"Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work."
— Chuck Close
Table of Contents
- This Wasn't Supposed to Be the Next Article
- What Locking In Actually Means
- It's Day One of 180. So What Do You Do?
- Now That You're Well Into The Camp Everything Matters
- How to Deal With Bad Days
- Commit to More Than One Thing, Just Not at Once
- My Suggestion to You
This Wasn't Supposed to Be the Next Article
It's 6:00 AM on a Sunday. I haven't had coffee yet, and I thought about fixing that before I started. I didn't. The longer I do this, the more I think the pre-coffee excuse is just a licence to do something badly and call it circumstance.
I hadn't planned to write this one either. My last piece on this topic A New Personal Best: What Six Months of Locking In Can Do got more engagement than I ever expected, which included praise and a handful of healthy critiques. I had a stack of technical articles queued up behind it. They can wait.
The questions were mostly the same question, asked different ways. That article was a list of outcomes: two hackathon wins, a new role, a charity donation, thirteen articles. What people wanted was the part I left out:
What the days actually looked like.
So that's what this is. The routine, written down as it ran. Roughly the same day, 180 times. It is far less interesting than the results made it look. But if you're anything like me, you love to hear about the process even more than the results.
Let's just get it done.
What Locking In Actually Means
Locking in sounds dramatic, and it isn't. I don't lock myself up in a room for six months and I don't go up a mountain to think about nothing but work while meditating for 12 hours a day. That stuff ain't for me.
Quite the contrary.
These are the stretches when I'm most active socially and most active on my own projects at the same time.
Strip the phrase down and it's ordinary: sustained, hyperfocus on a goal and on the process that gets you to it. The only unusual part is how long I hold it. Six months. Quite a stretch, huh?
There are reasons it has to run that long.
The Longer You Practice Consistency, The More Consistent You Get
That sounds obvious. The interesting part is why it happens.
Your brain has that weird and useful feature to handle almost anything you hand it repeatedly. That includes things you actively disliked at the start: training, sitting with a hard problem, running errands, even organizing your desk. Do them often enough and they stop costing what they used to. Some of them start pulling at you instead.
The mechanism isn't mysterious. Repetition makes a thing part of your baseline, and the baseline is what your brain treats as normal. Once something is in there, skipping it doesn't feel like a day off. It feels like a day with something missing from it.
Here's roughly how that went for me:
- One week: A good start and nothing more. Nothing is in the system yet.
- One month: It's getting easier. You still have to decide to do it.
- Three months: A habit. You notice when you skip it. It's significant.
- Six months: Part of you. Skipping it costs more than doing it, and your brain actively protests.
Two things amplify all of this when there's a reward waiting at the end: motivation and anticipation.
They aren't the same force and confusing them is why people stall around month two.
Motivation starts you. It's whatever you're after: a skill, money, connections, a promotion, recognition, or everything together.
Anticipation carries you. Same reward, different job. Motivation is spent the moment you begin, anticipation is what you run on for the six months after that.
The Rule of 100: The Compounding Effect of Life
I borrowed this from Jesse Itzler, an American entrepreneur, who's also one of my favorite authors.
The rule of 100 basically means the following:
If you spend 100 hours a year on any discipline, about 17 minutes a day, you'll end up better than 95% of the world's population at that discipline.
Pick any discipline you want: coding, playing basketball, playing guitar, boxing, riding a bike. It doesn't really matter which one.
If you practice it for 17 minutes a day, within a year you'll be more skilled than most people in the world. This doesn't mean you'll become a boxing champion, an NBA player, or a professional software engineer. But you'll be pretty decent.
Now imagine what you can achieve if you do something for hours a day. You can reach a professional level in a few years if you stay consistent. But keep in mind: consistency isn't measured in time alone. The hours only count if you put real effort into them.
This is called the compounding effect of life.
