Category Archives: Productivity

Where you spend your money is where you spend your time

I think I’ve subconsciously thought this before but I came across this notion a few months ago and it resonated with me. Change is an incredibly hard thing to enact, often taking huge amounts of effort to do. This thought isn’t going to drastically make it easier, but I’m sure anyone who has tried to make a change knows that if you environment is working against you, behavior change becomes much harder. An example of this is if you wanted to stop eating processed sweets, but didn’t clean out your cupboard of chocolates, you’re going to have a much harder time avoiding them.

So if you wanted to spend less time on your phone, it seems silly to upgrade to the latest model. However, if you want to spend more time running, it seems like a good idea to spend money on running clothes, shoes etc. This may seem very obvious, but if we change our purchasing habits, I believe it can really shape our lives.

This isn’t to say that as soon as you buy a pair of running shoes you’re going to consistently run 3x per week, but it definitely reduces the activation energy for doing that activity.

Another example of this I’ve noticed in my life is, I bought a kindle about 1 year ago to enable me to read more of the books I wanted to read and was interested in. Previously what I had done to get books was go to the local primary school fete book store and buy 20 books, and repeat this every year. This limited me in the scope of books I would read to a lot of crime fiction and some classics, which wasn’t bad I just wanted something different. The kindle allowed me to get whatever book I wanted much easier and cheaper than going to a book store and buying one. I already had a habit of reading every night, but I now consume a much more varied literary diet which has been great. All because I lowered the activation energy to doing so by my spending choices.

This is a very simple but very powerful tool to use to help you enact the changes you want. So next time you’re spending money on something, think, do I really want to spend more time in this area?

The Two-Minute Rule

There are two things I hate, inefficiency and forgetting to do something. Despite (I think) being pretty productive, one of my biggest weaknesses is saying “I’ll do it later” just after I do something else quickly. With this strategy, I inevitably forget to do it later, leading to the accumulation of small tasks. An example of this is putting my clothes away, which usually takes no time at all, piles up to be a big task. This is very inefficient because it takes a lot more time than it would have, and requires a lot more effort to do so. In the context of clothes and housework type tasks, it also affects my productivity as well because everything is messy, which is well known to disrupt focus.

This was all until I discovered the two-minute rule.

The two-minute rule is simply, if a task takes less than two minutes to complete, do it immediately. It’s so simple but so effective. This has helped me not procrastinate on those small tasks that we all put off doing.

Whilst the two-minute rule isn’t not the most complex, just having it among the back of my mind makes has made such a difference.

Whilst forgetting to hang your clothes up isnt the end of the world, the two minute rule also applies to many other areas of life. Often I think about messaging my girlfriend something she asked me to do, or send an email I have to send, but say to myself “I’ll do it in a sec.”

Famous. Last. Words.

I almost never remember to do it, because, thinking about doing it makes me feel like I’ve done it. This is another area the two minute rule comes in clutch and you just send the email there and then.

What if I’m in the middle of something? What if it takes more than two minutes?

Write it down.

If the task is more than 2 minutes or you really dont have time, make sure you write it down. This safeguards against our poor short term memory and means you wont forget to come back to it later. Often I have been riding my bike and remember I have to do something, or come up with an idea, and rather than stop and type it up, I just say “Hey Siri, make a note…” and speak whatever it is that I have to do.

Whilst this isn’t anything groundbreaking on the surface, it can be so helpful to just keep in the back of your mind the next time a small task comes your way. I’ve found it just gives me a lot of clarity and helps me overcome the minuscule activation energy it takes to do the small task. This not only helps me get more done, but it makes life more efficient because things don’t get messy, and it also helps me not forget things which pop into my head.

This all helps make life just that little bit more productive.

Cognitive Dissonance

Have you ever done something which proved to be a bad idea, then proceeded to find a million different ways to justify why you did it? I know I do this quite often, not even realising, until I came across the theory of cognitive dissonance. A nice example of cognitive dissonance is if you were someone who smoked cigarette’s, knowing the severe health impact they had on you. Many people I know justify this by saying, oh yes but i’ll quite before I have kids, or I’ll quite in a few years. This shows that they are justifying their habit by giving themselves a hall pass because they are going to quit.

This isn’t a post to bash people who smoke, you do you. I believe smoking is a great example of cognitive dissonance, people who are addicted will find ways to make themselves feel better about their actions, and that is cognitive dissonance. Another example may be if you were furious at someone for something they did to you, you hated them; fair enough. Weeks later you find out that it wasn’t actually them who wronged you, rather than go back on your hatred and apologise, you double down and invent another reason to justify your anger at them.

