In 2020, our successful agency lost all its clients due to the pandemic.

We had to innovate out of a crisis and built the first cloud platform that turns WordPress sites into low-code SaaS. We got funded by leading VCs backed by household names such as Porsche and Axel Springer.

To get there and beyond, I’ve been dedicated to building a personal strategy and systems to attain my goals. Twice per month, I share what works for me and why.

Introduction

“The more you do something, the stronger and more efficient the neural connections become”, I explained to Linsey. “It’s called Synaptic Pruning”. I smiled confidently, even though I had only read about the term moments before.

My girlfriend looked at me confused, “and that’s why we make a list of our current habits?”.

I nodded. “Exactly!”.

“But I still don’t understand how this will help us to be more productive and stop eating so much chocolate”, she signed.

“We stack new, good habits with our existing habits we want to keep. We also get rid of bad habits by making a Habit Scorecard. It’s easy!”

At the time, I had no idea what I was talking about. But it turned out really well.

My key System for Life

Let’s talk about something that will divide the room: I score myself daily based on the number of good habits I have and the number of bad habits I haven’t performed.

Last week, I scored 88/100. I know, it sounds crazy to me too.

This system still delivers me the focus and discipline to consistently execute my goals (read my Personal OKRs article). I assure you, it changed my life. Proceed with an open mind.

This article discusses my daily Habit Stack as my key System for Life. I explain the science, why I have one, and why it’s so powerful.

And yes, I’ll share my Habit Stack with you.

What is a “Habit Stack”

My mother died in December 2018. Since then and until my turnaround year in 2022, I could not get out of bed in the morning. And I don’t mean that as a general statement. I just didn’t see the point.

I honestly could not think of a single reason why I would get out of bed. In my mind, everything inside that bed was better than outside. I would eventually drag myself out of bed begrudgingly, usually after an hour and a half snoozing.

I was desperately looking for a way out of that cycle. I put my alarm in a different room, I tried different sleeping methods, and I even tried drinking a glass of chili pepper-infused water once right after waking up. Bad idea! But in 2022, everything changed after I fundamentally reset my mentality and adopted a new system.

I’ve mentioned it briefly in my foundational article about OKRs: the system I use I call my “Habit Stack”. It’s a list of all the good habits I want to perform every day, all the bad habits I want to avoid, and the times of days they will occur.

In his book “Atomic Habits”, James Clear explains that you need to change your habits to change your life. If you want to be different, you must behave differently. For change to succeed, you have to be consistent. Thus, habits.

From Habit Stacking to “Habit Stack”

James explains the concept of “habit stacking”. The idea is to take a micro habit (hence the title Atomic Habits) that takes little to no effort to perform. When you do, you have a win. This win carries some momentum. If you can stack micro habits on top of each other, the momentum of the first will help you perform the next, the next, and so on.

Creating flow by stacking habits ingrains them into your system. This creates new and powerful neural networks that support your current behaviors. The idea behind my habit stack came from James Clear, and I’ve built upon his theory to form a personal system since then. Here’s what James says about the underlying science.

Synaptic pruning occurs with every habit you build. […] your brain builds a strong network of neurons to support your current behaviors. The more you do something, the stronger and more efficient the connection becomes. – Atomic Habits (James Clear)

I’ve also found a slightly different explanation of what Synaptic Pruning is. Still, the underlying assumptions as to how they play a role in your habits and assist in behavior change remain the same:

Synaptic pruning is thought to be the brain’s way of removing connections in the brain that are no longer needed. Researchers have recently learned that the brain is more “plastic” and moldable than previously thought. Synaptic pruning is our body’s way of maintaining more efficient brain function as we get older and learn new complex information. (Healthline)

Reading James Clear’s ideas on habits profoundly changed my view on building my Systems for Life and iterating on them. I had read and knew for a long time that to be successful at anything; you needed to be consistent. But consistency is tough to achieve without a structured plan.

From personal experience, a decision to go to the gym more often didn’t necessarily result in more visits, let alone a more chiseled body. A decision to send out more cold emails didn’t always lead to me consistently staying on target week by week. Usually, I would slack off after a month and have forgotten about it entirely soon after.

