Hacking Back the Triggers

Plus: Full Fathom Five Discussion today at r/CraftSequence, 2pm!

First things first: today’s the Craft Countdown Book Club on Full Fathom Five, hosted by r/CraftSequence and the Hidden Schools fan site! I’ll post some discussion questions today but I try to stay out of the Book Club thread to let people have more honest conversations—folks tend to congregate at 2pm but it looks like the thread’s already started so here it is! Have a good chat, and don’t forget to drop by r/CraftSequence on Thursday at 2pm US Eastern, when I’ll be hosting an ask-me-anything Q&A for all your Full Fathom Five thoughts. Talk soon!

This email is a bit off-schedule, my apologies—I was profoundly away from my desk last week and didn’t have access to the accounts I use to publish here. Anyway, let’s get to it.

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There’s a difference between a checkpoint and a trigger. We talked about checkpoints in this newsletter a while back—those useful marks to which we return when we’re doing something complicated and sensitive and dependent on initial conditions (as human life tends to be). Checkpoints can serve as prompts for embedded skills. Runners don’t, generally, have full prana-bindu awareness of the sequence of calf and quad and hamstring contractions—if you think otherwise you haven’t played qwop in a while. But a checkpoint like “move your arms faster to run faster” can prompt your body to make the necessary adjustments.

Triggers are a similar concept, but they’re not under your conscious control. You’ve probably seen ‘trigger’ in the context of ‘trigger warning,’ that is, a warning that particular discussion or thematic element might touch off a trauma response. I’m using the term more generally here—I first heard it used in this sense by Nir Eyal, whose book Indistractable is a fun and useful read, if very designed to be read by people whose hearts reside in Palo Alto regardless of where the remainder of their corporeal forms might be housed.

A “trigger” is a prompt in our environment that occasions a set of embedded, habitual behaviors (which is what we call skills when we don’t like them) before our will has a chance to intervene. Pavlov’s dog salivating when the bell rings is a triggered behavior. Modern app design (and modern media) loves creating triggers for users. I’m not just talking about commonly accepted ‘dark patterns’—design decisions that mislead users into doing something against their monetary interest, like an e-commerce website auto-selecting the ‘subscribe and save’ option. Little apparently harmless trigger-tweaks that ‘increase engagement’ or maximize time-in-app can be just as detrimental in aggregate, because they manipulate the user’s attention, which is to say, ultimately, they steal the user’s time—that one absolutely unrecoverable resource. That bit of the next picture peeking at the bottom of your Instagram page is a trigger to scroll; a notification is a trigger to open an app and engage in whatever habit behaviors you’ve formed inside that app.¹

Let’s say that when you pick up your phone, under certain conditions you will sometimes open an app that presents you with pictures, some percentage of which are of attractive persons of a gender presentation relevant to your interests. Your body comes to associate the pleasure of seeing or at least scrolling past APoGPRtyI with the act of picking up your phone and opening the app, so that whole cycle of “pick up phone, open app,” is reinforced over time.

It’s easy to adopt a Puritan disdain for the particular cycle I described in the last paragraph—but it works even (especially?) if the APoGPRtyI in question are not presenting themselves primarily as an APoGPRtyI, if they’re talking about stocks or philosophy or weightlifting or, you know, science fiction. Or, even if the Gender Presentation isn’t particularly Relevant, there are still Attractive Persons of Relevant Status Preoccupation, you know the type: this person presents as having a status or attribute I want! And I can for sure trust them because they look like they smell nice. (Or not-nice, in the case of the lifters…)

Let’s get specific. One trigger / action set I’ve been wrestling with for a while now goes like this:

• I have a very nice and ergonomic computer setup. I use this to work.

• I have a lot of things to do, because I am a writer and parent and small business owner. There are more balls in the air than I can juggle at any given time.

• Since we live in The Society, much of all that other work is done through the same computer I use to write.

• I sit down at my computer. My conscious mind says, “time to write.”

