By this point in time, habit stacking is a somewhat popular concept in productivity focused communities. Its a concept that asks, how might we have our habits flow into each other to improve the stickiness of new habits we want to integrate into our routine. Something like adding light standing stretches while you’re cleaning your home, or taking your evening anime enjoyment to the gym elliptical. Its a way to use the staying power of your existing lifestyle to nudge yourself towards a slightly more productive version of you.
Lately I’ve been doing something of a “hobby” stacking technique. I have some long standing hobbies that I don’t fear are at risk, like table top role playing games. I’ve been committed to a handful of long running games since 2020 and my thirst for trying more games is as powerful as ever. So when I began to feel my hobby repertoire was feeling a bit stale, I endeavored to stack on this interest.
Mostly, this has manifested as art, a natural pairing to a hobby primarily composed of imagining fantastical worlds and characters. On my page you can see some character design that has resulted from this. I’ve also recently picked up pottery and clay building as a more practical avenue of this. Premium dice towers and trays cost around $100 each, which is a bit prohibitive for me for something that’s just a nice to have. However, with the power of clay, I’m able to create the towers and trays that’ll fit my space perfectly, and for the cost of clay and kiln time.
These pairings of hobbies has proven to be a powerful driving force, pushing me to be better and better at my craft. Perhaps my character portrait doesn’t quite capture the emotion I intended, which launches me into a study on gestural drawing and color theory. Or my dice tower has a strange wobble to it, pushing me to rabbit hole projects to prototype new ways to build for stability.
There’s a real strength and power to a healthy ecosystem of efforts. In my life, its habit stacking and now hobby stacking. In my professional career, its pushing for cohesive value streams and provisioning projects such that they naturally feed each other. I always am striving to make sure our teams exist in an ecosystem where the connections in our work is evident to our team members, to help drive the purpose home in a natural grass roots way. It can be a wicked organizational problem to solve fraught with political pitfalls. But even without a reorganization, there’s ways to organize ART syncs (or project syncs depending on your organizations philosophies) to bring together naturally joined work into a single space where we can map the dependencies and let the team discover on their own why their work is critical to our company.
So, how might you bring together different aspects of your life, interests, work, to more cohesively draw out your passion and drive in an effortless way?
DaiLynn Dietz 