Why stop at one hour? Why can’t we string one hour into another and then another so that self-testing for an entire day becomes our structure?

In any situation we can live in one of three dimensions: past, present, or future. When we commit to being miserable in a dull meeting, we’re doing one of two things, neither good:

1. We’re wallowing in the past, remembering with regret and frustration all the previous boring meetings we’ve attended, or

2. We’re thinking about the future, muddling through the meeting with impatience or misguided longing for whatever’s next.

When we know we’ll be tested—even if it’s just pretend—we’re forcing ourselves to live in the present. We’re alert, aware, and mindful of our behavior and everyone else’s, because we sense that in the very immediate future we will have to account for our actions. The present is the ideal place to be. This is where we shape ourselves into a better person. We can’t do it in the past; that’s gone. We can’t do it in a future that exists only in our minds, where the people who matter have yet to arrive. We can only do it in the moment.

Adapting Daily Questions into Hourly Questions creates a powerful structure for locating ourselves in the moment.

Remember Griffin with the Clinking Cubes Problem from Chapter 12? A year after he solved that problem, Griffin came to me with another issue. Griffin lived in New York City but owned a weekend home in a lake community in New Hampshire, where over the years he and his wife had become good friends with several neighbors, all native New Englanders. On the rare occasions when these New Hampshire neighbors visited Manhattan, Griffin extended an open invitation to stay with him and his wife in their Upper West Side town house. Griffin’s three grown children were out of the house, so there was plenty of room for overnight visitors to stay without being bothersome. Griffin enjoyed being a magnanimous host—until an unforeseen issue arose. Here’s how Griffin explained it:

“In New Hampshire we socialize a lot with our neighbors. That’s what everyone does on the lake. So we looked forward to seeing them in New York. They’re hardy New Englanders, not city people. They don’t visit New York that often. But after the third couple stayed with us, it got to be tiresome taking them around, repeating the same tour of the city’s greatest hits: the Statue of Liberty, the 9/11 site and MoMA and the Museum of Natural History. We’d walk the High Line and Soho and Brooklyn, see a musical, eat at fancy restaurants. New York’s our home base, so when we go to a Broadway show or museum it’s because we want to, not because we’re in the big city for a few days and want to squeeze everything in. I got grumpy with the last visitors, not where it ruptured a friendship but enough for my wife to mention it.”

Another couple would soon be visiting Griffin for a three-day weekend and he was worried that as the visit stretched out, he’d ruin their time by betraying his real feelings. (In depletion terms, the effort of controlling himself would wear down his discipline—and he’d turn nasty.) He was frustrated with a situation of his own creation. The longer the guests stayed, the more the kind invitation he’d extended morphed into an intrusion. His situation was not much different than the prospect of the awful meeting. How do you transform an environment you dread into a positive experience?

Griffin was disciplined about self-testing. He believed in Daily Questions.

“Turn daily into hourly,” I said. “When your New Hampshire friends are with you, test how you’re holding up every hour with a few pointed questions.”

“Only one question matters,” he said. “Did I do my best to enjoy my friends?”

When the friends appeared, Griffin was ready. His Hourly Question provided a structure to guide his behavior, keep him on point. Thus, as he jostled with crowds at a trendy pizzeria in Bushwick or waited in line at the American Museum of Natural History Hayden Planetarium for the third time in six months, Griffin’s smartphone, which he had set to vibrate at the top of the hour, reminded him to ponder the simple question, Am I doing my best to enjoy my friends? This continued throughout the day. He could either pass the hourly test or fail. Here’s his report on a ten-hour day touring New York City:

“I expected it would be like a marathon. I’d pace myself, starting out strong and barely standing at the finish line. That’s when the hourly questioning would save me—when I was really frustrated and hating the situation. That’s not what happened. After three or four hours, I got stronger, not weaker. The phone would vibrate, I’d review my behavior, congratulate myself for doing well, and get on with it. By the end of the day, when I expected to be at my most curmudgeonly, I was on cruise control. It was a great day.”

Griffin’s story seems to defy the notion of depletion. But it makes sense to me. Knowing he’d be tested hourly—and wanting to do well—meant Griffin didn’t have a choice about enjoying himself (or else he’d fail a test he’d written!). The structure took being a curmudgeon out of the mix. No choice, no discipline required, no depletion.

One other thing: when we decide to behave well and our first steps are successful, we often achieve a self-fulfilling momentum—Griffin called it “cruise control”—where we don’t have to try as hard to be good. Like getting through the first four days of a strict diet, if we can handle the initial stages of inhibiting our undesirable impulses, we’re less likely to backslide. We don’t want to waste the gains of our behavioral investment. Good behavior becomes the sunk cost we hate to sacrifice.

Can it be that simple? Evidently yes. The simpler the structure, the more likely we’ll stick with it. And Hourly Questions are fairly simple, comprising a series of steps that segue so smoothly from one to the other we barely register them as discrete stages in the process.