Vacations Happen Roughly Once Every Six Months
On average, people take a big vacation about once every six months, and I'm no different. When I take one, I always travel somewhere to clear my head. Traveling after six months of locking in is one of the most rewarding feelings there is. You know you got through that "six-month camp," you have results you're proud of, and now you're out in your favorite countries and cities. Oh gosh, there's nothing like it.
If a trip falls inside a lock-in period, I try not to step away from the work completely. Even without my laptop, I'll research things on my phone on a plane or a train, where there's plenty of time anyway.
It's Day One of 180. So What Do You Do?
Just Plan Things
Nothing dramatic. There's no starting gun. Day one is for preparation.
I spend it on prerequisites: a rough map of what I'm doing over the next six months, and roughly when. It's the dullest day of the entire stretch and skipping it is the most expensive mistake on offer.
Here's the thing about that map: it's wrong. Some things slip, others land early. Even the most disciplined person alive doesn't hit the schedule they drew on day one, and I never have either.
That's fine, because the dates were never the point.
You're not trying to predict when you'll reach the goal, or even its sub-goals. You're deciding what you'll do every single day, repeatedly to get closer to it. Plan the input, not the outcome. Input is something that you actually control, so make it precise. If you say: "I'm going to spend 4 hours a day on this project", mean it! Making claims you don't follow through on will cost you trust in your own word. And there's nothing worse than not trusting yourself. If you can't count on yourself, how can anyone (your team, your boss, your friends, your loved ones) count on you?
So spend day one planning. If you're building something, decide which features come first, then break the work down until you're left with pieces small enough to estimate honestly. Usually there's more than one thing running at once - a project, articles, open source, competitions, whatever else you've signed up for. Deciding roughly when you'll do what is what stops those from collapsing into each other.
The worse alternative is working on whatever you feel like that evening. And whatever you feel like, six months out, adds up to nothing. That'll just waste your time. Don't do that to yourself.
Sharpen Your Tools
Take a look around your workspace. Yes, right now. What does it look like? Messy or organized?
If it's organized, congratulations, that box is already ticked.
If it's messy, start there. Discipline isn't just saying "I'm going to review three pull requests today."
A few weeks ago, when I started my current six-month lock-in period, do you know what the very first thing I did was?
I washed my car. Then I cleaned my laptops and my keyboard. Sounds weird, right? It does, but it also works for me like a charm.
Real discipline is the kind that's embedded in your whole system, your life, not just your projects. The broader it is, the more sustainable it is and the more it carries into everything else you do.
If your car is full of garbage, soda cans and old receipts and your living room has last month's pizza boxes and empty bottles scattered around it, there's a good chance you're not consistent in your repositories either. Best practices, timely reviews, pruning dead branches and stale pull requests, all of it tends to be sloppy for the same reason. Not because you don't know better, but because discipline isn't a thing you switch on when the editor opens, or not even when your eyes open in the morning.
So start with the basics. You'll be surprised how much it changes your attitude toward the actual work. You'll feel proud of yourself, and you'll trust yourself more.
Once that's done, get specific. For example, if you're building a new app, make sure:
- Every tool installed, configured, and updated
- Every dependency installed and resolving cleanly
- The latest version of your framework. You don't want to start on an old one unless there's a specific reason for it
- A repository that's ready on day one: README, license, .gitignore, branch naming, branch protection
- Formatting and linting rules committed, so you're not arguing with your editor in week three
- CI running green on an empty commit, before there's anything to break
- Secrets and environment variables sorted, documented, and out of source control
- Somewhere to track work: a board, issues, whatever you'll actually open (I usually use GitHub projects)
And many other things.
Every item on that list is a small piece of friction you're removing now, while setting things up is still interesting, so that it can't stop you later. Because it will be day 56 at eleven at night, you'll have forty minutes and no energy, and the difference between doing something and doing nothing will come down to whether the build runs on the first try. Clear the obstacles while you're still enthusiastic.
