How to be consistent
Systems for creating long-term accountability
When you start working on a long-term goal, you generally have a rush of excitement and motivation that gives you the energy to take immediate action. However, as you well know, that excitement doesn’t last. With time, your energy fades, life throws challenges at you, and you eventually let go of your goal.
That is unless you establish a system to maintain consistency. Something that will persistently remind you, like a crying baby, when you start neglecting your goal. This article will help you do that. It's broken into four sections, which you can skip to based on your interest:
Theory - why it's so difficult to remain consistent
Tactics - simple systems that force consistency
Template - my comprehensive consistency system
Technology - ready-to-use accountability platforms
Theory - why it’s so difficult to remain consistent
Long-term goals don't happen by accident. If you've read the first four articles in this series, you will have hopefully internalized that point. Our psychology isn't designed to achieve long-term goals. Our bodies and brains have evolved to respond to basic instincts that motivate us to avoid death, reproduce, and not much else. We almost always respond to what feels most urgent in the moment and neglect anything with payoffs in the distant future. Given this reality, we shouldn't expect to achieve long-term goals without very intentional effort. Achieving long-term goals requires systems that help us overcome the force of our own minds.
You can't change how your mind works to consistently feel motivated to forgo short-term pleasure in pursuit of a long-term goal. However, sometimes our short-term impulses align with long-term goals. Babies are an example of this. When they are unhappy, they scream and cry. The sound of a crying baby feels very urgent, so we respond. We don't have to put in effort to feel motivated to stop a baby from crying because it is more painful to sit and listen to the heartbreaking screech. But if you respond to the screech of a child for a few years, before you know it, your baby has grown into an adult, and you have achieved one of life's most significant long-term goals.
Unsurprisingly, when you ask people about their most significant accomplishments, they say raising their children. It's one of the few important goals that literally screams at you when you neglect it. The problem is that most of life's important goals never scream at us. Writing a book, training for a marathon, or spending time with our aging parents never feels urgent, so we inevitably neglect them in favor of things that are screaming at us, literally and metaphorically.
However, it is possible to intentionally establish systems that act like babies—systems that make important goals feel more urgent day-to-day. Over the last five years, I have slowly manipulated my environments to make important, non-urgent things scream at me (i.e., feel urgent). That has allowed me to accomplish several things I am proud of, such as running a marathon, building a mobile app, and writing this article series.
The primary mechanism that I use to make important things feel urgent is social accountability. I don't like to let people down or not follow through on my word. I use that to motivate myself on big tasks and small tasks. For example, for some very small tasks that I procrastinate, like sending awkward emails, I often tell my wife, "At 4 pm, can you check in with me and make sure I have sent this email?" The pain of telling her I procrastinated sending the email for the entire afternoon outweighs the discomfort of writing it, so I eventually get it done. This simple tactic works for discrete tasks; however, long-term goals require a more robust system.
The following section outlines how you can practically implement this idea. It describes a series of systems you can implement to ensure you remain committed to your goals in the long run.
Tactics - simple systems that force consistency
Seven core tactics have helped me maintain consistency when working on long-term goals. You can use each tactic individually or combine them. The section that follows explains how I have combined them into my "consistency mega system."
You might find my system overwhelming or more than you want to try. If that's the case, I recommend starting by trying one or two of the tactics on their own. So, the next time you feel motivated to work on an important goal, consider implementing one of these tactics instead of immediately starting a discrete task. It will help you stay consistent regardless of how you feel.
Make it a shared goal
It's easier to maintain consistency when others are depending on you. If you can find someone who shares your goal, the best thing you can do is team up.
In high school, I was a good but not a great student. I was in the 80th percentile for grades in my state. In university, I became a great student. I moved to the 99th percentile, completed my undergraduate degree with first-class honors, and went on to complete a combined master's and PhD. On reflection, the primary thing that changed was my approach to studying. I stopped going at it alone.
In my first year at university, I used a surge of motivation to set up a study group with a few friends. I would meet with my group several times each week to systematically study the lecture material. Without making it explicit, we all held each other accountable. If one of us didn't show up, we would call each other or reschedule the study session so that we could all stay on the same page.
It’s worth thinking about your goal and if anyone else shares a similar goal. If you can team up with others, you are significantly more likely to stick to it. For example:
Increasing your fitness ⇒ join a sports team or CrossFit gym
Reading more ⇒ join a reading group
Learning a language ⇒ move to a foreign country for six months
Being more social ⇒ join a community organization or church
Establish recurring systems
You should avoid having to remember to act on your goals consciously. As best you can, you want to make acting in line with your goals automatic. For instance, automatic retirement savings plans make saving effortless. Once set up, you don't need to think about saving; you're forced to limit your spending to whatever is left in your checking account.
