You Don’t Need to be Perfect to Get Perfectly Good Results

Recently I was teaching a time management seminar for a software company. At a break, I spoke with a group of people from the program. One of them, a woman in her 20s, said to me, “You are so good at this stuff. I’ll bet you’re like a robot.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You just get this stuff automatically, don’t you? I’ll bet you do every one of the things you’re teaching us today, perfectly.”

I laughed. I know how much that’s not the case. I know all the areas I struggle to improve. I know also how long I had to work to build up all the little habits that allow me to do the things I was teaching her consistently. I told her this.

I’m not sure she believed me.


We don’t need to do everything perfectly to have perfectly great lives

I am far from perfect. I don’t think we need to do things perfectly to get great results, at least in most areas of life. I drink a lot of coffee. I average about 4-5 cups a day. Sometimes my hands shake as a result. An interesting question, though: Do I drink too much coffee? This question leads me to the topic for this next post: not doing things perfectly is OK.

We just can’t do everything perfectly. There simply isn’t the time and resources to do so. There isn’t really a need to do so. Also, trying to do one thing optimized may interfere with optimizing another area of our life.

Speaking of coffee drinking, one thing I’ve decided not to do perfectly is diet and exercise. I want to do well in this area, and do that consistently. But I’ve decided after many trials to stop trying to do it perfectly. This is an area I’ve struggled my whole life, feeling the burden of all the “shoulds.” I should eat so many leafy greens a day, should eat more fruit, and should eat less refined sugar.


Diet and exercise can feel like an area that needs to be perfect

This area, diet and exercise, has been studied and written about so extensively, is reported about in the news and media so often, I think it’s easy for us all to feel inundated by the shoulds. Unfortunately, no amount of shoulds got me where I wanted to be. In fact, the more I told myself I should the less I seemed to want to persevere in creating an eating plan I could live with.

That’s the critical thing, as I mentioned in my last post on the 5% idea. We have to focus on building a system of habits we can live with. Otherwise any change we make is just a temporary set of behaviors getting pushed through by our willpower alone, and will likely depart as soon as our focus shifts or our willpower gives.

I experienced this cycle (willpower alone and then the behavior leaves) many times around diet and exercise. I decided to do something to end it, something I based on the 80/20 rule. You’ve probably heard of this rule: it postulates that in many performance areas, 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. In other words, everything we do or strive to do, in my case around diet, is not worth the same amount. If you can’t do it all (which we usually can’t), choose the things that will give you the best return. That way you can invest less and reap more.


Eat, Drink and Be Healthy helped me take a different approach

So I did: I focused on choosing my 20% behaviors. I started by looking for new information I this area of diet and exercise, something that would enable me rather than bury me in shoulds. Getting new information can be a great way to get unstuck from a habit that’s not working for you. I finally stumbled upon the new information, the new perspective. It came to me in a program I taught a few years ago where I mentioned some things about diet and exercise during the course of my talk. A program participant spoke with me afterward and recommended I check out a book. The book is called Eat, Drink and be Healthy by Walter Willett, MD. What a wonderful book. I highly recommend it.

The author, the Dean of Nutrition at Harvard Medical school, takes an intriguing approach to health. First, he ranks all health behaviors in order of importance. In his food pyramid, the most important rules to follow are at the foundation of the pyramid. (This was perfect for me, as I wanted to know the 20% to focus on.)

Also, he bases every conclusion on the existing data and results of many tests. It’s interesting to note there’s not a lot of conclusive information in the area of diet and exercise. You’ve probably experienced this watching the news. One day, a study comes to one conclusion, and a few months later another study reverses it. He speaks about how not all published conclusions are founded. Turns out it takes a while to test most aspects of diet, many years often, and most of these studies haven’t yet put in the time.

My favorite part of the book, and why I thought you might find it useful, is that he breaks his recommendations into three categories:

• here’s what we know for sure is good/bad for you (based on extensive tests)
• here’s what we are almost sure of (still need some more tests to be sure)
• here’s what I believe but we don’t have the data to be sure yet

I love his approach. I get overwhelmed sometimes when reading about all the things I should do in order to have a good diet and be healthy. I love how he’s broken out the to-dos, making it easier to choose the most important ones for your goals.