Cognitive dissonance is the state of having inconsistent or conflicting beliefs on something, usually relating to behaviours. It can arise when you are provided with new evidence for something which contradicts your previous actions or beliefs. This can be a very uncomfortable state of mind and can result in a heightened level of stress.

So what can I do about it?

Getting yourself out of a state of cognitive dissonance can be very easy or very difficult. Fundamentally all it requires is for you to identify the mismatch between your beliefs (or the new evidence) and your actions, then change them. In the case of being angry at someone, reflecting on the new information and accepting that there is no reason to continue to be angry (and maybe even apologising). That isn’t too hard. When it comes to longstanding behaviours or addictions such as smoking it gets harder because you must break your addiction (the current best evidence suggests nicotine patches are likely the best to assist with this. Just so everyone knows).

Ultimately, the only way to solve cognitive dissonance is to bring your beliefs and actions into alignment, which can be done by either changing your behaviour, or change your beliefs. The former is usually the hardest to do as it is normally ingrained in us but sometimes beliefs can be just as hard, due to social reasons. Maybe you’ve been a massive proponent of the paleo diet for years, only to realise that it has very little evidence going for it *cough* Pete Evans *cough*.

An example for me was realising that I’d made a bad purchase, but rather than admit that, I began fabricating all these reasons it was actually a good purchase, which I told myself and my family. Now this isn’t a huge issue but it did make me feel uncomfortable, and in hindsight, makes me feel really silly.

I hope that having an understanding of what cognitive dissonance is will help you identify it in your life, helping you live more consistently.

I was inspired to write this after listening to ‘The Drive’ podcast by Peter Attia, he had an episode with Carol Tarvis and Eliot Aronson who are both social psychologists. This was an excellent listen where they discussed the concept of cognitive dissonance, the theory and how it affects our lives. Check it out if you’re interested to learn more.

Stress and Anxiety: Don’t Suffer Twice

This week, I listened to a great podcast about mindfulness and anxiety from Sam Harris and Tim Ferris. Whilst writing my weekly review I realised I experienced some stressful situations in the short, medium and long term which the podcast helped me control, with varying degrees of success. If you just want to see the techniques I use, jump to here

Short Term Stress

I had a very difficult exam (my final one for university!) which seemed to be designed to push you for time. I had roughly 30mins to go, with 30 marks unfinished (out of a 100 mark, 2hr exam), all long responses and I noticed myself getting frazzled and spending time thinking about how I was not going to finish, and flipping between questions.

After about 30 seconds of fueling the fire of anxiety, I identified my stress and thought, “it doesn’t matter how many questions I’ve got to go, I just need to keep powering through them and finish them the best I can,” and that’s exactly what I did. I put this ability to identify and put aside my stress down to my meditation, which I poorly adhere to but have still seen the benefits, this being one.

Medium Term Stress

My medium term stress was having a busy week ahead with Friday, Saturday and Sunday being full of work, and a lot of research to do. The way I managed this stress was ensuring I had a to do list of the essential pieces I needed to have finished, and just worked hard to get them finished by thursday so on the days I was working I was able to switch off afterwards so it still felt like I had a weekend; worked a charm.

Writing the tasks down and blocking out time in my calendar has been a great way to show me how much I really do need to get done because the worry about having a lot of work to do is always worse than the actual work.

Long Term Stress

My long term stress is more about the career I want to pursue, I am coming to the end of my degree and have several options but unsure which one to take. I’m still figuring out how best to approach this, but I currently have two heuristics:

  • Which path will be more fun to do
  • Which path has the most options afterwards

So far this led me to choose my degree (Exercise Physiology is more fun than Engineering) my jobs and the research projects I’ve been involved in as well. It is working out pretty well so far.

You can never know whether the decisions you make are the right ones, so by choosing a path which has the most options and will be fun in the short term removes a lot of the stress around making significant live decisions. Tim Ferriss’ fear setting exercise is also really useful for life-altering decisions as well.

Strategies to Stress Less

It’s not that I don’t stress, I do, but I’ve really learned over the past few years how to better manage my stress so that it doesn’t distract me from what is important.

For short term, in the moment stress, like in an exam, you have to understand your stress, allowing it to be put away and ignored so you can deal with the problem at hand. Mindfulness Meditation (with Sam Harris’ ‘Waking Up’ app) has helped in identifying this stress, allowing you to not be consumed by it.

For medium term, stress about the coming days or weeks, writing a list and scheduling your time in a calendar helps to make you realise that the stressor is probably not as time consuming as it seems, and by blocking out time for it, Steve Jobs’ ‘Imaginary time’ comes in and with a pressing enough deadline, clearly set out in a calendar and a list, you can achieve almost anything. What happens when your tasks aren’t time bound is called Parkinson’s Law, where “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” so block off the time you need and have no more, trust me, you’ll finish it.