Now That You're Well Into The Camp Everything Matters
The System Is the Point
When I'm in the middle of a camp like this, which I am right now, the only thing that matters is following the system. Not feeling good about it. Not being perfect at it. Following it.
You will not be perfect. Some days are slow, others are faster. Some days you'll do half of what you planned, and some days you'll do none of it. That's fine. A system you follow 80% of the time for six months will beat a system you follow perfectly for nine days and then abandon. The goal isn't a clean record. It's that the thing keeps running while you're tired, bored, annoyed, or unconvinced.
One rule that's worth more than the rest: never miss twice. One missed day is noise. Two missed days is the new pattern - a very very bad bad pattern.
Same Hours, Every Day
Wake up at the same time. Go to sleep at the same time. Work in the same windows. It sounds joyless and it's the single highest-leverage thing on this list, because a fixed schedule means you stop spending willpower on when. The decision is already made, so all you have to do is show up.
Find out how long you can actually concentrate before the quality drops, not how long you can sit at a desk, how long you can genuinely hold a problem in your head. For most people it's shorter than they'd like to admit. Build your blocks around that real number instead of the one you wish you had and then work on stretching it. Attention is trainable, and it pays out in everything else you do.
Protect the first block of the day for the hardest thing. Whatever gets your best hours is what actually gets done. And once you've gotten over with that hard part, the rest of the day is almost like coasting.
Clock Out Twice
Draw a hard line between your day job and your personal work. Not a soft one, a hard one, with a time on it. I know, it's much harder than it sounds, I'm speaking from experience, but it's not impossible. It'll actually make way more productive on both sides of the fence.
You also need a marker for done. Decide in advance what finishing looks like today, and when you hit it, stop. Being unable to stop is not discipline, it's the thing that ends six-month runs early.
Do one thing in a given time. Only one.
I've watched people brag about working on four or five things at once, and I used to be one of them. Here's what I eventually understood: doing five things simultaneously mostly means screwing up all five things simultaneously, because none of them get the quality they need.
There's a real cost to task switching, too. Every jump between contexts leaves part of your attention stuck on the last thing, and you pay that tax on every single switch. It doesn't feel like a cost, which is exactly what makes it expensive. Ten context switches an hour and you're already exhausted without getting any quality work done.
Put Your Phone Away
It goes without saying that you should stay the hell away from social media. I mean it, put the phone down.
I don't think most people have honestly reckoned with what those stupid reels do to their ability to sit with a hard problem. You train your attention with whatever you feed it, and if you feed it seven-second clips all evening, then sit down to debug something that needs forty uninterrupted minutes, you're going to find the machinery doesn't work anymore. It isn't that you've lost the ability. It's that you've spent months practicing the exact opposite "skill".
The fix is boring and it's mechanical: get the apps off the phone, or just don't touch the phone unless you absolutely need to. Willpower is not a strategy here, and you're not competing only against your own laziness. You're competing against companies who have spent billions figuring out how to win this specific fight.
Think about how much pointless content you consume per day and how much great content you could've actually produce if you had used that time productively.
I'm not saying cut it out entirely. I still watch videos to keep up with things I like during breaks and over lunch. But there's a line and it isn't blurry. When I sit back down, the phone is done for the next block.
The Body Is Part of the System
For me this was never only about the hours at the desk. The rest of your life either supports the goal or quietly undermines it.
Think like a professional athlete.
Sleep properly. You'll be tired at the end of every day and that's normal, but tired and under-slept aren't the same thing. Sleep is where the recovery actually happens and it's the first thing people sacrifice when they're behind. It's also the worst possible thing to sacrifice, because everything you're trying to do runs on the organ that sleep repairs - your brain.
I used to stay up all night or two nights in a row, writing code, but it'd take 2 full days to recover after from that hardcore session, which isn't productive.
Eat like it matters. It affects your thinking more than you'd expect. Junk food, sugar, fat, carbs don't just make you slower physically, they make the afternoons foggy, and foggy afternoons are where your six months quietly leak away.
