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“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
William Blake
I cut my team’s one-on-ones from every 2 weeks to once a month. Stretching the schedule looked like a clean win: fewer calls and more hours back.
Alignment broke instead. Feedback piled up, expectations pulled apart and reconciling the drift took more time than the calls I set out to save. I moved them back to every 2 weeks.
Stretching the time between calls revealed the hurdle rate for team alignment: 2 weeks kept us aligned, 4 weeks fell behind.
Each habit has a hurdle rate: the minimum input the system needs to clear what pushes back on it.
Entropy pushes back on each habit: competition, fatigue, things going wrong, life. Run below the rate and you lose ground, however faithfully you show up.
In 1966, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern put 5 healthy 20-year-olds on complete bed rest for 3 weeks. 3 weeks of lying still dropped their aerobic capacity by 27 percent.
30 years later, cardiologist Benjamin Levine measured the same 5 men as 50-year-olds. 30 years of natural aging only reduced their fitness by 12 percent.
3 weeks of zero input cost them more conditioning than 30 years of aging.
The Silver Bridge had no regular inspection schedule when it collapsed into the Ohio River in December 1967. 46 people died.
Investigators traced the disaster to a single crack in 1 steel eyebar. In 1971, the federal government established the first national bridge safety standard: every 2 years by a trained inspector.
It took 46 deaths to discover the minimum check a suspension bridge needs to survive.
Pay below the hurdle rate and you lose ground. Pay too far above it and you waste energy on diminishing returns. You find a habit’s hurdle rate by lowering what you put in until progress slips, then returning to the input that held.
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Which habit could you trim until you feel the floor?
