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On Sunday, I made a mistake I've made before. In fact, it was the fourth time. I'm going to share the story of what happened, because it illustrates why we struggle to fix what seem like easy problems.

Hustle culture tells us that better routines are the solution to almost any human stumble, but you'll see here why that's not the case.

The following five steps are aimed at helping you diagnose and address where standard advice falls apart, through a very non-newsworthy story.

1. Errors Tend to Occur When We're Already Distracted, Busy, Out-of-Routine, Tired, etc.

What did I mess up? I was hanging laundry and noticed my pool water level was low. I was in "get things done" mode, so I turned the hose on to fill it up, intending to set a 20-minute timer on my Google Home to turn the hose off.

Either I got distracted and never set the timer, or I called out to set it when I walked inside but it didn't work, and I was preoccupied enough that I didn't listen for the confirmation.

Several hours later I realized I'd left the hose on and wasted about 2000 gallons of water. I was really frustrated with myself and also went into a rumination spiral about what could have happened if a worse mistake had occurred due to not learning from a prior error or being inattentive generally.

Traditional advice tends to recommend adopting more disciplined routines so these kinds of preventable mistakes don't happen. But if you're trying to eliminate unforced errors, it's important to recognize the ones that tend to happen when your routines are under stress and prone to high rates of failure. If I'd let the water level run low, and was already thinking, "I'd better do that now before I forget," it was a high-risk time for failing to set the timer correctly.

2. Identify Failure Points of Systems and Plans

After the first time this happened, I'd decided to always set a timer to turn the hose off. As you read above, that system is too fragile.

It has still happened three more times.

Understanding failure points—in our systems and our systems of fixing our systems—requires both cognitive and behavioral psychology.

I'll start with the cognitive.

3. Identify Why Something That Seems Simple Isn't

We often cognitively beat ourselves up about why we don't solve simple problems, without recognizing that simple fixes aren't as straightforward as they seem. Here's what I tried next:

I realized I could get a timer for the spigot so it would automatically turn off. But every product I looked at had some bad reviews, and many of the positive reviews clearly seemed to be part of promotions and so couldn't be trusted.

I started to feel like buying a timer was a minefield of opportunities to make the wrong decision and create future to-dos for myself, perhaps because the device would break after one season, which was what some of the reviews mentioned. Since I'd just done something "dumb," I wasn't in the mood to do another.

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I also tend to indulge in scope creep—thinking that I shouldn't just solve this problem; I should have a more robust system for automatically filling the pool, including when we're out of town. In this way, I make a problem harder to solve.

4. Understand the Limits of Habit Tricks

When the search for a timer proved frustrating, I again scanned my mental library of behavioral psychology strategies, like linking the habit to another one that would ensure not forgetting.

Examples of what I considered but ruled out:

Only putting the hose on when I put the washing machine on, so I'd hear the water running when I got the laundry out of the machine (which is near the tap). But that won't work as a solution because I regularly forget about the laundry too.

Linking it to another activity of roughly the same length, like putting the hose on when I start cooking pasta and turning it off when I turn the pasta off.

Having a consistent routine, but when the water needs topping up varies.

I know a lot of behavioral psychology techniques to help create disciplined routines, and if you're a regular reader here, you probably do too. Still, none adequately met me where I was in this scenario.

5. If You're Tempted to Do Nothing, Eliminate the Worst Option

When ideas we've heard for better self-regulation seem like they should work, but don't, it can be tempting to throw up our hands and do nothing. That can be a valid choice if you've got other priorities. But here's a mental model I like to use in this scenario:

A lot of the value of careful decision-making comes from eliminating the worst option.

In my case, the worst option was to keep trying strategies involving better routines. The better choice was to try a timer and see if that worked, without expecting that it necessarily would. A simple timer would at least move the process of solving the problem along, and hopefully help prevent a situation like accidentally leaving the hose on overnight.

Simple Systems Are More Fragile Than They Appear

Systems to prevent and fix unforced errors tend to have more friction than anticipated.

Our attempts to create robust systems can trigger self-sabotage in understandable ways, e.g., we'd rather develop a comprehensive system than a piecemeal one, although that's harder.

Error rates rise when we're distracted, tired, or stressed. All the behavioral psychology tricks you've heard before tend to be much more fragile in real life than they're marketed to be.

When you feel like you're failing, one approach is simply to eliminate the worst option, and become more tolerant of iterative improvement—developing a better system over time, not all at once.

Routines and habit stacks become most fragile when we're most fragile. Whenever possible, create systems that don't rely on them.

© Psychology Today