Pushing for “always” to achieve “usually”

About a year ago, I mentioned a friend that was able to work out 3x weekly, which is something I struggle with. If I aim to work out three times in a week, it quickly slips to maybe once or twice. Instead, I plan to work out every day, and that filters down to “most days”, which is really what I’m after.

I’ve found that taking this approach is helpful in other areas as well.

“Weekly” calls

I have a good friend that I met during my time in the altMBA, and we like to chat frequently to help push one another forward. For a while, we tried to meet “fairly often”, but it would slip to months between calls. We changed it to a weekly call every Monday, and that’s worked perfectly.

It’s not that we talk every week. In fact, we rarely ever get two in a row. Instead, it becomes a couple times a month, which is perfect! By aiming for a weekly call, with the caveat that either of us can cancel if a client or other priority comes up, it’s led to a very solid cadence for us.

Blogging?

In theory, this is my plan with blogging too. My thought was to aim for “every day” and be happy with “a few times a week”, but I’ve generally been able to keep the pace of daily blogging going for almost two years straight (minus a brief break for COVID). I think the difference there is that I’m able to batch my posts ahead of time, which you can’t do with phone calls or exercise.

Now that I’ve seen how well the “push for always to achieve usually” has worked, I’m looking for other areas in my life where I can implement this. A few areas I’m working on:

• Reaching out to old friends and connections. It’s on my list every day, but only happens a few times a week.
• The same with reading. I have a goal to read from a book (or Blinkist) every day, but it doesn’t always happen.

I’m working to find more areas to add to this, so we’ll see where it goes. The only downside I’m seeing so far is that my daily list of tasks is getting a bit long, causing me to skip a few things more often. Maybe that’s ok, as it’ll keep me well-rounded while still working to keep fit, connected, and well-read, but we’ll see. I fear that over time, the longer daily list could become tiring, so I’ll have to work to keep it in check.

Do you have any always –> usually types of things that you do?