Read this if you’re having doubts about the method... if you're having a hard time staying motivated to stick with the daily process.

 

You buy a hyped-up productivity and time-management book. You vow to take it seriously—to implement the advice and follow the 30-day protocol to a T.

You crack it open feeling optimistic. Enthusiasm blooms as you read each inspiring word of the intro.

You reach the end of the first chapter. Time for those dreaded exercises they always put there. But you grit your teeth, determined to stay committed to completing them all.

Start by doing X, it says, which you do.

Now do Y, which you start, but stop half-way ‘cause it’s sorta weird and… ok, you get the point. 

Time now for Z… um… well … like you get why others might need to do Z, but you… yeah, you can skip that. It really doesn’t apply.

The exercises there are useless, really. Unessential. You figure that your time would be better spent moving on and taking action directed at your specific goals. No need to expend calories thinking of what you’d want your co-worker to say about you at your eulogy (or some other self-help type exercise).

You start up on the next chapter. The time-management and habit making type stuff is practical—that’s what you bought the book for—so you take a few mental notes. You end up skimming most of the exercises or “doing it in your head,” justifying it all with what feel like perfectly logical and valid reasons. 

You get through maybe two or three more chapters like this before your interest wanes—okay, sweet, I get the gist of the method, let’s put it to work—and you stop reading. 

Within a few days, the practices from the book start to feel more and more like the exercises: taxing, skippable for today, not applicable to me and my situation.

As the days go on, you continue to tweak and simplify and skip. Soon enough you’re back to your old ways with another half-read productivity book on a shelf destined to collect dust.

 

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That was me for the longest time.

This sort of thing didn’t just extend to implementing advice from books. This habit—my kneejerk mentality to reject any activity that felt “unessential”—permeated my entire existence.

Planning my day, for example, seemed like a needless chore. There was no need to go through with it: I had a mountain of work, I knew what to do, what to prioritize—so the thing to do was to get on with it and stop dilly dallying with schedulers, to-do lists, and fancy calendars. There certainly wasn’t time for vision boards, five-year-goal exercises, or whatever-the-heck-else. 

I kept insisting to myself that the cure to procrastination, and by extension, the solutions to all my life’s problems, was to just shut the heck up and effing take action already. Reflecting, organizing, planning etc. was the optional, nice-to-have part. The work was not.

Needless to say, it never played out as I wanted—and then I was hit with a massive realization.

It happened, oddly enough, as I nestled into my cozy bed, exhausted after a long day. I was just about to reach over and turn off the bedside lamp when I realized that I forgot to do my nightly stretches. 

In that moment, my brain flooded me with the usual reasons why I could and should put it off.

I’ll catch up tomorrow. I’m tired and need to prioritize sleep. I would mess up the sheets. I would disturb the dog. I sort-of did a half-stretch after lunch so I’m good…

On and on it went. In a word, doing my stretches was entirely “unessential” in my mind and thus justifiably skippable.

But something in me made me get up. I had this George Costanza moment where I realized that, up until that moment, I had always listened to that little voice in my head which would always lead to failure and regret… so maybe it was time to do the opposite of what that voice was saying.

I realized that, yeah ok, the key to staying consistent with my commitments… was to stay consistent with my commitments; but what was absolutely crucial was that I needed to do the thing even and especially when it felt trite, unnecessary, skippable. “Unessential” was just the opposite.

In fact, self-improvement is ALL about recognizing and seizing those moments. The moment when something feels unessential is, paradoxically, a giant neon sign telling you that THIS THING IS ESSENSTIAL.

The more you say eff-you to your instincts and that little voice to do the “unessential,” the better your life will be.

 

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One of the grizzly beasts we’re all fighting on our tireless quests to get disciplined and productive is complacency.

Complacency is the tendency to be overly confident. It’s what leads to that gut instinct to just skip parts of your routine and process. It has you thinking stuff like…

C'mon, I have a mountain of work to do. I got supervisors up the bum-bum, deadlines coming at me from all angles… the stakes could not be higher… there’s just no effing way I’d rationalize pulling up my phone and risk getting sucked into Reddit.

I don’t need to waste precious time and energy with the rigmarole of these routines and defenses.

Complacency is the opposite of being careful.

When you’re careful, you triple-check that the doors are locked—meaning you do the menial, repetitive, often irrational things to eliminate ANY risks, any doubt. You do your routine; you go through the motions, no matter what. You don’t just let things slide.

Complacency, on the other hand, has you assume all is well, that things will go as intended. But intentions, at the end of the day, have no substance. They have no weight to keep things under control.

This all stems from our egos. And egos are fragile. They won’t let us believe that we are flawed. Or maybe we are flawed, but it won’t let go of the idea that we have ability to “fix” things all on our own. So, we resist the idea that we need assistance, routines, and enforced boundaries. We don’t need training wheels, crutches and blinders to get our work done. When we're already behind and stressed and overwhelmed.... don’t need a bunch of rules to obey, protocols to follow, or a rigid schedule to dictate what we need to do and when.

We prefer to rely on intuition—on “motivation” and “inspiration,” on grit and resolve.

We rationalize this by saying that every second spent on unessential planning or prepping is a second not spent on our obligations and goals.

I mean, it makes sense. We all are under so much pressure. Our minds are constantly nagging us about how far behind we are on our work and on our dreams. We cling to this fantasy of sitting down, working for 16 hours straight, eight days in a row until we are finally all caught up.

Only then can we afford to do the “unessential.” Only then will we do what’s not urgent. Only then will we start to meditate, eat right, exercise, volunteer, make diligent use of a day-planner, or set up and read through our daily North Star Reminder.

But that’s not how it works. 

What feels unessential is in fact essential. What feels useless has its use—yet it’s just hidden to us in that point in time. In any election, a single vote is insignificant. But it’s the accumulation of votes that counts. And any accumulation requires that first one, and the next, and the next.

 

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I am not perfect. I have good days and bad days.

But one thing’s for sure: if I have a good day—especially in the context of my work sessions—it’s only because I carved out time to follow the protocols and mind the boundaries I set ahead of time, even when they felt unimportant or useless or like I had good reason to do otherwise.

That’s the key.

The day I pried myself out of bed—the coziest place on earth after a long hard day—to do my stupid useless annoying stretches that I could just do tomorrow and not effing die... was the day that the tide turned in my self-development.

I care about what’s proven to work, not what I assume would/should/could work.

I try to be smart in what I do. I try to optimize. I try to cut out what demonstrably shows a lack of benefits. But I also always make sure I do what feels unessential.

So should you.