The Best Self-Help is Free: Habit and the Elimination of the Quality-Quantity Tradeoff

A common fallacy presumes that there is a necessary tradeoff between the quantity of work produced and the quality of that work. By this notion, one can either produce a lot of mediocre units of output or a scant few exceptional ones. While this might be true in some cases, it overlooks several important factors.

Over time, by engaging in certain activities, individuals form habits relating to these activities. A habit is a default pattern of functioning with regard to an activity; people follow their habits in the absence of explicit internal or external stimuli to the contrary. Habits do not require undue discomfort to sustain once established; the individual perceives them to be the natural, "easy" course of action. Thus, habits provide a baseline for productivity: a person cannot, on the whole, be less productive than his habits make possible. He can be more productive, however, by deliberately exerting additional effort and perhaps stretching the limits of his comfort - in order to gradually raise his habits to a new level and make it comfortable for him to produce higher amounts of output.

Habits can be formed with regard to quantity of output produced, but they can also be formed with regard to quality. After all, with sufficient practice, one can improve the quality of any given output - be it a written work, a painting, a musical composition, a scientific procedure, a production process, or a marketing approach. Initially, developing quality might be a time-consuming, painstaking endeavor that does involve a tradeoff with quantity. However, as a habit of quality develops, the tradeoff disappears! To provide a personal example, I do not - unlike most writers - produce multiple drafts of my work. I simply write an essay once, in sequence, from beginning to end and then scan it for typographical errors. This was not the case initially and has only become possible by means of a decade of systematic and steady efforts at writing. Yet it has managed to greatly enhance the rate of my writing output without diminishing its quality.

With a habit of quality work as one's baseline, one can produce such work in a high quantity while exerting moderate effort in the direction of enhancing both the quantitative and the qualitative dimensions of one's accomplishment. This mode of progress in productivity is challenging but not exhausting; it is, more importantly, sustainable over long periods of time.

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