The Third "M"

Robert Epstein's Self-Help Without the Hype presents the "Three Ms-" approach to modifying one's own behavior. The three Ms are: modify your environment, monitor your behavior, and make commitments. When I was living in Mexico I would send weekly practice reports to my friend Danilo in Italy. In my apartment in Ottawa I had a posted chart (1) that any friend that happened to be over for a visit could glance at. With this blog post, I am going to make a similar public commitment by announcing that henceforth, I will be updating daily practice reports in a Google docs spreadsheet.

1. This is exactly the kind of thing, by the way, that I would like for C.A.R.P.E.T. to address. What kinds of feedback (what kinds of stimuli, presented how, for how long, by whom, to whom, with what latency, and with what kind of user input, say) make for the most effective "self-help."