Category: Productivity

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It Appears to be Sleep

I’m now something like 5 days into my efforts to sleep at least 9 hours per night, and it would appear that it probably was, in fact, the issue that was making me feel unmotivated and generally unhappy.

And it really shouldn’t be surprising. Sleep affects so much, and obviously can impact all of the things I brought up. The only reason I didn’t think of it right away was that I was generally sleeping more than 8 hours per night, and I didn’t think it could possibly make much of a difference beyond that.

But I was wrong! It seems that it can and it did.

I only even thought of it now because I had the thought, “if I’m starting to run a lot… Should I be sleeping more as a result?”

I outlined this in a previous post I think, but the answer is: yes. You should be sleeping a lot more.

So since I had this thought, I’ve been sleeping more than 9 hours each night, and the results do seem fairly impressive. Overall, I feel a lot better and in a better mood.

Motivation and focus are way up, as is productivity.

I also had an interesting result with my running. Usually once or twice a week, I run a very similar route that comes out to about 2.41 miles. Yesterday I completed this route in 20:07, which I didn’t think much of at the time, especially since it didn’t feel particularly challenging.

It wasn’t until I reviewed my other runs that I realized that this was way faster than my other runs. The previous record (for this year, anyway) was 20:53. I shaved off 47 seconds on a relatively short run. That’s huge.

I’ve also been struggling to improve my mile time (which is my ultimate goal), and set what I thought to be an ambitious goal for my run last week of 6:40. I ended up flying past that goal and finished in 6:33.

I now believe that lack of sufficient sleep has been significantly affecting my performance. I was starting to lose hope that I’d be able to get my mile down to below 6 minutes, but now I’m once again hopeful that I’ll be able to do it.

So one final thought I had today regarding my sleep is this: if all this time, I simply haven’t been sleeping enough, how does this pertain to drinking?

You see, in the past, after drinking, the next day I often felt unmotivated, generally bad, and just didn’t perform very well. I assumed this was just 100% directly caused by the alcohol.

But the symptoms were always almost identical to what I’ve been feeling recently due to a little bit less sleep (and to be clear: I’m not drinking at all right now).

To what extent did lack of sleep play?

Most times that I drank, I’d stay up later than I should. Given that I usually had commitments, I’d generally still get up at the same time, meaning I was sleep deprived.

Additionally, alcohol greatly impairs the quality of that sleep. Even if I slept “long enough”, it likely still affected me greatly.

So what do I do with this information?

I think that when/if I go back to drinking, it’s important to be especially careful around my sleep. I need to not stay up too late, and ideally I’d be totally sober by the time I went to bed. If not, I’m killing my productivity and mood.

This is great, too, because the whole point of me taking a year off is to gather insights like this. I’ll want to figure out if alcohol needs to be eliminated entirely. If I can figure out in which situations it is really damaging, I can reduce the incidences of them.

I’ll keep posting back here with the long-term results of my “increased sleep”. Currently, I’m struggling a little bit because it’s hard/impossible to keep up with all the sleep-related habits I’ve developed and still maintain 9 hours each night. So I may have to alter what is required as I go along.

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I’m Anxious and Low-Energy Right Now

So lately I’ve seemed to have no mental energy or motivation at all and have been considerably more anxious than usual.

So far, my working theory is that I’m actually too lean. In addition to weight training and eating very well, I’ve added quite a bit of cardio to my routine in the form of running. Since then, I’ve gotten quite lean and may now be below 10% body fat.

I was aware that at a certain point (that’s different for everyone), you start to feel some negative side-effects of being lean. And the symptoms seem to line up with what I’m experiencing, unfortunately.

It’s also possible that I’ve just burnt myself out doing so much every day and being so productive. Maybe I just need to relax for a bit.

I’ve also had a bit of tumult in my dating life that has certainly affected me in the last week, though it’s hard for me to imagine that it is the cause.

Finally, it’s always possible I’m fighting an illness, even though I don’t seem to have any other symptoms. It could be something behind the scenes.

I might just keep going exactly as I am for a bit and see if anything changes. If not, it may be time to start eating a lot more and getting my bodyfat percentage back up.

