What does it mean that micro-commitments for big goals?

Break large commitments into daily micro-commitments that are easy to keep.

Example: You want to write a book. You have wanted to write it for three years. You have a concept, an outline, a folder of notes. You have told people about it. But every time you sit down to write, the scale of the project — 60,000 words, dozens of chapters, a coherent argument sustained across hundreds of pages — presses down on you like atmospheric weight. You open the document, stare at the blinking cursor, feel the distance between where you are and where you need to be, and close the laptop. Not because you do not care. Because the commitment as stated — 'write a book' — gives your doer self an impossible instruction. Now you restructure. Your micro-commitment is: 'Write 200 words before my first meeting each morning.' Two hundred words is less than this paragraph. It takes eight to twelve minutes. It requires no inspiration. Within a week you have 1,000 words. Within a month, 4,000 to 6,000. Within a year, a draft. The book did not get easier. The daily unit of commitment got small enough to keep.

Try this: Choose a goal you have been stalling on — one that feels too large to start or too complex to sustain. Write it down in its current form. Now decompose it into the smallest daily action that would constitute genuine progress. The micro-commitment must pass three tests: (1) it takes less than fifteen minutes, (2) you could do it on your worst day — tired, distracted, unmotivated, (3) it is specific enough that you know within ten seconds whether you did it. Write this micro-commitment as an implementation intention (L-0666): 'When [specific daily cue], I will [micro-action].' Execute it for seven consecutive days. At the end of the week, assess: did keeping the micro-commitment create momentum toward the larger goal? If yes, continue. If it felt too easy, increase the threshold slightly — but never beyond the point where your worst-day self would skip it.