bones?

Have you seen Noodle? Not the food, and he’s not a Wordle-like game either. Noodle was a pug; who got famous in 2021 on TikTok because of his bones.

Well, kind of.

Every single day, his owner, Jonathan Graziano , would stand this very very old dog up. If he managed to stay on his legs, then the day would be a bones day, and if not, a no bones day. See a very cute example of no bones and one bone day that is a bit of a close call . Bones day are for work, they’re for productivity and doing hard things. It’s a bones day, try the important thing you’ve been putting off! No bones days, on the other hand, are for self-care. Give yourself a break, call a friend, take a bath.

I sadly never experienced the full fervor of the No Bones game, as Jon called it, but his TikTok page has (at the time of writing) 120 million likes over more than two billion views. You can see the effect it has on people still, in the comments:

And it seems to actually work too!

That is fascinating to me, perhaps to a degree because I hope it could work on me too. Neil Dangull - in applied cognitive psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University in England - when talking to CNN Health , said:

“Life is full of uncertainty and Noodle’s actions provide a form of guidance and reassurance to some people.

CNN likens it to a morning horoscope, a nice narrative. But I don’t think that actually addresses the whole phenomenon. To understand better, try to imagine yourself back in 2020 (sorry). Everybody is at home, you are working remotely, the lines between working and not working are fading ever so slowly. Now you can work anytime! What’s your excuse in not working then?

Everybody had to learn to manage some sort of a work-life balance, a healthy one or not. Everyone had to learn to manage their time, split it between all the things in a day. Some people managed it by trying to keep it as similar as possible to how it was before. They got up when they always did, got dressed, walked around their house for however long their commute usually took. They then got back, sat in their work clothes and worked the same hours they always did. It worked, to a degree. They couldn’t stop the work from trying to find a way into their off hours. An urgent email, a call from their boss. It was frustrating!

And some people, sat in their pajamas, starting work while having breakfast, pouring crumbs all over the keyboard. We all had our pandemic journeys, okay? I was trying my best.

After a while, we all saw that we need to actively take time off. We need to allow ourselves to rest, because we always could be working. We needed to recognise that we need the rest. And maybe that wasn’t that hard. But then you needed to choose to take that time. You needed to ignore the “but you already took a day off this month!” and “what if I won’t get back to my routine if I don’t do it today?” and “maybe tomorrow?”. Rest became something you could put off.

Enter Noodle. He could allow you to rest. You don’t need to think about it, today is just a no bones day. You don’t need to force yourself to get up every single day, today is a bones day, so please try, but tomorrow could be a no bones day! You will get to rest, and you don’t need to allow yourself to rest, or make yourself work, Noodle will do that for you.

To be absolutely clear, I think this is a good thing! CNN’s comparison to horoscopes, and their entire article, is meant to be a jab, as in, “look at this silly thing these idiots are into!”. But here’s the thing, yes, it might be silly, but I can prove that it is actually useful.

Ego depletion and Decision Fatigue

Ego depletion is psychological hypothesis, stating that our ego or self - the conscious, aware and controlling part of us - is a limited resource. More clearly, it hypothesizes that the part of us that controls our behavior can get tired, and any act from it - making a choice, not buying a tub of ice-cream - leads to subsequent ones being less effective and strong. A subset of ego depletion is decision fatigue, simply saying that making an active choice uses a resource, and making too many decisions before renewing that resource can lead to just running out of it, allowing the next choice to be really bad as you just don’t have what it takes to make a good call anymore.

It might not be completely correct, but for the sake of simplicity, I propose that we call that resource self-control. So now, self-control is not a quality of a person, it’s a resource everyone has. Now, not having self-control is not a problem you have in general, it’s a result of using up that resource too quickly. Or not having enough of it, but I won’t explore that option here.

There are many studies supporting this worldview. I will go through some studies in the References and talk a bit more in detail about them. But accepting this concept means accepting that we have a limited number of effective decisions per day. There are ways to cope with this, mainly being aware of it and planning around it seems to work to a degree. Make a list before you go grocery shopping, so you don’t have to spend some of that precious self-control on not buying ice-cream or deciding whether you need more eggs. Meal plan. Take breaks. Maybe don’t go shopping for clothes on the same day that you have to make an important work decision.

