↗️ Creative Mental Accounting

Have you set yourself exciting daily goals before, only to trash the whole idea when you fail for the first time and miss day? You are not alone.

I have spoken to many people who experience this ’streak devastation’.

Use cases I heard:

– Reading every day 30 min
– Trying to keep your cool in meetings
– Getting to know one new person in the office per week more closely
– Doing sports every day; go to the gym
– Making a certain amount of income in my shop every day.

It’s a common behavior…while we maintain a streak, it feels extremely motivating (‘200 days without a snickers bar, yay!’).

A broken streak then becomes equally intensely demotivating (‘I ate one snickers bar. Ah, WHATEVER! Let’s stop this nonsense streak stuff. I eat what I want!‘).

Streaks tend to lead to a binary, extreme approach with success and backlash periods…similar to being on a successful diet to lose weight, only to yo-yo back later on.

I came across an alternative mental model hat tries to avoid the extremes of streaks: Creative Mental Accounting!

You basically treat each day like its very own account.

You forget how you performed yesterday.

Failure OR Success before is actually irrelevant.

If you succeed today, congratulate yourself. You earn something.

If you fail today, you get another fresh chance tomorrow!

Here’s a Pro Tip:

You can go crazier by playing with the units of time. Day is just one type of unit.

Why not try half-days?

If your goal is to eat healthily and you ate badly in the morning, does that mean that the whole day is lost? No, if your mental accounting works in half-day units. You get a fresh chance to be healthy and clean from 12pm to midnight.

Why not try hours?

If your goal is to be more mindful and emotionally controlled throughout the day in every single meeting you have, does that mean you failed when you did badly in one meeting in the afternoon? No, if your mental accounting works in hour units. You get a fresh chance to be mindful and controlled with every starting hour. A good starting goal could be to collect more positive than negative hours on a day.

You see, there are so many ways to play with it!

I hope I gave you something to think and ponder about!

What creative mental accounting can you come up with, Maik, to help you maintain positive, daily habits?

Maik

John Maxwell:

“You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily” (Maik: or hourly, half-daily, weekly :))