So, based on his recommendations, I decided to follow the 80/20 rule and just focus on the most important things. The things I’ve chosen to focus on are first, exercising regularly (even more important to life length and quality of life than diet, based on the research). Second, I’m working to moderate my intake of saturated fats.

I may choose never to get to the rest of the recommendations. If I do go further, though, the next thing on my list would be to eat more whole grains. Even though I’ve chosen, at least for now, to try doing well on diet and exercise, and not going after perfection, it feels great to know I’m doing a good job on the two most important things.

Should I stop drinking coffee, or is it not a bad thing?

So back to drinking coffee. I may drink too much, but maybe not. According to Willet, coffee is pretty much an OK thing to drink, according to the data. He suggests not going over four cups a day, but he points out that much of the past research into the negative effects of coffee had a research problem: it didn’t separate coffee drinking from smoking, a related habit at the time. As a result, many of the negatives we may associate with coffee today are more a product of smoking than coffee.

Willet says a moderate amount of coffee is likely a neutral behavior: the benefits match the risks. Drinking coffee may cause kidney stones and a few other problems, but according to the data, it helps as well. Did you know that if you’re a regular coffee drinker, you are 50% less likely to commit suicide?

I’ll continue to drink my coffee. His conclusions about coffee are good news for me. Even if the data pointed to coffee being an overall negative, I might still drink as much as I do. I get psychological benefits. I enjoy drinking it. I enjoy making it, the daily ritual of grinding the beans. I enjoy the smell of it. I love the pick-me-up.

So where do you need to apply the 80/20 rule? Are there areas in your life that are full of shoulds? Might you benefit from choosing a few good behaviors, doing them consistently, and letting the rest go—at least for now? Think about it. Let me know what you decide.

Frequently Asked Questions about the 5% Idea

(This is part of a series on the 5% Idea. You may want to start with the first post.)

What are some helpful tools to support me in doing to 5% idea?

One critical tool is to track what you’re doing and your progress. I mentioned earlier how critical it is for us to measure or to estimate our past behavior when determining how much to stretch. From that we can determine a realistic future goal.

For my exercise goal, as an example, I have a spreadsheet that I use to track my goals for the week and my actuals for the week. I additionally track how I’m doing over time. If the week is under goal then I’ll need to push myself the next week to correct it. Tracking allows us to really look at our performance and see where we need to build, as well as see the growth we’re making.

Another useful tool can be reminders. Most habits take faster if we build them into other structures we’ve created. For example, if you have a calendar that you look at consistently every day, putting reminders on the days you like to get your habit done will make it more likely that you get it done.

Be careful with reminders, however. Most of us over-remind ourselves. Have you ever had (maybe you do now) Post-It Notes littered throughout your office? Pasted around your monitor border, on your desktop? If we overuse reminders it’s like they don’t even exist.

I advocate that if you’re going to put reminders around you, it’s better to put them where you’ll be at the time you really need to act—what I call the “drop dead point.” Many of us put reminders to ourselves at the point in time we think we should be doing this thing. Instead, put your reminder at the point in time you must do it in order to keep the habit on track for that week. (You can put this kind of reminder on your task list for that day, your calendar, or some other tool with days on it.)

So, if I were trying to make sure I flossed twice a week, I might put my first reminder on the second-to-last day of the week, or maybe the day before, so that I had one day to “miss.” (You definitely don’t need to be perfect to get the benefits of the 5% rule—just consistent over periods of time.) I’ve found that over time, you’ll come to need the reminders less and less as the habit builds up.

You can also hook your habit to structure that’s already in your life. My wife and I don’t have kids (yet?), so we’ll often watch TV together a couple of nights a week. I hide my floss among the magazines on the coffee table and that way the floss is always there and available to me at the commercial breaks. This is an example of a good, simple way to hook into the existing structure of things, to hook your habit into where you know you’re going to be. All these little changes make consistency more likely.

Should I celebrate my progress along the way as I work the 5% idea?

Most definitely! You should celebrate your 5% progress. Celebration is one of my favorite parts of life, but it’s also a great way to anchor habits.

There are several places I often celebrate, but invent and celebrate any time you want to. The first celebration point is often as you're starting to measure your past progress and establishing your baseline performance level. Remind yourself of the power of getting out of the rut and deciding to just start something new in this area, to get off the train of overstretch. Congratulate yourself for that.

