9Hello there, friend!

Last time I wrote that an essential element of goal-setting is making "best guesses about the optimal sub-goals and their requirements". Thanks to Honza Veselý, I realized this was more compressed than I intended, so unpacking it is in order.

To reiterate – just setting a goal doesn't achieve anything, that's the easy part. The only purpose of goals is to motivate you and to inform your actions in the present.

From goals to repetition

However, for any but the simplest goals, the pivotal actions will be those you repeat.

For example, pursuing fitness goals often consists almost exclusively of establishing new habits and practices, from exercising to shopping.

Less cyclical pursuits like launching a new product might at first glance require a more varied set of tasks, but there will still be plenty of repetition found in the skills you'll be using.

And even a hypothetical project consisting purely of one-off tasks that each require a different skill would still involve recurring actions in the way you organize your work (e.g. prioritizing the tasks and monitoring progress).

All this to say – repetition is unavoidable.

From repetition to optimal performance

And because it's repeated, getting this part right is far more important than getting right what you only do once – both the errors and successes of recurring actions keep stacking up. 

That's why you need to ensure that you're repeating the right actions, in the right way.

But this means that repetition is your friend – if you repeat the action, you can get better at it. In fact, you can only get better at what you repeat.

The above implies that optimal performance consists of two main, mutually supportive aspects – consistency and continuous improvement.

The more consistent you are, the easier it is to get better, and the better you get, the easier it is to maintain consistency.

Today, we'll zero in on consistency and its four main building blocks: habits, practices, processes, and rules.

Habits & Practices

Habits are the tiny, largely automated and subconscious elements of what you do. They can be very potent triggers and nudges, setting off a whole chain reaction of behaviors – for better or worse.

Their automaticity makes them very trigger-dependent, which is why habits can be very liable to disruption when you find yourself in novel conditions.

This is what makes choosing the right trigger (i.e. the "thing" that prompts you to do the habit, which can itself be a habit) a key element of designing better habits.

What also follows from the automaticity of habits is that it doesn't really make sense to talk about something like working out or writing as habits, as it is impossible to get through them on total autopilot.

These longer, intentional, and often demanding activities are better thought of as practices.

They certainly have an important habitual component, which is why maintaining consistency in them gets easier with repetition, but this will only help you get started.

The capacity to actually follow through with the practice will often be something you need to build up gradually, with humility... and that's perfectly fine.

That's the point of a practice – to practice it and get better.

Remember, consistency is what you're after.

Here, the fact that practices are more deliberate can over time actually become an advantage – as you see yourself repeat them over and over, practices start shaping your identity, they start changing from what you do to who you are.

This then makes them much more resistant to disruption, as missing out on the practice would feel wrong, so you'll look for ways to fit them into your day even under unusual circumstances.

Processes

However, not all repetition is for the sake of getting better at something – oftentimes, you just need consistent results as efficiently as possible. That's what processes are for.

They are a set of steps that you ideally complete every time in the same way and in the same order.

How you save an article to read later should have a process.

How you onboard a new client should have a process.

Or how you run meetings.

By creating a standardized process, you decrease the cognitive load for performing the given action – you don't have to think about what to do, you just run the routine.

Of course, real consistency usually requires that the process be explicated in some form.

This can be a lot of work, but fortunately, processes are where you can get the most help from various tools (spotlight on Notion).

You see, explication doesn't have to mean writing down the steps or creating a flowchart – if you design your workspace right (or have someone like me do it for you), it can then remind you of steps in the process by making the best way the easiest one to follow.

Rules

Finally, rules are the via negativa of performance – they help you with consistency largely by telling you what not to do.

Where habits help you do the right thing through automaticity, practices through identity, and processes by standardization, rules focus on the elimination of distractions.

"No meetings before lunch."

"No social media before dinner."

"No fast carbs during the week."

By establishing clear boundaries, rules help you avoid having to decide all the time about whether something is acceptable or not.

This is also why it's easier to follow a rule 100% of the time than 99% of the time – if you allow any deviance, you reintroduce the need to assess if a given instance belongs to that 1% or not.

And this is why it's often beneficial to include "release valves", i.e. boundary conditions for the rule itself, as shown in all the examples above.

By leaving some space for whatever thing you're trying to downregulate, you assuage the voice in your head trying to convince you that you actually REALLY NEED THE THING!

"Yes, I do need it, but it's sufficient within these limits."

This way, you can follow the rule 100% of the time, while also indulging yourself in things like carbs and meetings.

Wrapping up

If you can establish the right habits, practices, processes, and rules for the goals you’re pursuing, both improvement and achievement are virtually guaranteed.

That said, without consciously designing for it, you'd still be leaving a lot of possible improvement on the table. Not the mention that figuring out all the right actions to repeat likely won’t happen immediately.

This is where reflection and designing for feedback come in. We’ll dig into that next time.

Reflection

Okay, this took way, WAAY longer to write than I expected or wanted, as you might have gathered from me not posting last week.

I’m still figuring out how to get through the stage where I’m just drowning in the chaos of my own thoughts faster.

I’m taking notes to self on how what I need to improve in writing all the time, and I’ll almost certainly write about it at some point, but here’s a preview for you, as a token of appreciation for reading the newsletter (I don’t post anything that’s in the Reflection section anywhere else):

Anyway, thanks so much for reading, please do let me know any suggestions, comments, or criticisms you might have, and I’ll see you here next time.

Take care

Chris