Loop 006 · about 3 minutes
You don't have bad weeks. You have the same bad week, on repeat.
A meeting runs late on Tuesday, so you skip the gym. The fridge is empty by Thursday, so it's takeout again. You scroll in bed until 1 AM and drag through Friday. Then Sunday comes, and you tell yourself next week will be different.
It isn't. Same week, again.
That's not a willpower problem. It's a bug.
In software, when the same bug keeps waking an engineer up at 3 AM, nobody tells them to try harder. The team sits down and asks two things: what in the setup let this happen, and what change stops it from happening again? Google's engineering guide puts it simply: "You can't 'fix' people, but you can fix systems and processes."
With our own weeks, we do the opposite. We blame ourselves, promise to try harder, and keep the exact same setup. So we get the exact same week.
There's research on what happens when you stop and look back. Researchers from Harvard Business School and other schools studied new call center employees in training. One group spent the last 15 minutes of each day writing about what they'd learned. Another group just kept working those 15 minutes. On the final test, the group that stopped to reflect scored about 23% higher. Less time working, better results.
You can do the same thing for your week in ten minutes on a Sunday. I call it the Sunday bug fix:
Find the bug. What went wrong more than once this week?
Find the cause, not the culprit. What made it easy to happen? "I'm lazy" isn't a cause.
Ship one fix. One change to your setup for next week.
Some examples:
Skipped the gym twice? Cause: workouts were after late meetings. Fix: move them to the mornings on meeting days.
Takeout four nights? Cause: nothing in the fridge by midweek. Fix: put in a grocery order every Sunday.
Up past midnight? Cause: "one more episode" autoplay. Fix: turn autoplay off.
Felt behind all week? Cause: planning in the Monday morning rush. Fix: pick your top three tasks Sunday night.
One fix per week. That's it. Fix one bug every Sunday, and the same bad week stops repeating.
The bad-week version
If this week was rough and you don't want to think about it:
Pick just one thing that went wrong more than once.
Write one change to your setup that would stop it.
Put it in your phone's notes app. Two minutes, tops.
Blame the setup, not yourself. You can't fix a bug you're busy feeling bad about.
One question
What's the bug that keeps showing up in your week?
Hit reply. I read every one.
Mahmoud
P.S. Know someone stuck in the same week on repeat? Forward this to them. It takes ten seconds.