Promise yourself ten minutes, not two hours. A small promise kept beats a big one broken by Wednesday.

Ambitious commitments are satisfying to make and almost designed to fail, and each failure makes the next promise less believable. A small one succeeds, which is the entire point, because what you are building is not today’s output but the habit of keeping your word to yourself. Ten minutes done is worth more than two hours intended.

Set the bar low enough that skipping would be absurd, then treat it as fixed. Do more if you want to, but count only the ten. Raise it after a few weeks of never missing, not before.