Minimum Unit of Effort (MUE)

I’ve noticed that anything is easier once you get some momentum, but the “activation- energy” is hard to come by.

The hardest part about going to the gym is getting my body into the car to go there. Once I’m there, I’ll easily get a good workout. Even on harder days, it’ll usually take 15m of warm up and then I can’t believe how hard it was earlier to make the trip.

Likewise for waking up early; once I’ve turned on a light and washed my face, I’ve done the hard part.

• Define a MUE as a set of clear instructions to make progress on a task or goal.
• Always write the MUE down.
• MUEs should all be extremely SIMPLE and CLEAR.

Never leave the next step in any of your goals or tasks ambigious.

Often if I have a work-related task, I’ll know that the “next-step” in that process is performing a single Google search, reading an article, or opening up my terminal and running a command.

Another pro tip is to write down your MUE wherever you leave off so you can quickly get back to it. For example, after a coding session I’ll write down what I would do when I get back to my desk. The more specific, the better. “Create a spec file, and add tests for the #foo method”

Christine had the same idea and got 2.6m views on her TED talk.

PS. My MUE for this blog post was re-reading it at a later time and hitting publish.