Incremental Improvements
Among self-development circles, there is a tendency to assume that you must “walk through fire” if you want to make a lasting change in your life.
This manifests itself in a whole lot of blog articles where a person says, “I’m going to do this massive great undertaking” followed by proclamations of fixing their life, business and relationship goals. They’re going to do it all in one go and probably within a short time limit of thirty days or less.
Needless to say, this results in a lot of empty blogs and broken promises. I’m not going to judge, because I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. In fact, for a lot of my undertakings, I consider this a feature as opposed to a bug.
However, it is worth pointing out that this isn’t the only way to do it. Arguably, it’s not the best way to do it.
Incremental improvements help, and they work.
Incremental Improvements
I’ve written about a lot of different project ideas and business things this site. Unlike a lot of life hackers, I have always maintained that working a lot and working hard is important to success. I don’t really agree with the idea that you can hack a process before you’ve learned how to do it, and I don’t think that shortcuts are necessarily better than learning and working.
One of the reasons I suggest a volume-based approach to work is that a lot of “hacks” come from putting in the hours and learning shortcuts in a natural way.
When it comes to incremental improvement, you want to find these little habits and when you do find them, you need to implement them. They will give you massive productivity boosts over time.
Example
For example, I was reading an old book a few months back called Plotto. I’ve written about it here. It’s a fantastic book and it will help you if you want to learn about writing fiction.
One of the tiny incremental improvements in my work day came about recently when I thought back to that book. In that book, protagonists (for fiction stories) are referred to by a letter and number code. So your hero might be referred to as A1. His friend might be referred to as A2. The heroine, or love interest, might be referred to as B1. A villain might be referred to as C1. So on and so forth. The actual structure is unimportant. What is important though is that I’ve realised that when I am writing fiction, I can plot the book out in advance using these identifiers. This means that I don’t have to think about back story, names of characters or anything like that. In fact, you could write out a whole synopsis of a book without having worked any of those details out.
This isn’t a massive change. I haven’t dedicated my life to writing fiction or stopped speaking to family members until the book is done. That’s the sort of advice you get online. Let your children starve, quit your job, so on and so forth.
So the incremental improvement isn’t a case of overhauling a massive behavioural change, but it is something that will save you a few minutes to a few hours each time you do something.
This is just a single novel idea. If you make a point of taking small incremental improvements each time you do something and using them the next time in a more efficient way, then you might save ten minutes every time. If you do this every single time with the new improvement, those minutes stack. After five iterations of similar incremental improvements, you’re saving an hour on each task. Over time, you get a lot better, a lot more efficient and also better at discovering the incremental improvements themselves.
This is the difference between someone who is a master at their chosen activity versus someone who aspires to be a master at the chosen activity.
Another Example
Because some of you don’t care about writing fiction, I thought I’d introduce another example.
Let’s say you read far too many blogs. One incremental improvement you could make is to limit yourself to one hour of reading a day. That’s a pretty big change though. You could also do the obvious things like cutting down by a few minutes a day, maybe only reading five blogs, something similar like that.
On the other hand, you could make an even smaller change. You could carry on reading your favourite blogs, but every time you see a link to an affiliate product, you can make note of that. Write down what the product is, who sells it and what the commission is.
Then, when you come to build your blog or your affiliate sites, you already have a database of possible offers to give people. You can do the same with good sales letters or product reviews. Put those in folder-this is what’s called a swipe file by copywriters.
Those two things above will take maybe two minutes a day, but if you do it over a significant amount of time, you will have lots of examples of things you can use as inspiration, and ideas to try out.
It’s incremental. You’re barely going to notice you do it. Once you’ve built habit of doing it, it will be automatic and invisible.
But it will pay dividends in the future.
Final Thoughts
There are two different ways you can approach change in your life. You can make a massive change. This is the New Year’s resolution thing where you throw out all the junk food and hit the gym 7 o’clock on 1 January.
Or you can take the second approach, which is to change something for thirty seconds a day. Make the least amount of improvement you can and over time wait for those changes to accumulate and add to your performance exponentially.
There is a place for both, but one of them is a lot easier and faster to implement than the other. That’s why incremental improvements are very important.