Waleed's Blog

My family bought a treadmill several years ago. Like many families, we enthusiastically used it for a few weeks before the novelty ran out. It slowly faded out of our lives; I can’t remember the last time someone worked up a sweat on it. But, we still use the treadmill. Now, it’s a mainstay in a part of my parent’s room, eternally folded up with an ever-changing pile of clothes stacked on top. If this treadmill wasn’t there, if we actively used it or if was stored away in a distant corner of the garage, where would those clothes go? Surely they wouldn’t be haphazardly thrown on the floor at the same square foot where the treadmill now stands. Instead, the clothes would likely either occupy their rightful spot in a closet or be folded over another fixture in our house.

The-clothes-on-the-treadmill phenomenon illustrates a peculiar principle: your possessions, especially furniture, can creep into your life in unexpected ways. An unused treadmill in a house will rarely stay that way. If you aren’t running on it, it is almost inevitable that you’ll pile something on top of it. The same thing happens if you put a side table next to your bed. Your intention could have been to use it as a place to hold your cellphone, a water bottle, and maybe a lamp. But, almost invariably, it’ll become a black box of things piled on top. Watches, medicine bottles, headphones, old snack wrappers; the possibilities are endless. The convenience invites usage. If the treadmill or the side table were removed, it’s likely that the clothes and miscellaneous objects would find different places. More intentional placement and increased organization would likely ensue.

Mastering this principle comes down to conscious usage of the things we own. I think putting more intention behind interactions with our possession will help us lead more organized and thoughtful lives. Here are three action-items that helped me.

Take monthly stock of your surroundings.

What’s your set-up looking like? Is something sitting in a corner unused or taking up a large amount of otherwise valuable real estate? Doing this with some frequency can ensure that you control your environment and your environment doesn’t control you. It’s scary how quickly a countertop can turn into a monstrous stack of papers. The key is to have a set time, maybe 30 minutes a month, to step back and take a look around.

Reposition your furniture.

My older brother comes back and forth every few weeks between his apartment in a different city and my parent’s home. Every time he comes, it seems like he has a new idea of how he wants his room and other places in our house to be configured. He’ll push his bed up to a different wall and his desk to another while displacing some drawers to the garage. I dread helping him move all of these heavy things but, to be honest, the results speak for themselves. Moving furniture around has resulted in some configurations that make the room feel significantly larger than it actually is. If you try this, you’re likely to get a room that, at the very least, has a nice fresh feel to it.

Eat on the floor, especially with friends.

This one’s oddly specific and, depending on your background, will come across as either ordinary or quite whacky. Growing up in an immigrant South Asian culture, sitting on a piece of large cloth while eating at a dinner-party was quite normal. It was an unwritten rule at every get-together; dinner time would arrive and, without words exchanged, the host would pull out a large cloth for the younger people to sit and eat on. I recently revisited this practice, but not out of cultural nostalgia. When I had friends over at my smaller Bay Area apartment, I pulled out a large cloth since I don’t have a proper dinner table. Unexpectedly, I found the social dinner experience to be much more pleasurable. The absence of a table made the space between us shrink. The dynamic was more intimate and relaxed; sitting criss-cross likewise added a fresh sense of novelty.

This isn’t to say that I’m going to constantly reposition my furniture or always eat on the floor. Instead, this slightly, yet significantly, altered my relationship with otherwise unobtrusive personal possessions. I’m more aware of the role a table can play in creating a vibe at dinner or how pushing a bed against the wall can make my room look incredibly vast. Conscious interactions with our larger possessions can change our relationships with our personal spaces.

I recently hooked up another monitor to my laptop at my home workspace and it’s added a lot of unexpected value to my day. It’s a simple addition really, most corporate offices provide their employees with two monitors. I’ve experienced the typical benefits an additional monitor promises to bring: my research experience while working has become smoother and my posture a little bit better.

But this monitor has affected my behavior in other ways as well. I’ve started reading more. The monitor makes it so much more enjoyable to read an ebook or a long article that I’ve found myself automatically pulling them up when I have free time, time I usually would have spent scrolling through social media. I also find myself writing notes while I’m reading, something I wouldn’t do that often beforehand. The extra monitor makes it easy to have both a note taking app and a book open at the same time without having to reduce text size. These extra notes in turn have made my own writing become much easier. I’ve inadvertently begun to create a repository of compelling anecdotes and data points that I can seamlessly implement to illustrate a point I’m trying to make.

