Resistance makes applying effort difficult. When applying effort becomes difficult, progress stalls.
An effective heuristic for dealing with resistance is as follows:
- If a protocol exists and works, use it.
- If no protocol exists, create one.
- If a protocol fails in practice, refine it.
The thing is, winning at applying this heuristic relies heavily on the tools at your disposal. The wrong tools deliver inconsistent results at dealing with resistance.
To achieve consistent results, it helps to bring to mind a tool your brain already uses to deal with resistance: routines.
Think of a routine as sequence of actions ordered to guide you, at a particular time, towards the completion of a recurring task.
It is 6:00AM.
You wake up → rise from bed → walk to the restroom → pee → brush → exercise → shower.
That is a routine.
If you think a routine is just a protocol, you'd be right. But left unattented, at the mercy of your brain as it responds to shifting demands, it can be an unconscious protocol you execute without deliberate control.
Say you wake up at 11:00AM instead of 6:00AM, and all other conditions are the same, you could still execute the routine. The timing changes, but the routine still carries you forward.
Now consider a different situation.
You wake up at 6:00AM, arrive at the bathroom to shower, and discover there is no running water.
At this point, if showering is still required, the routine no longer fits the conditions. The unconscious protocol your brain may default to in response to the shift in condition is to abandon the task.
To address this, you need a protocol that responds not just to time but to conditions as well: a regimen.
A regimen is a sequence of actions ordered to resolve a condition or constraint in order to make completion of a task or resolution of a need possible.
Unlike routines, regimens are not primarily time-responsive. They are state-responsive, and rely healivy on conscious engagement to deliver any usefulness.
The best regimens eventually inform your routines and the best routines inculcate regimens.
One of the best apps for succeeding at routines is Routinery. The app uses the effects of a timer and a sequenced list of tasks to essentially dissolve the need for what (at low moments) can feel like tremendous willpower or motivation. (If you would like a demonstration for how it works in practice, Scotty Luu has a great video.)
Routinery’s winning feature is that it recognizes completion of only one session of a particular routine per day. Restarting a routine discards the previous execution and begins again. This is excellent for routines.
But for sequences that need to be applied repeatedly within a single day, often in response to shifting conditions, you need a different tool: Stacked
Although Stacked markets itself as a routine app, it excels as a regimen tool. It treats routines not as tasks to be completed once, but as sequences to be executed as many times as necessary. The tasks run; the routine remains available for reuse.
For regimens, that distinction makes all the difference.
A regimen that deals squarely with resistance is precisely the kind of structure worth carrying into the new year, because while resistance is inevitable as the year unfolds, you are now prepared to tame it.
Here is how you can apply regimens:
- Pick a recurring task that is currently disturbing you, say "Declutter room".
- Create a "routine" for it in Stacked.
- Add tasks to the created routine, keeping each task simple and duration reasonable.
- Play the routine and execute the precribed steps.
- Replay as the need arises.
Happy New Year!
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