Conventions Are a System
A convention is a small decision you make once so you never have to make it again. Settle the boring choices and you free your attention for the work that is actually yours — consistency is calm execution made structural.
Principle Nº Four
A convention is infrastructure. Decide once; everyone inherits it.
Attention is the scarce resource — not time exactly, but attention, the finite supply of real decisions you can make well in a day. And small choices spend it just like big ones: what to name this, where to put that, which way to format the other. Each is trivial on its own, there are hundreds of them, and made fresh every time they quietly drain the exact resource you needed for the work that mattered.
A convention is how you stop paying that tax. You decide once — names look like this, files go there, this kind of thing is always done that way — and then you never spend attention on it again. The decision is banked. Every future instance just follows the convention, free, while your attention stays whole for the choices that actually require you. That's the real function of consistency: not tidiness for its own sake, but a refusal to re-decide the settled, so calm execution becomes structural rather than something you summon by willpower each morning. It's the oldest trick in well-built systems — what Rails called convention over configuration: sensible defaults that remove a boatload of low-value decisions so you can get to the work.
Don't
Re-decide each small choice for “variety” — naming this one differently because it felt nicer today. The creativity goes into things no one should think about.
Do
Settle the boring choice once, write it down, and let every future instance follow it free — spending your attention only on what's genuinely yours.
Where it goes wrong
The first failure is treating each small choice as a fresh chance to be clever; it feels harmless, even creative, but every deviation re-opens a decision the convention had closed, taxing your attention and everyone else's. The opposite failure is convention as a cage — clinging to a settled rule long after it's stopped serving the work, applying it where it plainly doesn't fit. A convention is a tool for freeing attention, not a law. Keep it while it pays, change it deliberately when it stops, and never spend real creativity on the parts that should be automatic.
Put it to work
Notice one small decision you keep re-making — a naming choice, a layout, an order you redo each time. Settle it once, write the rule down, and follow it without revisiting. Then watch where the freed attention goes. The whole point of a convention is that it's invisible afterward: you stop thinking about the boring thing, and the quiet you bought flows straight into the work that deserved you.
From my own practice, and the spirit of Rails' “convention over configuration” — consistency as calm execution made structural.