A good system works so well that you don’t notice it.
Until it stops working.
This morning I opened a cabinet to grab my electrolytes before a workout.
And I saw something strange.
The vitamins 💊 I was supposed to take last night were still sitting on my electrolyte bottle.
Untouched.
I haven’t forgotten to take supplements in almost a decade!
So this felt… unreal. Almost impossible. Like seeing an alien!
Then I laughed.
Ah.
That’s exactly how my clients forget to take their pills.
Not because they’re forgetful.
Not because they don’t care.
But because they built a system that doesn’t actually work for the human brain.
Any habit you want to repeat without thinking needs 3 things:
-
A cue – something that reminds you to act
-
An action – a simple, repeatable sequence
-
A reward – some sense of benefit or satisfaction
So what went wrong with my evening supplements?
In my old place, I always put them where I ate dinner.
While eating, I’d see them.
I’d take them. No thinking required.
In this temporary place, I couldn’t put them near the dinner table.
So I tucked them away in a cabinet.
Out of sight. Out of system. Out of mind.
And so… I forgot.
I forgot so completely that seeing them the next morning felt shocking.
But ... that was good news.
Because it reminded me how powerful good systems really are.
A great system frees your mind from small, repetitive decisions,
so it can focus on things that actually matter.
David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, has a saying:
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
That’s what systems are for.
Whenever I move into a new place, temporary or permanent, I do this first:
I make sure my day-to-day life requires as little thinking as possible.
Because when the basics run on autopilot, creativity shows up fully.
Focus deepens.
Flow becomes available and almost inevitable.
You can’t fully forget the outside world if your brain is busy reminding you to drink water, take supplements, send that email, remember "that" thing.
That's what systems are for.
Your mind gets to do what it does best - thinking and solving problems - at its full capacity, unoccupied by the mundane.
Over to you, dear reader,
Where in your life are you trying to remember your way to consistency, instead of designing a system that makes it happen?
