Systemise Your Self-Improvement

One thing I see many people struggle with when trying to self-improve is figuring out how to stick with it for more than a week.

Most things people choose, like dieting, exercising or learning are quite uncomfortable and difficult, but when with the added frustration of adding these changes into their daily routines, it’s almost inevitable that they won’t see them through. 

These people tend to do these activities when it suits them best, they choose to do them when they feel like doing it the most but this is a losing strategy. 

By putting your ‘new self’ in the hands of motivation, you’ll find that once it runs out, quitting whatever it is you’ve chosen to do is the easiest thing in the world to do, and you’ll do it.

This is consciously improving, you’re thinking about it, you’re worrying about it, you’re questioning everything about it.

Creating Habits

The opposite of consciously improving is subconsciously improving, it is essentially doing the activities as though you do not have a choice, it’s doing them without questioning or really even thinking about them at.

This is turning your changes into habits.

If changing takes conscious effort, on top of the effort it already takes, you’re increasing the chances of overwhelming yourself.

The goal, when starting any change, is to turn it into a habit, by systemising your self-improvement, you can literally become better every single day, and not even think twice.

This way, you eliminate all unnecessary friction involved in making big lifestyle changes.

Systemising your improvement is not genius, it’s just being clever in terms of how you address change.

To give you an example, If my goal was to lose weight, I’d have to take three things into account, exercise, diet and sleep.

My first option would be to simply declare ‘I’m going to exercise 3 times a week, I’m going to eat much healthier and sleep a minimum of 7 hours’

Now, this would work, but only if this promise was kept. The problem is, that most people think declaring it and aiming towards it is enough.

The second option would be to think it all the way through and plan it. I could make the very same promise, but instead, I take it a step further and say ‘I will bulk buy a week's worth of healthy foods on Sunday mornings, I will exercise at 7 AM at the gym on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I will go lights off at 10 PM every single night with a 6 AM alarm clock every morning.

If two people were to tell you these two different versions of the same goal, who would you believe has the most chance of succeeding?

What To Do From Here

In the initial stages of making a change, it’s expected that you’re a little unorthodox with it, it’s new to you and it takes some time to figure out what it will really look like going forward.

For example, the foods you choose to eat and the exercise you choose to do will almost always change within the first two weeks. However, you should aim to systemise them as soon as you possibly can.

Today is my 415th-day streak of learning a lesson on Duolingo, this is because I systemised it by only doing it in the car when I turn up to work, I have almost lost the streak several times on the weekends as the routine is broken.

I’m lucky that there is very little friction to learning a quick lesson on my phone at some point during my days off (usually when I’m on the toilet), but imagine if it was something with more friction, like going for a run or going to the gym.

If you treat your changes like I treat my weekend language learning, you’re more likely to fail.

Avoid it by creating a system, another example is my supplement and book reading, they both come in the night before I watch a bit of TV, but every single night, when I first get into bed, these two things pop straight into my head. 

Set a place, set a time, and if you can, stack them. By systemising your self-improvement, you're habituating them, making it much more likely that you’ll stick to it for the long term, and isn’t that the whole point?

So the next time you decide to make a change or start improving, keep this in mind, it could be the difference between you quitting and becoming a completely different person.