Discipline and Traction
I used to think discipline meant grinding harder. Now I think of it as engineering traction — building systems that make the right actions feel obvious, cheap, and almost inevitable.
Discipline as punishment vs. discipline as design
When people say “I need more discipline,” what they usually mean is: “I’m mad at myself for not brute-forcing this.” That was me for a long time. If I missed a workout, skipped studying, or fell off a project, I treated it as a moral failure instead of a design problem.
The problem with that version of discipline is that it scales terribly. Life gets more complicated — family, work, health, side projects — and suddenly “just try harder” collapses under its own weight.
Discipline is not how much pain you can tolerate. It’s how intelligently you design the path between intention and action.
Once I started thinking like that, a lot of things that felt like character flaws turned out to be system issues.
What traction feels like
Traction isn’t about hype or motivation spikes. It’s quieter than that. When you’ve got traction, your days start to develop a kind of rhythm:
- You don’t negotiate every habit from scratch — the slot already exists.
- The next action is clear and small enough that you don’t stall out.
- You can miss a day without the whole system exploding.
It’s the difference between dragging a broken shopping cart and one where all four wheels actually roll in the same direction.
Three levers that gave me real traction
1. Shrinking the unit of “success”
I used to define success at the project level: “launch a new dashboard,” “finish a certificate,” “renovate the property.” Those are multi-week or multi-month outcomes. Great for planning — terrible for daily momentum.
Traction started when I began defining success at the session level:
- One focused study block.
- One outbound message sent.
- One problem actually solved for a user, tenant, or client.
The question each day shifted from “Did I finish?” to “Did I move the ball clearly downfield?”
2. Locking in default time blocks
There’s a huge difference between “I’ll work on this sometime this week” and “This happens at 7–8 a.m. on weekdays unless the house is on fire.”
For me, that looked like:
- A **learning block** in the morning before the day gets noisy, where I work on skills that compound — data, systems, certifications.
- A **build block** a few times a week, dedicated to shipping something: a dashboard, automation, landing page, or outline for a new project.
- A short **reflection block** once a week to ask: “What actually moved the needle? What just made me feel busy?”
Once those blocks became defaults, discipline stopped being a question of motivation and became more about: “What goes in the block today?”
3. Making friction visible
Whenever I kept avoiding a task, I started assuming there was a hidden friction:
- The instructions were vague.
- The next step was too big.
- Important files lived in five different places.
- I was trying to do deep work in a shallow environment (notifications, chaos, etc.).
Instead of demanding more discipline from myself, I started asking one question: “What would this look like if it were 50% easier to start?”
Sometimes the answer was as simple as:
- Pre-opening the tabs and docs the night before.
- Breaking the work into 3 micro-steps on a sticky note.
- Moving the task into a quieter time block where it actually stood a chance.
The Traction Audit (how I reset when things drift)
When my routines fall apart — newborn schedules, travel, health flare-ups, whatever — I run a quick “traction audit” instead of just trying to power back on where I left off.
- List the arenas that matter right now. Work, learning, health, family, side projects. Not the ideal list — the real one.
- For each arena, ask: “What’s the smallest consistent action that would move this forward?”
- Give each arena a default slot. Not a vibe, a time.
- Remove one thing. Something has to get demoted so that the rest can get done with less friction.
The goal isn’t to rebuild a perfect system overnight. It’s to create just enough structure that traction can rebuild itself.
Discipline when nobody is watching
The hardest part of discipline is that most of it happens offstage. There’s no applause for debugging an automation, reworking a budget, or rewatching a lesson until it finally clicks.
The way I’ve made peace with that is by keeping a private scoreboard — not for external validation, but to see the compounding:
- Study blocks completed this month.
- Systems shipped or improved.
- People tangibly helped (a customer, a tenant, a student, my family).
When I look back at those numbers, it’s obvious: on any given day, the progress feels microscopic. Over six or twelve months, it’s the only reason anything big exists at all.
Discipline creates the conditions. Traction is the feeling once those conditions start compounding.
Where this mindset shows up in my work
This discipline-and-traction lens is baked into everything else on this site:
- The way I build **internal tools and dashboards** — start with one workflow, ship a scrappy version, tighten the loop, then scale.
- The structure behind **Degrees Sin Barreras** — break the path to a degree into smaller, repeatable moves instead of one overwhelming leap.
- The **SRQ Food Bank map**, which started as a weekend project and keeps improving in small, practical iterations.
I don’t trust motivation to stick around. I trust the systems that create traction — the boring, repeatable, almost invisible structures that keep me moving when things aren’t glamorous.