New habits

One of our consultants describes the inefficiency of moving.

As we mentioned last week, one of our consultants is in the process of moving from one apartment to another.  He is not really bothered that the new apartment is poorly-engineered (so it has lasted longer than intended) and uneconomic (so it long ago gave its owners more worth than the builder received).  He does find, however, that the process of moving is inefficient.

Of course there’s the disruption of packing everything up into cardboard boxes, which must then be moved to the new place and unpacked.  For a period of time most of his possessions will be unavailable.  In particular, he cannot pick out the book he wants to refer to, because he does not know which box it’s in (he has a large library).  He’s done this enough times before, however, that he knew to pull out the basic things he needs to live and work, and have them available.  The main inefficiency comes from having to develop new habits.

It’s safe to say that a large fraction of our actions are habitual.  We have a morning routine: up out of bed, to the bathroom, shaving and washing without a conscious thought about them; picking up the soap where we expect to find it, putting the towel back where it normally hangs.  Fixing meals means pulling out the right pan and putting in water from the tap, the movements so familiar that our hands do them while we are thinking of other things.  Even positioning the tap to get water of the proper temperature becomes unconscious after a time.  As is, our consultant points out, the accommodations we make to the peculiarities of our home: the fact that the toilet sometimes doesn’t flush properly, and must be checked each time he passes by.

All this has to be developed over again in the new place.  The towel rack is reached by a different motion from the shower; the pans for dinner are on a different shelf; the clothes are in a different place.  He regularly has to stop and think about where something is and what he needs to do next.  Often he finds himself going back and forth between rooms doing little tasks that would be better combined into one journey.  Eventually they will be.  Habits allow us to do routine things efficiently, and we all develop them.

But we generally go too far.  The toilet should really be fixed.  The meal that we prepare on autopilot may not be terribly nutritious.  And those things we’ve left in the back room, forgotten by habit, really need to be examined again: do we really need them?  Should we give them away or recycle them?

So the process of moving, as inconvenient and inefficient as it is, has this virtue: it forces us to confront our habits, and gives us the opportunity to change them.