The reason I bring it up is that everyday, the first decision you have to make is how you want to spend it. In a traditional work schedule, you don’t get much of a call on this, you have to be at work around nine if it’s a work day, and sleep in if it’s not. But in our transformed schedules, where you can work anytime and anywhere, you have to make that call every single day. And if you work too much, or if you take a break that you feel like you don’t deserve, it can have big emotional consequences.

Enter Noodle. He’s too tired to stand up on his own, and the decision is made for you. You don’t need to spend some of your limited resources to do it.

Is it silly? Yes. Is it effective? Scientifically yes.

Problems

At this point it does feel like Noodle has solved all of our problems. We can just arrange our days based on him and move on. But sadly, that’s not the case. Unfortunately, the No Bones game is no longer happening since Noodle has passed away (I know, I’m sad too, but he was pretty old to begin with and I’m happy we got to share some of that time with him).

Additionally, there were some issues even when the game was running:

Even though there have been significant changes in our work schedule, there are still meetings that we can’t cancel, even if Noodle declared the day a no bones day. And on the other hand, I want to take my birthday off, thank you very much, no matter what Noodle says. But deviating from a tool like this can sometimes decrease the effectiveness of it considerably, that’s why Duo the owl spends the entire day pestering you to visit Duolingo. When the streak breaks, it becomes way harder to make yourself continue the routine.

Lastly, have you ever had some free time and couldn’t think of anything you wanted to do, watch or play? The moment that you have to work, all of the TV shows and video games rush back into your brain. I personally need to plan for my fun (ADHD, amiright?), so just erasing my To Do list on a no bones day does not work for me.

The Answer

I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t think I will ever feel like a real developer until I write my own productivity app. And this is my chance! I propose an app that can:

• Randomly call the day a bones/no bones day, based on a previously determined distribution,
• Has two different schedules, based on the type of the day,
• Gives you the opportunity to override the type of the day given some cost,
• Maybe? learn from your routines and behavior, suggest things that can make you feel better.

I’m currently calling it bones, because names are hard. And as of now, it is just a webpage that declares each day a bones or a no bones day, with a message from Noodle himself. I will be working on this project and updating you on my progress, and will take suggestions on the features as well!

And here’s a preview of that feature, it shows you the quality of the day every single day!

References

• Jonathan Graziano’s TikTok and Instagram .
• Disclaimer: I have no connection to him and this is just a personal project, I just think that No Bones is neat.
• Disclaimer II: I caught at least 4 different instances of me misspelling TikTok before I published this, if there are any more please ignore them, I am an old.
• Disclaimer III: I am not a psychologist, just an enthusiastic rabbit-role diver. Anything here is my opinion and could be wrong, and I’ve linked to any sources that I’ve used.
• As far as I know, this is one of the first papers on Ego Depletion. Their experiment specifically focuses on impulse control, it’s a nice read!
• Healthline has a nice article on decision fatigue.
• This article by Olivia Ma on Medium is very well written and has mentioned a lot of good resources.
• And this one on Ness Labs.
• The famous paper that says hungry and tired judges are more harsh, independent of the actual seriousness of the crime.
• Caveat: Ego depletion is a Freudian idea, and many of those Freudian ideas are… not good. But I think it’s important to look at everything and decide for ourselves if we want to adopt it into our worldview, and I personally like this one.
• Caveat II: Something like ego depletion is hard to test and control for, so many studies on it have been criticized for not being replicable. Or when they are, they don’t produce the same results. This paper is one of the best results that I found that states that for now, the evidence is inconclusive. I don’t want this to be misleading, and that is why I introduced Ego Depletion as a hypothesis.
• Caveat III: This paper . This study suggests that while ego depletion is real, it’s more real for people that believe in it. So to a degree, it may be a self fulfilling prophecy.
• Caveats to caveat III: I think that paper shows that belief is a factor in this discussion, and not entirely the solution. Also, it is short term, with not that big of a sample size and focuses on glucose intake. I am by no means factoring it out, I’m just saying that I think it’s worthwhile to mitigate the number of decisions we make per day anyways. At the same time, I don’t want to encourage a worldview that might lower our self-control. Please keep in mind Disclaimer III above.
• Link to the Github repository of bones.
• Feel free to email me any suggestions!