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Shane Parrish, author, continuous learner, founder of Farnam Street, and long-time friend of the firm recently tweeted “The person who carefully designs their daily routine goes further than the person that negotiates with themselves every day.” While this might sound like a pitch for proactivity and for scheduling your calendar to death, the key word is routine – it’s actually more about inertia and momentum, and letting those forces work for you.

The following are excerpts from Brent Beshore and David Cover’s conversation with Shane. In an Outside Insights episode of Permanent Podcast recorded in January 2023, a conversation about New Year’s resolutions quickly morphed into a discussion about choice, discipline, ritual, and designing your days to support the life you want to be living.

My real take on this is…it’s a lot easier to work out every day than it is three days a week. If you do it three days a week, you need motivation – it’s a choice. If you do it every day, it’s just something you do every day – it’s not a choice.

If you’re relying on willpower to do all the things you want to do, you’re never going to do them. You’re just going to get stuck, and you’re going to convince yourself (with great stories) that you’ll do it tomorrow. [You say,] “Instead of going on the elliptical today, I’ll do extra tomorrow.” These are the lies we tell ourselves. But then tomorrow comes and you still don’t feel like it. And then all of a sudden it’s January 7th and you haven’t been to the gym for three days and your New Year’s resolutions are gone and you’re not living the life that you want to be living. 

When there are certain actions or behaviors or habits that are intrinsic to the life you want to be living (like going to the gym to support living a healthy and independent life), the easiest way to be sure they get done is not to rely on how you’re feeling on a given day, or what you intellectually know to be true, or sheer brute force, but to take choice out of the matter in the first place. And, it’s supported by research (just take it from Farnam Street). 

And designing your days to reflect your ideal life doesn’t stop at hitting the gym or keeping junk food out of the house. Shane applies these design and habit principles to the rhythm of his day, starting from the problem of finding time for the big stuff. 

I focus the morning on the biggest opportunity in front of me. That’s my best time of the day, so I want to work on…the seeds I’m planting for next year. I never need to find the time because I just block it in the mornings. 

All the talk about discipline and motivation doesn’t really resonate with Shane. Many may think this sounds like forming a “habit,” but Shane takes it a bit further. He thinks about it in terms of “ritual”:

I don’t have a ton of discipline, but ritual I can do… Discipline means making a choice, choosing to do something. I often need motivation or excitement to get to discipline. But ritual cements what I want to do with discipline. Ritual is what you do every day… You do it when you feel like it, you do it when you don’t feel like it. Because it’s what you do. And it’s so powerful. It doesn’t involve a lot of willpower. 

So how do you engineer your days to take advantage of ritual and inertia rather than discipline and motivation? The rabbit hole is deep here, and you can make this as detailed as you want. But there are a few easy steps to get started:

1. Identify your best time of the day. This is the time when you naturally have the most focus and the most energy. Prioritize accordingly.

2. Start blocking off time for the real work. Whether you ride an early morning high, get new wind in the afternoon, or like the quiet after everyone else has logged off for the day, start blocking off time to meet with yourself. You don’t have to reclaim a morning all at once – but if you can reliably start getting an hour to really buckle down on things that move the needle, start expanding it.

3. Relegate the miscellaneous to-dos to other parts of the day. Yes, you’ve got to talk to the accountants and lawyers and take the calls and all the other things that make your business and your life keep rolling down the road, but they probably don’t need the highest-and-best hours of your day.

4. Use your transition times more effectively. Using ritual to design your day isn’t just about what you do when you’re in the work; what you do when going from deep work to tasks to family time to meetings to whatever else is on your plate is an intimate part of how you manage and harness your focus and energy. Shane uses the gym as his transition between morning and afternoon – it gives him a pop of energy going into the next part of his day. What rituals can you put in the in-between times to set you up for what’s next?

5. Book time to reflect. It’s critical for learning, for planning, for tweaking your ritual.

Getting to the point where your day is automatic takes intentional work, the ability to identify opportunities and priorities, a commitment to setting boundaries on your time, and some trial and error around matching your focus and attention to time and activity. But the results are there:

I never have to find the time. It never has to fit in. It’s there. I have time every day.  

Listen to the full conversation, with more on continuous learning, maintaining optionality, recognizing when you’re lucky, the relative merits of having a sous vide, and the many benefits of compounding relationships.

For more conversations like this one, subscribe to Permanent Podcast.