Reading Atomic Habits by James Clear persuaded me that discipline does not exist, at least not as a skill or talent that totally blocks temptation. Disciplined people are actually just experts at structuring their lives to make it easy to do the good and avoid the bad.
Example 1: if you keep a bowl of chocolates on your kitchen bench, you might finish it in 2 days, with those empty calories transformed into body fat. A clear jar with a lid might take 4 days, because of the slight friction of opening it. An opaque jar, 10 days, from less visual stimulus. A jar inside a cupboard, 20 days. Store the jar in your garage and only bring it out for parties, and the loss to mindless snacking approaches zero. "Disciplined" people know it's better not to rely on willpower, and that out of sight is out of mind.
Example 2: you want to go to the gym every morning, yet after an initial burst of training you struggle to get out of bed and start hitting snooze instead. Instead of trying to white-knuckle your way through, make it easy to go to the gym and hard to stay in bed. Leave your charger and phone on the dresser overnight so it's harder to scroll in bed and you have physically get up to stop the alarm. Before bed, put your work clothes in the car, and put on your gym clothes or leave them out and ready. Come morning, it's smooth and simple to roll out of bed, drive to the gym, work out, shower, get into work clothes, go to work. It would be a chore to go get work clothes, bring them in, change, put away gym clothes. You sign up for a class, put down money, make friends to compete with, and post about it on Strava to get juicy social media dopamine reinforcement. You have made it easy and rewarding to do the right thing and weird and annoying to do otherwise.
Sounds great, but what if you don't know how to set goals, and need some pushing to stick to the project of restructuring your life? Here's where a goals group can help.
Goals groups are 3 or 4 people who meet to hold each other accountable. Any more and the meeting gets too long. They must be people you can be totally honest with, about sensitive issues, from your mental health to your relationship troubles to your wildest dreams. They have to be comfortable calling out your bullshit excuses and vice versa.
Start by setting goals over 5 years, 1 year, and 3 months. Goals should be SMART: specific, measureable, achieveable, relevant, and timely. Dumb goal: get super fit. SMART goal: run 5k in under 25 minutes by July. To identify goals, you can write out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis). You can write headings like fitness, nutrition, finances, social, educational, work, psychological, moral, spiritual and brainstorm ideas in each. You can write down everything you do in a typical day and look for the good and bad - James Clear style Habit Scorecard.
You write down your goals the night before the first meeting and post them to a Facebook group or private blog. At your first meeting you take turns reading your goals. You give feedback to keep them SMART. You each pick a quarterly goal to focus on for the next 3 months. This should be an outcome goal (run 5k in <25 minutes by July) and attached process goals (run 5k >=4 times/week, tracked on Strava so others can check and provide positive reinforcement). It's easy to tend towards fitness goals because they're easily quantified, but with some creativity you can do anything:
- Bench press your bodyweight via 4x weight sessions a week
- Improve sleep score to >80 by sleep hygiene, regular hours, melatonin
- Cut alcohol to once a week via removing stores from the house and avoiding boozy parties
- Waist measurement below 80cm via 10% calorie deficit on My Fitness Pal
- 10 minute meditation daily via app with streak-counting and reminder notifications
- Write two blog posts weekly via 20 minutes writing a day
- Reduce social media use to <1h / day via app blocker
- Save 10k by Christmas via budget app
- Make 2 new friends via calling once a week, seeing once a month
- Achieve intermediate Spanish via 4x Duolingo lessons/day
- Read one book a week via 30 minutes bedtime reading
- Quit smoking via NRT and self-determined rules
The group then meets once a week at a regular time. Can be virtual. The night before you post on your goal progress. In the meeting you read this out and the team reinforces your successes, calls out excuses, and helps you figure out how to structure your life for better adherence. Why haven't you run? Haven't been getting up early enough? Why not? Tried the distant alarm trick? Getting to bed too late? Why? Tried setting a bedtime? Tried blocking Instagram past 9pm? Tried melatonin at 7pm to get sleepiness on your side by 9pm? etc.
Soon enough you anticipate this and start calling out your own excuses and structuring yourself so you don't have to write an embarrassing report. But the group is still there to hold you accountable.
Ideally, track goals in an excel spreadsheet. Conditional formatting can automatically colour in your entries to give you a clear red light (bad fail), yellow light (near miss), green light (success) indicator on your weekly goals.
Every quarter you have a special meeting to report on the final outcome of your goals. Evaluate how successful your goals were, what methods worked and didn't, and whether the gains were valuable and if/how you intend to keep the new habits. Set new goals. Some can be carried over from last quarter. Could also include novel goals, or ones taken from from the 5 year/1 year goals you brainstormed last time, which you can also revise.
There's many variations. The above is just what my group does. We have also become dear friends and supports in other ways. We often add a weekly life update of non-goal material to our post. We sometimes set multiple goals, or carry one over to the next quarter, or finish a goal partway through a quarter. What matters is that the group examines any change, ensures it is well thought-out and not impulsive, and makes a joint decision.
Do you want to be the designer of your life, or just a consumer? If the former, read Atomic Habits, and also The Elephants by Nick Crocker, the blog post from which we stole this idea.
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