May 2, 2022
Century Sprints
100 Day sprints to develop discipline & perseverance to finish projects without abandoning.
A Century Sprint is at the core of TooledUp.Quest. The goal of TooledUp is to help you organize your mind and achieve consistent productivity. I have adopted the idea of time-boxing self investment efforts so that you can take breaks for self-reflection and have a better appreciation for work and relaxation. Whatever you do is an investment in yourself, it can be good or bad investments. For example: binging on anything is a bad investment because too much of anything is good for nothing. Time-Boxing 100 day efforts means, you have focused on improving yourself for a good 3 month period.
Time-boxing self-investment efforts helps you take a break after the sprint and step back to evaluate your progress and appreciate/celebrate your development. Learning and doing are rewarding investments as it helps you develop competence and feel good from within. When you are feeling good within, focus coms naturally and productivity goes up with ease.
What is it?
A Century Sprint is a 100-day commitment made towards developing a skill or finishing a project. The commitment helps develop discipline & perseverance to stick to a goal for an optimal period of time which is neither too short or too long.
When you are working towards your goal consistently, you are intentionally investing in yourself achieving confidence and clarity. You may also be developing a deeper understanding of yourself and that of the skill. Your perspectives could help you inter-relative the new skill with your existing skills, thus enhancing your mental models that establishes a correlation between things which may sound irrelevant at the beginning.
For example: If you decided to learn a no code tool for building a website or app, you’ll soon develop an appreciation for UI & UX without making any deliberate effort. You’d intuitively understand where to place your buttons and what colours to mix and match. This is the effect of compounding when you consistently invest in yourself over a period of time.
This compounding effect in learning, helped me achieve bigger goals relatively quicker. Whereas it was nothing more than a dream before I started investing in myself. Considering the Century Sprint in this context, you’ll be able to decide on your next steps before the sprint ends. You’ll develop the enthusiasm to pursue bigger goals.
Who is it for?
In short, a Century Sprint is for anyone who wants to finish what they started or someone wants to develop a lasting change in their life. It is about developing a new habit and then successfully habit-stack over the initial habit. This is also for people who have bigger goals and are feeling a bit overwhelmed about it or are unsure about how to achieve their bigger goal. It is about making incremental progress. A bigger goal can be something more than fulfilling personal needs, it can about helping a group of people or creating something which will scale to produce a passive income stream.
To quantify, it is for pre-product startup founders, SaaS business creators, artists with uncertain opportunities, university students dabbling with startup ideas, someone who wants to change careers and anyone developing new skills.
How did I come up with it?
I was working on validating my startup idea early 2021 and one of my mentors suggested that I should develop long form content for marketing as my startup required market education. I had a on-and-off relationship with writing and it was obvious that this time I had to develop the skill more seriously. But the other dimensions of my life were equally competing for attention and it was difficult for me to focus on writing, so I was procrastinating.
Then I understood that I have to establish a stoic routine to develop my long-form writing skills. So I decided to set an achievable goal — to write more than 500 words everyday for 100 days without a break. I watched 100 TedTalks and summarized them to write the daily content. I ended up publishing a booklet on Intentional Habits which is a compilation of over 200 ideas to develop intentional habits.
During this time, I also figured that I was not the right fit for the idea was working on. Instead, I figured what was suitable. I was working on Cheeky, which was an app for couples to develop a healthy relationship. I pivoted to Intentional Habits, which was an app for developing long-term habits. The again, I pivoted to TooledUp.Quest because the scope of Intentional Habits was too big and I had to scale down.
What is the logic or how does it connect with the real world?
In the real economic world, 100 days is a minimum. Companies talk about targets in terms of quarterly periods. 100 Days is a couple of days more than a quarter. So, it makes sense from a business perspective. When considering daily personal life, it can be hard to retain enthusiasm for something inexistent and it becomes easier to give up as we can get caught up with other things. This is exactly why, we need to establish an intentional commitment for self-improvement.
Is there any science behind it?
There is a bit of statistics around this topic, it can take anywhere between 18 to 254 days to develop a consistent habit. So I picked a nice round middle-ground of 100 in-between the two extremes. Also, approximately 80% of New Year resolutions fail by mid-February which is less than 50 days. When something as strong as a New Year resolution, die in less than 50 days; then any aspiration in the middle of the year is sure to suffer a similar fate. So the 100 day commitment, helps over the threshold meaningfully. Once you’ve completed a Century Sprint, you have proof that you can develop the discipline and reasoning to overcome strong limitations that discourage progress towards achieving your personal best.
Besides all the statistics and reasoning, you personally know what it means to have lost track on something you wanted to do. Im sure you must’ve tried to develop a new habit or change something in your daily routine so that you can experience a desirable feeling. But instead when you lost track and gave up, you experienced personal disappointment which in turn undermined your self-worth.
Access Century Sprints
You don’t have to wait for anyone or anything to begin your Century Sprint. If you decide, you can begin with it now, just with a pen and paper or your laptop or phone. Decide what you want to do and start. Writ it down and record your work every day. If you need help with defining your goal, feel free to email me at yololakshmi[at]gmail.com. I’ll reply the same day.
Sign up
You can start using the TooledUp.Quest app in a few days. I am building the MVP with Bubble and it will be available on 15th May. Sign up to the waitlist for earlier access. You can test the app before the release and help me fine tune the UX.
About me
I’m Lakshmi, founder of TooledUP.Quest. Visit my landing page for details on my previous work and some freebies from my Habits newsletter.
Thank you ❤️
