Optimize Your Life In 10 Minutes

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.” – Frank Herbert, Dune

One of my favorite little exercises for life optimization…

(ie. improving daily workflow, enhancing productivity, building energy and focus and motivation, etc)

…Is to sit down with a piece of paper (or laptop, like I did a few minutes ago), and write this question to yourself:

“Where are the biggest energy leaks in my daily routine, and how are they negatively affecting me?”

Then, list your answers.

(side note: our mind is better at spotting problems than opportunities, so framing the question negatively, ie. “where am I messing up?” is often more effective than framing it positively, ie. “how could I improve?”)

Here are a few of mine:

• Listening to YouTube / podcasts in-between blocks of work.

(drains dopamine, decreases motivation when returning to work, encourages impulsive mind)

• Skipping movement practice before lunch, moving straight from work into eating.

(stagnant energy, mental back-log, decreases productivity in the afternoon)

• Allowing physical tension to build up while working.

(stagnant energy, decreases working endurance and creativity, impacts meditation practice)

• Allowing empty work — flipping around between email, YouTube, analytics, etc — ie. “working” without actually doing anything.

(drains dopamine, decreases energy and motivation, encourages impulsive mind)

• Skipping morning contemplation (writing to myself) and jumping straight into writing these emails.

(pulls me off-center, decreases rate of insight)

• Two Unreal bars instead of one after lunch.

(seriously, I actually wrote this)

Those are just my own current areas of messiness, and we’ve all got ’em — so take a few minutes to list your own.

Then comes the all-important step:

Take that list and reframe each item into a positive, actionable instruction:

• Listening to YT/Podcasts during work breaks becomes “go for a short walk outside.”
• Allowing empty work becomes “work with smooth, unbroken focus and end work as soon as the task is complete.”
• Two Unreal bars becomes “one Unreal bar.”

You get the idea.

You now have a personalized list ways to immediately optimize your life, and all that’s left to do is — yep:

Actually do what is on the list.

Easier said than done, sometimes, but rest assured:

There are many (many) ways to overcome old behaviours, reinforce new behaviours, and make those new behaviours easy, effortless, and permanent.

If you’re interested, we can get into those another time.

For now, I’ll just say this:

1. Updating old behaviours can be hard, at first
2. But if you lean into the difficulty and take pleasure in overcoming it
3. They will get easier very quickly, and you’ll gain confidence in the process.
4. So don’t give up after a day or two when it gets uncomfortable,
5. Push through it for at least ~3 weeks before re-assessing.

Good luck, and happy Monday.

• T

P.S. If you do this exercise, I’d love to hear your findings.

(it would be helpful to know which specific behaviours you’re trying to overcome, so I can optimize our lessons for you)

In the meantime, here’s a simple trick you can add for even better results.