You can celebrate the point of consistency, after you’ve gone for a period (usually three to four weeks for me) consistently at the level of your historical average. That’s probably the first time you’ve done this habit with so much consistency, so why not celebrate?

Finally you can celebrate along the way. As you make your 5% increase, do that consistently and then add the next increase, find ways to reward yourself. Talk up this habit with others so they can enjoy your results. Maybe they’ll want to work on something, too, and you’ll inspire them with your progress.

Can I stretch for more than 5% improvements?

Sure you can. As I mentioned, sometimes we need more than 5% or something terrible might happen to something we deeply value, like our health, job or marriage.

Just be careful about deciding to go above 5%. Remember, I chose 5% (the idea being small, realistic stretches) because we tend to overstretch. Five percent, when added consistently over time, is a significant increase to a lifelong habit. Yet, it’s usually small enough an incremental change that most we can figure out how to build our way to that next level of behavior—just a little bit more.

If you’re going more than 5%, keep in mind doing that might stretch other areas of the system called “you.” When you’re progressing at 5%, my belief is that these other areas get a slow stretch and have time to recover. It’s like building a muscle very slowly. Nothing gets overdone and the rest of the “body” of your habits gets stronger and you slowly accommodate the slightly new behavior. Stretch too fast and it messes with some other part of the system.

So, if you’re going to go for the 10 or 20% stretch, you’ll need to account for the strain that could cause to other parts of your system. You’ll want to examine other affected habits, time commitments, quirks, etc. about you.

For example, if you’re going to put more time into project work each week, you’ll need to look at some other commitments of your time (other priorities, time wasters, or whatever) that you’re going to consciously reduce. Or, you may have to look at how you’re going to produce more time for the stretch itself. Maybe you’re going to work slightly more each week. Or you’re going to get off some other project. But you’ll need to adjust where your time is going in order to make that larger stretch.

You’ll also need to build the new stretch into your environment. You’re going to need more reminders. You’re going to need to think about the structure you could add to support you. Do you start scheduling appointments with yourself for this habit so that you can ensure the time is available? You’ll likely need to think about support.

Many of us perform better when we’re supported by others or accountable to them. To make this larger stretch, you may want to sign up with someone else for the result. If you’re going to be exercising 20% more over the next month, you may want to buddy up with someone and support each other. Larger stretches usually require you to adjust the overall system more if you’d like to be successful. Five percent stretches usually don’t require the extra support or system changes—they stretch more slowly, so can sneak their way in.

What is the hardest part of applying the 5% idea?

I’d say the first big block for most people in applying the 5% idea is inflexibility. We often get stuck in our ways of approaching things. The “should” trap I mentioned earlier is a pretty big one and so often the idea of doing anything other than what you believe you should be doing is met with resistance.

Einstein said it best when he said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.” But remember, the great part of the Einstein quote is this: if you’ve been feeling stuck or “insane” in a certain area, just by trying something new you’ve got a pretty good chance to get some new results.

The other common block, as I mentioned, is being impatient. We expect results to happen faster than they do. We think a certain level of results (usually a large incremental jump) must happen, or we believe we couldn’t possibly get real results from our efforts. Maybe on a certain level it’s that we’re just not confident that if the results don’t happen quickly enough we’ll have enough incentive to keep up the new changes. Managing our own impatience can be hard.

I’ve found the hardest part of the 5% idea is just keeping your impatience in check. As I feel the urge to do more or get started faster, I try to remind myself it’s not about what I do this month, or even this year. With maintenance habits, it’s really more about where I am five years or ten years from now in this area. Another thing I’ve found helps with the impatience is trying the 5% idea on several small habits simultaneously. That way you can feel the cumulative effect of tracking and starting to move on several small things. This usually feels like more of a benefit immediately, which is I think what our brain craves—we want the shorter term gratification!

What if I’m inconsistent as I get things started? What if I have periods of up and down?

I have had these periods every time I’ve used the 5% idea, and it still works for me. I remind myself the idea isn’t to eliminate inconsistency around my habits--it’s just to reduce it to smaller intervals. So rather than: I exercise for a month, then I don’t for a month, then I do, then I don’t, I try to be more consistent each week, even if each day isn’t perfect.

