"It's a reward"

A reward is a good thing to give yourself, and I'm not going to argue against rewards. I'm going to argue that the daily has stopped being one, and the reason is in what a reward is for.

A reward marks. It says this day, or this piece of work, or this effort, was different from the others, and here's the sign of it. The marking is the whole point. A prize given to everyone in the room for turning up isn't a prize. It's a place setting. And a treat that arrives at six every day, on the day the report went in and on the day you watched the clock, is marking nothing, because it can't tell the days apart. It's the same glass either way.

Wendy Wood and Dennis Rünger, reviewing the psychology of habit, describe habits as the efficient default mode of action, formed by repeating the same response in the same setting, and they note something that's worth sitting with. People tend to infer, from how often they do a thing, that they must have intended it. The frequency gets read backwards as a choice. Which is what's happened to the daily. It happens every day, so you conclude you must want it every day, so it must be a reward you're choosing. The habit produced the wanting, and then the wanting claimed to be the cause.

In an earlier study, Wood, Jeffrey Quinn and Deborah Kashy had people report every hour on what they were doing and thinking. When they were doing something habitual, meaning almost daily in a stable setting, their thoughts were usually elsewhere. When they were doing something they did less often, their thoughts were on it. That's the test for whether the treat is still a reward. Where's your mind at six? If it's on the glass, on the taste of it and the pleasure of having it, it's a reward. If it's on the phone, or tomorrow, or nothing, and the glass is just what your hand does at six, it's a routine, and routines don't mark.

Think of a bell that rings every hour. After a week you don't hear it, and if it rang once on a Tuesday afternoon you'd stop and look up. The daily is the bell that rings every hour. The proper treat is the one that rings once.

None of this means you can't have a glass at six. It means that if you do, you should stop calling it a reward, because the word is doing something the glass no longer does. Chapter 18 comes back to this. You can keep the treat and drop the word. You can also keep the word and make the treat rare enough to earn it back.