Having a system is the foundation of taking action of your plan and is the fifth step. By designing your behaviors, matching your identity, creating systems, and doing what works for you is how you’ll take systemized action.
Luckily, this page contains the best ideas & top research on how create a system. We will break down the science between creating sustainable systems. Whether you’re looking to become more systematic on how you take coherent action from a plan, this page should cover everything you need to know.
I. Designing Behaviors: Your Desired Behaviors
II. Matching Your Identity: Behaviors That Match Your Identity
III. Creating Systems: Small Changes Will Change Everything
IV: Do What Works: Your Preferred Way
I. Designing Behaviors: Your Desired Behaviors
By designing your behaviors, you’re designing a system for how you take action. Your behaviors shape your action and allow you to achieve more each day through motivation, ability, and triggers.
Motivation Is Motion
Motivation is unreliable. We believe that motivation will come to us when we most need it, but the reality is that it doesn’t. Your motivation is your desire to do a specific behavior. You either want to take action already, have pain or pleasure for taking / not taking action, or you’re in a context / environment that makes you take action.
Your motivation will fluctuate. You’ll ride a wave of having big spikes of motivation, and no motivation at all. We cannot rely on motivation alone to design the behaviors for long-term change. Rather we can ride the highs of motivation, and fall back to our systems when there’s no motivation at all.
Having The Ability
Ability is reliable. When a behavior is easy to do, it’s easier for us to do without the need of motivation. This typically means that a behavior should be small and easy. Your ability is typically limited to your time, money, physical effort, mental effort, and routine. Not having ability in any one of these categories can limit your ability to do behavior.
Your ability will stabilize. As you continue to repeat a behavior, the behavior becomes easier for you. As you make a behavior smaller, it becomes easier to do. Lastly, as you get more tools and resources, your ability is stable.
The Power of Prompts
Motivation and Ability live on a continuum. Your prompts however are binary; you either notice a prompt or you don’t. A prompt is the moment in which we do a behavior or not. You may have a prompt from your person such as being hungry or thirsty. You may have a prompt from a context / environment such as brushing your teeth in the bathroom. You may even have a prompt from an existing behavior that prompts you to engage in a different behavior.
There is power in prompts that leverage your existing behaviors which you can anchor new behaviors on. These are already established behaviors that you can engage into a new behavior when you’ve completed the previous one. Stacking your behaviors will design your ideal behaviors to be reliable and easy.
II. Matching Your Identity: Behaviors That Match Your Identity
Your behaviors shape your future identity. Each behavior that you design is a future vote towards it. By designing your behaviors to match your future identity, you are instilling the process and outcomes to take a single step towards it everyday.
Shaping Your Identity
To become the type of person you want to be, you have to shape a system around a new identity. You have to start thinking about the types of behaviors this new identity has. Each behavior becomes part of the ultimate identity.
Ask yourself questions like “What would this type of person be doing right now?”, “How might this type of person act in this situation?”, “What type of cereal does this person eat?”. The possibilities are endless. Find behaviors to your future identity and embrace them.
A Vote Towards Your Future Identity
Each behavior that you take part in is a vote towards your future identity. If you believed that your future identity enjoys going on morning runs before work, then you should start running in the morning.
When you encounter a behavior that is detrimental to your future identity, you will realize that it is subtractive in nature. These are behaviors that you want to eliminate or replace entirely with another that would make sense in your future identity.
Living In The Future
Now that you’ve shaped and started acting upon your future identity, you simply have to just do by living in the future. Each repetition of a behavior that suits future you is one step closer to realizing your future identity.
Live the life that future you would. Start to embrace the future life that you’ll live in by thinking in terms of your new identity. Would future you watch TV until you needed to go to bed for work next morning? Or would future you be reading or creating a future where you work for yourself?
III. Creating Systems: Small Changes Will Change Everything
Your system is a collection of actions & behaviors that make your future identity a reality. Focusing on the system is optimizing your execution plan of getting what matters done. Designing and iterating to improve your system will make any vision possible.
Obvious and Attractive
When your behaviors are obvious to you, they are obvious to do. Your behaviors should make sense in terms of when they happen (time) and where they happen (location). Your behaviors should work for you, not against you. Grouping your behaviors to happen at similar times or locations helps you do just that.
Having behaviors that are attractive will make you want to do them. Your behaviors today should help define what your normal desired behavior should be. You can pair unattractive behaviors with attractive behaviors to help you do just that. Otherwise, you can find ways to reward yourself for behaviors that aren’t attractive.
Easy and Satisfying
Making your behaviors easy will ensure you take action. You can do this by reducing any friction your behavior may have today to make it frictionless. You can also prime your environment by preparing future actions to be easier to do. If you find a behavior that can be automated, invest some time or technology into locking in that desired behavior.
For each behavior that is satisfying to you, the more likely you’ll do it again. You can use rewards to help make each behavior satisfying after you complete it. If you’re a more visual person, you can use a habit tracker or calendar to show you each time you successfully complete a behavior.
Starting Small
Starting with the smallest behavior and gradually increasing the difficulty is how you’ll sustain a system for many years to come. Taking on too much behavior change at a time can be overwhelming and lead to inaction.
Your small changes will change everything overtime. Some of your behaviors will grow, and some will multiply. When you feel successful at something even if it’s small, your confidence and motivation will grow with it. This will create enough momentum to do just about anything.
IV: Do What Works: Your Preferred Way
There are many behaviors that have significant impact and opportunity to drive our lives forward. There are also many ideas and tools that may have an impact that we haven’t tried out yet. This shouldn’t distract you from doing what works.
What Works For You
What works for you may not work for someone else. The way you do things is unique to how others do things. You should be doing what works for you as only you know best what ultimately will work to obtain your desired behavior.
Even if the thing that works for you is boring, we have to be focused to stick to what we know will work regardless of the circumstance. If you do something in a particular way that others may believe is weird, you should embrace it.
Embracing Weird
Your normal may be someone’s weird. Someone’s weird may be your normal. Regardless of what it is, embrace what you know is tried and true. Don’t worry about being conventional or orthodox. Challenge the status quo as there is always a better way to do something.
Explore the many ways your desired behavior is done and help it shape your ultimate behavior. You’re the judge of whether certain things will stick for you, or whether they are overhyped in getting the results you’re after.
Consistency Over Missing
When you focus on consistency, you’re always making progress. Missing once occasionally is perfectly human, but missing twice in a row is setting yourself up for failure. Avoid loses as much as possible.
Each day that you put your repetition into your behavior, the stronger of a foundation that behavior will have. You may not be able to control or predict when you miss a repetition, but you can make it happen when you can.