I work out regularly now and have for a couple of years. But by saying I work out regularly, I don’t mean I work out exactly the same amount each week. I do have a goal for the week, though, and when I miss it, I try to catch it up as fast as I can. I’m inconsistent, but I guess I’ve developed, through the 5% idea, the habits and the mental muscle to keep small inconsistencies around exercise from building to larger ones.

Building maintenance habits is more about building your internal confidence than anything. Your success in the habit is more a product of: overall do you feel confident that you are getting consistent? When you start to feel that way, you see that this week in the habit area may be slightly different from last week, but it’s not wildly different from last week. You’re no longer pitching between working out like a madman (or woman) and not working out at all.

The key part of building a habit is to watch for the wild swings, and learn to taper them. One behavior I highly recommend is to check in weekly with the habit, to learn from your performance. Each week, I look at my performance and say, “How can I make this even more consistent next week? What small corrections can I make?”

As an example, when I find that I haven’t been exercising consistently and I ask myself why, it may be that I’ve been traveling and the travel is interfering with the exercise. OK, good, so I ask myself, how I can improve that inconsistency by just a little bit the next time I travel? The answer might be I’m going to start looking a couple weeks ahead each month at my travel schedule and plan when I’m going to exercise. It may be that I’ll work out more in weeks when I’m not traveling as a way to keep my exercise consistent. Or I might think about the usual travel exercise obstacles and think of one change I’ll make that will shrink one obstacle.

In my next post I will talk about how I handle my diet, an area where I’ve chosen not to be perfect, where I’ve chosen to be just good and do that consistently.

More 5% Idea – How It Helps Us to Get Out of the Overstretch Cycle and Get Results

(This is part of a series on the 5% Idea. You may want to start with the first post.)

In my previous post about the 5% Idea, I mentioned that we sometimes have difficulty making and keeping maintenance habits (an example for me is flossing my teeth regularly). With habits like exercise, we have a tendency to get lost in what we should do, rather than work on getting the consistency of the habit established. So we tend to bounce back and forth between forcing ourselves to work on the habit and forgetting it entirely. Let’s talk a bit about why we do this, and how the 5% Idea can help us to get out of the inconsistency trap.

With maintenance activities, it’s all about the habit. Because we’re going to need to do this thing, whether it be exercise, reading and keeping up on our career, time spent with each child, developing new business ideas, or whatever—because we need to do this consistently, week-in and week out, we’ve got to have a habit. Otherwise the energy involved in doing it routinely is just too much for the benefits received, and we’re sure to stop doing it.

It’s common to overstretch when we try to work on exercise. Do you know anyone who makes a pact to get in shape each New Years, joins a gym, works really hard at it for a few weeks, and then lets exercise go for the year? It’s so easy to get stuck in cycles like these, where we forget about the activity (at least we forget to put time into it), then we feel the pain (weight gain, lethargy, guilt, in the case of exercise) and frantically reinvest.

We have this annoying tendency to overstretch

Why do we tend to overstretch, rather than build up some consistent engagement we can keep up? It can be hard to get these consistent habits going. We don’t feel the pain of them every day when they’re not being done. Or, if we feel the pain, it’s below threshold. It’s easy to tune out soft background noise after a while, and it’s easy to tune out the annoying hum of guilt that says I need to invest more time in my projects each week. There’s pain there, but it’s less pain than the pain of not handling that latest crisis, email, or request.

We don’t feel the pain of not developing our employees until that employee mentally checks out or actually physically checks out and heads for another employer. We don’t think of the stress of becoming obsolete in our career on a daily basis, so we forget to invest in reading or developing ourselves. Because it can go a while before the pain or impact builds up, we tend to miss it or ignore it for a while. Then, one day we see the pain or lack of investment as a problem, and we overstretch to try to correct it. That overstretching reaction is a problem in itself.

Overstretching is not the only way we could approach the situation, but it’s the common way. We could decide to invest in the long-haul, in developing a lifetime habit in that area, and to work in small bits until we get it. But we often don’t. Why? Perhaps we overstretch because, as people, we are not always terrific with the application of patience and flexibility to the hardest parts of our lives.

These virtues of patience and flexibility are so important to human effectiveness, but they are hard to develop. We tend to get impatient for results, especially when we’re feeling the pain. Or we tend to get stuck in our cycles of how things must be done, should be done, and so we don’t alter our behavior enough to get new results, like a consistent habit. “I must do my exercise in the morning” cuts off options like lunch break, walk with kids after work, weekend yoga clinic, etc.

