Progressive Efforts 🌅

One Hour, One Project, Every Morning

This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.

Me, 8 years ago, in a 3D trick-art museum in Saigon, Vietnam. A fantasy path of many steps. Progressive Efforts work exactly like this — one step at a time, steady progress toward something distant.

About a decade ago, a friend lent me a self-help book titled The Miracle Morning. The main premise: get up earlier, and take charge of your day before it takes charge of you. The author, Hal Elrod, knows a thing or two about rebuilding. In December 1999, at 20 years old, he had a near-fatal car accident that left him in a coma with permanent brain damage predicted. A morning routine, he argues, put his life back together.

The general idea of early rising is sound — “early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” as Franklin supposedly said. That’s why I’ve had some version of a morning routine ever since I read the book at 24. But Elrod’s specific approach is too ambitious for most. He wants you to meditate, affirm, visualize, exercise, read, journal, and somehow become a new person — all before breakfast. My own routine has included all of these at various points, but rarely all at once. And I don’t think you should even try.

In this post, I want to suggest almost the opposite: use that morning window for one thing and one thing only.

Discretionary time is becoming ever rarer. An uninterrupted morning window is ideal for reclaiming the little time we have. It fosters all the necessary conditions to progress on something that matters, but doesn’t scream.™️ If you chip away at the same thing every morning, uninterrupted, progress becomes boringly reliable. Almost inevitable.

I call this a progressive effort: a personal project (or program) you touch every morning for 60 minutes, no matter how full your life is. During that hour, you exile news, inboxes, and all other interruptions and practice direct contact with the thing you say you care about.

The best part of this is how non-invasive it is. Progressive efforts fit alongside your work week, family, exercise, and social life. You can even practice on days with all-day commitments—the morning window exists before those begin.

One hour of focused work right in the morning doesn’t steal your day. You fire and forget: do the session, close the loop, then start your day as if nothing happened. Except it did. Progress happened. And it will keep happening, day after day.

While your exact mileage may differ, here are the exact constraints that make it work for me:

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The Format:

• Reserve the first 60 minutes of your day. Mark it in your calendar.¹

• Practice this 5 to 6 days per week. Give yourself at least one day off.

• During that hour, focus only on your effort—no news, no inbox, no interruptions.

• Keep it to one progressive effort at a time. Do not splinter yourself.

What to Work On:

• Choose Quadrant 2 work: important but not urgent. Something that will still matter in 5 years, even when everything else is chaos.

• Choose something deep: writing, reading, coding—anything that rewards repeated contact and has low ramp-up once it becomes habit.

• Pick something substantial that will take months, not weeksyou’ll want time for the slow-burn creativity boosts that follow (more on that below).

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Progressive efforts are behind most of what I've built. During university, I used them to study the hardest material right after waking up — often working through demanding online courses for an hour at a time. I graduated at the top of my class. Later, as a software engineer, I used the same window to dig deeper into code than others did and to read essential books in my field. Stay consistent, and you can finish long, demanding books within a month or two. Within a few years, I became a well-rounded senior engineer.

My book Scale-Smart — a 1,000-page compendium on productivity and life design — happened the same way. It took well over a year, but what could have been a scheduling nightmare turned into a simple game of patience. I showed up, wrote a little, and left. Most of what you read on this Substack was composed the same way.

Progressive efforts are the only operation I’ve found that reliably produces serious results over time without requiring heroic motivation. Beyond the practical benefits, there’s something deeper happening when you work on the same thing for one hour every morning: the slow burn. Over time, your brain starts to process your effort between sessions. Ideas keep simmering in the background. Creative problems begin to solve themselves as your subconscious works through them, all because you kept the relationship with the effort alive.

Many people try a Miracle Morning, but without a single progressive effort to anchor it, it’s easy to scatter—reacting, optimizing, reorganizing—but never actually advancing anything that matters. And after months of early rising with nothing to show for it, no wonder they drift back to their old ways. With a progressive effort, things can be different. Try it for a few months. Once you feel that steady, inevitable momentum, you won’t want to stop.

So, right now, pick one thing. Not five. Not three. Just one project that matters to you and will pay long-term dividends. Then, tomorrow morning, claim the day before the day claims you. Give it an hour. Not more. Not less. The day after tomorrow: repeat.

Progressive efforts are simple, non-invasive, inevitable.

1. Note for night owls: If mornings don’t work, claim the hour after everyone else goes to bed. You’re looking for a predictable pocket of quiet when the world stops pulling on your sleeve. Still, for most people, mornings work best.