Try it for a few months

Experiments are all about gathering data

In life, it’s hard to know what will be a good use of your time. You might join a volunteer group looking to make more friends, and find it tough going. You may sign up for a pottery class and feel frustrated by the teacher’s style. You might start a newsletter hoping to build a platform about a book concept but soon feel short on ideas.

When we don’t know if something is the right thing to do or not, this can make motivation challenging.

But you can solve this problem by reclassifying any new activity as an “experiment.” You aren’t committing to doing something forever. You’re trying it for a certain number of weeks or months and then you will evaluate and make a decision on whether to keep going, modify, or let it go.

Trial and error

So for instance, if you decide to start a newsletter, you might decide to write and publish faithfully for six months. You might even brainstorm close to six months’ worth of ideas at the start to make sure this is feasible. You go all in with writing and promotion and then, six months in, evaluate. Is anyone reading the newsletter? Or perhaps overall readership isn’t great, but certain posts get a lot of engagement. This is good information to know too — and that wasn’t a waste of time to figure that out. You may decide to relaunch focusing only on that one topic.

If you decide to try running, you could try running for six months and see how it goes. It definitely takes a few weeks for running to feel comfortable, but by six months in, you will be over a lot of that and regularly running a few miles at a time. At that point you can evaluate if you enjoy running more than other forms of exercise or if, all things considered, you’d like to do Pilates classes instead.

Getting to yes

In general, framing something as an experiment makes it easier to try. You can use this to your advantage if you’d like to change something at work! For instance, if you’d like to move to a hybrid schedule rather than being fully in-office, propose it as an experiment for three months with a definite evaluation date. It’s a lot harder for a manager to say no to that, when she knows she can say no in the future, than it is to say no if she’s being asked to agree to something until the end of time.

In any case, I find that 3-6 months is a long enough period of time that you can really give something the old college try. Some stuff takes longer and some takes less, but this is a good enough amount of time that daily mishaps are absorbed into the overall experience. On the other hand, 3-6 months doesn’t feel infinite. You can see the finish line. If you really find yourself unhappy with how things are going, you can decide that come December you will stop doing the thing guilt free.

In many cases, people quit things that could have worked out if they’d stuck with it. In many cases, a little more resilience and discipline would be wise. There are good returns to not getting distracted too early.

On the other hand, there’s no need to stick with things forever. And if there are diminishing returns, it’s wise to bow out and put those resources somewhere else.

So if there’s something you’re thinking of trying, see if you can do it for a few months as an experiment. You’re not declaring anything about life one way or the other. You’re just gathering data, like any good scientist would. Then you can decide what you think.