Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Lift, provides a hypothesis about achieving goals in an interview with Fast Company, which closely resemble my personal approach.
The number one driver of whether a habit change is a success or not that we see is how big is the initial goal is. Because everyone, if they’re consistent, will eventually achieve something massive. But the people that end up failing are the people trying to achieve overnight success.
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It’s not that either of those two (people) have more aptitude for [insert your goal here], it’s that one of them set themselves such a big goal that they had so much early failure that they ended up being completely turned off and thinking, “Well, I’m never going to reach this goal.”
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For me, my number one productivity practice is to set priorities at the beginning of the day, before I get lost in the chaos that goes on around me.
That last paragraph is my rountine too.