How did one monitor make me read, retain, and write more?

The ripple effect of my extra monitor reminds me of a principle Atul Gawande discusses in his book, The Checklist Manifesto. He describes something he calls a behavior change vehicle. This is something that, when introduced into an environment, doesn’t seem like it should yield significant change. But, the effects of this vehicle ripple out, affecting behavior in a variety of unexpected ways. Gawande provides an excellent example of one of these in action: Safeguard Soap in Karachi, Pakistan.

Karachi is one of the world’s most populous and dense cities, with over 16 million inhabitants. The city suffers from inadequate public health infrastructure; over tens of thousands of children die from diarrhea and other infections every year in the city. One of the leading causes of these diseases is unsanitary drinking and bathing water. But, changing the public health infrastructure of a city is a decades-long undertaking.

Presented with this pressing problem, public health officials tried an unintuitive approach. They randomly chose 25 neighborhoods and assigned them “hand washing promotion.” An official would distribute Safeguard brand soap to these houses and conduct weekly check-ins for a year. At these check-ins, the officials demonstrated soap best practices while recording data regarding disease rates.

The results were astounding. Children under 5 had a 50% lower incidence of pneumonia and children under 15 had had a 53% lower incidence of diarrhea. What’s really fascinating is that almost all of these households already had soap and practiced hand washing (many would already walk quite a distance to wash their hands after using the restroom, due to the cultural importance of cleanliness). The soap was not the reason this experiment was so successful — it was the way the soap was introduced into the environment. First, the health officials didn’t come as scolders; they came bearing a gift and positive encouragement. Second, the soap, although not particularly more sanitary than other soaps, was one that was considered a high quality brand. And third, the officials encouraged people to expand the instances when they used soap to more than just after the bathroom: when cooking, changing infant diapers, or washing clothes.

Gifting a different version of something people already had and encouraging use of it in novel ways was enough to tremendously change the behavior of the inhabitants of these neighborhoods. My extra monitor, to a much lesser degree, accomplished something similar. I didn’t buy a new laptop or carve out more reading and research time in my day. Instead, the monitor’s simple addition naturally resulted in these changes. When watching a YouTube video, I find it significantly easier to open the notes app and jot down a quote or statistic that resonates with me. When looking for something to do to kill time, opening the Books app and reading on my larger screen is much more enjoyable and so I find myself doing it with more frequency. The monitor is a different version of something I already have that encourages use in novel ways.

I think it’s a worthwhile exercise for all of us to identify places in our life where we can implement behavior change vehicles. All it takes is identifying something you use a lot in daily life, pinpoint what you mostly use that thing for, and ask if that thing is best suited for that purpose. Would a small tweak or simple add-on greatly enhance your experience and change the way you behave?

This might seem unintuitive. We convince ourselves that we do or don’t do certain things because we’ve made that decision. I don’t read because I don’t have time, because I don’t want to, because there’s nothing worth reading. We convince ourselves that we are in control. But, that’s simply not true. A large part of our behavior is a function of our environment. This happens at a simple level like snacking: a study at Google showed that people ate less snacks when snacks were placed a little farther out of proximity. This also takes place on a more profound level, like morality: another study showed that people made more severe moral judgements when asked to make a judgement while exposed to a fart smell as compared to people exposed to no smell.

This is unsettling. I do certain things and make particular judgements because I’ve rationally concluded that that’s what should be done. The thought that something as small as an extra monitor stands in the way of me reading or an unpleasant smell makes me a harsher person robs me of a sense of control. But, I think this is also liberating. Our environments are usually changeable. We can try removing unhealthy snacks from our house or have nicer smelling friends (working on it). Intentional study and change of our environments can change the way we act.

Our surroundings obviously aren’t the ultimate explanation of our actions. Willpower and introspection are just as important. But, even if small changes in our surroundings can yield a 20% change, I think that’s a thing to be optimistic about and worth spending time on. You’ll get some unexpected results.

Interested?

