At Stanford we’ve been advocating habit-stacking as a hack to get folks to flip one problem with an idea quota every day. I’m a believer in what BJ Fogg and James Clear have taught about the power of piggy-backing on existing behaviors in driving desired behaviors — hence why we’ve been teaching the technique! — but something about how we’ve been teaching it has felt off…

While it is indeed useful to have a predetermined time (hopefully based on your chronotypical time curve!) blocked each day for generating ideas, yet designing the habit around existing cues (like making coffee, taking a shower, morning jog, etc) felt a little… arbitrary. Or rather, it fails to provide sufficient inputs to the divergent moment. All too often, when I ask myself, at the beginning of an idea quota session, “Where am I too focused on quality? Where should I be generating more volume instead?” I draw a blank. I don’t really know.

I’ve realized that the habit I need is a habit around documenting the problems for which I’m prone to seek closure. Just like we advise folks to keep a “Bug List” of potential problems in the world worth solving, I have discovered I need to keep a “Shrug List” of all those problems I’ve kicked down the road. For me, that usually looks like marking an email as “unread,” as that’s my typical way of dealing with problems for which I don’t have a great answer, when I don’t have time to deal with them.

The beauty is, those are often the most important items on my list, and yet they’re the very problems I avoid, because of my need for closure, and because there are so many other easily-closed tasks that I can distract myself with.

So now, when I flip one problem and do my idea quota, I have a list of actually relevant problems to draw from. Problems I’ve been avoiding anyway, specifically because they’re in need of the very mindset I’m hoping to stimulate during my idea quota. At the very least, I get practice with “live ammo” — and seed my subconscious with juicy fodder for background processing — but often, I solve the problem I’ve been avoiding as well.

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