Up to now, I’ve been talking about design in the abstract.
Defaults.
Pre-decisions.
Structures that reduce effort.
That can still feel a bit slippery, so I want to ground this in something concrete.
Here’s a simple example from my own life.
For years, I kept rereading the same kinds of books.
They were all pretty good.
Yet nothing changed after I finished them.
I’d underline passages.
Take notes.
Tell myself, “This is important.”
And then a week later, I was back where I started, vaguely annoyed that I “knew better” but wasn’t doing better.
So instead of asking, “How do I remember this book?”
Through trial and error, I learned to ask a different question:
What would need to exist so this book didn’t rely on me remembering anything at all?
I wanted to set it and forget it.
That’s where design starts.
I didn’t try to apply everything from the book.
I didn’t set ambitious goals.
I didn’t motivate myself.
I made three decisions once, up front:
What is this book for in my life right now?
(what it’s meant to change.)What are the few behaviours that would signal it’s actually working?
(Not outcomes)Where do those behaviours live so I don’t have to keep thinking about them?
Once those decisions were made, the book stopped being something I revisited mentally.
Once I set it, I trusted it.
It became something that ran quietly in the background.
There was a place where actions lived.
A rhythm for reviewing them.
A way to notice when something wasn’t sticking; without self-judgment.
What changed wasn’t my discipline.
What changed was that the book no longer competed for attention.
This is the part most people miss:
Design doesn’t feel like productivity.
It feels like closure.
You stop carrying ideas around in your head.
You stop renegotiating with yourself.
You stop asking, “Should I be doing something with this?”
The system answers that for you.
And if nothing needs to be done?
That’s an answer too.
That’s what good design protects:
your attention, your energy, and your capacity to move on.
Next time, I’ll talk about when it does make sense to get help with this — and when it doesn’t.
Because there’s a point where designing everything yourself becomes its own form of effort.
— Greg