This will include a practical walk through on:
For graduate school I have performed extensive research on the topic of task switching costs. While studying about task switching, I came across the topic of willpower limits and how they related to performance. Essentially, the study of willpower limits says that individuals have a limited amount of decision making power each day.
If that sounds weird to you, don't worry, I had a hard time with the concept right away too. So, let's go through a typical day for a developer. What are some decisions that you make each day?
Notice how none of those items are related to development at all. And in fact, those were all common decision items that you have to make each morning before you even get into work. If you actually count the number of decisions that you have to make each day, you'd discover the number is probably in the hundreds or even thousands. If you include subconscious decisions such as staying in your lane while driving, the number is most likely in the millions every day!
Hopefully, I've helped you see all of the decisions that we make daily. So why do willpower limits matter when it comes to making decisions? Mainly because without willpower the quality of our decisions will suffer dramatically.
Imagine yourself without willpower for a second. With no willpower, you:
So, with all of that in mind, is there really a limit to the amount of willpower you have each day? I recently went through the book, The Willpower Instinct, written by Dr. Kelly McGonigal (no relation to Professor McGonagall that I'm aware of). In the book Kelly presents research and countless case studies that clearly show that we do indeed have a limit to our daily willpower.
With all of this in mind, the concept of saving up our willpower reserves seems like a pretty important concept. Let's go back to the water bottle analogy. If you were in a desert and had a limited supply of water, what would you do? I think the obvious answer is that you would only use the water when it was needed.
What's a practical way of doing this? Let's walk through a simple but practical example.
If you watch my show on CronDose you may have noticed something… You get a gold star if you noticed that for the last 13 weeks (14 weeks if you include this week) I've worn the same shirt. Please note, it's not the same exact shirt. When I decided to experiment with the one outfit concept I purchased eight identical shirts.
Does wearing the same outfit each day really help improve my performance? I can't scientifically say one way or the other. Most likely it has a negligible effect. However, it has a much more powerful benefit than simply removing my morning outfit decision. Each day when I put this shirt on it reminds me that I have a limit to my willpower and that I need to use it wisely. And having that mindset does make a difference.
As a side note, the idea of wearing the same outfit is not an original idea. Steve Jobs, President Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg all have a similar ritual and that's where I got the idea from. If some of the most successful individuals in the world make it a priority to remove any and all unnecessary decisions, I thought it would be a good idea to try out.