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“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
Steve Jobs
I turn off my phone at 10pm each night.
My laptop closes at 9pm. Work finishes by 4pm.
Messaging apps stay closed until 12pm. Coffee stays off the menu, with all caffeine ending by 10am. Meals happen only between 12pm and 10pm.
My diet excludes sugar, rice, fried food, grapes and watermelon. Red meat appears only on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Chess and poker wait until work ends and stop by 8pm.
These 10 rules are anti-habits.
Commitment habits are the actions chosen for execution: meditating for 2.5 hours, running for 13 minutes, doing 21 experiments, finishing 5 courage challenges and reaching out to 5 people a day. Each demands time, energy and working memory.
Standard advice focuses on what to add: morning routines, daily disciplines and habit stacks. But adding more disciplines increases fragility.
The more parts a system has, the more prone it is to breaking. Adding more tasks increases context-switching and makes a daily routine fragile. To keep work reliable, you must put a strict limit on active commitments.
Anti-habits protect capacity by deciding what stays outside.
A refusal requires zero runtime execution, so you can maintain dozens of boundaries without cluttering your day. Turning off a phone at 10pm protects sleep, making the next morning’s schedule far more likely to hold.
Under the Federal Aviation Administration’s Sterile Cockpit Rule, flight crews cannot chat, eat or read non-flight material below 10,000 feet. The policy protects the pilots’ attention so they can execute critical checklists during takeoff and landing.
In surgery, teams maintain a sterile field around the patient. Staff hold their hands above the waist, keep unsterilized tools off the tray and leave unscrubbed visitors outside the perimeter. The barrier stops contamination so the surgeon can finish the operation safely.
When your routine starts to break down, adding more disciplines exhausts the system.
Instead of piling on new tasks, set anti-habits on what you refuse to do.
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What anti-habit would make your most important commitment habit easier?
