Work & Career
Ambition, at a sustainable size
The costs of a demanding career are real and are frequently paid unconsciously, and the accounting is worth doing deliberately.
Sam Delacroix
23 articles by Delacroix
Goals & Motivation
Wanting the thing versus wanting to have done it
A distinction that explains a great deal of stalled ambition, and a test that resolves it in about a minute.
Focus & Attention
Noise, music and working in shared space
Speech is the specific problem rather than volume, which explains why open offices are worse than building sites and why some music helps.
Habits
Reviewing your own systems
Personal systems accumulate features and stop being used, and a periodic review is the only thing that prevents it.
Goals & Motivation
Momentum and the cost of stopping
Restarting is expensive in ways that are invisible until you have done it several times.
Focus & Attention
Single-tasking, in practice
A simple prescription that almost nobody follows, and the obstacles are practical rather than motivational.
Goals & Motivation
Deadlines, and what they are actually for
External deadlines improve completion. Self-imposed ones work less well, and the difference tells you how to design them.
Focus & Attention
Reading well in an environment designed against it
Sustained reading is a habit that has to be defended, and the defences are more practical than moral.
Habits
Accountability, and what makes it work
Telling someone your plan does very little. Specific arrangements with specific people do considerably more.
Goals & Motivation
Planning that survives contact with the week
Weekly plans fail predictably, and the reasons are estimable rather than mysterious.
Focus & Attention
The morning is not magic, but it is quiet
The advantage of early work is mostly the absence of interruption, which means it is available at other times if you can arrange the absence.
Habits
Exercise as a cognitive intervention
The evidence for effects on mood and executive function is reasonable, the effect sizes are modest, and the dose required is smaller than most people assume.
Goals & Motivation
Systems, not goals, is half right
A popular slogan with a genuine insight inside it and a failure mode that its advocates rarely mention.
Focus & Attention
Boredom, and why it might be useful
The gaps that used to be empty are now filled, and there is a reasonable case that something was lost in the exchange.
Habits
Tracking behaviour without becoming preoccupied by it
Measurement improves behaviour up to a point, past which it becomes the behaviour.
Goals & Motivation
Why most goals should be smaller
Ambitious targets are motivating at the point of setting and are the main reason plans collapse in the second month.
Focus & Attention
Notifications, phones and the attention economy
The products are designed by people with far more resources than you have, which is worth knowing before deciding that the problem is your discipline.
Habits
Breaking a habit is a different problem from building one
The cue-response link does not get deleted. It gets outcompeted, which changes what the strategy has to be.
Habits
Habit stacking, and where it breaks down
Attaching a new behaviour to an existing one is genuinely effective, provided the anchor is more reliable than most people assume theirs is.
Habits
The environment does more work than willpower
Self-control research has moved substantially, and the people who appear to have the most of it mostly arrange to need less.
Goals & Motivation
Motivation is not the thing you are waiting for
The feeling generally follows action rather than preceding it, which inverts how most people plan their week.
Habits
Streaks, and when they stop helping
Counting consecutive days is genuinely motivating and creates a specific fragility that most people discover the hard way.
Habits
Why habits fail in week three
The first fortnight runs on novelty and resolve. What replaces them determines whether anything survives.