Everyday Systems Podcast — Episode 103: Rule Burden, Decision Burden

In this episode: I'm now practicing 33 Everyday Systems. How is that possible? Is it even a good idea?

Back when I had one Everyday System, the No S Diet, I described it as “a system without too much system.” And still I think that’s an accurate description — of the No S Diet, and of any of the other Everyday Systems. Each of them, individually, is simple, elegant, economical.

But what happens when you get to practicing 33 of them? Because that’s how many systems I am up to according to the tally I made for the last state of the systems episode.

How can that not be, cumulatively, “too much system?”

I was a little worried, when I revealed that number, that you might construe it as a little obnoxious, that you might be like “I can’t even practice one system successfully and this guy is bragging about juggling 33?”

Or that maybe you’d be thinking: “Even if I could practice that many systems, would I even want to? It sounds like a constant strain. Like it would be really stressful. Like it wouldn’t be worth it. Like it would be worse than the problems it was solving. Like I would be living my life as a slave to all these rules. It sounds like self-totalitarianism, not self-improvement."

Or maybe: “It’s just not psychologically healthy. That guy clearly has obsessive compulsive disorder, or something like it, and he’s going around preaching it as if it’s a good thing. He’s like one of those pro anorexia influencers except for OCD.”

I was worried you might be thinking these things because I myself sometimes wonder about these things. There is a real cost to practicing all these systems. And maybe a perfectly healthy human being wouldn’t feel the need to practice so many of them (or any of them at all). And maybe there is a touch of vanity in podcasting about them, in wanting to be seen as espousing wisdom. I’m sure there is. But there’s not just cost, and it’s not just vanity. And in some respects it’s not as hard as you might think. That’s what I want to talk about today: Total Rule Burden. The cost of seeing systems everywhere, the costs of not doing so, and (hopefully) finding the right balance.

First off: my starting point. I am not, by nature, the kind of person who sees rules everywhere. The Everyday Systems are not a law written in my heart. I am by nature disorganized, a slob even. I didn’t start out this way. I learned this. They are compensations for natural deficiencies.

I recently dug up my elementary school report cards while cleaning up my basement. I present to you now a few choice comments from my sixth grade teacher (who, by the way, I am still, to this day, utterly terrified of) as evidence of the sort of person I started out as and still deeply am:

“Reinhard still needs guidance in organizing his books and assignments. His desk is evidence of definite need in organization… . His tendency toward nervousness compounds his problems in alertness and organization… he is still quite forgetful. Assignments are often overlooked. He must get his act together.”

“And I thought Germans were supposed to be organized” she would sometimes tell me, off the record. That really stung. It was bad enough being the bad guy in every movie (this was before the Russians took over that function) but, sheesh, to not even be a competent bad guy.

The No S Diet, my first Everyday System, did not come to me early in life. I was 28. That’s not old, but it’s old to grow up. It’s old to graduate emotionally from 6th grade. It’s old to become a quasi-functional adult. At least, it was back then. I think the goal posts have shifted a bit lately.

As I’ve mentioned before, I did not seriously think the No S Diet would work. I started it half out of despair because the other alternatives seemed so awful and half as a joke. Like it was a parody of a real diet plan. I was stunned that I was able to stick with it at all and that it resulted in me eating less and losing weight and enjoying food more. I was stunned, after I published it on the web that it seemed to work for other people. I was stunned when the same kind of approach seemed to work for other problems in my life, first physical ones, moving from diet to exercise (shovelglove and urban ranger), to substances (glass ceiling), to productivity (personal punch cards and the lifelog), to the life of the mind (the study habit), to soul systems (spider hunter, allocation mind). At some point soon I should probably cease being stunned, but it still amazes me — that’s how much of that disorganized 12-year old is still inside me.

After a while, after a few of these systems, it started to be like that old tootsie roll commercial: without even necessarily setting out to consciously, I’d see systems everywhere. Any activity I did regularly or recurring situation I was in, I’d automatically start to wonder: What are the patterns? Would a rule help here? Would a default help here? Would a metaphor help here? Would a joke help here? Are there better ways of responding to this situation that I should notice and encourage? Are there worse ways that I should avoid? How should I codify these responses?

