Minimum Viable Effort

It’s all too easy to fall off the wagon when it comes to keeping up habits that we genuinely care about for self-improvement. If you miss a day at the gym, it’s not uncommon to despair and scrap your whole fitness plan—even if you’ve been consistent for months! Similarly, if you’ve been learning a language steadily for months or years, missing a couple days of language learning can be very demotivating. We’ve all been there where life gets in the way, you divert from your routine, and suddenly you haven’t touched your target language in weeks or months (or years! 😬).

To make things worse, the longer you stay away from your self-improvement habit, the more difficult it is to begin again because you’ll have to face the fact that some (or most) of your hard-earned gains will have withered away. It’s also human to avoid living a contradictory life. After all, if you believe that working out and learning a language are important to you, but your actions do not reflect this, it creates a keen sense of discomfort and stress that is hard to ignore.

All in all, if you feel that if you can’t make progress towards your goals, the human defense mechanism is to not strive at all. This is the typical way we avoid the discomfort of a conflicted identity until we find the time and summon the motivation to start again (which all too often is spurred by the panic of recognizing that significant gains have evaporated).

This very human phenomenon unfortunately traps us in a cycle of activity-atrophy that at best slows down our progress, or at worst, prevents us from reaching our goals.

However, there is a way to break the cycle without drastic alteration to your daily routine and still make steady progress to your goals. This solution is to change your rate of progress. By lowering your efforts to the minimum amount required to sustain progress (where any lower and you’d just be standing still), you will minimize the burden that keeping up your habits will require on your daily life. This will allow you to weather the sudden demands of life and continue striving toward your goals as you find your free time diminishing (hello working adults and new parents!).

The activity-atrophy cycle is not caused by lack of time but by the arbitrary timeline we set for ourselves to achieve the goals—I need to lose 10 pounds in two months, I want to be fluent in two years, etc. While aspirational goals are great, ambitious goals that require an unsustainable rate of progress are often the culprit for keeping us back.

The ironic reality is that making steady progress towards our goals often requires far, far less effort than we imagine. For instance, you need only workout for about 1 hour 3 times a week to steadily build strength. This isn’t just maintaining strength—we’re talking actual muscle growth. Similarly, making progress in a language takes only 15 minutes a day, 4 times a week. Again, we are not talking about beginner stuff here—you can master a new language with laughably small effort sustained over time.

If you put in the minimum viable effort to work out and learn a language, it will cost you at most 4 of the 168 hours you have in a week. Once you realize it only requires 2% of the total hours you have in a week to reach your goals, it’s hard to make excuses that your lack of free time is holding you back.

Sure, putting in only the minimum viable effort will take you longer to reach your goals than you might wish. You’re not going to start from 0 and become fluent in your target language or start benching 350 lbs in 9 months. But with consistency you will eventually achieve your ambitious goals.

So if you find that you are stopping and starting on your self-improvement habits in an activity-atrophy cycle, take a moment to examine how many hours each week you committed when you were actively progressing towards your goals. I guarantee that you’ll find the effort you were putting in far exceeded the minimum viable effort required to reach that goal.

If you’re getting burned out or need the motivation to start again, try putting in the minimum viable effort towards your goals and see what happens. You’ll be surprised by how consistent you will be, how your interest and motivation to reach your goal will increase, and most importantly, how much progress you achieve on a weekly basis.

Don’t compromise on your goals or on becoming the best version of yourself. But do give yourself a longer runway. Sure, it might take months or years to reach your ultimate goals. But if you’re moving towards them, your mind will be at peace and you will be flying soon enough.