Because I really don’t want to continue like this. In times when I need to call on some extra motivation or self-control, it’s not there. And I’m not used to that.

Half the time I feel like just collapsing and not moving at all.

The funny thing is that it’s entirely mental. My body is just fine. I can go out in the morning and run 4 and a half miles at a good pace without issue. But getting myself to start anything or cook or do one last task feels like so much work.

There’s also just a general feeling that everything is pointless. I had believed that this was a side-effect of not dating at all, because I haven’t dated since I returned from my last trip a couple months ago. But it may be unrelated.

It’s also affecting my ability to stick with new habits. I’ve gotten up past 7:30 for the first time in a long time more than once lately, and also have been slow to get out of bed. Literally everything is harder.

I also haven’t been able to make any progress on my photos site or other initiatives and it has been frustrating.

So I figure I’ll just keep an eye on it and share more if things change. Hopefully they do soon.

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“Do What You Love” Is Good Advice for Most People Because they Couldn’t Excel Elsewhere

I’ve come to the understand that the vast majority of people sort of just do what they feel like all the time. They lack self-control and discipline and lots of other things that would be required to succeed in most areas.

In most cases, I think that when things get tough, people either lose interest, tune out, or just give up.

To get great or even good at most things requires a lot of effort and experience, and lots of of hardships.

I think most people end up finding something they are good at, and more often than not, it’s something that they are passionate about and enjoy doing.

But contrary to the popular wisdom, I think that they are only good at it because they are passionate about it.

I think that passion is what keeps them going even when things get hard. It’s the only way they can keep going, because they simply don’t have the level of self-discipline or self-awareness to continue progressing if they weren’t passionate.

I think of these guys who seem like total screw-ups in most of their life, but they have one thing they love and are actually really good at. Some of the more apparent examples are many mechanics, electricians, and other people in skilled trades.

Those things are not easy to do or to get good at, yet it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that someone that was at the bottom of my high school class had succeeded in that field.

I certainly don’t want to come off as elitist, conceited, or judgmental here. This is just one piece of my broader understanding lately that advice that is designed to be broadly applied to the population does not really feel relevant to me or many others.

I’ve worked hard over decades to improve my self-discipline, habits, and overall performance. And now it seems that I’m at a level where most advice doesn’t seem to apply to me.

And “do what you love” sort of just feels like one of those things. I now think that’s its actually a pragmatic suggestion for finding economic success and providing value to society for those who would otherwise struggle to do so, rather than a deep nugget of wisdom designed to bring about happiness and fulfilment.

Those things may, indeed, be related, but the happiness may actually just be a secondary side-effect.

That’s also not to say that this advice wouldn’t help others, as well. It would be easier for anyone to continue through adversity if they were doing something they loved.

But it is limiting to only do things you love. Almost nobody has a love for management, scaling operations, HR, accounting, and many other crucial pieces of a functional business. Perhaps one or 2 of those things, but not all of them.

Yet the reward is great for those that successfully navigate all of them into a successful business. And that generally requires a great deal of self-discipline that allows one to push through even when things are really hard or they don’t feel at all passionate about the matter at hand.

I’ll keep thinking about the idea of most advice not being applicable and will probably keep writing about it in the future.

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I Stopped Doing Grunt Work by Making it More Taxing, but it Comes With a Cost

There was a time when I did absolutely everything in my business. Most of the work I did consisted of coding, design, and configuration of websites. I learned fairly early that this would have to change if I wanted to grow and scale my business.

And it took a while to change. Obviously nothing happened overnight. But it did work eventually.

So how did I do it?

Basically, I started associating that type of work with a lack of success. Stagnation. Over time I started to really feel that every time I engaged in those activities, I was letting my dreams (and business) slowly die.

And it worked!

Such a visceral reaction to something really does work to make you go out of your way to avoid it. While I still occasionally dabble in very small (or sometimes just complicated) tasks of this nature, I try to keep it very brief and I start to get stressed out if it goes on too long.

That’s usually my cue to just give it to a dev.

Overall, that’s a good thing and it has, in fact, allowed me to grow and scale my business. Without it, I would be stuck doing all of those things and would be limited primarily by the hours in the day.

