A common pitfall is designing our lives with unsustainable rhythms.

As we’ve discussed, habit formation is hard. And changes to your operating cadence are habits like any other.

You want to give yourself grace as you start to implement these changes. And a great way to do that is to think in terms of moving averages.

I try to take several walks each day, and monitor my steps using the Apple Health app. But I don’t get down if I have a busy day and don’t hit my steps goal. I pay much more attention to my week. Some days I can get 2x as many steps in. As long as I hit my average for the week I’m happy.

You can apply this to many things. Meditating or working out X times per week. Reading X pages per week. Writing X words per week. Some days you might write 5000 words, some days you might write 0.

Eventually your daily and weekly rhythms will be encoded and you will be able to show up each day and do the thing you want. But in the beginning focus on the average.