Motte and bailey goals

A friend I met up with a little while ago told me he was trying to form a habit of writing some code every day. It seemed like a pretty good idea and, since I'd already had some success with the habit of writing words every day, I figured I'd give it a try. Much like writing, code has the nice quality that it can be big or small; a commit can be a simple bug fix or some documentation, all the way up to a whole new feature or new project. However, I ended up entirely doing little crappy fixes and then gave up entirely.

A while back I learned about the motte-and-bailey doctrine, a delightful construction where you put forth a big, indefensible proposition ("consciousness is caused by quantum effects") and, when you are challenged on it, retreat into a small, defensible one ("quantum effects appear in the brain"). Once the challenge has gone away, you can return to making the more bombastic claim again. The name is from a medieval defensive structure that worked much the same way.

It strikes me that goal-setting could be a less ethically dubious way to use that technique. A grandiose goal is much more motivating than a modest one. Unfortunately, modest goals are achievable and grandiose ones are often not. Can we have our cake and eat it too? Perhaps, if we create motte and bailey goals. Think about a big motte-goal ("add a new feature to one of my projects every day"), but only actually commit to a much smaller bailey-goal ("write any code at all").

This seems to me the major difference between how I think about writing on my website vs how I thought about the code-every-day challenge. I have a motte-goal of sharing ideas or things I've made, and a bailey-goal of just write something. The ambition of the ideal keeps me motivated to do it, and the modest actual commitment makes it feasible. Code every day, on the other hand, is pretty uninspiring by itself.

I think I'll try again soon with a more ambitious motte and see how that goes.