You Are As Good As Your Systems

The less you test your discipline, the more you can test yourself in other areas.

Each decision that one makes is an opportunity to succeed or to fail; therefore minimizing decisions through automation will reduce the potential for tactical failures.

Automation is a powerful concept. It says that anything that needs to be done repeatedly should just be set up into a repeatable system. A system can be a schedule, a procedure, or some other organization of activities that has a definitive time, period, and sequence through which it gets done.

The concept of automation is straightforward enough to understand and implement; so instead, let’s discuss the advantages afforded to someone who runs highly automated systems. Automation offers few specific advantages:

  1. It defines the amount of time one can reasonably expect to spend on a certain task

A system helps a person to plan around a specific activity. Take for instance a morning routine. This is a system that one puts into place and is the same few things they do every morning to get ready for their day. This will have a time commitment associated with it and it will take that specific amount of time each morning to get done. It is a system – repeatable and schedulable.

  1. Takes the guesswork out of when these tasks will get done.

Consider a training schedule. One such instance will say that a person must train 4 nights a week. A person should decide on which 4 nights they will work out each week and maintain that schedule. They have systematized their schedule to block out the same 4 nights each week for training. 

  1. Allows for one to maneuver around interruptions. 

If being realistic – there will be interruptions to these systems. Work will run late, a doctor appointment will be scheduled, or family will come into town. To say that once a system is in place that it will be followed with no deviation is not realistic.

With strong systems in place it is easy to work around these interruptions with minimal impact to the larger progress toward the goal.

Here is what I mean:

By knowing how long a certain activity takes, one will have the flexibility to find that chunk of time somewhere that better fits around the interruption. If it is defined that a training session takes an hour, all one must do is work a one hour chunk into their schedule to go bang out a workout. This immediately quantifies the amount of time required and simplifies finding a block of time where it fits. Further, having a schedule for the amount of times one must train in a week helps to determine on which days one can fit in these training sessions. 

Thinking of this a bit differently, with these two things figured out, one will no longer have to plan activities, rather, they are just moving blocks of time around on a schedule. It doesn’t matter what the activity is, necessarily, it just matters that one blocks out the necessary chunk of time to get it done. It takes all of the ancillary information out of the actual planning and scheduling and forces one to get the work done.

Said yet another way, all of the subjective nuances of a task are removed leaving only the objective blocks on a schedule. With this schedule, one simply has to either follow through on the activities or choose to fail; which is a far different thought than having to choose to succeed, as is the case when there is not a system established.

Remaining disciplined is already challenging enough – there are more more things that will work against an individual than for them in this regard. The more one can simplify and automate those systems that help them to remain disciplined, the less thought one has to put toward specific tasks. 

The more one tests their discipline, the more opportunity one gives themself to fail – so one should aim to test themselves less often in this way.

In practicing automation, discipline becomes mechanical. Rather than having to decide to be disciplined, one will instead have to decide to be undisciplined – which is arguably a far harder decision to force oneself to make.

You are only going to be as good as your systems – the less you test your discipline, the less often you will fail.

Fail less.

Yours in strength,