Tactics Tuesdays: Tactics Timers

If you meet a girl or have a date, but you use a tactic too long or too many times, the tactic “inflates” – i.e., turns stale. How can you avoid stale tactics? By using a tactics timer.

This is a little technique I developed for myself to guard against inflation.

As a refresher: any time you use a certain tactic too long, it becomes 'inflated'. That is to say, you get predictable and things turn stale.

You can use this with any basic example. Imagine a guy talking to a girl who uses a good "That's what she said!" joke at an opportune time. The girl laughs. It's kind of cheesy, but also a little bit funny.

Three minutes later, he uses the exact same joke. Then another five minutes and he uses it again. Ten minutes after that, he tells her, "That's what she said!" yet again.

By this point, the joke is tired, stale, and inflated, and using it actually hurts the interaction because it feels like this guy has nothing else. He only has the few tricks he's been using, and while they might've felt fresh at first, that freshness is now long gone.

What are this guy's odds to hook up with the girl he's talking to? Not great, and getting lower by the minute. The more time he spends in inflation, the lower his odds become.

When you're learning, or you're rusty, you will tend to find yourself trapped in inflationary spirals at times. You'll realize you're getting boring, stale, and predictable... and then you can feel stuck.

You might start to panic a bit.

What can you do to escape, and salvage things with this girl?

The solution is to use tactics timers as a way to consciously avoid slipping into inflated interactions.