why you skip your calendar (and how to fix it)

Summary

the habits you skip are the ones costing your future the most. time-blocking is great until you ignore the block. the fix is not more discipline. the fix is making the task mean something.

the two-part reframe I use with clients:

1. rename the task. “workout” becomes “life extension modality.” “kids dinner” becomes “future memory.” the words you put on the calendar shape the identity you act from when the calendar pings you.
2. star-rate the goal. every task gets a 1 to 5 rating for how directly it serves the goal you actually care about. anything 3 or below probably shouldn’t be on your calendar at all. anything 4 or 5 you don’t get to skip.

real examples:

• workout becomes “life extension modality”
• sleep becomes “tomorrow’s performance, locked in tonight”
• family time becomes “the only thing I’ll regret missing in 30 years”
• deep work becomes “the thing I’m uniquely paid to do”

why this works: language shapes identity. the boring habit becomes a meaningful identity move, and meaningful identity moves don’t get skipped.

the other thing nobody wants to hear: you’ll never outgrow the basics. the boring stuff is the work. mastery is the same five things, executed a thousand times. try harder, and reframe everything.

Transcript

the habits you skip are costing your future

The boring habits you keep skipping are the small things that are actually going to help you live a better life. So, let’s talk about different reframes you can take to your calendar and your schedule to make sure you are getting things done. So, I was working with an entrepreneur uh recently. I was helping him grow his business, but one thing that he kept struggling with was his ability to be consistent in working out. Now, if you don’t know anything about me or my approach or my style is it’s very well-rounded.

I don’t really care if your business is growing. If your health sucks and if your health is awesome and you have a six-pack abs, but you’re not growing your business, well, that sucks, too. You need to try and balance it all really. And uh this ruthless accountability is what I go after when I coach people one-on-one. And one thing that I did with this individual was I just helped him reframe a bunch of different habits on his calendar because I didn’t know what else to do. you know, I didn’t know what else to do on how to get him to stick to things he said he wanted.

Because when I work with anyone, I’m going to start with what are your goals? Because I have to know if what we’re working on a daily basis or weekly basis is congruent with what you actually want. So step one for you, if you want to implement any of the reframing strategy I’m about to go over is you have to start with knowing your goals in different categories of your life. So, if you want to be fit or healthy or whatever the goal is, why is that?

Like, what is the goal? What is it to play with your grandkids when you’re 80 years old? Or is it some sort of performance goal in the short term?

coaching story: time-blocking isn’t enough

Like, why is it that you even want to work out? If you want to work out, you absolutely should be doing those things. And then, if you want to grow a big giant business, why? Like, what’s the what’s the purpose? And what’s enough? Do you have a number? Like, where’s the end of that? All of these different things you have to know. You have to know what your goals are to be able to know if you’re congruent with your daily activities and if what you’re doing is helping.

So, let me go over some of the reframes I went over with him that helped him better understand things. So, what we did was a two-prong strategy, and I did this with a couple different ones. I’m going to give you a bunch that I ended up coming up with, but we just did it with a few things in his life.

step 1: reframe the calendar task

But the first one was he wasn’t working out. And so I had him pull up his calendar and we looked at it and he had all these blocks for workout. And so he had time blocked it, right? It’s like, okay, I’m gonna do workout here, workout there. And I would say that’s level one productivity, right? It’s just like time block, put it on the calendar, make sure it happens, right? But what was happening was it would get to the time block and he would just skip it or it wouldn’t be the priority.

He would fill in the gap with something else. And specifically all on his calendar, like he was already doing the time blocking and he was good at getting things done, but it said workout on the on the calendar. And I was like, “All right, man. We need to we need to change something here.” Because like you’re not making the connection. You think you’re just skipping a workout today, but what you’re doing every time you do that today, you are stealing from the future person you want to be.

So if you’re not working out today, that might seem like it’s okay today, but in you know, you do that for 2 or 3 years and now you’re not the person that you want to be or you’re not the person you once were, whatever the case is. So, I actually had him change it to something that came off the top of my head. I said, “I want you to change everything on your calendar that says workout to life extension modality because when we did uh go over his goals, one of his biggest goals was that the longevity piece was like, yeah, I want to be able to play with my grandkids.

I want to be able to be fit and healthy for long term cuz he has a wife and kids.” And so, I was like, I want you to label it life extension modality, which is kind of a crazy term, but you get it right. It’s like you said you want to live longer, you want to be healthy. This is how you do it. So, we’re going to label it life extension modality. So, now every time it comes up on your calendar, you’re not skipping Wednesday’s workout.

