Lifestyle Scope Creep
Takeaway Points:
Scope creep, the accidental inflation of a project over time, can happen in many areas of work and personal life. When we let scope creep get out of hand, it can lead to overwhelming issues that create more work than necessary or undo progress we already made.
Habit scope creep is when your habits take up more and more of your time that they start to have negative effects on your life like take up all your time, cause too much stress, or lead to burnout.
One of the best ways to combat habit scope creep is to regularly assess if what you’re doing aligns with your goals and what’s important to you. Quitting and move on from things isn’t bad - it ensures that your valuable time is spent on what really matters.
Scope creep is the process by which a project tends to balloon in size over time, as you work on it.
This is a pretty natural thing that can happen in a lot of different fields. A book might take on more chapters as an author decides to explore themes that didn’t originally come to mind when they were planning it out. A home renovation might encounter unexpected setbacks and require additional work to come to the expected completion.
Most frequently, however, this refers to scope creep in software development. Software is often changing because a lot of people are working on it at once, and a lot of people use the underlying software, and the communication between those groups can lead to evolving set of expectations about what the software is and what it should be able to do. Over time, these evolving expectations tend to cause software to balloon in size, as developers add on more and more features in an attempt to please everyone - and eventually, the software itself can become so bloated and unwieldy that it struggles to perform the primary task that it was designed for in the first place.
In order to combat scope creep, software production processes are employed. Producers are expected to help keep coders in line, combating scope creep by working to keep everyone on task and unified in their vision about the product. In essence, combating scope creep is about trying to achieve a kind of unity of expectation between all participants in the process - from leadership, to workers, to the customers who use the product - in order to ensure that the end result optimally satisfies everybody’s needs without growing too much in size.
Today I wanted to talk about the concept of lifestyle scope creep - the kind of scope creep that occurs as your habits grow and change over time as you mature as a person.
Personal Finance/Hedonic Scope Creep
In personal finance circles, it’s common to talk about this concept as a warning against becoming too loose with your money. As the story goes, you start out not making much money, having debt to grapple with, and so on - but as you become more financially literate, earn more money, become more savvy with minimizing your spending and saving and investing for the future, you now have more money to spend. At this point, it becomes tempting to give in to financial scope creep, spend your money more loosely, and end up right back where you started.
In personal finance, scope creep can be a pretty destructive thing, in large part because it involves undoing a lot of the hard work you did to get somewhere. If you let yourself develop expensive habits as a result of earning more money, it creates an endless treadmill in which no amount of money is enough - as you earn more money, you develop more and more expensive habits to counter it, and the end result is that you have to earn more and more without getting much of a benefit out of it.
This is closely related to the concept of the hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation. This is a theory which proposes that human beings generally trend towards a basic state of being not particularly happy or sad, and that this tends to happen no matter the other positive or negative events that happen in your life. Thus, as you earn more money or make successes in your career, you might initially experience a burst of happiness, but you quickly return to your baseline and don’t get any lasting effect on your wellbeing out of it. Everyone has a kind of set level of happiness towards which they tend to trend, and while that can change over time, it tends to do so slowly and not in response to short term changes in lifestyle.
While this theory isn’t always strictly true, it’s popular because we can all see that there’s kind of a grain of truth to it. Most of us can relate to the feeling of getting a new cell phone and being amazed by how well it works - only to stop caring completely and start treating it basically the same as our previous cellphone within a week or two. If you’re not getting much permanent happiness out of a new cellphone, the argument goes, you might as well not get it, or only get it when it becomes absolutely necessary because the old one is holding you back somehow.
Personal finance scope creep and hedonic adaptation are both good examples of ways that you should be careful about managing scope creep in your own life. If you earn a sudden bonus, it should probably go into saving for an emergency rather than being immediately spent on a shiny new gadget. If you get a better paying job, that doesn’t mean you should immediately move to a more expensive apartment, and so on.
Habit Scope Creep
The kind of scope creep that I have a much harder time dealing with is what I call “habit scope creep”, and it occurs when you let habits start to consume so much of your time that they detract from your day.
As someone who’s been into self-improvement in some form or another for more than half of my life, I’ve picked up a lot of regular habits, and a lot of them have been very empowering in terms of the overall effect they’ve had on my life. I lift weights regularly, I do cardio regularly, I read a few books a month, I write regularly, and I regularly practice the handful of new languages I’m engaged in learning.
However, the problem is that often, I’d still have to admit that I have a nasty habit of trending towards scope creep in my habits. I’m somebody who regularly dives headfirst into new projects - even when I don’t necessarily have the time for it, and it ends up eating into my free time and making me exhausted and miserable. Many times, I have felt like a failure for not being able to stick to whatever the latest project is that I’ve invented for myself.
Sometimes, I find that I’ve gotten myself to a place where it feels like I have a massive, exhausting checklist to get through before I can just relax. I have to do language flashcards, use this app, be sure to get my daily streak on this other app, and so on until I have no time leftover to just relax, and I feel exhausted. I started out wanting to learn one language and now I’m juggling four - I started out wanting to focus on one writing project this year, and now I’m working on three - and so on.
Habit scope creep can be just as damaging as bad habits, because they can add up to the extent that they drain you and feel like an impossible barrier on those days where your energy is naturally low. All it takes is that one day where your energy levels aren’t up to it, and suddenly you’re feeling like a failure or you’re burning yourself out.
To combat scope creep, it helps to regularly reassess what you’re doing, and whether or not it actually aligns with your goals. I play a lot of video games, but I’ve also gotten very good at recognizing when a video game is starting to take over my life - and when I does, I usually delete it ASAP to discourage myself from letting it do so. Likewise, I’ve had to regularly stop reading books, watching movies, or carrying out projects that I realized halfway through that I have no desire to finish.
I’ve written before about how I’m a big fan of quitting, and a big fan of strategic failure. Learning how to quit, and how to fail, and how to do both of those things strategically, is probably the most valuable skill you have when it comes to combating habit scope creep.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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