The 90 day lock in and where your Q4 energy goes

Blog Post Written By: Melrose Michaels

In late September of last year, Vixen Media Group asked me to shoot for Slayed, and I said yes before I had done any math on what that actually meant. It left me about 90 days before I would be on their set and on their website permanently. What I could not have known is that the same 90 days would turn into the hardest season of my life, and that part of it would be spent traveling to funerals.

I showed up every single day of it anyway, and not one bit of that was motivation. What carried it was that I had taken the daily decision off the table before the hard part ever arrived.

That is the whole thing I want to hand you before Q4 does what Q4 does. The problem most of us call a willpower problem is actually an energy problem, and the energy is not going toward the goal at all. It is going toward the daily negotiation about whether to pursue the goal in the first place.

Where your energy actually goes in Q4

Think about everything the next 3 months actually contain for a creator. There are holiday invitations and family obligations and travel, plus my birthday on October 31, which everybody else insists on calling Halloween. Then come the cosplay and themed filming, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday customs and a whole season of fans in a generous mood who want more of your time in exactly the stretch where you have the least of it.

Every single one of those things is a decision you personally have to make. Do I go to that event or stay home, do I film today or tomorrow, do I answer this message now or later, what am I posting, what am I charging and what am I saying yes to.

Your willpower does not grow in November just because your to-do list did. You get the same brain and the same 24 hours, and you spend more of those hours making choices. That is why so many of us come out of December feeling like we accomplished nothing despite never once stopping, because we ran out of decisions a long time before we ran out of time.

I go through the full decision load in this week's podcast, including the exercise I want you to do with a notes app before October gets any further along.

There is one piece of Q4 infrastructure worth naming right here. Fans are already in a generous mood this season and the impulse to do something for you is already there, so gifting is a revenue line that runs on their energy instead of yours. The only caveat is that it has to be set up before you need it. I spun the wheel through 6 or 8 creators on a recent video and could not send any of them anything, because none of them had finished setting up their payments.

The 3 moves that close the negotiation

The first move is to take the option away entirely. During the Slayed lock in that meant I came home from the gym and drank a protein shake, every morning, for 90 days. I do not even like protein shakes, and by week 2 it had become automatic, because the only thing that changed across that whole stretch is that I stopped arguing about it. This time it means getting off social media for the full 90 days and running everything through Buffer instead, so there is no daily decision about posting left to make.

The second move is to let something else decide for the things you know you will skip when you are tired. For the last lock in that was a 9pm alarm that sent me into MyFitnessPal to log the day, because 9pm me wanted Snickers and ginger ale and could not be trusted with anything. In a business it looks like an alarm for checking your numbers or following up on a mass message nobody unlocked. Pick the time once, set it once, and do the thing when it goes off.

The third move is to put a person on the other end. A trainer waiting at 5am worked because another human was awake and the negotiation became impossible. That part costs nothing to recreate, and it can be a creator friend you text your numbers to or a group of people running the same 90 days.

In this week's newsletter, I wrote about the energy audit that told me where my biggest leak actually was and why the answer made me uncomfortable.

Why I picked the hardest quarter of the year

October 5 through to January 3 is exactly 90 days. January is when everybody starts things, when the gym is packed and the planners are new, and I think that makes it too easy. If I can hold this when it is hardest, I know it holds for real.

Day 90 also lands on January 3, which means anybody doing this walks into the new year with 3 months already behind them instead of starting from zero alongside everyone else.

There is also some research on this that is worth knowing. A University College London study led by Phillippa Lally, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2010, had 96 volunteers each pick one new daily behavior and repeat it for 12 weeks. It took 66 days on average for a behavior to reach peak automaticity, with a range running from 18 days to a projected 254. The people who picked exercise took longest, with a median around 91 days.

Here is the finding I want you holding onto when you slip, because you will slip. Missing a single day did not materially affect habit formation. One missed day sent nobody back to the start, which means the day that counts is the one after.

I break down what I am locking in on and what it cost me in this video, including the thing I paused to make room for it.

The short version is that I paused The Boardroom, which I loved and which was working, because my capacity had to go toward my fitness, toward solving traffic for the MelRose Michaels brand and toward building the next set of features for GPTease.

What ties all three together

Deciding something once is cheap and deciding it every morning is what empties you. That is true of a protein shake and it is true of whether you open your inbox, and it is true of whether a fan has a clear path to spend money on you in December.

Sacrifice is also what makes a lock in real, because anything worth the next 90 days costs you something you would rather keep. Saying you will focus is easy and paying for it is not.

Do this today

Write down every small boring daily decision you already know is coming between now and January. Skip the big ones and get the repeat offenders, which are posting, filming, eating, working out and when you answer DMs.

Then run each one against the 3 moves and ask which it needs. Can the option come off the table entirely, can an alarm handle it, or does it need a person waiting on the other end?

P.S. Come post your goals on the 90 day lock in thread inside CEO Society, which is free, and where I will be posting my own updates the whole way through.

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