You’re ex you’re you’re skipping your life extension modality practice. So, that was the first thing we did. Then the second thing that we did was we actually used stars on his calendar on a rating between one and five stars. And the rating has to do with how congruent it is with your goal. So his life extension modality or workout we rated five stars.

step 2: add a 1 to 5 star goal rating

So on the calendar it would say life extension modality and then next to it have five stars. So it showed him two different things. Whenever he was face to face just by himself looking at his calendar and he’s about to skip a workout but now he sees okay this is my life extension modality practice that I’m about to skip and it’s five out of five related to who I want to be in the future. So maybe I don’t skip it because other than me being there with him saying do not skip this in his face like at his, you know, at his gym wherever and like hey you have to do this which isn’t realistic.

Most people don’t have coaches who can hold you to that level of accountability every second of the day. But that helped him a ton and that’s ultimately why I’m sharing it because he was like, “Yeah, every time I would come up to my calendar and want to skip that specific thing, I wouldn’t do it because it he saw the importance.”

why language shapes identity and action

And so all it’s doing is a reframe. And so if you can do those two things, start to reframe things how they what they actually are and then also have a star rating between one and five of how connected is this to your future goals, your future self. And so we came up with plenty more. I came up with some just for examples, reframes that you could do. Uh so in the health department, workout was life extension modality, five stars.

Uh we labeled sleep as the 24hour recovery cycle. And I didn’t do all these with him. I only did like three or four. Some were in the family uh in relationships. Uh but meal prep was the cellular construction project.

reframe examples: workouts, sleep, family, business

Just giving these things insane names. Again, that one was four stars. Uh, walking the dog was an active longevity insurance practice. Um, meditation was a stress bankruptcy prevention. So, you see how crazy we’re getting with the names. And then going into over to family and relationship was like spending time with kids was a legacy transfer session. Date night, marriage equity growth, uh, family dinner, generational alignment hour, five stars. So, you see where I’m going. Like, these things aren’t necessarily any different.

And most of the time, the only disconnect I have from someone who’s achieving their goals and not is they haven’t connected the why. They haven’t connected why it’s so important that you do whatever it is today. So, what I think you should do if you’re struggling with this, what I had him do and how I think about things is what is this practice truly? What am I actually working on? So if you’re like have on your calendar like team meeting and it’s like you can’t necessarily skip the team meeting but how you show up for that team meeting could be completely different if you are like look at it as investment into the long-term version of my business or long-term business growth investment is the team meeting because you’re investing in your team to grow to perform better to be better.

You’re not going to be the person who’s not paying attention in the meeting. you’re not going to be the person who’s showing up unprepared for the meeting. So, you need all these reframes in your life if you’re struggling to get things done that are actually on your calendar. And it doesn’t mean you don’t do the smaller things, right? Administrative work or the daily doing of any of these tasks.

the connection between boredom and mastery

They’re important. They might be three and four stars and they are ultimately how I make income right now. So, like those can still be labeled appropriately, but if you don’t start reframing things in your mind and truly realizing how important they are, you will keep skipping them. And here’s what I’ve learned in being doing self-development, trying to improve myself for the last 20 years is it is boring as hell. It’s not super complicated. When you first get into this space, if you’re trying to get better, you’re reading books, you’re hiring mentors and coaches, it’s it’s exciting.

You can get a new coach every 6 months or a year. You think you outgrow them when in reality you probably didn’t. And you just keep bouncing around and you’re learning all this exciting stuff. Do that for a decade and then you’ll probably get to the point where you realize, “Oh, this is really boring. All I need to be doing each and every single day is eating healthy foods, getting my workouts in, reading books, taking courses, continually trying to get better, looking for mentors, having good conversations.

Like, it’s not all that complex.” And the checklist isn’t very long. And then you just have to do it for the rest of your life. So, it’s the monotony that gets to people sometimes even when they’re already at a high level. It’s like, “Yeah, I’ve already been there, done that.” It’s like, no, no, no. You haven’t mastered anything. This is just something that you have to do for the rest of your life. You don’t master leadership and then take a break, right?

You don’t master business and then you just your business continues making money forever.

why you’ll never outgrow the basics

You have to have the practice. And so, if you can start to reframe how you look at each one of your activities, it will help you stick to it more. You will have more motivation, more explanation to yourself behind the why. And hell, you can even start to explain this to your team members so they can start to see more progress as well. So if you are struggling to make progress with the mundane task, the things that you should be doing, try a reframe with a rating system and start sticking to your goals.

final thought: try harder… and reframe everything

Try harder.