The Paper Clip Strategy Only Works for One Kind of Thing
A 23-year-old stockbroker, two jars, and 120 paper clips. The cheapest habit system I know can beat the app on your phone.
I do something a little dumb with my to-do list. If I finish something that was never on it (empty the dishwasher, answer an email, swap the air filter) I’ll write it down after the fact just so I can check it off. The task is already done. I’m not tracking anything. I just want the little click of marking it complete.
I felt slightly ridiculous about this until I read about a guy and his paper clips.
The jar
In 1993, a 23-year-old stockbroker named Trent Dyrsmid started each day at a bank desk in Abbotsford, outside Vancouver, with two jars in front of him. One held 120 paper clips. The other was empty. Every time he finished a sales call he moved one clip to the empty jar, and he kept dialing until the first jar was empty.
Eighteen months later he was bringing in $5 million for the firm. James Clear, who tells this story on his site, says Dyrsmid was making around $75,000 a year by 24. He didn’t use an app or have a streak counter. A dollar of office supplies and a rule he wouldn’t break.
That’s the same click I’m chasing when I log a finished chore just to cross it out. So the concept works, but I want to be careful here, because the internet loves to turn a story like this into “do this one weird trick and your life changes,” and that’s not true. It works for certain things and it’s useless for most.
Why it works when it works
Three reasons, and none of them are complicated.
You can see it. The clips pile up on the desk, in real time, whether or not you open your phone. Most habit apps bury your progress behind a lock screen and a tap.
Moving the clip is its own small reward. That’s the click I keep coming back to. It’s a tiny hit of “done” that’s separate from whether the call went well or the chore was fun.
An empty jar is a finishable goal. “Make more calls” is a wish. “Move all 120 clips” is either done or it isn’t, and you know the second you look.
The part most people get wrong
Here’s the distinction that matters, and it took me a minute to see it clearly. A paper clip is a completed-rep counter. The clip moves because you did something and that’s not the same as measuring something.
I wear a Dexcom because I’m a type 2 diabetic, and my blood sugar sits on my phone all day. It’s useful, but it’s a different tool. The number changes on its own. I didn’t finish a task to make it move. When I first tried to fit that into the paper clip idea as an example for this newsletter, it fell apart. Reading a number is feedback. Moving a clip is a rep. If you blur those two together you’ll try to “paper clip” things that can’t be counted, and you’ll quit when it doesn’t work.
So the test is simple. Can you point at a single, finished action and say “that’s one”? If yes, the jar can help. If you’re measuring a state (mood, weight, energy, how present you were with your kids) the jar has nothing to grab.
Where I actually use it
I’ve never owned the literal jar. That’s the whole magpie move: I stole what works and left the rest. The part worth taking is a counter for finished reps. The part I skipped is a jar of paper clips cluttering my desk. What I have instead is a Todoist project called Recurring, and it does the same job.
Restart the Mac mini once a month, change my razor every two weeks, swap out the air filter. One of them (drain the water heater) only happens once a year, and without the checkbox I would absolutely never remember it exists.Each one is a rep I check off, and the check is the point. None of them are exciting, and that’s exactly why the little completion marker keeps me doing them.
The one that matters most looks a lot like Dyrsmid’s calls. I have a task that repeats every single day: post one Note and reply to a few other writers to slowly grow this newsletter. On its own, any single day of that feels like nothing. Checking it off, day after day, is what keeps me showing up when the results are slow. I want people to learn and grow, by talking with others daily, I’m growing relationships and hopefully helping people out.
The rep is small, the counter makes it visible, and the visibility keeps me going.
This is the same reason I keep my task units tiny, which I wrote about in The 5-Minute Task System for Busy People. A small rep is one you’ll actually finish, and a finished rep is one you get to count. If you want the “do it because it’s easier than avoiding it” version of this, that’s You Don’t Need More Discipline, You Need Less Friction.
The honest caveat
It’s not a catch-all, and I’d be lying if I sold it that way.
It only works for things you can reduce to one clean, countable rep. And there’s a failure mode I’ve walked straight into: the check can become the goal. When I write down a chore I already did just to mark it done, that’s harmless, but push it far enough and you’re optimizing for boxes instead of the actual work. The clip is supposed to follow the rep, not replace it. If you use Todoist, a recurring task is basically a paper clip you never have to buy.
But for the boring, repeatable things you keep dropping? A visible count of finished reps is the cheapest fix I know. Two jars, a fistful of clips, one rule you don’t break. Or a recurring task and the small satisfaction of the check. Just don’t ask it to measure anything.
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