Photo by Don Farrall / Getty Images
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Whenever you set a goal, create a new habit or make some plan for your life, there’s a few different ways you can go about it
The first way is to target the minimum output.
The idea here is that you focus on always doing at least a little bit,
so that overall, you’ll end up doing enough to make it count. Examples:
meditating for ten minutes a day, taking the stairs at work to get in
shape, learning a new word every day.
The second way is to target the average output.
Here, you focus on setting a goal that you don’t always achieve, but if
you reach it enough, you’ll end up making a big difference. Examples:
write a new blog post every week, read two books a month, go to the gym
4x per week.
A final way is to focus on the maximum output.
Invest your energy in surmounting a specific, intense threshold that
will pull you to a new level. Examples: one-rep maximum, deliberate
practice, aiming at setting a personal best.
A huge array of different suggestions from personal development flow
into one of these three types, yet I’ve rarely seen them analyzed
together. I’d like to do that, and try to see if there’s a way of
thinking which can make sense of when you should expect each type to be
more useful.
When Should You Focus on the Minimum?
To understand where each of these strategies succeeds (or underperforms) you need to compare them to the status-quo.
The status-quo in minimum-focused projects is zero. This is the
default, and what will happen in the overwhelming majority of cases.
One habit I’ve focused on in this way was doing
fifty push-ups every day. (Since Jan 1 been doing sun salutes, 30 pushups, 1 min plank, 50 heel lifts. Not amazing but better than nothing).Some people critiqued this as not being ideal for fitness. But it
ignores the alternative—usually I would do no push-ups in a day, so some
is certainly better than none. Doing the push-ups hasn’t stopped me
from going to the gym, but keeping the habit has made me stronger.
Another way I’ve used this was doing
reading practice for Chinese.
I set a goal to do ten minutes per day. Again, the default here was
zero. Most days I did no practice, so a ten minute goal, even if I never
do more than this, is going to be an improvement.
The other reason to focus on a minimum is that it assumes the
difficulty is in starting. When initiating a behavior or effort is the
hardest step in the process, you want to set lower thresholds for effort
so that you can make starting as easy as possible. (This is another reason that I sometimes do the Pareto technique cycling through tasks. Just to start and do 25 minutes of something on the list, even if it isn't the ideal deliberate practice.)
Minimum-targeting works very well for establishing stable, long-term
habits. It also works when the status-quo is very low or zero effort.
Finally it makes sense when initiating effort is the hardest obstacle to
overcome.
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