Design three operating modes for every important process

For every important recurring process, design three explicit operating modes—full, reduced, and minimal—where each preserves progressively less fidelity but never loses continuity.

When This Fires

When designing any important recurring process that needs to survive disruptions
When Design a degraded-mode version of every recurring system…'s two-mode structure (full/degraded) needs more granularity
When travel, illness, or crisis approaches and you want to protect existing processes
During process architecture reviews when evaluating resilience

Common Failure Mode

Designing only full mode and treating disruption as binary failure: "My review process takes 2 hours every Friday." When Friday is disrupted, the review doesn't happen at all — there's no reduced mode (30-minute focused review) or minimal mode (5-minute priority check). The process dies for that week, and the behavioral chain weakens.

The Protocol

(1) For each important recurring process, explicitly design three modes: Full mode: the ideal execution with all components. Document what "full" includes. Reduced mode: shed the 40-60% lowest-value components. What's the core output this process must produce? Design a version that delivers that core in 30-50% of full mode's time/effort. Minimal mode: the absolute minimum that preserves continuity. Under 5 minutes, zero preparation, executable under any conditions. This mode's only job is to keep the habit chain alive. (2) Write all three modes down with explicit switching criteria: "When [conditions], switch to [mode]." (3) Pre-test reduced and minimal modes during normal conditions to verify they're actually executable. (4) When conditions degrade → switch modes rather than dropping the process entirely. Continuity at minimal fidelity beats perfect execution 60% of the time and silence 40% of the time.