Building sturdy fences is about establishing boundaries and being intentionally proactive with your energy and attention. Rather than letting the environment dictate where your focus goes—usually toward whatever is most urgent—you protect your time for what is actually important. Guarding your time like this is foundational to both leading myself and leading others.
But where these fences become absolutely critical for me is in protecting my routines.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear notes that we do not rise to the level of our aspirations; we fall to the level of our systems. I’ve learned the hard way that if you think building a good system is hard work, protecting it is the real battle. You have to build sturdy fences around your habits, and you have to be extremely vigilant about maintaining them.
When I rely on my conscious brain, I am not disciplined. If given the choice between doing a hard thing or taking the easy way out, my conscious brain will happily choose watching YouTube over getting on the rowing machine every single time.
The only way I survive is by bypassing that decision-making process entirely. Through my Personal Retrospective practice, I’ve established (and lost, and sometimes re-established) many routines over time. When I am successful, the body simply gets up on certain days, at certain times, and does what it has been programmed to do. There is incredible power in that automation.
But these routines are fragile. What I didn’t realize early on is that once a boundary is breached and a habit slips, the energy required to rebuild it is exponentially higher than the energy required to just maintain it. If you let the fence fall into disrepair, the whole system wanders off.