Every once in a while I discover new way to miss the mark in personal productivity—a new trap I might fall into even as I’m avoiding all the previous traps. This one became clear to me in the past ~2 years or so. For me it was about physical exercise, but it pertains to effort in general.
Narrative permission to slack off
I started lifting weights in college and continued through most of the years since college. I also trained Parkour on and off throughout that time. During covid I did calisthenics/resistance band workouts. Those were all self-directed fitness activities.
Putting effort into a self-directed plan can be tricky—when you’re the Manager of your own program, you consider things like like how fatigued you feel, how tight or sore your muscles feel, or how busy you are elsewhere in life. “I can’t go too hard today because __.” Maybe it’s “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,” or “I’m traveling soon, so I have to be careful not to get hurt,” or “My mind is preoccupied by this other thing I have to do today.”
My body’s natural response to those thoughts is to give less effort. On those days, I don’t set personal records in my lifts, maybe I skip an exercise at the end, etc. And it’s not necessarily a conscious decision—just noticing that the conditions aren’t the best at a given moment has an effect on my mind and body. Once there’s a “reason” for underperforming, a narrative explanation for it, then my body will take the opportunity to underperform.
(Some people do the opposite: they tend to give high effort only when there’s some special obstacle to overcome, and they see perfect conditions as chance to relax their effort. More on that in the next post.)
This doesn’t mean I never try hard—I’m proud to say I’ve made measurable progress in physical fitness over the years just planning and executing programs by myself. But still, the above is always a factor I’ve had to contend with.
Hiring an outside Manager
When I started training Muay Thai kickboxing two years ago, I went in with the intention to do a lot of training right away, rushing toward save points to make my training more effective. So, I was doing a lot of training.
And at my gym, like most martial arts gyms, we train in guided group classes. It’s not self-directed like the stuff was doing before that, or the solo running/biking/calisthenics that so many other people do for their physical fitness. The special thing about guided training is that the expectations placed on your effort are detached from your internal state: assuming you respect the teacher/coach (and I do), you’ll put as much effort into the class regardless of how you feel.
That’s simply because the coach doesn’t know your internal state. They expect the same effort regardless. It’s a bit like when a company hires an outside consultant, who is ignorant of the company’s internal culture and processes: that’s on purpose, so they can tell hard truths and call for high performance without being biased by the status quo.
I see now why people get so much benefit from using a personal trainer, even if they could easily plan out the exact same workout routine for themselves. It’s the separation of circumstances and expectations. In the corporate world, if your manager is working at the desk right next to yours, you can, for lack of a better term, invite them to micromanage. “Hey I know you assigned me this task, but this one complication just came up. Do you think we should change the deadline, or should I do XYZ to address the complication?” And then your manager will answer, and… this just isn’t isn’t a good use of their time, and it conditions you to look for little reasons to delay the actual work. Alternatively, if your manager is behind a closed door at the end of the hall, you’ll more likely just do the work and deliver the best result you can.
No factor
I’ve learned something about my capability in these kickboxing classes. I’ve shown up to class sleep-deprived, or hungover, or bloated, or hungry, or upset about something, and I notice I perform at about the same level every time. Or, if there’s variation in my performance, it’s not very correlated with those other things.
(Disclaimer: of course any one of those factors would be a problem if it happened regularly—you shouldn’t be sleep deprived! etc.—but as one-off issues that just come up in the randomness of life, they… don’t matter like I thought they would.)
One time I went to the 7:30am class on 3 hours of sleep after celebrating Halloween drinking all night with my friends, and to my surprise the class went the same as always. Your body will give you as much adrenaline as you need to perform to the level required, as long as you actually require it. Of course, your future self pays the bill for that: I felt totally exhausted later in the day. But that, too, was perfectly bearable in the context of an otherwise normal, healthy week.
Behavioral rewards
I realized that in the past I’ve been addicted to perfect conditions. I needed to be at 100% readiness to give 100% effort. I think the rationale for that was something like: If you only give max effort when the conditions are great, then your outcome/performance is pretty much guaranteed to be great in those cases, and you’ll set personal records or whatever. So your max-effort is always associated with real measurable wins, and so you get that behavioral reward for it.
It takes a different mindset to be able to give max effort and accept that some other factor might end up hurting your performance. Again, I learned from experience that effort matters more than I thought, and other circumstances matter less, so that alone changed my mindset a lot.
What also helps is rewarding the process. If I give max effort, I should reap some kind of reward—it may just be a mental feeling of satisfaction, or it may be something tangible. But if I attach the reward to giving maximum effort rather than getting measurable success in my performance, then I’ll be conditioned to give max effort a lot more often. By default, rewarding outcomes is more comfortable for me, because then the outcome is guaranteed, but the downside is I may end up cutting corners on the day-to-day process. This is the constant dance between goals and systems—I think only experience can help you find the best balance.