There are many things we do just before bed: brush teeth, review the day, set up for tomorrow’s exercise routine, etc. The best way to start a new habit is to chain it with an existing habit. So after you’ve completed your bedtime routine, add one last thing: make a movie.
Wait, shouldn’t we be relaxing and calming down to sleep? Making a movie sounds counter-productive! Hear me out: we’re making a mental movie. Visualize yourself perfectly executing whatever you are wanting to master. We looked at this previously but today we want to dig a little deeper.
When you visualize something just before you sleep, you essentially give your unconscious mind a project to work on while you sleep. It takes all you know and all you can do and figures out how to assemble them so that what you visualized can take place. It’s not magic. It takes some practice. But if you make this a habit, you will find that mastering new skills starts to come more naturally.
Many professional athletes and performers use this technique to help them to improve their skill set. There’s no reason we can’t apply it to our own skill sets as well. Just imagine looking at a tangled pile of spaghetti code. We look over it a few times, find a spot that we can start making things a little bit better. We make that change and that leads to another simplification. A few iterations on this and a plan starts to come together about how this can be split up into proper methods and classes – all with helpful names. You drift off to sleep with a wonderful feeling of having made the world a better place!
It doesn’t have to be specifically detailed, just enough detail so that your mind will have something to work with. A Hollywood image of two programmers typing on the same keyboard to find the magical solution faster probably won’t help. But picturing yourself hitting those keys accurately on the top row might work. Or seeing the shape of some duplicated code and extracting a new method would work. Or seeing a string of “if” statements and turning them into a Chain of Command pattern. Just specific enough that you don’t have to crank your brain up to imagine specific code.
Give it a try. How might you visualize what you’re learning now?