Now the way Asmodeus, the evil, self-critical voice in my head interprets this is: the fact that I need these systems, these crutches, is evidence of my fundamental inadequacy as a human being. And what’s more, the more I continue to rely on these crutches, the more dependent I am on them, the weaker I become, the more I perpetuate this inadequacy. The crutch shows that I am a cripple. And it keeps me a cripple as long as I keep leaning on it. Each new system is a revelation of some other way in which I am a cripple, some other dimension, and, by practicing it, by leaning on it, it just makes me fundamentally weaker over time in yet another way. That’s what he says. And no doubt, he is at least a tiny bit right.

But fortunately, one of the systems I have come up with, one of these 33 crutches, as he would put it, is an early warning system for Asmodeus detection, and for sounding an alarm when I notice it’s him making these delightful observations and then putting them in their proper place. I have a name for him, a label, and a funny persona worked out, and an absurd picture on page 20 of the Monster Manual to call to mind. That’s pretty much the whole system. It’s like an intellectual tripwire. I can quickly recognize him and then disarm him with this goofy image.

So, now that we’ve recognized him, and heard him out, and acknowledged that there may be at least a little truth in his observations, what is a more positive, more useful, more fully true way to look at my hunger for rules? A better analogy than crutches? I have three actually. And they have to do with the kinds of systems Everyday Systems are. Because they aren’t just any old rules, but rules with certain characteristics. If you kept piling on rules without these characteristics the burden soon would become overwhelming. But Everyday Systems rules, I hope you’ll agree, are a little different.

An important starting point is where you position these rules in your life. And the metaphor I have for this positional aspect is traffic. I see Everyday systems as decision traffic control.

As I mentioned, after the first few, I started seeing systems everywhere. Once I woke up to this kind of systems thinking, new systems seemed to emerge from the situations that already existed in my life rather than being something new and external and extra that I was imposing on them. It didn’t feel like adding rules, it felt like noticing and then standardizing how I responded to various situations that were happening to me anyway. I have to get up in the morning. I have to eat. I have to take a shower. I have to get from point A to point B. I have to interact with other human beings. Whether or not I respond to these situations consistently, they will arise. By thinking through and structuring my responses, it felt like I was making things easier rather than harder because now instead of agonizing over what to do, the systems made it so the decision process was instantaneous, automatic.

It felt like routing traffic. These rules weren’t about adding new decisions, but about simplifying the process of resolving existing decisions that were already coming at me. They’re rules that inhabit the intersections of my life, that resolve a mess of questions coming at me every day. That ease the flow. They prevent traffic jams, crashes and especially multicar pileups. Remember the “habit traffic light?” This was the original metaphor that inspired the habit traffic light and later the lifelog. And you can think of all of Everyday Systems as traffic signals of one sort or another.

You’ve heard of decision fatigue? Apparently, according to various random places on the internet, we have to make an average of about 35,000 decisions every day. Who knows if this number is real, but in any case, it’s a lot of decisions, and it gets exhausting. A good Everyday System will reduce the number of decisions you have to make, or at least make some of those decisions easier and more automatic and less exhausting. More rules, more of the right kind of rules, equals fewer decisions, or at least easier decisions. It’s a tradeoff that most of us, I think, would gladly make.

As I’ve written about the No S Diet:

It might seem counterintuitive, but strictness makes things easier. There’s no decision to be made, no wrangling, no “can I? can’t I?”. You’re pre-disapproved, so forget it and move on to something else.

You’re also steering all the traffic of those food related decisions towards three easy to monitor intersections a day. You don’t have to be on your guard and agonizing over food decisions all day long, under any circumstances. Just at mealtimes. Between meals is an impregnable wall.

As long as your total rule burden decreases your total decision burden, as long as it eases decision traffic, the net effect is to make things easier, and you can bear it.

How do the Everyday Systems accomplish this? We’ve talked now about where the systems sit, but what is the mechanism? We’ve channeled all this decision traffic towards them, now how do they ease the flow?

