Working definition
Flight strategies are the repeatable avoidance moves you use to escape a known high-value action — dopamine hits, errands, novelty drives, busywork — harvested by hourly journal so the saboteur mechanic becomes trainable.
How it works
You often already know what you should do. Flight strategies are how you purchase relief without doing it: scroll, shop, eat, drive for novelty, reorganise the inbox, start a easier task that flatters progress.
They pair with Failure Strategy on autopilot and with dopamine baseline drift — micro-rewards that lower the cost of fleeing. Hourly journaling asks two lines: what moved me toward the aim and what did I do to avoid it.
Naming the strategy beats moralising it. Once the pattern has a label, deliberate practice can attach — hold the discomfort one beat longer than last time.
Failure modes
- Moralising instead of naming — shame loops replace harvest; the pattern stays untrainable.
- Only logging victories — hourly journal captures progress but skips what did I flee?
- Treating scatter as random — Dispersion and dopamine purchases repeat on schedule until labelled (Dopamine governance).
Example
You sit down for the declared morning block. Within four minutes you are in email — just checking one thread. Ten minutes later a podcast tab is open; the real move (one outreach call) is still untouched. Alone you call it distraction; in the room you would name it flight strategy #3: research that feels like work. That is B3 miss — the saboteur bought relief before the rep started.
Signature
The image is an hourly harvest — one line toward the aim, one line naming the flee move before relief rewrites the story.
Yann on 2026-07-01: what did I do to flee? — the restaurant detour, the channel flip, the petit shoot de dopamine — map them like single points of failure in your chain, not scattered shame.
Progress line vs flee move — name the strategy, do not moralise the scatter. Your move: Your move this week.
Your move this week
Set one hourly reminder. Each ping: one line on progress toward your Q3 aim, one line on what flight strategy fired (if any).