And obviously, stay away from alcohol and cigs. Not only because they'll cost you a productive evening, but because they'll cost you the brain and the body that your own life depends on. Well, unless you want to destroy both, your brain and body, for some reason.
Move most days, preferrably every day. It doesn't have to be hard or complicated. Walking outside, or an hour on a treadmill, is enough. It's fine to do the bare minimum if being athlete-level fit isn't your goal. It pays back in ways that aren't obvious. Better sleep, steadier energy, fewer bad afternoons, and a real confidence boost that comes from doing a moderately unpleasant thing that most people skip.
None of this is optimization for its own sake. It's maintenance on the machine that has to run for 180 days.
Day Five Is Usually When It Turns
Here's the part nobody warns you about.
Day one is great. You're excited, the plan is fresh, you have all the energy in the world.
Day two, slightly less.
By day five you absolutely hate it.
That's not a sign you picked the wrong goal. The goal is fine. That's just what motivation does, it's a starting force, and it wears off.
The problem is that this happens before discipline has had time to develop, so for a couple of weeks you're in a gap with no motivation left and no habit yet to carry you. That gap is where almost everyone quits. I've quit there myself a few times.
Checkpoints Get You Through the Gap
The technique that worked for me was scheduled checkpoints. Every two weeks, on a Monday, I'd stop and look at what's actually happened.
Two things make it work. First, you look at the record instead of the feeling. The feeling on day twelve is "I'm getting nowhere." The record says you shipped four things, wrote 2 articles and the record is right. That's why it's worth keeping a rough log as you go, a checkpoint with no data is just a mood.
Second, judge yourself on what you did, not on what it produced. Results arrive on their own schedule and mostly late. Whether you did the work is knowable today.
Then treat the checkpoint as a small restart: readjust the plan, cut what isn't working, remind yourself what the end goal actually is, and go again. You keep doing that until the day you notice you don't need the checkpoints anymore, because the thing has become who you are. Now you're a disciplined guy or a girl.
That's when it stops being hard.
Recharge on Purpose
You have to let the system cool down every once in a while. Pick a day, let's say once every two weeks, or once a week if you need it, where you deliberately move slowly or do nothing at all. I mean the personal work, obviously. I'm not telling you to take the day off from your job.
Spend that day on something you genuinely enjoy. This matters more than it sounds. If you don't feel like playing video games, don't play them just for the sake of "taking a break." If you don't feel like going out and socializing, don't go out because someone told you that's what fun looks like. It's fine to decline a casual invitation, the real friends will understand.
One warning, though: make sure that day doesn't quietly turn into three. That's a new pattern forming, and it needs to be spotted and terminated early. One day restores your momentum. Three days end it.
How to Deal With Bad Days
We've talked a lot about discipline and how it answers almost everything. But some days are just awful. Everyone gets them. Some stretches, most days are awful.
I had one recently.
Back in March I won the GitHub Copilot CLI challenge, came first out of more than 400 participants with this project: Metal Birds Watch
It's still the biggest thing I've ever won, and it's special to me for a second reason: I used it to make a significant donation to charity.
One of the prizes was a ticket to GitHub Universe in San Francisco this October. I've been looking forward to it all year.
I just found out I'm not going to be able to go. The reason is completely outside my control.
It sucks, right?
It absolutely does. It especially sucks when you've done everything right and the thing standing in the way isn't yours to fix. That win was one of the high points of my life. This is one of the sharpest disappointments of it.
But that's life. It's unfair, there's nothing new about that, and if I sit here and dwell on it the only thing I'll actually change is my own state of mind - for the absolute worse.
So here's what happened on the evening I found out: I opened my editor and worked my a$$ off on one of my personal projects. Not heroically, not particularly well. I just did the block that was on the schedule.