This brings me to my second analogy, from a very different field: Everyday Systems as action branding. I’ve already primed your mind for this with my reference to the tootsie roll jingle. How does action branding work? Well, it’s a little like regular branding. When I go to the supermarket and mayonnaise is on my shopping list, I don’t agonize over Kraft or Hellmans or Market Basket store brand because I know which one I prefer. It’s not more work to have a preferred brand, it’s less. It would take me hours to get out of the store if every time I was evaluating every single brand of every single product. In the same way, with Everyday Systems, in the problem domain each system is targeting, I know my preferred brand of action or attitude. A lot of the system itself is about building that distinctive brand.

Take Mindful Bagful, which is a system that literally takes place while I am shopping. As you may recall, it’s a system for not freaking out while I’m bagging my groceries, which may seem absurdly specific, and like “why do I need a system for this?” but c’mon, I’m sure you have a situation or two like this, where you regularly find yourself disproportionately stressing out. I just call these words to mind when I’m standing in the checkout line and I smile at myself and the freakout I was about to have and I calm down. It costs me no more effort to remember these words than not to. In fact it’s harder not to remember these words at this point. It would be like, “don’t think of a white elephant.” And the net gain, the calm I gain from remembering them, would more than make up for the effort even if there was any.

Order is simpler than chaos. Order is easier than chaos. Order can be, paradoxically maybe, freeing. Having a favorite brand of mayo is not slavery. I guess it can be if someone is forcing you to buy a certain brand or has brainwashed you. But the Everyday Systems process is basically you thinking through what is your favorite brand of action, and why, and essentially coming up with your own advertising jingle about it, for yourself. You are your own marketing agency. The Man isn’t doing it to you. You are the Man.

Here’s a final analogy, or I guess it’s more of a parallel than an analogy: you’ve heard of the 10 commandments, right? Well in traditional Judaism, there are officially 613 commandments that are recognized. 248 positive (“thou shalt”) and 365 negative (“thou shalt not”). That sounds like a tall order. I mean, 10 commandments feels hard enough. And yet millions of observant Jews not only more or less mostly abide by these, but view them not as a burden, but as a gift, as a source of joy in their lives.

Now granted, most of these commandments are not about heavy duty moral issues like killing or coveting. Some them are about things that came up a lot in the ancient mediterranean but not so much any more, like when not to muzzle an Ox. A lot of them are about daily life things, like diet. Depending on how you count, 30-40 of them are related to diet. Comparatively trivial stuff, you could say. But if you are listening to this podcast, you know that diet is not so easy either. I’m pretty good at the No S Diet at this point, but I personally still find it much easier to refrain from killing people than to avoid sweets.

So how do they do it? Here I was bragging about living with a total rule burden of 33, and these guys are living with 613? All of a sudden I don’t feel so impressive anymore.

Part of it is the mayo thing, maybe. The traffic thing. The simplifying power of rules. But part of it is exactly that joy. Looking at life as not like, here is this confusing mess hurtling toward me that I have to figure out how to endure somehow, but how do I best accept this tremendous gift, how do I do all of these categories of daily things that I have to do anyway, because we all have to eat and sleep and drink, in a way that makes the most of them, and maybe even turns them into something more?

Rabbi Nachman of Breslau, who is sometimes annoyingly but also deservedly trendy far beyond his original community — I sometimes think he’s a little like the Rilke or Rumi of Hasidic Judaism — supposedly said the following:

Become the kind of person who makes fulfilling physical needs a spiritual experience. Some people eat to have the strength to study the Word of God. Others, more spiritually aware, study the Word of God in order to know how to eat.

I love this. The dietary rules (“knowing how to eat”) are not a burden. They are a reward. You’re going to eat anyway. It’s not something extra. You can eat so it’s just an unavoidable chore, which it in some sense is and has to be, or you can use these rules to unlock the deeper value and joy of it.

I am not saying that Everyday Systems are divinely inspired. What I’m saying is that they work, when they work, because they too, inspire a kind of joy. Maybe not dance on the rooftops joy, but the crack of a smile, a twinkle in the eye, a chuckle.

So, putting it all together: rule burden not only reduces decision burden, but becomes rule reward. And that when you look at the Everyday Systems like that, in this context, it’s not really all that remarkable for me to be practicing a mere 33 of them. In a very straight forward and earthly way, this yoke is easy, and this burden is light.

That’s all for today. Thanks for listening.

By Reinhard Engels

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