I also tend to just be bad at being proactive with work like that, too, but that’s a different conversation.

But my thought today is: what are the downsides of this method?

Because there are some. It’s not like I just handed those tasks off and there is nothing bad to come from it.

I think that essentially I built a huge barrier for myself to doing these tasks. Every minute I do engage with them, I am having to overcome a large mental and emotional barrier that is quite draining.

Therefor, in the times when I do end up having to do some of it, it leaves me more worn-out and with less energy to do other things once I’m done.

The exact same task is now considerably more difficult for me to do, essentially by design.

Of course it works out in the end since overall I’m still way more free to focus on more important tasks, but it’s still just interesting to consider these downsides.

I think it’s particularly important to acknowledge this concept because it probably applies to many other areas in my life and business, too.

Off the top of my head, scheduled meetings and phone calls seem to have the same barrier for me. I try to avoid them as much as possible, and as a result, they are actually much more difficult for me to actually do. I’ve create barriers to doing them – which has worked in terms of decreasing their frequency – but now when I’m required to do them, it’s much more draining on me.

I think this process is something that can be performed consciously, and knowing what I know now, I need to be careful about what tasks I apply it to. Some things are inevitable, and it is probably unwise to build large barriers to accomplishing them.

On the flip side, I now know that this process does work, and it might be smart to seek out other opportunities to using it.

The low-hanging fruit would be things that are unquestionably bad for me. I think I’ve already done it with mindless social media usage, but using it for drinking, junk food, and laziness could also work quite well.

I guess I’ll consider this an important tool in my toolkit and just make sure to be very careful about when I choose to use it.

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Historically, Things like Hunger and Fear Moved us to Action, but not Anymore

During the vast majority of the time that humans were evolving, we were motivated to action by strong biological desires like hunger, fear, or sex.

But in modern society, we are generally comfortable. While sex may still be very motivating for people, hunger and fear rarely are feelings that cause us to act.

And I don’t mean: you feel hungry so you go to the refrigerator and grab something to eat.

I mean: you had concerns about your ability to secure food for yourself for the whole year, and that motivates you to work tirelessly, 365 days a year until you die, to do everything you can to secure food.

Nearly all of your actions were based around just a few basic needs.

And we simply don’t have that anymore. You barely have to do anything to survive and meet those needs.

So now we’re operating on a completely alien system of motivation. We’re forced to think about what we really want in life and make complicated decisions about how to meet long-term goals.

And, more to my original thought and point of this article: in the short term, there is almost nothing motivating you to action.

I have no intense biological needs that are in danger of not being met anytime soon.

So how exactly do I motivate myself to do… Anything?

Animals behave almost entirely on instinct and in response to their needs. Everything is very low-level and they basically do what feels right at every given moment.

But for us humans, we’ve created a world in which almost every action we take has to be guided by higher-level thinking that’s generally not tied to basic needs like food and safety.

To some degree, it’s wholly unnatural.

Sure, we do use stand-ins for our basic needs and let those motivate us. For example, sex appeal is used to sell everything from cars to vacations to kitchen appliances.

You can motivate people at a fundamental, animalistic level by tapping into their biological desire for sex. But of course you’re not giving them sex, you’re selling them a product.

Obviously money tends to be pretty motivating to people, too. And I think it tends to be a stand-in for basically all biological needs: hunger, safety, sex, shelter, everything.

It’s almost an avatar of our base needs that have guided our actions for millions of years. We’ve replaced those needs with a need for money.

While that’s motivating, I’m not sure it’s as motivating as a true need for food, for example.

And so it makes sense that for most people, once they’ve reached a level of stability and comfort in their lives, they essentially stop trying at anything.

Why would they? Our evolution hasn’t prepared us for that type of situation. Once you’re there, there is no script. You are not biologically motivated to do anything else.

And so they do nothing.

Obviously I could get deep into philosophy and psychology here, and there’s not going to be any concrete takeaways.

But I almost think that you have to somehow rewire your brain and treat your goals like needs, in the same way that food would be to a nomadic hunter-gatherer 2 million years ago.

