A Reminder Is the Weakest Fix There Is

In my line of work we have a phrase for a fix that depends on somebody remembering. We call it a training solution. People say it in meetings with a straight face, and everybody in the room knows it is not going to hold.

There is a hierarchy of controls we use in industry, and it goes in a specific order for a reason. You try to eliminate the hazard. If you cannot, you substitute something safer. If you cannot do that, you engineer a control, meaning you change the equipment so the bad outcome is difficult or impossible. Only after all of that do you fall back to procedure and training, which is us asking a human being to remember the right thing at the wrong moment. It is dead last on the list because it fails the most.

Now look at your growth plan.

Almost everybody's is an administrative control. It is a decision, held in memory, that depends on you remembering to want it on a Thursday in February when three things went wrong before ten in the morning. That is not a strategy. That is a reminder with a nice title.

The Law of Design says that to maximize growth you develop strategies. Which is true, and which most people hear as "make a plan." It is not the same thing. A plan is what you intend to do. A design is what happens whether or not you feel like it.

Design the Week, Not the Goal

The goal is the easy part and it is almost never the problem.

You already know roughly what you want. Better at speaking, better with people, that certification, the book you have been meaning to write. Goals are cheap and everybody has good ones. What almost nobody has is a week that produces them.

So stop working on the goal and start working on the week. Take whatever you want and ask a plainer question: what has to appear on my calendar, and what has to disappear from it, for this to happen without heroics?

That question is uncomfortable because it has a subtraction in it. Something is coming off the week. Most plans fail at exactly that point, when a person tries to add a new thing to a full week and expects willpower to make room.

Design means deciding in advance. When, where, how long, and what it replaces. If you cannot answer all four, you do not have a design, you have a wish with a deadline.

Build for the Version of You That Is Tired

Here is the single most useful design principle I know, and it comes straight off the plant floor.

You do not build for the good day. You build for the bad one.

Nobody designs a machine around its best hour. You design around the worst realistic conditions, because that is when it will actually be tested, and a design that only works in ideal conditions is not a design, it is a demonstration.

So run your plan against your worst likely Tuesday. Not a catastrophe, just a normal bad day: something broke, somebody called out, you slept badly, you are behind. Does the plan survive that day?

If it needs you to be motivated, it fails. If it needs a clean ninety minutes, it fails. If it needs you to make a decision in the moment, it fails, because the tired version of you does not make good decisions, he takes the path of least resistance every single time.

Design so the path of least resistance is the thing you wanted. Put the book on the seat of the car. Set the recurring meeting. Pay in advance. Tell somebody. Make the right move easier than the wrong one, and you will stop needing to be impressive.

What This Looks Like When You Get It Wrong

It looks like a very good binder.

I have seen people spend an entire weekend building a development plan, complete with categories and target dates, and it is genuinely thoughtful work. Then it goes on a shelf, because the plan described a destination and never touched a single hour of an actual week.

It also looks like relying on remembering. You decided to read twenty minutes a night. There is no time attached, no place, nothing that puts the book in your hand. So it happens for a while, while the decision is still warm, and then one night you forget, and forgetting has no consequence, so it happens again.

And it looks like designing for the wrong person. You looked at what somebody impressive does, five in the morning and two hours before work, and you copied the output of their design instead of building your own. They designed for their life. You have a different one.

The tell in every case is the same. When it fails, you conclude something about your character. It was never your character. It was the design, and designs are fixable in an afternoon.

One Mentor Is a Single Point of Failure

Now let me put the same engineering idea on the people side, because this is where design and mentorship meet.

In reliability work, a single point of failure is any one component whose loss takes down the whole system. You find them, and then you build around them, because sooner or later everything fails.

One mentor is a single point of failure.

They are terrific until they change jobs, get busy, move, or simply reach the edge of what they know. And there is a second problem that shows up earlier: one person can only see you from one angle. A great operations mentor will give you excellent operations advice about a problem that is actually a communication problem, and neither of you will catch it.

The design answer is a small board rather than a single seat. Three or four people, each covering something different. Somebody a step ahead in your function. Somebody who is good at the thing you are worst at. Somebody outside your industry entirely, who will ask the obvious question nobody inside it is allowed to ask. And ideally somebody behind you, because teaching a thing is how you find out whether you understand it.

None of them has to be a formal mentor. Nobody has to sign anything. Most of the best versions of this are four people who each think they are just having coffee with you occasionally, and the design lives in your head, not in theirs.

Three articles that go further:

One Thing to Do This Week

Take the one thing you have been meaning to do and give it four answers. When. Where. How long. What it replaces.

Write them down, and then do the part everybody skips: put it in the calendar as a repeating item, and take the thing it replaces off the calendar in the same sitting. Both moves, same five minutes.

Then run it against your worst likely Tuesday. If it would not survive that day, cut it in half and run it again.

You are not making a commitment. You are removing the need for one, which is the entire point of a design.