Elimination, Delegation, Automation

If habits are hard to build because of either insufficient motivation or ability, it would follow that the easiest approach would be to make it where you don’t have to do anything at all.

There are three ways to do this.

Elimination

The first is to ask yourself if you need to do it at all. Dwight Eisenhower was famous (among other things) for coining the important/urgent rubric. The idea was if something was neither important or urgent, you can eliminate it altogether.

An example of this would be creating the habit of organizing your emails using labels or folders. It’s not urgent, and it’s debatable how important it is now that email search is pretty solid. You can delete or archive most of your email without issue.

Delegation

Second, you can ask yourself if you need to be the one doing it. We talked a bit about this last week with your Waiting For list as part of your task management system. But just as you can delegate individual tasks or projects, you can also delegate repeatable tasks.

Employees, advisors, and personal assistants (in person or remote) can all be avenues to explore here. The examples are many and varied, but some examples using some of the ideas we’ve discussed in previous weeks:

• Health: delegate the creation of your meal plans, you grocery shopping, and even your meal prep. You can also delegate the creation of your workout regimen, and use accountability as a tool to increase compliance.
• Money: delegate the maintenance of your budget, reconciling budgeted expenses to actual expenditures using your bank statements. Creating monthly personal income statements, etc.
• Relationships: delegate the maintenance of your Relationship Management system - updating and enriching contacts you want added, etc.

Of course, delegation replaces one set of habits with another. While delegation reduces your cognitive load and is better than trying to build the habit itself, effective delegation requires:

• Effectively communicating what needs to be done
• Documenting the way it should be done
• Following up to make sure it’s done
• Auditing the result to ensure it’s up to standard.

Automation

The third approach is automation. Automation doesn’t require anyone to do anything at all. Examples of automation include:

Finances

• If you’re on direct deposit, you can have your deposit split into multiple accounts. Set up a series of transfers to the appropriate saving and investing accounts, allowing you to hit your Income Allocation % before you have a chance to spend it.

Home

• Automate the recurring order of various items for home maintenance (air filters, light bulbs, etc.)
• Copy Google Calendar events from your personal calendar to your work calendar, with buffer on either side.
• Automate a checklist in your task manager based on date -for example, when you add a flight to your Google Calendar, it can queue up your flight checklist in your Task Management tool a couple days prior.

Automation doesn’t have to mean software. To ensure that we did our weekly date night consistently, we set up an “automation” for our sitter to just show up every single week at 7pm. Sometimes we had forgotten that we had a date until we showed up. But we’d throw our jackets on and head out anyway.

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