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Module 27 — Micro-Agreements
How an agreement is built in the session so that it survives an ordinary week at home.
This program has handed you a dozen things to take home, and all of them land in the same place: an ordinary week, in a house that was already full. This module walks through the five minutes near the end of a session where one agreement gets built. The way it is built is most of the work.
How an agreement gets built
Summary: what happens in the session
1 Your therapist asks where the last one stopped. Not why it did not happen. Which of five places it stalled, each with its own repair.
2 You are offered three things, not handed one. A short menu, with none of the above kept genuinely open.
3 One behavior, with one name beside it. A verb and an object, and the person who starts it.
4 It gets attached to something that already happens. An event rather than a clock time, and one that already happens anyway.
5 It gets smaller, and a floor goes under it. Cut, then cut again, with a finish line you can both see from here.
6 You decide now what happens if it does not. While nobody is ashamed, and with one sentence that keeps a miss from becoming evidence.
7 Your therapist asks what would stop you. Then waits. A polite no is worth more here than a yes on its way out.
All of it happens in the room. An agreement made in a coat, at the door, is gone by Tuesday.
Step 1. Where the last one stopped
The five minutes come near the end of a session, not in its last nine seconds. If there is an agreement from the week before, they start there. The sentence that arrives is we didn’t do it, and five different things hide inside it. It was not remembered. It was remembered every day and would not start. Nobody knew what done meant. The week was a wall. Or one of you said yes because saying no is hard.
Four of those are design faults, and design faults are ours to fix.
The row that gets misread. Autistic adults asked about this describe being unable to begin simple things they fully intend to do, in a way that feels outside their control.1 What moves them is something from outside: a prompt, or a setting where the action is half made already. That state gets filed as not caring, and the filing does more damage than the missed task.
The location question. I am not going to ask why it did not happen — nobody can answer that about themselves. Tell me where it stopped, and that is the part we change.
The drop-off points sit along the week itself, in the order they arrive.
Step 2. Three things, not one
An option, not an instruction. Some people find a thing impossible when it is a requirement and straightforward when it is an option. So your therapist offers a menu rather than setting homework, and the offer is meant. Saying that none of the three fits is an ordinary answer; a yes given to get out of the room is not an agreement.
The menu. Three things we could send you home with. Any one of them is fine. So is none of them, and that is worth knowing now rather than in three weeks.
Step 3. One behavior, one name
An agreement has six drawers. The first is the behavior itself, said plainly enough that a stranger could tell whether it happened. Not connect more.
The second drawer is a single name. A job that belongs to both of you belongs to neither, and that is the one that quietly does not happen. If the same partner is always the one starting things, that is the grievance rather than the fix.
The drawers are filled in this order, one at a time, in about ninety seconds. The last one is most often left empty.
What, exactly. Ask her the three questions on Sunday and write down what she says. That I can picture. Which of you starts it?
Step 4. What it comes after
The cue is an event rather than a clock time. Research on if-then plans, the ones that say when this happens, I will do that, finds that the cue does the starting, so the person does not have to.2
Tuesday evening needs somebody to notice it is Tuesday evening, which is the exact capacity that is short.
After the kettle goes on needs nobody to notice anything.
One caution about the event you pick. A cue that lands in the middle of something absorbing arrives as an interruption, and it gets resented and then ignored.
On the cue. Not Tuesday. What does it come after? After the kettle. After bedtime. After the laptop closes.
Step 5. Smaller, with a floor
The size you first think of is built for a week that is elastic. So it gets cut, and cut again, until what is left is a version a bad week does not break.
The floor is the agreement, not a consolation prize.
It also needs a finish line you can see from here: done is three things written on the card. Without one, a task gets abandoned or gets perfected.
On the size. Halve it. Now halve it again. What still counts on your worst day? That one is the agreement. The bigger one is there if you want it.
The height is the only thing that changes between the three, and the top two are marked optional because that is what they are.
Why so small. New behaviors take far longer to become automatic than anyone expects. In one study of daily habits the range ran from a few weeks to most of a year, and missing a day made no real difference.3 Two quiet weeks are not evidence, and a missed day is not a reset.