Critically, this doesn't only apply to saving. These are some of the recurring systems that have helped me make progress on otherwise challenging goals:
Healthy eating – Like many people, I gained weight when I first moved to New York. Eventually, I signed up for a meal service that sent premade nutritious vegan lunches to my office every week.
Writing my PhD thesis – I hosted a weekly silent writing session in my house every Sunday morning. That guaranteed I would get at least 3 hours of focused writing each week.
Meaningful leisure time – I absolutely cherish going to see NBA basketball games with my friends, but I would never find the time to coordinate seeing games with friends. Eventually, along with a few friends, we committed to buying a ten-game pass, which meant every couple of weeks, I was guaranteed to see a game with friends.
Accountability emails are a recurring system you can apply to almost any goal. Most email services like Gmail allow you to preschedule emails. At the start of every year, I use this feature to schedule a monthly email to my family and friends to hold me accountable to my annual goal.
On the first day of every month, an email is automatically sent to my accountability group reminding them of my goal and including a link to a page that summarizes my progress. If the update is missing, the email instructs them to encourage me to get it done. Knowing that an email is going out at the end of every month keeps me focused on my goal. Critically, it's not something I need to remember to do every month. By default, the email is sent unless I intervene.
Systematise saying no
A crucial part of achieving any ambitious goal is maintaining focus in the face of distraction. Without intentional effort, life will hijack your time. For most people, a simple request to do something can pull them away from their goal. Often, people are averse to saying no because it feels awkward. As a consequence, they casually commit to plans, and their days end up filled with activities they regret, preventing them from ever working on their goals.
It might sound weird, but you can systematize saying no. In a work setting, you can do that by actively booking time in your calendar to work on personal tasks. This forces people to respect your time. It makes it explicit to others that they are preventing you from working on something important when they put time in your calendar. In many instances, this makes people reconsider the need for a meeting.
Even if you don't have an open calendar, requests for your time will be ever-present. Because of that, it pays to be skilled at saying no gracefully. The book "Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" by Greg McKeown has an entire chapter dedicated to this. The chapter shares practical techniques for gracefully declining without hurting people's feelings, such as using softening phrases, being clear about current commitments, and offering alternative solutions when possible. I especially like that he shared specific phrases that you can use, like "I appreciate you thinking of me, but I can't commit to that right now" or "I'm really focused on prioritizing my workload at the moment, so I won't be able to take this on." When I was first learning this skill, I wrote out some of these phrases on Post-it notes and stuck them to my monitor at work so that I could quickly bring them to mind and gracefully decline requests. If you often commit to activities you later regret, I strongly recommend trying something like this.
Make a public commitment
Over the years, I've become known for making a big deal about my annual goals. Each December, I sit down with a few family members and walk them through a slide deck summarizing my goals for the upcoming year and why they’re important to me.
Sharing my goals is helpful for two reasons. First, it binds me to my commitment. Once I've shared my goals publicly, people naturally ask how I'm doing and notice when I stop working on them. That makes it harder to give up on my goals without a good reason. Second, it gets my family members to support my goals more strongly. For instance, knowing that I need to write an article or record a video each week, my wife helps ensure we set aside time each week for what she calls "Jordan's computer time."
Including your loved ones in the goal-setting process is important because pursuing significant life goals often necessitates their support. So, the more you can make it a shared goal, the more likely you are to succeed.
Visualize your progress
It's worth setting up a prominent visual indicator of progress toward your goal. Being able to see your progress serves as a motivator. Just like checking off completed tasks on a checklist provides a psychological reward, seeing something move closer to completion keeps you engaged. It doesn't guarantee consistency, but it makes it a lot easier.
The progress indicator that has had the most substantial influence on my behavior is my weight training chart. In 2020, I figured out there were calculators that could estimate your maximum lift strengths based on lifting any number of repetitions. For example, if you do eight squats at 110kg, your estimated maximum squat is 137kg for a single lift. This allowed me to convert all my workouts into a single number I could track over time. Seeing the number go up and down but slowly trend upwards kept me engaged in training. So engaged that four years later, I still use the same system to monitor progress. It's one of the stickiest habit tools I've ever created.
Schedule check-ins
You can almost guarantee that if you work on a challenging goal for long enough, it will get boring, and you'll start thinking about giving up. When that happens, it's helpful to have someone encourage you to keep going and help you through the struggle.
