verb]
To irritate by constant scolding or urging
To be a persistent source of annoying or distraction
It all sounds kind of annoying, doesn’t it? You can easily imagine someone in your ear frequently reminding you that you didn’t do something right or fast enough. Many of us default to hating that type of interaction.
But let me pick out two key words from the definition: constant, and persistent.
Maintenance implies deliberate consistency applied on a recurring basis. A constant reminder might simply be something that helps ensure things truly do happen.
Persistence is key in so many of life’s adventures. If you’re trying to convince someone of something, you probably need to be persistent. You can tell a great story, sure, but even the act of regularly applying effort to the process helps either actually convince, or quickly disqualify and move on.
Suppose, instead, it’s something truly mundane. You have lots of unread emails from friends. They’re in Gmail, or if you truly hate your personal inbox, Yahoo. Do you let them sit for weeks? Or do you apply a regular schedule to reading them and persist that action over the long-term (pick your time-frame)
Irrespective of the circumstance, systems for care and nurture that persist ideally stir up real habits. But forming those habits requires time and work.
And rather than try to do it alone, you can piggyback on other people’s nudges to help you. These nudges aren’t teasing or nagging when viewed through the lens that they’re care and nurture. Someone else says - metaphorically or even directly - “I enjoy hearing that you are doing X regularly, keep doing it.” Here are a few examples from my life:
Did you update the deal source in HubSpot?
Did you call the garage guy yet?
We need to order groceries
Please try those pants on
Some of you who know me in non-Meta Quest life are laughing right now because you know how some of those nudges arrive at my doorstep. But, we don’t all have people regularly nudging us to do things in all parts of our lives.
Instead, technology helps when you might otherwise hope to tackle habit formation alone. This is where Todoist works for me. Have a look:
Here’s why I like it, so far:
Very clean interface. A simple interface is sometimes too simple. Todoist is simple, functional, and in stark contrast to something like ClickUp that shows me lots of interface elements that aren’t my actual to-dos.
Full cross-device integration. I use the Mac App, the iOS app, and the web interface. Having access to all three would seem to be table-stakes for most apps, but surprisingly, many exhibit functional or visual inconsistencies across their various delivery platforms or lack one altogether.
Simple to-do set-up: As a start, write a task name. That’s it. I use due dates to keep myself honest too. There are more advanced features, some of which I've used, but I’m not doing a deep dive right now.
Nudges: The app sends push notifications and reminder emails. The reminder email is great as it highlights what I need to do - once per day. It is. So far, this combination works effectively as it’s not overwhelming but also not letting me off the hook.
Is the process working so? Yes, so far.
Often, accomplishing the simplest things elicits the most satisfaction. And, many of these to-dos are morphing into habits. I don’t have to force myself to do them, and instead, feel accomplished when I get them done.
One good example is, well, hair care. These days, in my 40s, I’m trying to keep the hair I have rather than lose it to the gods of bald heads, comb-overs, and other lost-hair styles.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear writes that the four laws of behavior change (i.e. habit formation) are:
Make it obvious
Make it attractive
Make it easy
Make is satisfying
As you might imagine, there are four laws of bad habits that run in the opposite direction of those bullets.
In this new routine of maintaining my top-head lion’s mane, I’ve captured all four good habit reinforcements with one product. It’s an off-the-shelf oil mixture with caffeine that purports to save existing hair strands by mimicking Minoxidil, one of the two popular hair-loss prevention drugs.
So, covering bullets (1)(2) - the oil arrives in an attractive little green bottle and lives directly on my bathroom counter. And it’s not hard to use. I toss a few drops in various spots on top of my head - notably towards the back where infamous bald spots appear - and make sure it hits my scalp.
The oil is also a satisfying product. It smells good. A small amount of tingling occurs on my scalp every time those precious drops sink in. Thus far, it actually seems to be working as well. I don’t think I’m losing hair quite like I was before, based on some very anecdotal measuring.
What’s key to all of this is the maintenance. There’s a level of care and nurture that is increasingly habitual and therapeutic. Politely reminding myself to do this every day helps pay real and diverse dividends
Circling back to the broader point, I’m not trying to internalize everything first and hope for the best. I’m relying on a system that helps me drop into maintenance mode regularly, track my progress, and develop habit that help me look and feel better.
After all, you wouldn’t buy from a slob, right?