Recurrence Maintenance


Why do you do things as often as you do? Celebrating birthdays and anniversaries once a year makes sense. Visiting the doctor every six months isn’t unreasonable. Taking out the trash once or twice a week is just sensible. But what about your other routines?

Why do we wait a whole year for annual reviews when one’s work and skills can change so much more quickly? Why do we do quarterly planning only every three months when the world changes so much faster than that? Why do so many of us have to go two or four weeks between paychecks? Why do we sleep only once a day? What’s stopping us from reevaluating these schedules on the regular?

What do you do once a year that could be done once a quarter? Or once a month? Or every day? What could you scale down from once a day to twice a day? Twice an hour? Every few minutes? In your OODA loops, how often do you perform each of those four steps? How much quicker would you have to complete that loop in order to get ahead, whether it’s ahead of your competition or ahead of your own misgivings and doubts? Whatever the time frame, it’s often more fungible than everyone assumes. Try adjusting your expectations, up or down. The faster you can change, after all, the better your chances of changing for the better.