Jan 5

Sahil is one of my favourite writers on the internet. He recently published an article on - 23 Ways to Make 2023 Your Miracle Year that brought some actionable ideas to improve your life. I have been using a few of them and a few of them, I want to add to my life - especially the ideas around attention residue, energy and priority. Here are my notes on the same:

Schedule rest or free time into your day: Go into your calendar and add at least two 15-minute blocks for absolutely nothing. During these windows, don't check email or get anything done. Go for a walk, read something non-work related, sit and stare into space, whatever. Prioritize and protect these short bouts of rest as a key part of your daily systems, not a reward for your efforts. Growth requires this balance.

Free time doesn’t mean - you take out your phone and scroll. It means to vacate your mind. We keep feeding our minds with so much information, that it failed to process or go deeper.

Build a deep work practice by blocking 60-minute windows during which you have zero email, messaging, apps, or distractions: These windows should become sacred windows of progress on important long-term tasks (not urgent short-term ones).

I have been prioritizing deep work of at least an hour a day to work on the most critical or complex tasks of the day - like making progress in an online course, studying or working on critical office tasks, or writing freely.

Reduce the impact of attention residue by taking breaks.

Noted! after completing an hour of learning activity or reading something, I will take up some time to settle. (5-10 minutes).

Use the Spaced Repetition Technique to retain anything new that you learn.
With Spaced Repetition, information is consumed at increasing intervals until it's committed to long-term memory. If you first consume some new information at 8am, you'd have Rep 1 at 9am (1 hr later), Rep 2 at 12pm (3 hrs later), Rep 3 at 6pm (6 hrs later), Rep 4 at 6am (12 hrs later), and so on. The memory is reinforced at increasing intervals. Your brain is a muscle—each repetition is a "flex" of that muscle. By steadily increasing the intervals between reps, you are pushing the muscle with a steadily more challenging load. You're forcing the retention muscle to grow.

I am bad at remembering things. I jot down and forget it. not repeating enough is the key I identified that is been missing.

Use an Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize your tasks: Learn the difference between urgent and important. Work towards delegating or deleting the unimportant tasks that are draining your time and mental energy. The goal is to spend more time on important tasks that further your long-term values, missions, goals, and principles.

In the name of productivity, we feed ourselves with a lot of unnecessary tasks and metrics. We are not realizing what’s important and urgent. This matrix helped me to prioritize, though, I didn’t go deeper into such an analysis of the task.

Batch email and message processing into 1-3 condensed windows during the day.

To feel energized as soon as you get out of bed, try using my 5-5-5-30 Method: When you wake up, do 5 push-ups, 5 squats, 5 lunges, and a 30-second plank.

I left the gym for some time due to the weather and some other stuff, This is a great way to get started again until I go full-fledged with my gym routine.

Go for a 15 minute tech-free walk every morning: You don't need a fancy morning routine—just go for a walk. The sunlight, movement, and fresh air have a direct positive impact on your mood, circadian rhythm, metabolism, digestion, and more. Leave your phone at home (or put it on airplane mode). Let your creativity flow.

This can be clubbed with the - attention residue + free time thing that we discussed earlier. it serves both purposes.

Develop a simple Power Down Ritual to more effectively separate work from your personal life: A Power Down Ritual is a fixed set of actions and behaviours that mentally and physically mark the end of your professional day.

When I first started working from home, I wasn’t aware of the boundaries of personal and professional space. There are no set rules and no set hours. recently, I switched to differentiating both and setting up a routine to close the day for work. There is similar downtime activity to set the end of the day as well.

Tell your partner one thing you appreciate about them every single night

Set Character Alarms to get into character for a specific role or identity during the day.

Interesting point, I will definitely add the same to my Google calender description to identify with different characters.

Make progress on something new with my 30-for-30 Approach : Do the new thing for 30 minutes per day for 30 straight days

This can be clubbed with deep work activity. I tried but this doesn’t work for me. I can’t do things this regularly and my routine shift tremendously on weekends. but definitely, try for something like writing essays, or learning some tech stack.

Use the Feynman Technique for learning anything new: Identify a topic, try to explain it to a 5-year-old, study to fill in knowledge gaps exposed by the explanation, and iterate on the process accordingly. Teaching is the most powerful form of learning.

The first part of explaining it to a 5-year-old doesn’t work for technology stuff. but other things are really good to work on.

Take yourself out for a meal alone once each month.
Carry a notebook and pen, bring your favorite book, and leave your phone in your bag. Let your mind run free. Flex that boredom muscle. It’s insanely freeing—a meditative experience. You'll learn new things about yourself and unlock new, creative ideas.

Will definitely try.

Create an automated direct deposit for a small amount of money into an investment account every month: Never look at the account. Don't pay any attention to it. A $100 monthly investment into the S&P 500 for the last 10 years would be worth ~$20,000 today. Let it compound.

Not aware of how this work in the Indian context but the closest example is to buy the mutual fund of Indian indexes with some SIP amount and run it indefinitely.