Coaching practices for Do More of What Works
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Do More of What Works, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I know exactly which handful of things actually move the needle for me
- We keep piling new initiatives on top of old ones we’ve outgrown but never stopped, so the team is overloaded and there’s no room to start anything fresh
- I treat every task as if it counts the same and spread myself evenly across all of them
- After a bad result I tend to change everything at once, and then when the next round goes differently I have no idea which tweak actually did it
- I already know what I’m good at, but I only ever use those strengths in the same few familiar places
Practices that may help
- Multiply time and resource investment in the vital few
Once you know your high-leverage 20%, invest more time and energy there — not less.
The Pareto Principle: 80/20 for Personal Productivity - Use Start-Stop-Keep reviews to drive continuous improvement
Regularly ask what the team should start, stop, and keep doing — and act on the answers.
The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus - Apply the 80/20 rule
Find the few tasks that produce most of the value, and make those your frogs.
Eat That Frog, Made Practical - Act on exactly one change before cycling again
Carry one specific modification into the next cycle — not a wholesale overhaul.
Plan–Do–Study–Act: Deming’s Loop for Personal Improvement - Use a signature strength in a new way each day for one week
Apply one of your top character strengths to a context or relationship where you don’t normally use it.
VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical - Analyze your best days — not just your failures — to identify what drives success
When performance is above target, investigate what made it so: replicating peaks is as important as preventing troughs.
Feedback Loops and Behavior Change - Use descriptive praise instead of generic approval
Tell the child exactly what they did right so they know what to repeat.
Triple P Parenting (Matthew Sanders) - Less but better
Channel your effort into a few vital things done excellently rather than many done adequately.
Essentialism, Made Practical - Design a genuine positive reinforcer for the target behavior
Identify something that genuinely increases your likelihood of repeating the behavior — not what should work, but what actually does.
Operant Conditioning and Schedules of Reinforcement - Find and amplify reinforcing (virtuous) feedback loops
A virtuous loop compounds: find the small wins that set off cascades of further productivity.
Systems Thinking for Personal Productivity
Related concerns
- Do Fewer Things Better
Channel your effort into a few vital things done excellently rather than many done adequately.
Less but better
- How To Do Less And Achieve More
Channel your effort into a few vital things done excellently rather than many done adequately.
- Leverage Points Productivity
Leverage points are places in a system where a small change can produce large shifts in behavior. Donella Meadows ranked them by structural depth in her widely cited 1999 paper: numbers and parameters are low-leverage; feedback loops, goals, and the rules of the system are medium-leverage; and the paradigm from which the system arises is highest-leverage of all. The counterintuitive finding is that people’s intuition about leverage is often backwards.
- Leverage Your Best Activities
Once you know your high-leverage 20%, invest more time and energy there — not less.
Multiply time and resource investment in the vital few
- Plan Do Study Act Deming S Loop For Personal Improvement At Work
The Plan–Do–Study–Act (PDSA) cycle is a four-step iterative method developed by W. Edwards Deming: form a hypothesis, run a small test, study what actually happened, then act on the lesson before cycling again. Originally industrial, it applies directly to personal skill-building: it replaces vague "try harder" with small, testable experiments and forces honest assessment of results.
- Quality Over Quantity Work
Yes — the consistent research finding is that people who produce the most ideas also tend to produce the best ones. Quality is partly a function of quantity: you cannot reliably pick your best work in advance, so generating more output raises the ceiling. The mechanism is well supported in creativity studies, though the exact magnitude depends heavily on domain and task.
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