Commitment devices

Currently reading articles from the Heath Brothers and finding lots of good ideas in every column. This one is about commitment devices. E.g.,

A piggy bank is an example of a "commitment device" -- a way to lock yourself into an option you might otherwise dodge, like saving money, because you think it'll be good for you. One graduating Stanford business-school student used a commitment device to lock down his own career choice. As reported by Jim Collins in a Harvard Business Reviewarticle, the student wanted to start a company, but first he needed to pay down some debt. So he took a job at a big company, promising himself that he'd exit after five years and live his entrepreneurial dream. But he also worried about being seduced by the benefits-and-bagels comfort of corporate America. So he wrote a resignation letter, dated for five years into the future, and distributed signed copies to several people he trusted. His instructions: If I don't resign in five years, put this letter in the mail and do it for me.

In the gym, commitment devices are most often used by locking in the client to a certain set of behaviors or goals:

• If I don't lose 30 pounds by June 1, I will donate $1,000 to the Republican party (or whichever party you dislike the most).
• I will do 10 minutes of stretching every day for the next 30 days. If I fail, I will do something humiliating (like wear a funny outfit and do a workout in public).
• One of my favorites, from Dan John, I believe. The Aldo diet: I will lose/gain 20 pounds in six months. If I fail, I will eat a can of dog food. Highly motivating!

The Heath brothers suggest a couple of novel ideas that are based off of comparing shoulds and wants. The idea comes from a study on Netflix that showed that people put lots of highbrow movies in their queues (documentaries, foreign films) but they usually end up watching lowbrow movies (Die Hard, Transformers, Twilight) more often and moving them to the head of the queue.

Hence their idea for gyms:

For instance, exercising is a should, so what if your gym offered to receive your magazine subscriptions? That way, to read the new Vanity Fair (a want), you'd have to drop by the gym. ... It's a compelling idea: Might the future of business lie in encouraging shoulds rather than indulging wants? Could corporations help us bring out our better selves?

Also, here's an idea applicable to the business/administration side of things:

Norm Brodsky, an entrepreneur and a writer for Inc. magazine, runs a document-storage-and-retrieval business. He committed to taking four weeks of vacation a year, forcing himself to create systems that would allow his operation to run smoothly without him. He was successful, and since then, he has announced an even tougher commitment device: Now he'll take four months of vacation per year. This would appear to commit him to becoming French.

I can really see myself failing to plan for time off and making myself an indispensable part of the gym machinery, so I find very appealing the idea of forcing myself to design systems that run well in my absence.