To date, I've tried many ways of programming my life: Chaining daily habits, tracking weekly goals, challenging myself publicly for 100 days, 30 weeks, or even a year. So, I can call myself fairly experienced in setting goals. However, there was one thing that I'd never tried so far: setting rules to live by.
What do I mean by a rule?
A rule (or a rule to live by) is a decision your current self makes, on behalf of all your future selves. A rule is a short but firm manifestation of self discipline that will become a part of your identity.
It's easier to show than tell what I mean by rules, so let me show you one:
#1 Workdays start with reading.
This is the first rule I set a couple of months ago when I decided to finally act on my ever-existed craving to be a literate and cultured man. I've always wanted to be a man of high-culture and knowledge. I've always looked upon people who have read many books and who read regularly. I tried to make reading a habit but at the end I found a solution: setting a rule.
Let's break how this rule is crafted:
| Workdays
By scoping the rule to the workdays, I eliminate a lot of things that may go wrong for a usual goal. I might be on vacation in a different continent, I might be traveling to a funeral, I might be too sick or too depressed to read. Life is full of fluctuations and surprises and you cannot rely on your future self to play by the rule in any circumstances.
But if it's a good day to work, it's most probably a good day to read too.
| start with
This is how this rule enforces an action. By defining a trigger point to the action, I can make sure the act of reading is not postponed until it's forgotten for good. So that's why "I read every workday" is not as good of a rule as "Workdays start with reading".
The way I crafted the rule also makes use of what's called "habit stacking" in the behavioral psychology. You will keep starting to work throughout almost all your lifetime and the reading will be piggy-backing this repeated action to ensure it's persistence.
| reading.
Note that the rule does not mention any book or any genre or it does not enforces any minimum amount of reading. Goals like: "I will read 30 mins everyday" or "I will read 10 pages at non-fiction before going to sleep" are too constraining. They might work better than a rule in the short term but they are doomed to fail when the scope is a lifetime.
The idea of deciding something for a lifetime could be scary for sure, but if you empathize enough with your future selves you would come up with forgiving rules.
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The second rule I set for myself is:
#2 I lift weights.
This would immediately look different than my first rule: It does not specify a trigger point. It's because I wanted to be even more forgiving with this particular rule.
Lifting weights is hard, it's too hard that a future Safa might come up with excuses to slip away from it. That's why this rule needed to be so generic. I might change how many times in a week I exercise weightlifting or how hard I go with my body but one thing remains: I lift weights.
So, one could easily come up with this question: if you stopped lifting for a month is this rule still intact or have you violated it?
The answer is: it depends. If I'm prescribed by a doctor that I can't do any physical exercise other than walking for some period of time and I'm planning to introduce weightlifting right after it's a no. I wouldn't be violating it. If I'm taking care of a loved one in an hospital (Allah forbid) and can't leave the hospital, again it's not a violation. If I say: "I'm tired of lifting, it's not worth the effort, it's taking too much time and creating not much value." and stop weightlifting then yes, this is a violation and I should remove¹ this from the play book.
So, if it's not clear until now, rules are less about micro-managing your behavioral patterns and more about self-definition and identity.
If somebody asks me "do you lift weights?", the answer should be "yes!" and not "yeah, I guess, sometimes", "I used to...", or "oh, that's complicated".
***
Now another rule:
#3 No food after 9pm.
I want to tell you two more important thing about rules. The first one: they should come after long observational or experimental processes. One should not wake up one day and decide to set a rule that will affect their whole life.
For example, this rule is here to protect me against my repeated late-night food binges. They all start with little and seemingly-innocent snacking a fruit and end up in me eating a bowl of olives with a whole bread and two cans of soda.
These late-night eatings lived with me since my childhood and noticed professionally by a dietitian as one of the bigger contributors of my obesity. Since I well recognized how this behavior happens and how it repeatedly bring regret I could set a rule to prevent it and could fine-tune the specific hour (9pm) I can draw the line.
Make it 7pm and I can't eat dinner on most days of the week. Make it 10pm I'll binge-eat for that entire hour.
The second thing I should mention about this rule is that I sometimes cheat.
Wait, what? What's the point of setting a rule if you can still cheat?
Hold, on. Let's not jump to conclusions that fast.
Let's say after a long and tiring day I arrived to home around 7.30pm only to notice there's no dinner ready. After deciding on a meal and ordering the food doesn't arrive timely to my horror. It's 8.50pm, I haven't eaten since lunch and food finally arrives.
What should I do other than to eat it²?
The fact that I identify as not-a-night-eater or a no-food-after-9pm-guy does not mean I should starve myself. If I be too strict in obeying these man-made rules, I would give up on setting rules at one point or at best I would get rid of that rule soon.
Again, the rules are a way of identifying and manifesting yourself. Your friends won't invite you to a pizza night because they know you can't eat after 9pm. Your wife won't offer you some ice cream if she's intending to have one. Your room-mate won't tempt you into buying çiğköfte wraps.
And you won't easily make your way into midnight binge eating.
***
That's how I set rules to live by, and I hope my experience helps you in crafting your own.
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¹ Yes, even though I've never done it yet, rules can be deactivated as a last resort. Although it's upsetting to do that, we should admit life can change drastically and make rules infeasible. One thing though: rules never get lost. The number in front of a rule is a unique identifier and all deactivated rules would still live in the archive part of the playbook.
² I had to eat after 9pm a few times in the past couple of months and every time I had enough excuses to justify my eating. Nevertheless, I tried to stop eating as soon as possible since I know that I wouldn't be eating at that time of the day. This shows that the rules are still in effect even though they are actively being violated.