You can’t hide from you.
How iCal saved my soul.
Three words. One alert. Every Friday for 12 years straight. Progress not perfection. That’s the message that set me on track, corrected my direction, clarified my intent. Not an epiphany. Not from a guru. Just something I heard across the rooms, in the first days. It marked week one. The first Friday without a drink. I was prepared to fail on that day. Even if I made it through the week, Friday was the dead cert. The reward for surviving life over a whole seven days. The escape hatch. The collapse of all good intentions. But I knew—if I could survive that first weekend, I might stand a chance. So I typed three words into iCal as an event: Progress not perfection. And set it to repeat. Every Friday. Forever. Back then it was a warning shot. Don’t get cocky. You’re not out of the woods. Now it’s a fucking war cry. Keep going. Keep building. Keep moving forward. That one reminder is louder than my excuses. So—do you want to change your life? Start by honouring a single promise. Not to the world. To yourself. You ask, how? Set traps for your weaker self. Make it harder to slip. Make it easier to win. Put the message where you’ll see it. Where it haunts you. Don’t wait for motivation. Manufacture it. You don’t need a breakthrough. You need a system that won’t let you lie to yourself. Because in the end, we don’t rise to the level of our dreams. We fall to the level of our default settings.
So I post this article today at the start of a new beautifully clean and productive week. That’s 645 Friday calendar alerts. So yes—iCal saved my soul.
Your turn.
Pick one promise to yourself. Just one.
Not a goal. Not a dream. A promise. Something so simple you can’t wriggle out of it.
It could be: no phone in bed, run 3k before work, write one page a day, drink water before coffee.
Whatever you choose, set a trap for the weaker version of you. Put the reminder where you can’t ignore it—calendar alert, Post-it on the fridge, marker scrawled on your bathroom mirror.
When the moment comes and you want to duck out, don’t negotiate. Don’t justify. Keep the promise.
At the end of the week, look back and ask: Did I honour myself?
If yes—stack another promise on top. If not—strip it back and make it even smaller until it’s impossible to break.