I learned from experience that around six months into working on a goal, my motivation starts to fade. Knowing this ahead of time allows me to plan for it. I like to set a reminder to check in with a friend around that time. The image below is a particularly dramatic email I scheduled to send in June 2023.
Change your environment
The most important system determining the difficulty of sticking to your goals is your environment - the people and things you interact with daily. As the saying goes, you're the average of the people you spend the most time with, so if you want to change your life, it might be necessary to change your friends.
A simple example for me is changing my diet. For a long time, I've been intellectually convinced that I should be vegan, but I have always struggled to reduce my meat consumption. In large part, that's because everyone I interact with eats meat, and my house and office are full of non-vegan products. Eating a vegan meal requires working against all of that inertia. I only made progress on this once I signed up for a vegan lunch delivery service. Now, when I go into the office, the fridge is full of relatively tasty vegan meals. The small change to my environment made acting in line with my values ten times easier.
Whatever your goal, it's worth scanning your environment and asking yourself, how are the people and things I interact with daily helping or hurting my goal? Where practical, try modifying your environment to start working with you. If you want to read more, leave a book on your pillow. If you want to drink less, stock your fridge with tasty non-alcoholic beverages. Reshape your surroundings to support your desired habits and goals.
Template - my comprehensive consistency system
I've combined seven core tactics into a consistency mega-system. This system has become a central part of my life, forcing me to live in line with my values and accomplish almost any ambitious goal I set my mind to. My system consists of four interconnected components:
Goal summary slides
A tracking sheet
Automated accountability emails
Monthly update slides
Goal summary slide
The core of my consistency mega-system is my life goals planning deck. I use this slide deck to summarize each of my life goals into a single, easy-to-read slide. A lot of thinking and writing goes into planning and refining my goals, but the constraint of a single slide forces me to boil it all down to a simple bottom line. That forces clarity on my goals and lets me quickly communicate with others what I am working on and why.
My goal template consists of four elements:
Brief title
Specific goal
The actions I am planning to take
A rationale for why this goal is important to me
Tracking sheet
I use a single spreadsheet to track my progress toward my goals. The sheet includes input and output variables. Input variables are things I do to create desired outcomes. Inputs are generally entirely within my control (e.g., going to the gym), whereas the outputs are not always within my control (e.g., my maximum squat weight).
In most instances, I track the input variable with a checkbox for each day, denoting if I did what I planned. For example, I have a checkbox for going to the gym and one for spending at least 15 minutes working on my writing goal. The output variable is generally a number I can update every week or month, such as my maximum squat weight, mobile app revenue, or the number of content pieces I have published.
This spreadsheet is a pinned tab in my browser so that I can easily access and update it daily.
Automated accountability emails
As I’ve mentioned, I like to schedule a monthly accountability email to close friends and family. The format of the email makes holding me accountable extremely low effort. All the recipients need to do is click the link to read my update and respond with a thumbs up or down. Knowing these emails are going out each month motivates me to update the slide deck with an end-of-month reflection.
Monthly update slide
My monthly email links to a slide deck with an end-of-month reflection. The template I use is very simple. It consists of four elements:
Brief title
Specific goal
My planned actions for the month
The outcome of my effort and any learnings
I put a red or green dot next to each planned action to make the update easy to scan. Green dots are actions that I completed, and red dots are actions that I failed to accomplish. The data to populate the update comes from the tracking sheet.
When I update the end-of-month reflection, I also create my plan for the coming month. Doing this each month forces me to reflect on what isn't going well and change plans when needed. Critically, knowing that people I respect will read my reflection makes me take it seriously. I needed that accountability to remain committed and engaged with my goals.
Technology - ready-to-use accountability platforms
I built my consistency mega system based on my preferences, and it's working for me. However, a few excellent off-the-shelf accountability tools can achieve a similar outcome. The two I recommend are StickK and Beeminder.
StickK
Stickk is a commitment platform that uses commitment contracts to motivate you to stay on track with your goals. When setting up a goal on Stickk, you can choose to put money on the line that you will lose if you fail to meet your goal. You can also appoint a referee to verify your progress and add supporters to cheer you on.
Beeminder
If you are a data nerd, you will love Beeminder! It combines data tracking with monetary incentives to help you stay on track with your goals. You set a goal to track your progress, and Beeminder plots this on a graph against a "yellow brick road," representing the pace required to achieve the target by the due date. If you stay on track, you succeed; if you go off track, you pay the amount you pledged. You can update your key metrics every day or connect it with other apps to update automatically, for example, Fitbit to increase your daily steps, RescueTime to reduce your screen time, or Todoist to track specific tasks.