That's the whole argument for the system, and it's why this section isn't a detour from the rest of the article. On a good day, discipline is a nice-to-have, you'd have done the work anyway, because you wanted to. On a day like that one, it's the only thing standing between you and a week you don't get back. The routine doesn't ask how your news went. It just says it's eight o'clock.
Something didn't work out for you? Fine. Try again, or try something else. Life is unfair sometimes, and it's also full of opportunities you haven't looked at yet. But don't wait until you feel better before you start moving again. Moving again is what makes you feel better.
Commit to More Than One Thing, Just Not at Once
If you want to give the whole six months to a single thing because of its size or importance, go for it. But it helps to have somewhere else to put your attention when you're sick of staring at the same problem for the fourth day running and it's better if that somewhere is fundamentally different from the main work.
Right now I've got the biggest personal project I've ever attempted. Realistically it's five or six months just to reach a basic, shippable version (or so I hope). Alongside it I'm still writing articles, recording videos, and entering challenges. And last but definitely not least, I've started learning German on my own, no teacher, no class, nobody. My argument is that I'm a software engineer and I know a thing or two about learning languages, I'm hoping to have the basics in about a year. So far I'm loving it.
That sounds like it contradicts what I said earlier about doing one thing at a time. It doesn't, and the distinction is worth being precise about: multiple commitments, never simultaneous ones. Nothing on that list ever shares an hour with anything else on it. They share a week. That's the difference between variety and multitasking, and it's the whole game.
So allocate days, not attention.
A lock-in period can also contain smaller lock-in periods inside it. You block off a week or two for something specific, finish it, and return to whatever you were doing before.
Say you're deep in your main project and DEV Community posts a challenge you can't turn down. You pause the main work, lock in on the challenge for a couple of weeks, then lock back into the primary thing. It works like a function call stack, the last thing you pushed is the first thing that gets finished and then you unwind back down to where you were. LIFO.
The catch is the same one you'd recognize in code. A stack only works if the frames actually return. Push something new on top every time a shinier thing appears and never pop any of it, and you don't have a system, you have a leak. Six months later there's nothing finished at the bottom of it.
My Suggestion to You
Congratulations
If you've made it this far and you've read the whole thing, congratulations. This article turned out much longer than I anticipated, and reading it end to end in one sitting says something real about your attention span. That's not a throwaway compliment either, the ability to stay with something long after it stops being novel is the best predictor I know of whether you'll finish a six-month run or abandon it in week three.
Start Slow
If you've never done anything like this, don't start at six months. Start at one, with something specific you want finished by the end of it. Then raise it to three. What you're really practicing is patience, attention, and the ability to finish what you started, those are real skills, and they can be trained like any other. Pull off three months and six is absolutely within reach. At that point it's just a decision.
Lonesome Is a State of Mind
This is actually a song by Djo - great song by the way. But the statement itself is also very true. Especially when it comes to this topic.
Do it quietly. Tell nobody, or tell only the people closest to you. Two reasons for that. First, announcing a plan hands you a hit of almost the same satisfaction you'd get from actually doing the thing, you collect the congratulations up front, and the drive that was supposed to carry you leaks out through your own mouth.
Second, very few people are going to come with you on a commitment this long. Be ready for that. If you're not a lone wolf type of person like I am, someone genuinely comfortable doing things alone, then you need to either find at least one person willing to run the same stretch alongside you, or get comfortable with the quiet.
And finally, this isn't an F1 sprint race. It's the 24 Hours of Daytona, not an F1 sprint race. Nobody wins it in the first hour. You win it by still being on track when most of the field isn't.
By The Way
This is also a song name this one's by Red Hot Chili Peppers. But it also fits the context.
Speaking of F1. As I was writing this I realized I'd missed the race at Monza, Italy. Got so carried away that it went straight past me. It's fine, I'll watch the highlights.
Let's get to that checkered flag!🏁
Enjoyed this deep dive? Let's stay connected!
I share more software engineering insights, projects, and experiments across these platforms: