How to improve your working habits - by Nicola Morgan

Note 1: No shed necessary. That's a promise!

Note 2: Those who came to the SAS Conference in Peterborough this year know all about this and know that it's called Stimulus Generalisation

Working well shouldn’t be difficult. Make a list of things to do; tell yourself that you will do a, b and c before lunch; apply posterior to chair; do a, b and c. But most of us know what actually happens: in the absence of a boss to enforce when and where we produce a piece of work, bad habits come into play and we (I) play Spider Solitaire, go on Twitter, answer social emails, pay bills, make more coffee, dust behind the fridge…

That was me, until May 2011. Years of self-employment and working from home had created appallingly chaotic working habits. I got the work done – never missed a deadline yet – but it felt unhappily ill-disciplined, ineffective, pathetic. Social, domestic and work tasks were mixed up; the hours spent at my desk were too long and ineffective; real writing seemed to come last, if at all. Work-life not so much balance as collapsed in a heap of tangled intentions.

In May that changed. Now, if I say “shed”, you’ll roll your eyes and want to switch off, but I promise this is not about getting a writing shed. It’s about stimulus generalisation, as I now realise, thanks to my clinical psychologist friend who nodded wisely when I told her how my working habits changed instantly, the day I got a shed. Stimulus generalisation is something psychologists harness when dealing with addictions and negative habits, she said. Hmmm, sounds like me. Does it sound like you?

I’ll briefly explain the relevant aspects of stimulus generalisation but then, more importantly, unpick the elements of what I accidentally did, in order to make suggestions that anyone can use to alter poor working habits, including internet addiction. (Disclosure: I’m not a trained psychologist, though some of my work involves a degree of understanding of how our brains work; I’m just making sense of what happened to me and what might help others.)

Stimulus generalisation is akin to a Pavlovian response, although reflexes are not necessarily involved. Behaviour (leading to habits) is conditioned subconsciously by stimuli around us. So, if you tend to have a glass of wine while cooking the evening meal, cooking the evening meal becomes part of the set of triggers to have a glass of wine. Aspects of cooking the evening meal are the general stimuli around you: the clock saying 7pm, the light falling, the sound of a partner coming home, your own body clock, the smells in the kitchen, all the cues to anticipation of a relaxing evening. Together, these stimuli subconsciously reinforce a habit; and breaking the habit will be very hard if you don’t break the stimuli. In theory, you could just say, “I won’t have a glass of wine,” but the stimuli play heavily on your desires and behaviours and you are pretty likely to have that glass of wine. Thus speaks the voice of experience.

So, let’s unpick what happened with my shed. Effectively, I had suddenly changed almost all the stimuli around me, in one go. This made my existing desire to change working habits much easier; it enabled an immediate fresh slate, allowing new stimuli to create new habits. In the same way, an addict is encouraged, as part of therapy, to remove all physical aspects of the situations in which previously he took the addictive substance. Move house; throw away posters, furniture, possessions; avoid the friends who accompanied the addictive behaviour; take up new activities; change as much about your life and environs as possible. Every repeated stimulus has a hold on the person, each one like a strand within a rope.

Let’s move away from the specific shed example and generalise the conditions which may make new behaviours possible, conditions which any of us could replicate if we wanted to break undesired working habits.

1. Desire to change. We need to know what we want to change, and to want it strongly enough that we will make effort and think positively about the outcome. Part of this may involve feeling sufficiently negative about the current situation.

2. Planning ahead. Making detailed advance decisions about the changes, and setting a date on which the changes will start, help prime the mind to activate those changes.

3. Investment. It makes sense that if we have invested time, money and/or effort in the changes, this will help motivation.

4. Rising anticipation. If we have to wait eagerly for the start date, this is likely to help.

5. Support from others. Support from partner, family or friends, and their own investment in your success, are likely to have a positive effect.

6. Out with the old and in with the new. The tendency of the brain towards stimulus generalisation means that the more physical surroundings you can change, the better. You may not be able to afford a whole new room, or to replace all the furniture in it, but the more you can alter the physical surroundings, the better.

7. The use of all the senses. Our brains learn best when several senses are used. 

8. Blitzing it. I suspect that doing it all at once makes a greater impact.

Based on those principles, there follow some specific suggestions to help change working habits. Some are small and may seem trivial but your brain will notice more than you think. Some of the larger things won’t be practical for everyone and I’m not suggesting anyone does them all: pick a few that suit your situation; plan when to instigate the new regime; then do them all at once. Remember: once you have selected your new stimuli, make sure you apply them to your working hours, not your social or domestic hours. The point is to use a specific setting to teach your brain that it is supposed to be working, not doing social or domestic tasks. Or playing Spider Solitaire… The new environment will perform the role of a boss.

Suggestions:

o Move your work-space to a different room.

o Rearrange the furniture in your work-space, including the position of your desk and your view.

o Redecorate with new colours, changing as much as possible.

o Choose new furniture, particularly chair and desk and whatever is in your range of sight while working.

o Create a time-table for arriving and leaving work; leave your office door open if just taking a break, but close it (lock it?) when your working day ends. Make sure you take everything you will need during the evening, just as if you worked away from home; use a briefcase?!

o Have a separate in-tray for domestic/social tasks, and only deal with them outside working hours.

o Even something small can help, such as using a specific mug during working hours, or a particular pen or notebook for “real” writing.

o Anything separate for “work” use will help: stationery, clothes, shelves, diary, etc. Make use of the visual element: eg if you use blue files for work docs, have only the blue files in front of you during work hours or in your work space.

o Use all the senses. The suggestions above are all about what you can see but consider the following: you might play music when working (or when not working); you might harness the sense of smell by lighting a scented candle when doing writing work, or enjoy the smell and taste of real coffee; and yes, you have my permission to eat chocolate to herald the start of a writing session… Anything that you can commit to doing every time you start what is supposed to be a proper working (or writing) session.

The more we can change, the more coherently we plan the changes and the more simultaneously we effect them all, the easier it is for our brain to break old habits and allow new behaviours.

But you’ve got to want to, as much as I wanted that shed, and you’ve got to keep wanting it. Old habits not only die hard, they can return. Be vigilant!

By the way, a new edition of my book, BLAME MY BRAIN - The Teenage Brain Revealed, is available from May, also with an ebook version.

Yes, we are all individuals - Nicola Morgan

This week is Dyslexia Awareness Week. Dyslexia and I have some history. Several bits.

When I was an English teacher, I found myself in a school with an exceptionally high proportion of pupils with various reasons for finding reading and writing difficult. In a sense they were all dyslexic, though only some of them had Dyslexia. Later, I did an RSA Diploma in teaching children and adults with "specific learning difficulties" (SpLD), which was the then phrase for Dyslexia in all its forms. I then spent the next 16 years teaching such children and adults.

While doing that Diploma, I discovered that I am, on many assessment criteria, dyslexic. Quite patently, I'm not dyslexic, as my spelling, reading, writing, comprehension etc are far from problematic. However, I measure as dyslexic (and somewhat dyspraxic) because: I am inexorably hopeless at left/right tasks; I am strongly crossed-lateral (right-handed but left-eyed); I cannot remember or perform sequences of various sorts; absolutely cannot recite my times tables beyond 5x; my coordination is poor - I am very bad coming down stairs, my typing is riddled with reversals, I cannot learn the simplest dance routines, and my attempts to learn musical instruments have been dismally hampered by my inability to become automatic and coordinated. I also recognise that my hilarious (to others) inability to talk while doing anything with my hands, such as make a cup of coffee, is a function of how my brain works (or doesn't work).

Despite being a so-called SpLD specialist, I failed to realise that my younger daughter had a specific difficulty until she took herself to the learning support teacher in her final year of school. (The guilt!) She turned out to have a "dyslexic-type" deficit, though she has different manifestations from me - for a start she is a brilliant musician and very well-coordinated. Her problem was essentially an information processing one, which had few outward symptoms, and which she disguised brilliantly and now has strategies for. She had been going around thinking she was "thick", despite the fact that I told her over and over again that she very obviously wasn't, pointing out that there were clever things she could do far better than other people.

During my training, one of the things I started to investigate was the human brain, the ways in which our brains are the same and the ways in which they are different, how weaknesses are often mirrored by strengths. I ended up writing two books on the brain, both for young people and families. The better known one is Blame My Brain - the Amazing Teenage Brain Revealed. But it's the other one that's relevant here: Know Your Brain. It seeks to show young people that there are many types of intelligence, that the ones most valued at school (literacy and numeracy) are not necessarily the best and are not necessarily the ones that determine your later success.

And that is what informs my thinking on this subject and why, although I'm proud to be one of Sir Jackie Stewart's Ambassadors for Dyslexia Scotland, I want people to understand that Dyslexia is only one set of conditions. There are many other people struggling to succeed on specific tasks and being laughed at or disrespected for their inability to do whatever it is.

Dyslexia is a useful word. Even if you don't know the definition, you kind of know sufficiently what it denotes. Going through school with undiagnosed or unmediated dyslexia is horrendous - and I've had many pupils whose self-esteem I've somehow had to try to rebuild. It's a scandal that there's no compulsory part of the teacher training curriculum in Scotland (I don't know about England and Wales) to make sure new teachers know how to identify and deal with the pupils they will inevitably come across.

There isn't a word for the things I (and many others) can't do, and the fact that on assessment criteria I'm dyslexic is irrelevant because I can't go around saying I am, as it would be ridiculous and unfair to those genuinely afflicted. What I have just feels like clumsiness; it feels like a brain failure; it sometimes makes me feel thick.

It also makes me fascinated by the human brain. One thing I believe is that it can't be brilliant at everything. The maths genius will lack something, perhaps artistic talent or leadership qualities; or the musical prodigy will lack something else, perhaps sporting skill or the ability to understand people and work well in a team; the lateral thinker may lack logic and the logician be too rigid to be creative. Even an apparent polymath will have some area of weakness. Show me someone who is genuinely brilliant at every one of the many intelligences.

Many dyslexic people have great creative or other skills - but many don't, and we should not assume that one thing produces the other. The differences between human brains are enormous and to be marvelled at, investigated and, most of all, celebrated. I wrote Know Your Brain because I wanted children and young people to understand their own strengths and to value them equally, artistic, creative, logical, literary, musical, spatial, courageous, whatever. I wanted children (and adults) to value different areas of cleverness properly and not set highest store by coming top in school tests and "academic" exams.

So, I can't walk down stairs smoothly, or make you coffee while talking; I am likely to give you the wrong directions (or, in fact, no directions) for getting to my house; I can't tell you a story in the right order; and you really wouldn't like to listen to me play the oboe. But I can write passably well and I can understand something about people's brains.

I'll cope with that.

I want all dyslexic people to value their own talents in Dyslexia Awareness Week. Actually, I want everyone to understand what their brains find difficult and what they find easier. Please share!

Important info: If your child's teacher would like a free, online, simple assessment for dyslexia, please send them towards Dyslexia Scotland's fabulous Addressing Dyslexia Toolkit. Available for all teachers everywhere, not just Scotland! FREEEEEEEEE!