- Task
- A single doable action, completable in one sitting. "Write the chapter" is not a task; "draft the first paragraph in the next 25 minutes" is. Tasks are the lowest grain in the V-R-G-T ladder; goals get traction once they've been broken into tasks small enough to start.
- Habit
- A task repeated until automatic. Duhigg's working definition from The Power of Habit: a behaviour the brain has stored as a routine attached to a cue, requiring less conscious attention each time it runs. Most goals are met by habits, not by acts of will.
- Cue-routine-reward
- Duhigg's three-part description of the habit loop. A cue (a trigger; a time, place, emotion, or preceding action) leads to a routine (the behaviour), which yields a reward (a felt benefit). Habits are formed and changed by working on the cue and the reward, not by willing the routine alone.
- Habit stack
- James Clear's technique: pair a new habit with an existing one as its cue. "After I pour my morning coffee, I will read one page of monitorial material." The existing habit (pouring coffee) is the cue the new habit needs, removing the daily decision about when to start.
- Two-minute rule
- Clear's scaling tool: scope a new habit so the starting version takes two minutes or less. "Read before bed" becomes "open the book before bed." The point is not to do a token version forever; it's to make starting frictionless. Once started, you usually keep going.
- Identity-based habit
- Clear's reframing: a habit ties to who you ARE, not what you do. "I'm a man who studies the Craft daily" carries the habit; "I want to study more" doesn't. The identity statement makes the right next action obvious because anything else would contradict who you are.
- Never miss twice
- Clear's rule for streak preservation. Missing one day is fine; everyone misses. Missing two in a row is the start of a slide because the cue-routine link begins to fade. The rule isn't about perfection; it's about repair speed.
- Keystone habit
- Duhigg's term for one habit that unlocks others. Daily exercise, for many people, is a keystone: it triggers better eating, better sleep, more consistent work, and lower screen time. Find one keystone, and the system around it organizes itself with much less effort.
- Friction
- The cost (mental, physical, social) of starting a task. Clear and Fogg both teach habit design as friction engineering: lower the friction on the habit you want, raise it on the one you don't. Putting the monitor on the nightstand lowers the friction on reading; deleting an app from your phone raises it on scrolling.
- 24-inch gauge
- The published Masonic working tool used to teach the division of the day. The figure (drawn from Webb's monitor and repeated in Mackey's Encyclopaedia) divides the 24-hour day into three equal parts: the service of God and a distressed worthy brother, one's usual vocations, and refreshment and sleep. The gauge is a habit-design tool in symbolic dress: it tells the Mason his day already has a structure.
- CIA Model
- A three-step decision tool from the York Rite Leadership tradition. For any task or pressure in front of you: Can you Control it? If yes, act. If no, can you Influence it? If yes, influence and accept the partial. If neither, Accept it (without resentment) and shift your attention to what you can affect. The model maps directly to Covey's Circle of Influence and to the Stoic dichotomy of control (Epictetus's Enchiridion).
- Law of Process (Maxwell)
- John Maxwell's third Irrefutable Law: "Leadership is developed daily, not in a day." The law is a process claim: no leader wakes up one morning suddenly competent. The man you'll be in five years is being assembled right now, one task at a time, mostly through habits no one sees you keep. Clear's daily 1% and Duhigg's cue-routine-reward describe the same mechanism in modern vocabulary.
- Law of the Big Mo (Maxwell)
- Maxwell's sixteenth Irrefutable Law: "Momentum is a leader's best friend." Momentum forgives a thousand small errors; a stalled team can't fix even the easy ones. For an individual the equivalent is the streak: the eighth day in a row carries the ninth almost for free, the fortieth carries the forty-first more or less automatically. Habit design is partly the art of generating Big Mo for yourself before it's needed.