But habits change the way you behave. They’re not about the target. They’re about the act. Targets are important. I’m not saying habits replace targets. But if you want to maintain your personal KPIs, you must have the systems to stay consistent. Habits are those systems.

Identifying the dominos

Getting back to stacking micro habits. As explained, these carry momentum no matter how small. Momentum isn’t inherently good or bad. It can pull you in any direction. The goal is to control which way. Let’s build on this thought by identifying our dominos.

Imagine you hate getting out of bed in the morning, just like me. So you snooze. That’s -1 point. Alright, next habit. It could be that you always go to the bathroom after waking up. That’s 0 because it’s neutral. After the bathroom, you always drink a glass of water. That’s hydration. This is good. We’ve identified our first +1 of the day. Our first win.

In his book, James Clear recommends making a list of all habits you have in the day and scoring them as above: good, bad, or neutral. As the example above, it allows you to identify your good habits throughout the day. Once they become clear, these become your foundational habits. These are your first dominos.

In my case, I wanted to start with a new morning routine. After identifying my first win, drinking water, that became my first domino. The habit I stacked on top of that first domino was getting dressed in workout clothes. The next one was going outside for a walk. And that was it for a few days. That’s all I did.

James Clear didn’t recommend this next part, but I tracked my progress every day. It was simple: I had identified my habits in the morning, the ones I already had, and the ones I wanted to introduce, and I scored myself accordingly. It went:

How I introduce new habits

As you can see, I get 8 points total if I do all my habits. I could also fine myself -3 points if I do my bad habits. The idea was to maintain 7 points for a couple of days before introducing a new habit or improving on one.

You may also notice that I started waking up at 06:00. How did I do it? Even though James Clear didn’t provide any science to help with this, my 2-step process was relatively straightforward:

By anticipating my first win (drinking water) straight after waking, I knew I would have momentum quickly
By scoring my daily habits, I would anticipate fines (-1’s) if I didn’t perform

In short, it was a total mind game. I had a carrot and a stick. The carrot was the anticipation of momentum after waking, which made waking early feel less overwhelming. All I had to do was rise fast, drink water, and be in the flow (I would say to myself).

The stick was the anticipation of -1 fines, the snoozing, and other habits not done that made me want to avoid that. If you play a game against yourself and keep score, you’d be surprised how your inner competitiveness can drive you to positive change.

Soon, I was able to improve on “go outside” to “go to gym”. Also, “walk until 07:30” eventually became “workout until 07:15”. I also introduced new habits like “stretching” and “drink shake”, which is my meal shake (I’ll expand on my 60% liquid diet in a separate article).

PS: one more trick I should add that helped me a lot was to visualize my morning routine before falling asleep. Not only did this repetitive task put my lights out quickly, it also helped me rehearse so that it became routine as soon as I woke up.

My Habit Stack 2023

At present, I have 20 daily habits that score 20 points total, and 8 bad habits that potentially detract from my daily score. I score myself Monday to Friday. Weekends are downtime, even though I try to behave (generally). My day is divided into 3 parts. Let’s have a look:

My Morning Stack

My Midday Stack

My Evening Stack

A daily Hollywood Action Movie Reel

This may look very uptight to you. If you had told me I would do this 2 years ago, let alone write about it, I would laugh at your face. But deep inside, I would already know that this is what works. It’s even ingrained into our culture.

Think about the classic Hollywood Action Movie meets Hero Journey (Joseph Campbell) format:

Hero has a unique power/talent he doesn’t know of or doesn’t use
There’s a call to action (often by a mentor of sorts)
The hero starts his journey with a few uncommon helpers
The hero has his first confrontation with evil and loses
The hero retreats into hiding and trains to develop his powers
The hero defeats evil
The hero learns a valuable lesson

I’m sure anyone reading this knows exactly what point 5 looks like in the movie: it’s a repetitive reel of the hero training and progressing throughout the scene. Think Rocky, the Hunger Games, Kung Fu Panda, and even Harry Potter!

That’s why I keep track of my habits and score myself. I realize you can’t skip the Hollywood Action Movie reel and get straight to the happy ending. As Aristotle famously put it:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Try not to choke

I analyze and rearrange my Habit Stack whenever I identify choke points. I did that regularly, in the beginning, to find the perfect configuration. Not all good habits allow having new ones stacked before them, for example. I also stacked too many new habits in a too short amount of time at some point.