We want the results right away, and we are inflexible with ourselves. You might catch yourself saying things like “I should be flossing seven times a week.” (That’s what I used to say to myself.) But those “shoulds,” that want of results, can get in the way of getting to those results. I might try to floss every day, but if I haven’t been flossing at all, that’s probably too much. That flossing habit won’t have time to take, and my result will likely be: flossing like a madman for a week or two and then I don’t do it anymore. I’ll be upset with myself and won’t believe in my ability to get results in this area, which will make it harder to get them the next time. What a vicious cycle this can become. Can you relate? There’s got to be another way.

It all works better when we stop overstretching and start respecting the system

This cycle of overstretching and then giving up, repeat, gives us terrible results over time. Yet getting stuck in this is our tendency, especially with the harder habits of our lives.

Here’s what the 5% Idea is really about. If you can get out of this cycle, and improve at all, you’re going to be doing better than you did before. If you can be patient with yourself and focus on improvement over time, rather than instant overstretch, you will benefit.

Here’s the thing we don’t get: the bumpy ride of overstretch and then do nothing produces terrible results. If we can grow that in small, patient increments, we can grow your results in any area. If we focus on your historical average (how much time do you actually spend on projects, not time you should spend on projects), we can use that as a starting point. We can then work to build a habit where you learn to do that average, horrible as you think it may be, consistently. Consistency (not robotic perfection, but more consistent execution than before) always helps with maintenance habits—I think it’s required for them to “take.”

Why does the overstretching cycle perform so badly? You are a system. A system of habits, responsibilities, things you’re invested in, strengths, weaknesses, and personality traits. As an engineer, I studied and worked on systems. I have a lot of respect for them, and realize that too much change in one area of a system can throw the whole system off. Systems need to maintain some kind of balance, or they break down, they react.

Stretch a habit too far in one area without accounting for it in some other way, and the system called you may not be able to handle it, at least long term. Let’s say you run for seven days straight and you’ve never done that before. That’s quite a stretch. You may be able to keep it up in the short term, but there are just too many things in your life that will be ready to come in and stop that habit from taking root. There are many, many different ways the system could react, and throw you back to where you started. Here are a few of the blocks that could come up with the exercise:

• The pain of exercise on your body, which isn’t conditioned for that much.
• You haven’t yet changed your lifestyle in other areas to free up the time.
• Others may question why you’re running so much.

If you can get unstuck from the overstretching and start to work on consistency, you experience success on several levels. First, you’ll probably be getting more of the habit in. Second, you’re being more consistent, which usually improves results with maintenance habits, as opposed to “crunching.” Third, you know that this is all toward a bigger picture, which is that every year you’re going to be doing this successful maintenance habit more and more. You’re going to enjoy these results for a lifetime. Every year the habit will grow in results, and getting those results will get easier. You won’t have to think about it so much.

Much as I love the 5% idea, it’s not for everything

I’m not advocating the 5% Idea for every habit or change. There are areas where we need to move faster. Luckily, though, we generally feel more pain in the moment in those situations, so it’s easier to set a habit, even if it’s a bit of a stretch.

If you had just had coronary bypass surgery and been told by your doctor that you needed to drastically modify your health habits or you would probably die, the 5% Idea would not be enough. You would need more drastic measures--although you might not take them. According to Dr. Edward D. Miller at John Hopkins, only 10% of patients change their lifestyles when measured two years following bypass surgery. Perhaps the 5% Idea could help that 90% that don’t change, although I’d probably advocate a faster rate of change, like the 10% Idea. You get the idea.

So the 5% Idea isn’t for everything, but I believe it can help with most of our habits. If you’re willing to invest a bit, and be patient in the smaller areas, I am convinced you will build a habit that will last a lifetime and get you better results than we get through the overstretch cycle.

In my next post, I’ll give you a walkthrough of how to apply the 5% Idea in detail. Until then, here’s some fieldwork for you. Ask yourself these questions around one area where you’d like to develop a more consistent habit. For this habit:

• How could lack of patience or unwillingness to try different approaches be getting in the way?
• What other things in the system called my life tend to react or get in the way when I try to invest in this habit?