“You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear
If you’re currently in a place where dog ownership mostly makes your life hell, it can be hard to know where to start making a change. It’s stressful to figure out if what you’re doing is making a positive difference. It feels like you’re winging it. The results are inconsistent at best, or completely missing at worst.
Hinging your success on day-to-day variables like motivation and ambition can result in the bottom falling out of your goals as soon as challenges arise. Physical energy levels, how much time we have available, how much we have going on, mental and emotional bandwidth - these things are constantly changing for everyone. You’re not alone in these challenges, but what differentiates who moves through them with success or failure?
Why a System?
Consistency is key in determining our success when we want to make a change. Manifesting true change takes a certain amount of discipline, and embracing the nature of repetitive practice - something we come back to every day. Through that practice we create new habits and little by little we take our life in the direction of our goals. But if it were that easy, it wouldn’t be so rare. So what can we do to get ourselves from where we are now, to where we want to go? We create a system.
Systems help remove the ambiguity of knowing “what to do next.” By standardizing our practices we can be assured that “at the bare minimum, I’m not making things any worse.” The systemization of your process also makes it possible to reproduce and plan - if my dog eats a bag of food every three weeks, setting up an autoship means I can plan to budget the correct amount towards dog food each month. If my dog is consistently fed 2 cups of food in his crate at 6 pm, this is an easy set of steps to follow on a stressful day or even to give to a pet sitter. This in turn lowers your stress levels and creates the mental space for other beneficial habits to form. Reliable practices create consistent results.
Getting Practical
When we start this journey, we should do so with a beginner’s mind and a mentally clean slate. Forget what we’ve done in the past - it hasn’t worked and attaching ourselves to past choices just creates clutter that gets in the way of the future. The place to begin is management and repeating events - the little everyday choices we make that form the foundation of our dog’s life.
“Management” is the things we do to set the dog up for success and prevent the rehearsal of undesired behavior. We prevent what we don’t want so we can encourage what we do want. These fundamental practices can transform the experience of dog ownership from overwhelming to manageable. Once we’re a little less overwhelmed, that gives us the room to start actively improving.
A Day In the Life
There are a few recurring responsibilities you signed up for when you got a dog: feeding, training, and exercise. These things need to happen every day whether we’re feeling motivated that day or not.
How you lay out your day will look different for everyone - life circumstances are unique to the individual. A low-key day for my well-managed pack of adult dogs goes something like this:
6:30 AM: wake up, let dogs out of crates out into the yard. Mine are okay outside unsupervised for a bit, so they hang out in the yard while I go get ready.
7:00 AM-ish: Leash everyone up and out the door for a 30-45 minute walk. I train for neutrality, being easy to walk on the leash, and disengaging quickly when something “interesting” catches their attention (sidewalk snacks, particularly interesting smells, etc).
7:45 AM: Get home, let everyone cool off, then into their crates. Feed breakfast.
8:00 AM - Noon: everybody chills out on Place or in their crates while I get my morning focus work done.
Noon: Take a break, get some sunshine. Maybe a quick game of fetch to decompress.
1-5 PM: More chill time while I work.
5:30 PM: Prep the dogs for training, crate them. Prep their food.
5:45 - 6:15 PM: Training sessions for each dog. Each session lasts around 10-15 minutes - it depends on what the dog needs that day! Crate each dog for a bit after training, this improves retention.
6:30-10 PM: Everyone comes out of their crates to relax in the evening. If one of the dogs is feeling high-energy, we might play some fetch or some tug. We might go for an “adventure” to a patio, store, or a park if the weather allows. Most nights, we just hang out
10 PM: Bedtime! Everyone into their crates until we wake up to do it again tomorrow!
Management Protocols
If my dogs are not eating directly from my hand during training, they are fed in their crates.
When I am gone, the dogs are crated. They also sleep in their crates at night.
Puppies are placed on a schedule of “2 hours in, 1 hour out” to ensure we are getting plenty of bonding time and interaction while teaching them self-settling and preventing “busyness”.
If I cannot guarantee a dog’s recall, they stay leashed in public.
Every time we go through a threshold (front door, yard gate, etc) we take a pause, get everyone calm, then proceed together. No charging through doorways or out of their crates.
The trash cans have lids.
The cat litter box is kept clean.
Baby gates are placed in the doorways of “other” rooms to prevent opportunities to create trouble.
Setting yourself up for Success
Change is hard, and sustainable change is even harder. So what can we do to set ourselves up for success, and make sure it sticks? Here are some strategies.
Only change one thing at a time.
While it’s tempting to overhaul your lifestyle because today’s the day it all changes for us, this all-or-nothing approach tends to see the bottom fall out of it. We are better served by making incremental changes, getting comfortable with the “new normal,” then making the next adjustment. This might start with crate training, and becoming accustomed to crating the dog at night and when we leave the house. It might mean moving from free feeding to offering food at “mealtimes” then picking it up. Don’t throw you or your dog in the deep end - take the long view and embrace gradual improvement. Let time and repetition do the work.
Make it easy on yourself
It’s much easier to maintain habits that aren’t wildly inconvenient. I keep my leashes and shoes stored by the front door, and I keep poop bags in my “dog walking” waist pack. I keep my training equipment stored together. I keep a measuring scoop in the dog food bag. I have dog crates in my bedroom for nighttime, and a second set in my vehicle for travel. Each crate has a water bucket. Things should be easy to find and easy to grab - the equipment shouldn’t be getting in the way of accomplishing our goals. Once upon a time, I used to toss my keys on the sideboard table by the door - now there’s a bowl there and the keys are “put away” even though the fundamental behavior of “tossing my keys down the moment I walk in” has not changed. By removing obstacles, we increase the likelihood of our own adherence.
Stay flexible
A good system is there to make your life easier, not harder. It’s there to remove stress and anxiety, not become a source of it. It should flex with the variables of life - bend, don’t break. Be flexible with yourself and find ways to integrate change into the very real parts of life that aren’t picture-perfect. If part of a system is consistently not-happening it is very likely that it’s either not a good fit for your everyday life, or there’s an adjustment we could make that will enable better adherence. A system is there to work for you - not the other way around.
Lower the Temperature of Life
By systemizing our must-do tasks, we ease the stress, anxiety, and mental load that can come with dog ownership. This system makes room for us to create additional positive changes - training for behaviors we want. It lowers the temperature of life, removes conflict between the human and animal, and lets you begin to experience a sense of routine and partnership. It creates structure that we can fall back on. And once we have that, we can start creating the life we dreamed of when we brought home the dog in the first place.