1. Pre-awareness. Successful people are generally good at anticipating environments where their best behavior is at risk. They’re rarely ambushed by a tough negotiation, awful meeting, challenging confrontation. They know what they’re getting into before they walk into the room. For lack of a better term, I call it pre-mindfulness—that sense, like an athlete mentally gearing up in the locker room before heading out onto the field, that a hyperaware mindset will soon be required.

2. Commitment. Successful people aren’t wishy-washy about a course of action. Choosing Hourly Questions as a structure and articulating the specific questions is a commitment device—certainly better than hoping things will work out. It’s the difference between considering a goal and writing it down.

3. Awareness. We’re most vulnerable to our environment’s whims when we ignore its impact on us. Hourly Questions, impinging on our consciousness with precise regularity, neutralize the ignorance and make us vibrantly aware. We don’t have time to forget our situation or get distracted from our objective—because the next test is coming in sixty minutes.

4. Scoring. Grading our performance adds reflection to mindfulness. It’s a force multiplier for awareness. It’s one thing to do a task privately, another to do it while being watched by a supervisor. We’re more self-conscious when we’re being observed and judged—except now we are observing and judging ourselves.

5. Repetition. The best part of Hourly Questions is their rinse-and-repeat frequency. If we score poorly in one hourly segment, we get a chance to do better an hour later. A behavioral mulligan is built into the structure.

Hourly Questions have a specific short-term utility. It would be impractical and exhausting—and no doubt depleting—to rely on them for long-term behavioral challenges such as rebranding yourself as a nicer person. Despite the acute self-awareness that being nice requires, daily and weekly checkups are more than enough for a goal that rewards persistence and consistency. You answer your Daily Questions each night and gradually reap the benefit many months later. It’s not an overnight religious conversion. You’re playing a long game.

Hourly Questions are for the short game—when we require a burst of discipline to restrain our behavioral impulses for a defined period of time. Two universal situations come to mind:

There’s the dreaded event—not just an awful meeting or weekend with houseguests but any environment where our inherent pessimism going in can trigger our careless unappealing behavior during the event. It could be the contrived camaraderie of a company retreat, or a tense Thanksgiving with the extended family, or a disappointing parent-teacher conference at a child’s school. If we participate in these moments without a structure to discipline what we say and do, our pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; we’re crafting the unpleasantness we anticipated. Hourly Questions are one kind of structure to defuse pessimism. It’s our choice.

Then there are people—the ones who throw us off our game because of their personalities and actions. It could be the colleague with the high chirping voice, or the customer service representative repeating the same nonhelpful response in six different ways, or the pompous know-it-all on the local school board, or the supermarket shopper in front of you with twenty items in the ten-item express line. We’ve seen these people before. And yet we still allow them to unhinge us. In those brief moments when we are vulnerable to the obtuseness and intransigence of another human being, Hourly Questions can bring out a newfound restraint in us.

Here’s an irony: I don’t rely on Hourly Questions for dreaded events and annoying people. Quite the opposite. My challenge is dealing with events I’m really looking forward to and people I really enjoy.

Consider, for example, the prospect of dinner at a top-flight restaurant with ten of my favorite clients. I don’t know many people who would dread this event—and neither do I. My challenge in such an environment is a matter of excessive enjoyment and appetite control. Under the best of circumstances, I need help restraining myself around the temptations of the table (I’m not alone in this weakness). But in a festive atmosphere with terrific people, I’m even more vulnerable. The situation is custom-made for abandoned discipline and overindulgence. It takes place at the end of the day, when depletion is greatest. The food and drink are plentiful, creating opportunity. Everyone around me is in a jolly mood, which amps up my own jolliness and further reduces self-control. Life is good, I tell myself, so why not enjoy the moment and regret it later? It’s a combustible environment for me. I become living proof that we need help when we are least likely to get it.

This is where Hourly Questions come to the rescue. I know I’m vulnerable in these situations, so I arm myself with as much structure as I can think of. I tell myself that I won’t eat the wonderful dessert. Sometimes I make a pact with the person sitting next to me: neither of us will succumb to the temptation of dessert. Sometimes, like Odysseus putting wax in his sailors’ ears, I ask the waitstaff to ignore me if I attempt to order dessert. But the most important structural element remains: I test myself every hour with the question, Did I do my best to enjoy who is here rather than what is being served?

I don’t always grade out summa cum laude. Some evenings I eat the dessert anyway. But I don’t forget to test myself hourly, and doing so reminds me that I am not an unconscious victim of my environment. Whatever I do, I’m indulging in a conscious choice, with eyes wide open. Even when I give myself middling grades, that heightened awareness is a net gain. The more I rely on this kind of self-testing for acute situations, the stronger my awareness, until it’s a permanent part of who I am. That’s a meaningful and lasting change I can live with.