Read this if you’ve slipped up or else binged out completely.
Why do so many of our work sessions go to shit?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for the past 5 years. And I mean really asking, like from scratch, with a concerted effort to set aside all my preconceived assumptions and theories.
In other words, I’ve been seeking the objective truth, aiming at challenging my habitual, knee-jerk self-critical reasoning that goes,
“Oh, my work session went to shit because I’m a slacker. One hundred percent because I have no self-control. I lack discipline. I can’t seem to learn my lesson. I’m an idiot procrastinator. I'm wasting away my life on apps, sites and games I don’t even enjoy... because I'm stupid, pathetic, etc.”
Chances are, you've been doing the same. You’ve been telling yourself the same story for years, yet you do have a choice to hold off on accepting it as truth. You can—in the aftermath of a completely derailed work session or an evening of binging on your vices—take a cold, impartial look and come to a different conclusion about what exactly happened and why.
And it’s not only that you can do this; I’d stress that you must get in the habit of doing it. Being able to scrutinize your failures in a detached and impartial way is essential to improving your situation with each iteration.
Sending the Impartial Investigator
Shifting the blame away from yourself is great, but it leaves us with the task of setting the blame on something else. But here’s the thing: “blame” is no longer the right word (like you don’t “blame” internal combustion for moving a car forward). So let’s cast aside the entire notion of blame; instead, we should think of it as establishing simple cause and effect. You need to identify the simple cause that precedes the effect.
I call the process “Sending in the Impartial Investigator". Here's what it looks like:
Imagine you witness a car crash. Arriving at the scene, is a thick-mustached investigator. He’s wearing a windbreaker and is holding a clipboard. It’s clear he’s been tasked with inspecting the wreckage and writing a report.
Having done this job for decades, the investigator goes through the process step-by-step with zero emotion. He’s detached and objective, ready with his camera and measuring tape, to report on nothing but cold, hard data.
He's not interested in the rantings of the adrenaline-charged parties—he’ll simply take a note of each side’s story. He’s more keen to document the subtle but critical details: tire tracks indicating braking distances and reaction times; debris and dents revealing impact angles, forces, and trajectories; traffic light sequences, intersection distances, blind spots; road and weather conditions.
He looks at everything—emotionlessly, indifferently, almost coldly, in the face of twisted metal and broken glass—and comes to simple, objective conclusions about what happened and why.
If the accident came as the result of a flaw in the design of the road network, he'd have a concrete recommendation to provide to the city. If it occurred because the ABS brakes of a new car model failed, he'd know who to inform.
Then, he packs up his stuff and leaves. Job done.
You need to do the same sort of thing. You need to build the habit of sending the mental equivalent of the crash-scene investigator to inspect your 30-car pileups of failed work sessions and prolonged binges.
Don’t get mad, get data.
That’s the motto of the Investigator. That's what's written on the side of his patrol car.
And that’s the mantra I want you to take to heart from now on.
When you slip and fail, don’t get mad at yourself; get data about yourself.
Send in the Impartial Investigator. Have him listen to the emotionally charged ramblings of your mind—I messed up again. I have no self-control. It’s all hopeless—but then allow him to move onto other, more objective pieces of information.
What did you do the second you sat down to work? Did you follow or disregard a part of your system?
What was going through your mind? How did that make you feel? What was your emotional state?
At some point, did something occur or change? Were you subtly (or overtly) triggered by someone or an event?
What was it about your system that failed or fell short? Where were the vulnerabilities in your Content Blocking System?
What you want to notice are patterns. You need to establish the tiny, almost imperceptible happenings that normally get lost in all the noise of your loud emotional experience—the stuff that happens again and again and that results in the slow but steady crashing of your work session.
So, once again:
Don’t get mad, get data.
The value of finding your data
I'd be willing to bet that, like me, you’ve been obsessing over fixing things about you and your life. This is fine... but it hasn’t been working because you haven't discovered the real reasons why you’re seemingly broken. You can’t find the solution if your assumptions about the cause of your problems are way off—which they are. Trust me.
You made up your mind around age 13, which was about the time you procrastinated on homework for the first time. This event led to the nucleus of the idea that you are fundamentally flawed, weak, and broken.
This idea was then reinforced through years of repeated experiences—years of you trying to harness your self-control, always followed by eventual failure. It's a classic case of confirmation bias; you tell yourself the same stories about who you are with your inherent flaws, collecting pieces of evidence that support this assertion and ignoring anything that contradicts it.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the thing you bought this program for—a foolproof, step-by-step method that’ll get you to instantly and permanently change into an ultra-disciplined superhuman—it doesn’t exist.
It cannot exist because the people writing self-help content, myself included, and more importantly, you, don’t know the whole picture.
You haven’t collected all the necessary data points yet—the hows, whys, whens, and other truths about your triggers, compulsive behaviors, and derailed work sessions. You haven’t identified the patterns yet.
Figuring all that out requires two things:
- Real experience of failure, which you’ve had and will continue to have, at least for a little while.
- Objective, calm, and dispassionate reflection. This is what you haven’t been doing, but you can and should start doing it today.
This was a huge breakthrough for me. Sorry if that sounds like a tacky self-help cliché, but it’s the truth. It led to a genuine mental shift and real progress.
By sending an Impartial Investigator, my derailed work sessions suddenly had meaning. They stopped being so damn shameful and reprehensible. They were useful. They were filled with crucial information—information I would need to better manage my actions and achieve my goals.
This is good news, isn’t it? Now, even when you have a moment of failure, you benefit from it. You become better because you failed. Isn’t that neat?
With a commitment to unconditional self-compassion, I let go of the expectation and fantasy that I could flip a switch and be perfect from some pivotal moment onwards. Instead, I integrated the idea of faltering and failing into my personal self-improvement system.
You need to do the same.