Finally, I find that the time of day matters a lot. I claim the morning for myself. That’s why I rise early. Nobody’s awake, no one to interrupt my flow. It allows me to stack the most habits and achieve great flow before the world wakes up. 50% of my habits are done by the time I start work.

As a startup founder, work is often hectic and unpredictable. I have systematized most of how I work by scheduling deep work sessions, organizing projects, blocking times to do mail, and learning how to get into creative flow. But an ever-changing company, with ever-changing projects and responsibilities, doesn’t lend itself well to many habits.

I like that unpredictability too. It may not look like it, but my daily structure is built entirely to accommodate my hectic and unpredictable work life. It keeps the rest of my life in check while I navigate the unknown waters and storms my startup life throws at me.

When I get home in the evening, I’m usually quite spent. That’s why my evening habits are low effort, low physical and mental strain, and mostly about cleaning house (literally and figuratively). The evening stack does start with “writing”, but that’s more for notes and scribbling loose ideas. I take those notes in the morning for my deep work writing sessions.

Also, it’s nearly impossible for me to predict when I’m done with work for the day. Nearly 80% of our customers and partners are from North or South America. I meet with many of them weekly, I need the flexibility to change my schedule and still stick to the few habits that remain.

I need Strategy to sustain Systems

I cannot sustain a habit, let alone a system, by reason alone. It’s too exhausting. I can’t fight the emotion that comes with the daily resistance I experience when doing my habits. I don’t feel like it, almost every day. Without strategy, I cannot sustain a system.

In the past, I would decide to work out more. I would decide to eat healthily. I would decide to meditate. I’d put that in a system, maybe not as sophisticated as the ones I have now, and fail. Over and over again.

You see, my systems are sophisticated today because I never stuck to one long enough to iterate on it over time. I never went so deep that I could remove all the kinks in the chain.

What I found to be most sustainable to consistently building and maintaining a system is strategy. I’ve written about my Personal Strategy extensively in this article on OKRs. My Personal Strategy consists of a yearly mission statement, a main Objective, and sub Objectives and Key Results for the different “departments” in my life. It guides my projects, my systems, and keeps me focused on my goals.

To reiterate OKRs if you haven’t read that article: Objectives are non-quantifiable goals, like “build a foundation for life” if you take mine for 2022. Key Results are clear, tangible results, like “save X money” or “lift X weight”. This strategy tool helped me tremendously in attaining my goals.

Based on my experience, I would recommend anyone to create a top-down strategy where the systems support the Objectives. When the Objectives are clear, and the Key Results are tangible, the systems become sustainable.

The Daily Score as a KPI for the System

The daily score in that sense, is a KPI for the system’s success. At the end of the week I sum up all daily scores. Because 20 is my maximum for one day, my maximum weekly score is a convenient 100. If I drop below 85/100, I’ll have a serious look at my Habit Stack to see if I need to optimize.

I wouldn’t recommend maintaining that same KPI of 85/100 right from the start. For the first two months, my weekly score would be more like 70/100. Sometimes less. Give yourself time to build the habits and the systems before you raise your standards.

Keep in mind the rule of marginal gains. Don’t implement a rigorous new system from day 1. Have a backlog of new habits and stack slowly. And once you have a full stack, give yourself time to build up. I never have a perfect week, but my KPI is about 90/100 to feel successful.

Conclusion

In this article, I’ve explained my personal system for life, which I call a “Habit Stack.” The Habit Stack is a list of all the good habits I want to perform every day, all the bad habits I want to avoid, and the times of day they will occur.

I score myself daily based on the number of good habits I’ve performed and the number of bad habits I have avoided. The science behind this system comes from the concept of “synaptic pruning,” which is the idea that the more you do something, the stronger and more efficient the neural connections become.

I’ve learned about this concept from James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits,” which explains that if you want to change your life, you must change your habits and be consistent.

I’ve also stressed the importance of having a top-down strategy where the systems support your Objectives and Key Results. I’ve written on that subject here. In my experience, this is what makes systems sustainable. I see my daily score as a KPI for the success of my systems. Give it a try.

Cheers, Roger

Unlock the Power of Daily Self-Assessment: How I Mastered my Habits