Step 6. If it does not happen
The last drawer is filled now, while nobody is ashamed. Here is the smaller version, and we would rather have that than nothing. If neither happens, come anyway and say so.
A miss is information about the design, not a failed test.
Between-session work that gets done is linked to better results in therapy.4 Read carefully, that is not an argument for pressing harder. It is what makes the design of a finishable agreement the intervention.
The sentence that protects it. Before you agree: this is not evidence. It does not get raised in an argument. If it did not happen, it comes back here and we fix the design.
The way this goes wrong. The agreement was that he texts at lunchtime on Wednesdays. He misses the third week and nothing is said. Four days later, in an argument about something else, it arrives: and you couldn’t even manage the text. Now it is a scoreboard, and he stops. The sentence above is what prevents that.
Step 7. What would stop you
Then one last question, and a silence after it that goes on longer than is comfortable. It is there to give a polite no somewhere to go.
The answer, when it comes, is usually small and concrete: the card lives in a drawer, Sunday is her mother’s day. Most of those can be designed around in ten seconds. The ones that will not bend are worth a session.
The real question. What would make you not do this? I am not testing you. I would rather find the problem now than in two weeks.
You can always say it. If any of this starts to feel like too much, you can say I am uncomfortable. That is a complete sentence. Nobody has to explain it or defend it. We stop, we look together at what is happening, and we decide as a group whether to stay with it or to understand first what is getting in the way.
Most people would rather smile past this question than answer it out loud. If answering it is more than you want today, there is another way to stop the moment.
After the session
Write the agreement where you will both see it without remembering to look: the fridge, a reminder on the phone that already runs your week, the shared note. Our Externalized-Brain Setup worksheet is for deciding where, and is worth doing once for all of them.
The check-in a week later. It does not open with did you do it, which puts one of you in front of a class. It opens with the design: I think I sized that badly. Then the five minutes run again from the top, and the new version is built by the two of you.
One honest limit. If nothing has happened for four weeks running and every session goes on redesigning, the design is not the problem. Something else is: a capacity crisis, a plan aimed at the wrong difficulty, or one partner who has quietly stepped out of the relationship. Your therapist will say so plainly rather than hand you a fifth sheet.
The workbook below is one agreement, built.
The one thing, if that is all you have. If this is too much this week, fill in two lines: who starts it, and what it comes after. Those two do more work than all the others together.
Your workbook
Your answers save to this device only - we cannot see a word of what you write. This one is a single agreement, built properly: the parts, the floor, where it lives, and the rule that keeps it from becoming a ledger.
The agreement
A verb and an object. If it contains an adjective about how you will be with each other, it is not there yet.
The agreement, in one line
Who starts it (a name)
It happens after ___ (something that already happens, not a time)
The floor: the smaller version that still counts on a bad week
How you will both know it happened
Where it is written down, where you will both see it
Before you agree
Answer these now, before there is anything to prove.
What would make you not do this?
We agree: this is not evidence and does not get raised in an argument. — Agreed, Agreed, and we have broken this rule before, Not yet - we should talk about that first
Where this comes from
Every source below was checked against the published record. They are grouped by the kind of evidence they are, so the numbers may not run straight down the page — a number points back to where the source is used in the lesson.
Research discussion
The tool in this module is a way of building an agreement in the session: one behavior, one name, one cue, one size with a floor, one visible proof, and a decision in advance about what happens if it does not happen. The five-way location question, the menu of three, the floor, the what-would-stop-you question and the rule against keeping score are practice moves, developed in use with neurodiverse couples and not tested as a package.
Four studies sit under it, and all of them are indirect. The inertia study is focus groups with thirty-two autistic adults: qualitative, self-selected, and describing experience rather than measuring it.1 It is the clearest account available of intention surviving intact while starting fails. The if-then planning meta-analysis pools ninety-four tests and finds a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment, but those tests are mostly individual goals in general populations, and none are two people agreeing something with each other.2 The lesson takes the mechanism and does not claim the number.
The habit study followed ninety-six volunteers doing a self-chosen behavior daily for twelve weeks.3 Its value is the spread rather than the median: a range so wide that no couple should measure themselves against a number. The finding that one missed opportunity did not materially affect the process is the one we quote most.