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I’ve been thinking about behavior change a lot recently. What is it that allows people to change a habit, something they’ve been doing for years, over a relatively short amount of time? There are hundreds of YouTube videos, self-help books, and academic studies that go into the process of behavior change, sometimes reporting conflicting data. I’ve tried to implement diet changes and exercise routines over the years with varying degrees of success (read: unsuccessfully). Others have experienced the same thing. However, every year millions of people around the world, myself included, are able to undertake a massive change in behavior and sustain it for an entire month. The change is the Islamic practice of fasting during the month of Ramadan, abstaining from food and water for 16 hours a day. How do people without any coaching or self-help books accomplish this feat?

Curious, I asked some friends about their fasting experience. Primarily I wondered if, while they’re fasting, did they come close to prematurely breaking their fast? When I try to implement a new habit, I’m usually met with a lot of friction. Even successful days consist of a lot of internal negotiating and conscious struggling to hold on. Surely, fasting should be met with the same friction? I mean, it’s easy for Muslims to think of it as not particularly impressive, but anyone on the outside would be amazed. Not consuming food or water for 16 hours is closer to the more difficult end of intermittent fasting, something many people struggle to do (and we don’t even drink water!).

But, incredibly, I found that virtually none my friends said that they came close to prematurely breaking their fast. Not only that, but none of them even seriously entertained that idea, despite feeling quite hungry and thirsty throughout the day. It was out of the question.

Maybe Muslims are habit experts? However, when I asked these same people about times when they tried to add other habits into their lives, like exercising or studying more, all of them said they found it incredibly difficult to implement change. But, these other changes seem, on their face, to be much easier endeavors than abstaining from food or water for 16 hours a day. Yet, one was done yearly without coming close to failure and the other could barely get off the ground.

I think the success of fasting is a great example of the way mindset influences behavior. More than half of the battle in convincing ourselves to do something is within our head. This is clear when we face a deadline: it can be on your calendar for weeks but you make no headway. The project comes in your mind here and there but you easily push it away. However, that changes drastically when the deadline is imminent. Then, you might spend all day working on it, ignoring everything else. Distractions that swayed you easily just the day before have no effect on you now. This gets more and more true as the deadline comes nearer and nearer. What happens in our minds that activates this level of dedication?

Not working on the project becomes non-negotiable. The severity of the consequences of not doing the action trumps all other desires.  If one of your friends came to you and tried to convince you to not complete the assignment – that it wouldn’t be a big deal if you got fired from your job or failed the class – you wouldn’t take them seriously. Your mind has become convinced you must complete the assignment.

The fasting experience of Muslims is somewhat similar. The prospect of continuing fasting becomes non-negotiable; almost nothing (barring incredibly extreme circumstances) would push any of my friends to prematurely break their fast. But, the comparison between fasting and deadlines doesn’t hold up perfectly. None of my friends were fearing any particular consequences. Instead, it was non-negotiable because of how strongly they believed in being Muslim (one might argue that they were motivated by a fear of Hell, but I think religious attitudes are more complex than that, maybe something worth exploring later). Identifying in a certain way can serve as a powerful motivating force.

I’ve come across this same frame of mind when talking to avid runners. They effortlessly get up to run several miles every morning, something that would take enormous willpower from me. If you asked them why they run, what prevents them from deciding to forgo it for a day, they would express a feeling that running is non-negotiable, it’s automatic. It would take something extreme, like weather or sickness, to stop them from getting their daily miles in. It’s not a fear of a consequence that’s driving them in that moment, it’s an internal belief that they have to run, something linked to their identity.

How can we get to a point where positive habits become non-negotiable for us? I think part of the answer lies in the identities and beliefs we hold: Muslim, Christian, writer, runner. Another, I think, is repetitions of certain behaviors: fasting, praying, blogging, exercising. But, these things are entwined. The more firmly you conceive of yourself as a religious person or a writer, the easier it’ll be to attend religious services and write blog posts. And the more times you attend religious services and write blog posts, the more you’ll feel like a religious person or a writer.

There doesn’t seem to be an exact path to cementing positive behavior changes. And, I don’t want to discount that we Muslims believe fasting is manageable, in part, because of the spiritual attributes of Ramadan. But, I do believe, and am amazed, at how the mindset we have – the way we conceive of and approach a task – can transform something fairly difficult, like fasting for 16 hours, spending several hours non-stop on a project, or running six miles every morning, into something that’s done automatically and with ease.

Interested?

I’d love to email you whenever I have a new post.