This suggests that committing in advance to working at something for a specific amount of time—a time that reaches past that most challenging first stage—can be useful. Give it two weeks, thirty days, a fiscal year—whatever seems like a reasonable duration to test whether this new behavior might actually help. Whether you’re learning to sleep with a breathing machine to help your apnea, or learning to stop running the experiments themselves and start running the lab, you need to resist letting the dip of the curve erode your resolve.7
