Life is full of people giving advice. You're literally reading some right now. Sometimes it's because we want to share what we've learnt, sometimes it's just to monetise an audience in whatever is the popular medium of the day. Sometimes it's both. This chapter isn't a treatise on the good and bad of all that, it simply needs you to bear in mind the existence of self-help techniques, systems, and so on.

I'm talking not so much about clever ways to cook meatballs (in a cardboard egg-carton to absorb the excess fat!) but more in terms of systems of organisation, project management, and things of that nature.

They can be big or small and this probably applies to all of them.

If you've not experienced what I'm about to describe then I'm glad for you. Keep up the good work and you can skip forward a few paragraphs.

Mostly I've observed this behaviour in friends and family. They learn of a new way to manage a problem they've had, try to make it work, struggle, attempt to reset and try again, and ultimately do something that contributes to poor mental health. I put it that way as the exact result varies but it's usually something like blaming themselves, tiring themselves out emotionally, or something else that doesn't end up helping anyone.

The classic example would be the new year's resolution. This year I will do thing. In most cases that doesn't really stick, does it? Not that it never does, just that it's common enough as to be an old cliché.

Anyway, enough waffle, let's explain the chapter's title. In situations like those - if it's clearly not working - stop trying to make it work.

This isn't a blank cheque to give up at the slightest difficulty. No, come on, you've got to give it a good go. Properly try. However if after doing that it doesn't work then you're just throwing good money after bad, so to speak. You were trying something new in the hope that it would improve your life in some way and not only are you not getting the desired result, you're also hurting yourself due to your unwillingness to accept that it's not working.

Instead reassess.

You don't need to dismiss the new arrangement outright but you can instead think of it as being incompatible with where you currently are in life. Maybe when you've made progress on other fronts it'll be worth reattempting.

Let's take a practical example. It's very mundane but illustrates the principle nicely.

My Jenny would be on the sofa at the end of the day and peel off her socks, dropping them on the floor. She'd mean to put them in the laundry basket later but invariably she would fail to do so. There'd regularly be two or three pairs of socks on the floor. Oh, and imagine that this living room is small as this takes place in Britain. The carpet would end up with a pile of grubby socks on it that would basically always be there.

Meanwhile we were trying to keep the house tidier. Riveting stuff, I know.

Anyway I asked her to pick up her socks a bit more often, several times. I know, I know, I could have done it myself but laundry was her remit just as cooking was mine. She agreed but it made no difference - within a few days the socks were back on the carpet.

This annoyed me a bit, mainly because it meant she hadn't done what she'd said she'd do. The socks themselves weren't that big a deal, it was more the principle really.

So what were my options?

I could do it myself - quietly letting the issue fester but treating the symptoms.

I could continue to nag her about it - probably damaging our relationship a bit and not getting the desired result anyway.

Or I could give up.

So I gave up. I decided that this was an issue that couldn't be fixed like this and so continuing to go down this path was unlikely to end in much happiness.

Instead we talked about it and decided to try something new. Instead we got a little canvas bag that would live where the pile of socks had lived. Now she'd pull off her socks and drop them into the little bag. They'd then live there until she did a round of laundry, at which point she'd grab that bag too and add the contents to the main laundry basket.

We use this system to this day and I'd be lying if I said that I've not sometimes thrown my own socks into it.

The point being that we didn't see any positive outcomes to continuing to bang our heads against the issue. She wasn't failing to tidy them up out of malice - she has her own issues related to prioritisation and task-switching. She'd mean to do it but then it'd be the end of the day and she'd not have done it. She'd then feel bad about it but not have the mental resources to do anything to break the cycle.

Another example - an old friend of mine with chronic fatigue had it drilled into him that responsible adults keep regular hours. To be asleep during the day was a moral failing of some sort. I don't mean that he agreed with that concept but that part of him had been taught to feel bad if he strayed from it. He spent literal years battling his body's inability to keep the hours he felt he should. At least once a month we'd hear him tell us that he was attempting to stay up in order to reset his circadian rhythm. Unsurprisingly it never worked.

The only result was that he felt worse and worse about himself.

He's not doing massively better now, I'm sorry to say, but that was always what was in the cards. What has improved is that he's accepted that his disability isn't a moral failing. He's got plenty of other things to torture himself about but it's not quite as bad as it was and that's always a positive step.

Perhaps you'd like to hear about a more practical example too. This one will be fairly brief as I suspect I'll be talking about it elsewhere in the book for other reasons anyway.

Essentially if I have more than a couple of projects on my workbench I'll struggle to choose one. I've tried various things to break this struggle but I've not found any that work for me (or at least, don't work for my current circumstances). Eventually I gave up trying to get through and decided it wasn't something that could be fixed this way. Instead I banished all other projects from the house and made the rule that there should never be more than one project on the bench. I sometimes bend this rule a bit but broadly speaking it works.

Don't waste the little energy you have torturing yourself for failing to make a routine or system work. It doesn't help anyone accomplish anything - instead it just wears you down.

Sometimes I think of this in terms of Boxer, the horse from George Orwell's Animal Farm. If you've not read it and want a fun, if bleak, allegory on the origins of the Soviet Union I'd recommend it. There's also film adaptations if you're into that but the book itself is pretty short (about 50 A4 pages, 30,000 words or so).

Anyway Boxer has a motto in the book - "I will work harder". Whatever the problem is, that's his solution. Without spoiling the story you can imagine, given this chapter's subject material, that this isn't a productive solution to all problems!

Before we close out the chapter I'd also like to really hammer home that this isn't about giving up at the first sign of difficulty. You need to properly try to make the system you're trying work. What that means exactly is going to depend on your personal circumstances so I can't give a hard and fast rule for it. More to the point it's going to depend on how much effort you have available. For some things I can keep plugging away for weeks, other times two attempts and I'm done.

When you do choose to give up you should reflect on why that is. Sometimes the answer is obvious - for example it might be too big a change too quickly (you're not going to run a marathon tomorrow if you get winded running down the street today). Other times though it's more complicated and learning what stopped you can be very informative for future attempts.

Going back to the sock thing - it's not because she was too physically tired to do more. She wasn't drowning in abundant energy but it wasn't the main limiting factor. It was more like trying to keep far too many plates spinning. Asking more of her just wasn't going to work.

This knowledge has really helped inform us when experimenting with other solutions. Something that takes physical effort isn't necessarily problematic but if there's a large mental overhead it's very unlikely to work.

Additionally this helps inform us about potential areas to work on to improve things more broadly. Why was she taking on too many tasks? We then started to explore that and worked on finding ways to address the underlying causes of that. That's more of a journey though and going into the specifics would take a whole book in and of itself (and ultimately not be all that interesting to you). Also let's be clear - I have a very similar problem that I'm working on too. It's one of the reasons we get along so well!