Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

I’ve had this idea for a while that the principles of Test-Driven Development (TDD) or Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) could be applied to everyday living with spectacular results. Below is an untested adaptation of TDD principles to life.

RDL works like this:

1. Make a list of all the commitments you want to keep
2. Pick the easiest commitment you’re currently failing to meet and then meet it
3. Reorganize your life to streamline your commitments

That’s the essence. But because we’re applying this to a fluid analog life that doesn’t really have a repeatable, automated testing framework, we have to make some additional rules to constrain things a bit. Here are the rules.

1. You can only take on a commitment that requires a direct daily action.
2. You can only take on a commitment that evaluates to pass/fail each day.
3. You can only take on a commitment if all of your commitments have been passing for at least one day.
4. You can only remove a commitment if you decide it’s not really a life requirement.

How well RDL works for you depends on how good you get at defining commitments. For example, “arrive at work early” is a very different commitment to me than “use the exit 24 bypass to get to work”. The former captures the essence of my goal while the latter locks me into a narrow and brittle heuristic that might change over time. Worse, the latter won’t allow me to see better alternatives as I continue to organize and streamline my life. Make your commitments as high-level as you can and save the tactical commitments for when you get confused and really need them for support. You might even create a separate list of tactical commitments to help you remember that they are not the end-goals.

My hypothesis is that RDL will gradually allow you to adapt, combine, and leverage commitments as your life transforms. I further predict that you will become a person you never imagined being - a person more beautiful than you could have designed intentionally. By simply taking the pragmatic route at each opportunity and continuing to streamline your life only when all your commitments are being met, you will develop a style that fits your desired life exactly.

There’s probably more to it, but it would be an interesting experiment. I think it has a lot of parallels to morning journals and goal recitation, but it has the benefit of yielding verifiable steps so you can pinpoint exactly where trouble is coming from. Maybe the mind is already big enough to track everything at once, but somehow this technique seems useful to me.