Micro habits: the smallest step that counts

Most people settle on a pace they can manage in a good week. Then a bad week comes, and what gets adjusted is not the pace but the whole project.

Shrink it until it cannot fail

Your smallest version has to be small enough to do on a day when everything else has gone wrong. Not on a normal day. On the worst day.

Examples of smallest versions:

• Setting up the phone and the tripod. Not recording anything.
• Recording one take. A single one, however it turns out.
• Writing three sentences of script.

Yes, the first one counts. Setting up the gear is the heavy part, and the rest follows more often than you would think once it is standing there.

Why so small

You are not building production right now. You are building evidence that this is something you do.

Fourteen days in a row of a small thing gives you something that fourteen hours on a single Sunday does not: a self-image where filming belongs to your ordinary life.

Count days, not clips

What you keep a record of becomes what you optimise. Count clips and you will postpone days when you only have a little energy. Count days and you will do the small version.

At this stage the days matter more.

What to do when the chain breaks

It breaks. The rule is never to miss two days in a row.

A missed day is a missed day. Two in a row is the start of a new pattern, and that is where people lose it.