sustained effort vs sudden sprints, what wins

Summary

there’s a phrase I use all the time: chronic minimal effort negates acute maximal effort. the small thing you do every week kills the huge thing you have to do once a quarter.

1. finance. I do a 30 minute money meeting every week. five minutes of looking, twenty five minutes of decisions. if I skipped this and tried to do it once a quarter, it would be eight hours of nightmare and I’d miss things.

2. fitness. a study compared one 30 minute walk per day to a 3 minute set of squats every hour. the squats won on blood glucose by a wide margin. small dose, more often, more impact.

3. business systems. a weekly review of the marketing funnel, a weekly check on the support queue, a weekly look at the dashboard. tiny touches. catches problems while they’re small.

if you only have time to do something once a year, the answer is not “do it once a year.” the answer is build the chronic minimal version and put it on the calendar. then delegate it when you can. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to procrastination and prioritization

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe, if you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Would you consider yourself a procrastinator or a person who just gets things done right away? This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And let’s be honest, we all procrastinate. I wish I could say I always got everything done right away, but you have to prioritize, right?

discussion on chronic minimal effort vs. acute maximal effort

You, you can’t always just get things done. We’re busy. We have some things that are priority, some things that aren’t. So we have to constantly deal with where do we put our time, effort, focus, attention. And one thing I wrote in my journal recently that I have to constantly remind myself of is chronic minimal effort negates acute maximal effort.

So one more time, it’s chronic minimal effort negates acute maximal effort. And what that means obviously is if you can just do a little bit all the time, chronically this minimal effort, just a little bit here, a little bit here, a little bit here, a little bit here, it will avoid you having to have these big projects that last two or three hours or whatever, like catching up on admin work.

real-life implications of delaying essential tasks like bookkeeping

And an example of that for me and my entrepreneurial journey was always a bookkeeping and finance. I don’t keep my books anymore, but let’s just talk about when I was keeping my own books. That’s what would happen, right? This happens to a lot of people in accounting or even taxes is you basically don’t pay attention to it all year.

You go make the money and, and you do the things, but then there’s, this is typically in the finance world is what I see with entrepreneurs. It can be your bookkeeping. It could be not doing tax stuff. It could be not looking at profit and loss isn’t like you’re just not doing these things. You’re not paying attention to them.

how regular finance meetings simplified financial management

And then all of a sudden you need this information. It’s like, what is my, what is my profit? Oh crap. I do need the last six months of books done right now. And what this results in as opposed to you just having it there ready to go is it’s a giant project. It’s either a fire for someone else because you tell an employee this all needs to be done right now, or you fire off emails to your accountant and you’re like, oh crap, I need this.

And, or it’s just on you to do all this work, right? And this used to be me in finances is like, I would sit down and do like a big quarterly finance meeting and I would like pull all the reports and pull the bookkeeping and look at numbers and, and all those kinds of things. I would, I would know how much money we were making every single month, but I, I didn’t have to like have the big meeting until it was once a quarter and then be several hours.

the pushup grid and its application in daily fitness

And over time that became really cumbersome. Like I just dreaded doing that thing to where then I dreaded it so much and I knew it was going to take so long that I would start putting it off and then I wouldn’t even do it at the beginning of the quarter. It would happen a month later. And I’m sure what I’m describing hits home with any of the entrepreneurs out there who’ve had to do a lot of the finance and bookkeeping stuff on their own.

How I changed that, at least in the finance world, is I have a meeting, a finance meeting with myself every single week, every single week. I have like a checklist of things that I need to review. I go over them, knock it out, pay off the credit card, look at this, move some money around, all those kinds of things.

the scientific backing for regular, minimal exercise routines

I have my own checklist for my finance meeting, but because I do it every single week and I really, really try not to ever miss unless I’m like out of town on vacation, whatever I try not to miss, it’s very minimal effort. It takes me 10, 15 minutes to have this finance meeting. It’s not a very challenging thing to do.

It’s not a maximal effort project. It’s because I can just do a little bit every single week and I don’t have to have these maximal efforts. And another example of this in the health and fitness world I found very interesting recently is something I’ve been encouraging people to do for a very long time is what I call a push-up grid or just a grid.

setting up business systems to foster consistent effort

And I got this from someone else in the fitness industry decades ago. I honestly don’t even remember who, but if you’re working, right, you’re not actually training. All you do is like on a, in your notebook or on a sticky note or whiteboard or whatever, you draw a grid and the grid can be anything you want.

It can be a two-by-two, a four-by-four, six-by-six, 10-by-10, doesn’t matter. But what you do is at a given interval, this could be once every hour, every 30 minutes, every 15 minutes, up to you, you just stop and you do some calisthenics, some reps. You do five push-ups, 10 push-ups, 20 push-ups, whatever, whatever a good number is for you.

strategic delegation and its benefits to business operations

You could also do squats. You could do pull-ups. You could do whatever you want. And I’ve been doing this off and on for a very long time. I just feel like it gives me a little bit more activity during the day. When people used to push back on this, they’d be like, you know, it doesn’t really make any sense, Jerred, to do, let’s call it an extra hundred push-ups a day because if you’re only doing sets of five or sets of 10, you’re not actually fatiguing the muscle enough or I’d always get this push-back.

I never understood why I’d get this push-back, but I would. But what people don’t realize is that those reps actually do add up. And a more recent study just came out on blood glucose and participants in the study who would do 20 squats every hour had a better blood glucose response, better ability to maintain their appropriate blood sugar levels than going on like a 10 or 15 minute walk.

closing thoughts on the importance of striving for consistent, minimal effort

You’ve probably heard that all the time, like going on a walk after you eat, go for a walk after you eat or whatever helps you maintain, you know, healthy blood glucose levels. Well, this is saying you just do 20 squats once an hour and it helps do that better than a walk. And so just think about all the ways these things can add up and how easy it is to add little habits like that.

And so just start thinking about your business, your health. We all know that consistency is king, but like what systems can you set up and put in place to where you won’t fail? And then if you do know, I’m not going to be able to do this forever. That’s fine. Like this finance meeting that I do every single week.

I like finance. I don’t love the all the nitty gritty details, but I like knowing where money’s at, what we can spend. I like knowing that some people, a lot of entrepreneurs in all honesty, just hate that they don’t ever want to know any of those things. They just want to go make the money, someone else count it.

And I get that to a certain degree. But what you need to do, set up these systems, set up a way you can have chronic minimal effort. And then what you do is you hand off this chronic minimal effort to employees. You don’t hand off acute maximal effort to employees. That’s not a job. Like, Hey, I need you to do a lot of crap once a month for four hours or eight hours.

And that’s it. No. How about you do this thing every week for 20 or 30 minutes? You come up with enough, enough of these tasks and you have a really good job description for someone you would like to hire. Whether that’s an administrative assistant, executive assistant, it could be anything, but start thinking about that in your business.

Chronic minimal effort negates acute maximal effort. Where are you spending maximal effort? And how can you overlay that on a longer timeline? So it’s chronic minimal effort that you can either consistently do, or you can eventually hand off as an employee or to an employee as a, as a job description.

Because if all you ever do in all of these administrative tasks and everything else is just this acute maximal effort, well, it might not sound like it, but you need to try harder to not try so hard. You need to try harder to have chronic minimal effort. That’s actually sustainable and gets you where you want to go.