At Shore Capital, I get to work on a lot of things I care about. Executive development programs, leadership summits, onboarding cohorts, and building new lead content for Shore leaders. Keeping those commitments takes more than effort. It takes a system I can rely on when several of them land in the same week.

Here’s a small example of what that buys you. A teammate recently needed help planning a new leadership event. Because I had already mapped my work for the next couple of weeks that Sunday, I knew within about a minute where the open space was and what I could shift to make room. I said “yes” the same day. Without that habit I would have hedged, promised to check, and circled back later, and the moment to help would have likely passed.

James Clear gave me language for this in Atomic Habits. His argument is that goals set direction while systems determine whether you actually move. Pair that with his point about compounding, that small improvements are invisible day to day and decisive over a year, and the conclusion is uncomfortable. Most of us over-invest in setting the target and under-invest in the mechanics underneath it.

Here are four strategies I’ve implemented that dramatically changed how I get work done:

Weekly calibration.

Every Sunday I plan the week. I name what must get done, check progress against my annual goals, look ahead at what’s coming in the next month, and block time before other people can claim it. It takes about an hour. The plan always changes. What carries over is that I start Monday already knowing what matters, which puts me in the position of making decisions rather than reacting to them.

Prioritizing Learning Time.

I used to struggle to make time for reading. So I stopped looking for new time and attached learning to time I was already spending. My commute runs 40 to 50 minutes a day, so that became audiobooks. Clear calls this habit stacking, anchoring a new behavior to one that already exists. I also built a filter for what reaches me. I subscribe to newsletters and creators covering leadership, private equity, AI, and local news, so what arrives in my inbox is already the thing I wanted to learn. Then the dead periods do the rest. Lunch. A waiting room. Ten minutes between calls.

Offloading repeatable tasks.

This is the one I’m still working on, and the one with the most upside. Take meeting notes for our Shore University programs. That used to be a one to two hour task. Draft in Word during the call, rewatch the Zoom recording to catch what I missed, format the document, write the summary. Now an AI agent captures the meeting, Claude synthesizes the transcript into a template I built, and I spend ten minutes confirming it. The habit here is protecting the time to build the system before the task shows up again. You already know what good output looks like. The shift is becoming the architect behind the AI rather than the builder. What’s one repeatable task you could experiment with this week that buys back an hour? And what would you actually do with that hour?

Preparing contingencies.

This habit goes unnoticed until something breaks. It means working through the what-ifs before they arrive. Extra copies of handouts and a backup file on my laptop. A teammate set as alternate Zoom host in case I can’t start the meeting. It also means naming uncertainty out loud with my team instead of hoping it resolves quietly. No surprises. It’s tedious work with no visible payoff on the day you do it, which is why most people skip it. The payoff arrives later as expectations that hold, trust that compounds, and an experience that doesn’t degrade when the plan shifts.

None of these look impressive on any given Tuesday. That’s the point. Clear’s most useful idea is that habits eventually stop being things you do and become evidence of who you are. Every one of these started as a fix for a specific problem. Over time they became the way I work.

That matters more the further you get from doing the work yourself. When you’re an individual contributor, your habits protect your output. When you lead a team, your habits set the standard. People take their cues from what they watch you do repeatedly.

What’s a habit that you can develop that improves your work?