• My deeper mind hears “time to work” and asks: “what is the most immediate and important task to resolve / danger to address?” -> ah! this parenting task / tax reporting thing / developing current-events horror / urgent email I’ve been sleeping on / it’s been ages since I did any social media marketing and the readers will all forget me (this one is malevolent and useless but lingers) / etc.

• Time passes.

• Eventually, I remember that writing is actually more important than most of those other things, even if less time sensitive, and get down to it.

When you’re dealing with a constrained schedule (everyone’s schedule is constrained, but a parent’s in particular— there are roughly five weeks in January, our kiddo was in school ‘full days’ M-F for only two of them, and the dinner must be prepped), that time damage stacks fast.

Toward the end of ’24, after taking my Pomera out for a spin and remembering the joy of single-purpose devices, I sat down to think about how I could bring more of that energy into my life. I love the Pomera for couch writing and on-the-go but my desk setup is unquestionably better—the screen is larger & more ergonomically positioned, the keyboard is nicer, etc. How could I make my Mac behave more like a single-purpose device, without sacrificing the ergonomics and utility of a general purpose computer?

I can’t change The Society, much as I’d like to²—and changing myself is a long process. But, looking back at the pattern of my days, that triggering step of “glancing at open windows” seemed like a useful line of attack. What if, the instant I opened my computer, I saw the same thing I see when I open the Pomera? That is: A blank gray page, a blinking cursor.

So I fired up Keyboard Maestro, a useful little automation program for the Mac, and made a simple macro that, whenever my computer wakes from sleep, checks what program’s open. If it’s one of my writing applications (Scrivener, Ulysses, Word, Arc Studio, Final Draft), it leaves it open in fullscreen mode. Otherwise, it switches into Ulysses in fullscreen.

I’m not going to say ‘problem solved,’ but the difference was dramatic. For the first several weeks after this change, I’d sit down, face the blank page, and, often: I wrote. Posts sometimes, sometimes fiction… but writing was happening.

There’s a Frog and Toad story where they’re eating too many cookies, and Toad decides to stop by placing the cookies in a box, tying the box with string, and setting the box on a high shelf. Whereupon Frog observes: “But Toad, we can climb a ladder to the shelf and untie the string and open the box and eat the cookies.” This is true! The whole rest of the universe remains one alt-tab away. But it takes the hindbrain a while to catch on.

I suspect that one advantage of this approach, is that it deploys the bothersome flatness of the screen to my advantage. Whatever’s on the screen doesn’t just “cover” other possibilities, the way the a sheet of paper covers the Leaning Tower of Physical Inbox—it replaces and effaces other possibilities. A computer can do (almost) anything, sure, but it’s often easiest to keep doing whatever you’re doing at the time (even/especially if that’s “scrolling through a feed”). But it disrupts the trigger sequence, replacing it with one more in line with my commitments and values. I’ve decided that, 99 times out of 100, what I want to be doing when I sit down at the computer in the morning is the most important (but perhaps less urgent) thing.

I’ve been working this way for five months now, and while much of the initial “life hack” magic of just doing anything differently has worn off—after all, alt-tab hasn’t gone anywhere—and it’s much less effective when my work involves copy edits and page proofs and email, which it has lately, this way still feels better, and produces better results. And when this approach seems to stop working, if I take a look at my triggers and loops I often find I’ve ended up in a loop that involves tabbing out of the fullscreen text editor before I start writing—to turn on some music, say. Once I address that—by writing in silence, or by using a keyboard macro to turn on a writing playlist—everything proceeds smoothly.

Have any of you found yourself in this position—adjusting triggers and playing around with your own process? What’s worked for you? I’d love to hear it.

1. This is a very ‘you must be a lot of fun at parties’ way to describe life in the age of apps, but, what the hell, I am fun at parties and this is what’s going on—it’s scary to think about and I keep scrolling too, often—but even though you might not miss those quarter-seconds on most days, they’re real, and really gone.

2. Though if I did have Society Genie powers, trust me, all this stuff would be far down the list. (the task of filling out the list I’d rather leave to you)