Why Daily-ish Is Good Enough

I once had the chance to ask comedian Jerry Seinfeld about the Seinfeld Technique, a productivity secret that supposedly explains his prolific joke writing and global success. It goes like this: Every day that you manage to spend at least some time on your most important creative work, you mark a big red X on your calendar. The goal is to not break the chain of X’s.

It turns out that he had indeed suggested it once, to some guy in a comedy club. Then he largely forgot all about it. “It doesn’t even seem to be worth talking about,” he told me. “If you’re a runner and you want to be a better runner, you say, ‘Well, I’ll run every day and mark an X on the calendar every day I run.’

“I can’t believe this was useful information to anybody,” he added. “Really? [Are there] people who think, I’ll just sit around and do absolutely nothing, and somehow the work will get done?”

I was struck by this exchange, because in productivity world the Seinfeld Technique has come to mean “work on what matters most to you, every single day, without fail.” But to Seinfeld it just meant putting in the effort, repeatedly, over the long haul.

No wonder it didn’t strike him as a particularly astounding system.

In fact, I’ve come to believe the do-something-every-single-day variation of this advice is actively terrible. An every-single-day rule is so rigid, so intolerant of the vagaries of life, that you’ll inevitably fall off the wagon. And once that’s happened, you may lose all motivation to continue. At that point you probably end up doing less, in aggregate, than if you hadn’t been quite so exacting in your demands.

I have instead become a proponent of author Dan Harris’s excellent alternative: Aim to do it daily-ish. He offers this guidance in the context of developing a meditation practice, but it’s relevant to almost any important goal in life.

Why Daily-ish?

If, like me, you’re prone to making yourself miserable by holding yourself to unachievable standards, daily-ish may sound a bit self-indulgent. Yet it’s the opposite. This approach involves surrendering the thrilling fantasy of yet-to-be-achieved perfection in favor of making concrete progress in the here and now.

Furthermore, daily-ish isn’t synonymous with “just do it as often as you can.” Deep down, we all know that if we never spend more than a day or two per week on that novel/fitness plan/meditation practice/side business/whatever, it will be impossible to gain the necessary momentum to move forward.

Daily-ish involves applying more pressure to yourself than that. But — crucial distinction coming up! — ­applying pressure is not the same as forcing it.

Behind so much productivity advice is the bewitching notion that a technique might force accomplishment to occur. Yet there is no such technique. And the yearning for one often seems to arise from buried ­insecurity or another agenda.

Maybe you don’t know how to do the work in question, and you’re hoping relentless effort might serve as a substitute for that knowledge. Maybe you don’t really want to do it but ­believe you ought to want to do it, so you use “productivity” to try to force the missing desire into being.

Or perhaps you think you need a flawless record of achievement to justify your existence on the planet. When the stakes are that high, clearly you can’t afford to put a foot wrong.

The daily-ish approach is different. Something about it shifts the focus away from one’s particular smorgasbord of anxieties and back to the thing itself. To the creation you’re seeking to bring into existence — whether that’s a work of art, a happy family, a healthier body, or a meditation habit.

Daily-ish reminds us that, in some fundamental way, real productivity isn’t about you. In the end, it’s about what gets created — not whether the person doing the creating has an impeccable record of red X’s.

Does Seinfeld owe his success to a productivity technique? I think not. More likely, he owes it to talent, perhaps also to luck. And then, on top of that, to his showing up and doing the work, on more days than not.

Holding yourself to a more flexible standard, such as daily-ish, is more forgiving than the alternative, but it’s not solely a matter of being kinder to yourself. It’s simply about getting you — and all your hang-ups and neuroses and ulterior agendas — out of accomplishment’s way.