I have noticed that compared to most people around my age, my level of motivation to improve and my general ambition and effort in accordance with that ambition is very high. And it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why that is.

If I could figure out the reason, maybe I could double-down on it and really supercharge it. Obviously I don’t want to become anxious, restless, or unsatisfied with my life, but I do want to maximize my motivation and energy which I can put towards advancing my goals.

I think I’m just going to have to keep pondering that until I come up with a satisfactory answer. Right now I’m not sure.

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The Right People Keep You On Track

I was going to give this post a much more descriptive and specific title, but I think this one actually captures the essence of what I’m about to say more clearly and, perhaps, accurately.

First, I’ll explain my initial thought.

I’ve come to believe that using any substance or activity that floods you with dopamine, whether that be alcohol, cannabis, TikTok, Instagram, or anything else, leaves you depleted of the dopamine you would otherwise need to pursue activities and objectives.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about my times going up to lake cabins in the summer. I always go with hopes that I’ll have tons of energy and do every activity available to me like kayaking, swimming, tubing, whatever.

As I’ve outlined in other posts, I’ve noticed in recent years that the energy and enthusiasm I’ve had for those things has been dwindling. One thing that’s been consistent over time is that these types of activities tend to come with more overall drinking that normal. Perhaps not all at once, but having White Claws throughout the day is quite common.

However, to the point of this post: I feel like the right people will sort of force you to do things. Even if you don’t have the energy to suggest it and make it happen, as long as somebody does, they’ll often convince you to do it.

And so even at times when perhaps I had been drinking more than usual, I still did more activities because somebody else convinced me to do it.

But in the last several years, more often the people who would have done that for me were in the same boat (literally and figuratively). As a result, we kind of just… Don’t do anything.

And that’s a shame.

The solution is probably for at least one person, me for now, to be the one who’s not drinking or doing anything else and sort of lead everyone.

But that’s not the main point here.

Having the right people around who are going to motivate you and keep you on track with a schedule and moving towards some kind of goal is extremely beneficial.

In my examples, I’ve highlighted how this is the case for leisure activities when on vacation. But I suspect it applies to so much more.

They say that having a strong group of close friends is one of the greatest predictors of success in life.

One of the main reasons could be that when you are struggling (in any way), they’ll help you through it and keep you on track.

Maybe you’re having a tough time with something. Your friends may encourage you to take the steps needed to keep your life going and even get back on track.

If you’re totally alone, it would be much easier to simply give up and not do anything to improve.

So I guess the main conclusion here is to keep the right people around who are going to support you, motivate you, and keep you on track.

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I Seriously Need to Focus on just Blasting Through my To-Do List

I’ve wrote about this same thing before years ago when I really started establishing my to-do list as a cornerstone of my progress. While the to-do has served me incredibly well, I think I really need to take a step back and re-evaluate how I approach it.

The main issue is that I still treating as if I have set work hours, and that my to-do should take me exactly as long as my set work hours.

There are a few ways in which this is extremely harmful:

  • It causes me to drag things out longer than they need to be if I see that I should have plenty of time
  • It causes me to get distracted with other misc. activities for the same reason
  • I have a tendency to add new things to the to-do list if I’m ahead of schedule

One of the points of working the way that I do is that I’m focusing on output and results rather than time spent working.

The way I’ve been approaching my to-do list is completely counter-productive to that.

I need to think carefully about what I want to accomplish in the day, and then do that and only that.

And most importantly, I need to be laser-focused on finishing it. No distractions, no new tasks, nothing.

I need to just blast through it.

And if I finish super early?

Great! That’s the dream. I’ll have the whole day to do other stuff.

So I need to do that, because I’ve felt frustrated lately that I seem to not have any extra time, even on days when my to-do was supposed to be easy. I think this is exactly why.

So let’s do better.

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Watching Spanish Content Makes me Feel Better than Other Stuff

I’ve noticed that I feel a lot better watching content in Spanish vs. watching random, time-wasting content on YouTube.

Now, this may not really be all that deep. Watching Spanish content feels productive and challenging.

Watching YouTube… Is typically not.

But I think it’s worth noting that watching things in Spanish can also be extremely entertaining. There’s nothing stopping me from watching my favorite shows and content in Spanish.