The homework meta-analysis pools seventeen studies of cognitive behavior therapy and is correlational: people who complete more between-session work do better, which is not the same as assigning more producing better outcomes.4 It is used here for one inference only, that completable work is worth designing for.
What no study shows is that building an agreement this way produces better outcomes for couples than describing one at the door. Nobody has run that trial. The claim the lesson makes is that the design of an agreement is the intervention, and that four of the five ways it fails are ours to fix rather than the couple’s.
Who this research was done with. The studies behind this module, none of them of neurodiverse couples, drew heavily on white, comparatively well-off, English-speaking participants. If your household carries pressures those samples did not — money, immigration, racism, disability, unsafe housing — the practice still applies, but the room you are practicing in is harder. That is the room, not you.
Peer-reviewed research
1. Buckle KL, Leadbitter K, Poliakoff E, Gowen E (2021) "No way out except from external intervention": First-hand accounts of autistic inertia. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 631596. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631596 Six focus groups with 32 autistic adults aged 23 to 64 on difficulty starting, stopping and changing activities despite intention. Participants described being unable to initiate even simple wanted actions, in a way outside conscious control, with stress and mental health difficulties making it worse; external prompts and compatible environments restored action. Re-cited from Module 6A. Limitation: qualitative self-report from a self-selected group; the authors note some accounts suggest a movement-disorder component that was not tested.
2. Gollwitzer PM, Sheeran P (2006) Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1 Meta-analysis of 94 independent tests of implementation intentions, if-then plans specifying when, where and how a goal will be pursued. They had a positive effect of medium-to-large magnitude (d = .65) on goal attainment, working by making the specified opportunity more accessible and automating the response to it. Re-cited from Module 6E. Limitation: largely individual goals in general-population samples; nothing about couples, households or neurodivergent participants, and the pooled estimate is from a 2006 synthesis rather than from recent better-controlled trials.
3. Lally P, van Jaarsveld CHM, Potts HWW, Wardle J (2010) How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674 96 volunteers chose an eating, drinking or activity behavior and performed it daily in a consistent context for 12 weeks, with 82 providing enough data for analysis. Nonlinear regressions fitted an asymptotic curve to each person's automaticity scores across 84 days; the time to reach 95 percent of that asymptote ranged from 18 to 254 days, and missing one opportunity to perform the behavior did not materially affect habit formation. Limitation: 96 volunteers performing simple individual behaviors; nothing about agreements between two people, and the widely quoted median is one point in a very wide range.
4. Kazantzis N, Whittington C, Zelencich L, Kyrios M, Norton PJ, Hofmann SG (2016) Quantity and quality of homework compliance: A meta-analysis of relations with outcome in cognitive behavior therapy. Behavior Therapy, 47(5), 755-772. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2016.05.002 Meta-analysis of 17 studies and 2,312 clients. Homework quantity related to post-treatment outcome with a pooled effect of g = 0.79 (15 studies, 1,537 clients) and quality with g = 0.78 (3 studies, 417 clients); associations persisted at follow-up. Limitation: correlational, so it cannot show that assigning more homework improves outcomes; the quality estimates rest on three studies with very wide confidence intervals, and none of the samples are couples in relationship therapy.
Further reading
• Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center (2026) The Externalized-Brain Setup. Practice materials, Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center. https://www.neurodiversecouplescounseling.com/worksheets/the-externalized-brain-setup The practice's worksheet for deciding where a thing lives: building capture systems so that working memory stops doing a job it cannot do, on the principle that out of sight really is out of mind. Used here for the cue and the place the agreement is written down. Limitation: a clinical tool developed in use rather than validated, and presented to couples on that basis.
The design of the agreement is the intervention
The Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center works with couples where one or both partners are autistic, ADHD or AuDHD. We build the agreement in the session rather than describing it at the door: one behavior, one name, a cue that already exists, a floor for the worst week, and a rule that keeps it from turning into evidence. Therapy for clients in California, coaching worldwide, all by telehealth. A first conversation costs nothing.
Up next
Module 28 — Eight Dates, Neurodiverse