How to Raise and Lower the Activation Energy of a Task
One of the powerful parts of appearing on about 100 podcasts in a year, is that you find yourself telling stories. And you find out which of those stories emerge more often than others.
And which ones lands more often than others.
This happens for me in my coaching sessions, too - I get to find out, over years, which ideas land with my clients. Often, the ones that land with clients end up being articles like this one.
Some of them even end up in my books.
Over a year of podcast appearances in 2022, most of my conversations were centred around the ideas in the 12-Minute Method series. Ideas about productivity, about getting things done, about Resistance and more.
By publishing the books one at a time and learning with each publication - very much a 12-Minute Method approach to publishing! - I was able to capture extra lessons that weren’t written about in the first three years of this blog, and get them into the books in intros and outros.
But there is one story, one idea, that kept coming up in my podcast interviews and speaking engagements, that isn’t in the books anywhere. It’s an idea that clients find incredibly useful too, and yet until now it hasn’t featured in one of my blogs.
That is the idea of activation energy.
I read about this first in Shawn Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage, where Achor succeeds in bringing much of the research from the field of Positive Psychology into one easily absorbable place. And one of the most powerful ideas I took from that book was the idea of activation energy.
Activation energy is - in essence - the energy required to do something. To start doing something. (You can see why this might appeal to me, right?) How hard is it to do? How much hassle is it to do? Is it effortless or does it require A LOT OF EFFORT?
If there are things that you want to do but perhaps aren’t doing, you want to lower the activation energy and make it easier to do them.
If there are things that you find yourself doing but want to stop doing, you might want to think about raising the activation energy.
To make this real, Achor tells two stories in the book, both about realising he could apply the insights from the research on activation energy to his life.
He wanted to go to the gym in the morning. He thought about it, and tried lowering the activation energy. Something like… putting his trainers by his bed.
It turned out that didn’t lower it enough - he ended up just stepping over the trainers. He tried various other ideas, but in the end what worked was this:
He went to sleep in his gym clothes.
Then, when he got up in the morning, the activation energy for NOT going to the gym, seemed higher than the activation energy for going. To NOT go, he’d have to actively get changed.
In the other story, as I remember it he finally managed to practice guitar regularly by putting his guitar in the centre of the room so he had to step round it. Almost harder to NOT practise than to advise.
It’s important to remember that the research seems to show that our willpower is limited. So if we can put that to use in our favour (by requiring willpower to NOT go to the gym instead of going to the gym) then we’re in the money.
I used activation energy the other way to stop spending as much time on Facebook and Twitter. I found that removing the apps wasn’t enough - the activation energy of going to the web browser on my phone and visiting Twitter was still low enough that I did it regularly. Until I logged out on my phone. Then, when I had to actively log in (enter my password) the activation energy was high enough that I was able to use what limited willpower I had to NOT log in.
Of course, if our willpower is limited, then if we can get the activation energy right for our tasks (so that less willpower is required), we may also be creating willpower surpluses elsewhere which we can use to our advantage.
Activation energy isn’t static - or at least, in my experience it’s not. As I’ve written before, one of the advantages of making something habitual in our life is that after a while it becomes stranger to NOT do it than it is to do it. At first, writing a blog or exercising every morning was WEIRD. It required activation energy, willpower, courage and more.
And then, in the end, I became someone who writes. And now it’s weird if I DON’T write. The activation energy to write a blog is low.
The question we then end with is: what do you want to do or stop doing? And how can you play with the activation energy to help you?
—
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Subscribe to this blog and read the archive here.
The 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, is out now!