Written Commitments
The Promise
What stays in your head is negotiable. What you write down is a contract with your future self, and the act of writing forces the clarity that bullets and self-talk hide.
How It Works
- Externalize in prose, not bullets. Bullets gesture at ideas; prose forces sequence, causation, and specificity. If the prose version will not come, the commitment is not yet thought through.
- Lock the specifics: numbers, dates, definitions of done. A commitment the future self can quietly rewrite is not a commitment.
- Treat the artifact as the reference point. The written version is what the present self has to negotiate with, visibly, rather than revise quietly.
In Practice
Writing a commitment does not just record a decision: it finishes the decision. Most commitments held mentally are half-formed; the act of committing words to a page surfaces the unresolved parts. The discomfort of trying to write a vague commitment in prose is the diagnostic doing its job.
Primary source: Peter M. Gollwitzer, Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans (1999).
Reading is the easy part
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Ch 3 · The Quarterly Operating System
OKRs
Ambitious objective, measurable key results. The goal stops being a talking point.
Primary sources: Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management; John Doerr, Measure What Matters.
Ch 5 · The Identity Install
Reverse Engineering from Outcome
Define the finished state in detail, then walk backward to today's step.
Primary source: Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.