Finally long term stress. Making life decisions suck, you can never be sure of what result your decision will have, but there are ways to ensure you enjoy it. Choose something that you’ll enjoy doing, the worst thing that happens is you enjoy yourself, then do something else. Choose something which doesn’t close doors, or even opens them, nobody knows what they want to be doing in 5 or 10 years, so don’t limit yourself with your choices.

Finally, the main takeaway from this post should be that the object of your stress will never be as bad as what you think it will be, so don’t suffer twice by stressing about it. Just saying ‘don’t stress’ doesn’t help so I’ve given some thoughts on how I manage my stress so I’m not wasting my energy on my ruminations.

I’d love to know what you do to manage your stress and any techniques which have worked for you, leave a comment down below and get in touch if you’d like to chat through your stresses with me!

Get in touch to have a chat with me

Investing in Relationships

Over the past few years there has definitely been a significant increase in the productivity sphere of social media, with the rise of people like Ali Abdaal and Thomas Frank. They are very insightful and have many great tips on strategies to improve your output, but I’ve found this can lead to the pursuit of becoming a machine which churns out study or content for business or social media non stop for 16 hours a day. I love both their work but it can be easy to ignore their advice for achieving balance, which is certainly a trap I’ve fallen into.

In the pursuit of becoming a productivity machine it can be easy to forget to invest in your relationships. My girlfriend told me to have more emotions the other day, “it was like I was a robot” she said. This made me think about the balance in my life. In my mind I was meditating, studying a lot and generally being very productive. I felt like I was on top of everything, but I realised I wasnt devoting enough mental space to my relationships, and this showed in me not showing too much emotion, which certainly isn’t me.

This isn’t a long one, nor a guide at how to be more in touch with your emotions, this is simply a reminder that relationships are arguably the most important thing in life, and producing more content or studying more won’t improve them. It’s important to take some time off, spend uninterrupted time with your friends or significant other, being vulnerable with them, and be willing to divulge as much emotion as you recieve.

Friendships are inevitable with enough time, but they are fast tracked or cemented when you are both vulnerable with each other, when you are willing to listen to their issues but also lay out your own. this is something I’m definitely not putting enough time towards, and am going to focus more on in the future.

Being Remarkable

If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it?

Seth Godin

I want to be remarkable, and I am sure that I will be. My girlfriend always laughs at me when I say this, or when I say “I want to change the world,” but I do, and more importantly, I will. How I plan on doing this, I’m not sure yet, it is looking like it will be in the realm of health and medicine, but who knows, that may very well change. For Me this is a constant struggle, I feel like I should know what to do, and what I want to do with my life, but I couldn’t be further from that.

I sat down on a rainy afternoon to do a fear-setting task as designed by Tim Ferriss. The task is designed to help you overcome your fears and act on whatever life change or decision it is you want to make. I sat down, drew out the matrix on an A3 piece of paper and couldn’t think what action it was I wanted to check. Pondering fruitlessly I looked back through my notes where I write in any ideas I have and stumbled upon some notes I took from the ‘Not Overthinking’ podcast by Ali & Taimur Abdaal on Vision (I’d definitely recommend it)

This led me to Seth Godin’s blog when in his ‘Top 100’ posts I found, how to be remarkable, 10 tips on how to be great, perfect for my problem. One of the tips to ask yourself was the one at the start of the post; “If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it.” Unfortunately I didn’t (and don’t) know what it would be I would be putting on a T-shirt, but it helped reinforce I had to do something, because I wasn’t going to wake up one day and be remarkable. I know my goal, but the path is unclear; which doesn’t mean there isn’t a path. I suppose that’s how it is for everyone. No (well, not many) 21 year old knows exactly what they want from life, nor should we, but you have to expose yourself to as many situations where new opportunities can present, and seize them when they do.

Tim Ferriss’ blog about fear setting opens with

Action may not bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

Benjamin Disraeli (British PM from the 1800’s)

Currently in my life, I’m cruising, I’ve got a few stable jobs, uni is going well and there is little risk (an issue i’ve talked about previously). With no risks, opportunity has no chance to present herself. On Not Overthinking they often speak about the internet as a means to ‘get yourself out of your village’ which is a metaphor for increasing your surface area to opportunity outside of your immediate connections. So in the absence of a clear path, I’m going to use that as a starting point. The internet is a gateway for a world of opportunity, so if you’re in a similar position to me, I suggest its your starting point too.