Operationalization: A Fancy Word for "Making Things Actually Happen"
Cool! We're getting to the end of the game — but we're not done yet.
A lot of people make plans... and then don't do them.
Well, duh, that doesn't work.
We want to do now is to operationalize all those plans: thinking through what mix of technology, behavior change, habits, skills, environment, and so on can be used to ensure your plans happen.
Monthly Theme and Short Policy Statement
Filled out example —
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of operationalization, here's two powerful tools —
(1) Monthly Theme: If you can "name" your month a very short and easy-to-remember phrase, it can help a lot with adhering to your Monthly Plan.
Now, on the off chance this is the first time you've come across Ultraworking and how Sebastian Marshall and Kai Zau like to work, we'd like to point that we're very much not into "woo-woo" magical thinking type stuff. Having a "Monthly Theme" and "naming your month" can sound like "woo-woo" thinking — it's not. We promise.
We originally came across the concept of using mantras or themes from the Navy SEAL Richard Machowicz. He made a short phrase for himself to get through the notoriously-difficult SEAL training which has a 90% failure rate — his phrase? "Not Dead, Can't Quit."
We've later come across Olympic athletes, professional sports teams, and very successful companies also using themes and mantras to help them stay mentally focused.
Sebastian did a long write-up of the success and fail rates of all his monthly policies from 2017 — you can read it if you're interested. The thematic names of all those 2017-months were:
- Structured Data
- Do Less, Better
- Sentry Ops II
- Repertoire
- Excellence
- Impact Floor
- Glorious Neutrality
- Acts
- Boring Methodical Execution
- Make List, Run List
- Trust the Process
- Build Supply
This is, frankly, a very powerful tool for adherence to your target habits, plans, and policies. When picking a Monthly Theme, keep it very short, easily repeatable to yourself, and ideally something positive and optimistic. It really legitimately works, so we include it despite the potential seeming-wooness of it.
(2) Short Policy Statement: It's easy to get lost in the details of everything you've got going on — if you can boil everything down to a very short statement of what you're doing that month, it becomes easier to remember and easier to evaluate afterwards.
Sebastian's August Monthly Theme was "Fun Protocol" and the Short Policy Statement was —
"This month, I'm doing two things — (1) Building a baseline of higher positive affect and fun, meaning taking fun seriously and studying how to make each week more fun before it starts; (2) Looking at all my protocols (tasks, nutrition, fitness, meetings, projects, etc) and thinking about each one seriously to build more fun into it."
(It went great, incidentally.)
Sebastian's June Monthly Theme was "Grounding" and the Short Policy Statement was —
"June’s monthly focus will be Grounding. Grounding means getting best practices going and keeping them going, and turning ongoing duties into easily runnable processes. This month should be a heavy consolidation month and be not-too-ambitious, just for one month. I'll look to build a framework to get and keep my mind and body maximally strong."
(Also went great, incidentally.)
If you're not 100% sure what your theme and policy should be, you can come back to it after you do the rest of the more technical operationalization below. Sometimes a better idea will click for you.
Of these two points, the Monthly Theme is probably the more important one — really sit and think for a while about what a good phrase would be that's easy to recall, motivating, and helps you stay on-track.
And the Nitty-Gritty Operationalization
So here's where the rubber hits the road — here's how figuring out how your Monthly Plan is actually going to happen.
Sample filled-out version —
Before going any further, note — you obviously don't need to use every strategy for every item you have.
Okay, now, let's talk about some strategies you can use to operationalize —
(1) Schedule it: Actually put blocks of time on the calendar when you're going to do the relevant items. You could schedule all your gym workouts, your creative time, or whatever else. Or this might be scheduling when you'll go to the library if you need a quiet place to work or study.
(2) Delegate it: Putting off shipping that new podcast because you don't know how to do sound editing? Pay someone to do it. Not sure what the progression on your Olympic Lifts should be at the gym? Get a trainer to do the progression for you. Executives and managers obviously use this regularly, but it's an under-utilized strategy for other people.
(3) Use a repeatable process: It's much easier to stay consistent when you do things the same way every time. This might be batch-cooking healthy food for the week on Sunday, it might be always documenting your code the same way, or a whole host of other things. If you're not sure how to develop processes, you might be interested in Sebastian's series "Background Ops" that he wrote at The Strategic Review.
(4) Track data/progress: We obviously recommend a Lights Spreadsheet quite highly — but any form of tracking can be helpful. If you want to be a writer, tracking word count written per day — even in a text file — is powerful. Tracking your gym lifts obviously helps you get stronger. You can also track subjective things like your mood or how well you think you performed in a day.
(5) Research best practices: Sometimes you just gotta learn how to do things better. How do elite musicians practice? How do the best students study? What goes into effective hiring for your company? You can mark down to do some research.
(6) Get accountability: For whatever strange reason, humans tend to be very willing to break commitments to themselves, but are much more hesitant to break commitments to other people. Accountability could be in the form of a professional — a nutritionist or personal trainer — or it could be informal, like telling a friend your goals for this month and that you'll update them each Saturday. We also recommend the Pentathlon highly, but we might be biased ;)
(7) New tools/software: Sometimes you just need better software or tools. Doing a few quick Google searches and checking the App Store can be worthwhile for some types of goals and plans.
(8) New habit/change habit: Oh my, habits are tricky to change. But sometimes it's the answer. We'll recommend Lights again here for actually seeing your habits play out over time. But however you change them, making it the plan of the month to stick with a new habit can be worthwhile.
(9) Add your own strategies: And of course, you got other good ideas? Add them here. Intense environmental shift — like going to a meditation retreat — might be on your list. We put all the common best practices we saw on this tab, but maybe you can think of something else.
Again, you don't need to do every strategy for everything. You probably can't delegate doing pushups each morning if that's what you're trying to do. But you want to pick a selection of strategies to ensure your plans happen.
Finally, note that the drop-down menus here have the options "To Research," "To Do," and "DONE!" — if it's helpful for you, you can use this as a checklist to ramp up during the first week of the new month.
With that said, for the low-hanging fruit like recruiting an accountability partner or scheduling the activity, we recommend doing it right away as you're finishing your Monthly Plan. You can always move the calendar block later, but why not put the sessions on your calendar? Shoot that email to your friend who could serve as accountability. When you move faster on operationalizing next month's plans, they become much more likely to happen.
Once that's done — cool, congrats, you've got a Monthly Plan. We've got some more final resources on the last page of this guide.