So I think it’s really important to stick to watching things in Spanish and not get sucked into wasting time watching pointless videos on YouTube.

Not much more to my post today. I think the main lesson is just that I really need to focus, always, on productive activities. I can’t be wasting time on mindless entertainment.

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I Need to Adopt a Pragmatic Approach to Everything

This feels very obvious but I don’t think I’ve really been living it: I need to adopt a pragmatic approach to everything.

I’ve posted many times about my idealism in the past and how I tend to think I’m going to be able to just brute-force my way through problems and achieve a level of perfection that will solve all my problems.

And that obviously isn’t a good strategy.

The only viable strategy is pragmatism.

It’s fine to want to improve, work towards goals, and imagine a future where we are better in certain ways.

But in the present, we need to be completely honest and realistic about ourselves, our opportunities, and our weaknesses.

Because none of those things change over night. If I’m weak against something now, I’m likely to continue being weak against it in the future.

The path the leads to success will take into account all pieces of information and make decisions based on that. Because why wouldn’t it?

Idealism simply ignores some data and replaces it with what you wish things were like.

Pragmatism is iterative, too. You can try something based on what you know, and alter your approach based on how that went. As you learn more, you can improve what works.

So here’s a concrete example of this.

I’m currently not drinking at all. Productivity is way up and lots of other things are greatly improved.

This is highly pragmatic. It recognizes that there are downsides to drinking and that it has very real consequences, and also that it’s difficult to just drink a small amount.

The idealistic side of me has always said, “I can limit it to weekends and it won’t affect me in the week” or, “even if I’m low on energy I’ll just power through it and it won’t affect me”.

They are idealistic and unrealistic ideas.

Whether or not I’ll one day be able to find a happy middle ground remains to be seen, but the fact remains that I definitely AM more productive now, and it is highly pragmatic and effective to give up drinking in an effort to be more successful.

But I can think of some other things that this applies to as well. Here are some of the top of my head:

  • I’m not effective on low sleep, and it’s generally better to sleep late than to try to power through the tiredness
  • I’m not motivated to work or be productive at night
  • Looking to others for help in areas where I’m lacking is probably much more beneficial and rapid than trying to do everything myself

I need to simply give up my idealism and focus on being pragmatic in all areas.

Most importantly, this means acknowledging my own weaknesses and consistent failings and altering my approach accordingly.

My goal now is to just be more aware of times when I’m being too idealistic and take a step back to figure out what I should really be doing. And perhaps writing about it there!

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Some Recent Wins

I’ve mentioned before that not every post here has to be ground-breaking and deeply profound. Sometimes it can just be an update of how things are going!

Today I had some solid wins that show I’m moving in the right direction and that things are generally going well.

First, I had a qualified seller reach out to me from my website that is interested in selling the hosting portion of his operations. It looks like a great potential seller and we’re speaking tomorrow.

But the best part is that he found me online. All of my marketing efforts lately have gone towards attracting exactly this type of person, and it sounds like they are paying off.

In fact, just today I posted a new article that I’ve been working on related to this topic.

Perhaps because I posted that and just an hour or two later I heard from this new seller, it really felt like I earned it. Like I’ve been doing the right things and am being rewarded for them.

Because this is really my long-term strategy and it’s still a bit unproven, it’s really great to see it start to pay off. I hope to continue working hard on expanding my web presence in this area and, hopefully, attracting tons of sellers like this.

The other thing that happened today was that I approved a great candidate for renting my vacant room. Everything looked great for him, and I think he’ll be an excellent renter.

This obviously is less ground-breaking, but it’s fairly important for my goals (for now anyway) that I have both rooms rented, and it’s great to finally have someone after months of searching.

From a day-to-day financial point of view, it just makes my life a ton easier. I don’t have to take nearly as many distributions, and it ends up being much easier to invest more.

I also recently hit a new personal record with weight training, which has been going extremely well.

Sleep has been going well. I’ve been able to wake up without using snooze every morning for quite some time now. I may even be able to finally move on to another habit!

I finally set up my system for tracking initiatives, which is going well. It has helped me concentrate on things I’m trying to get done, and actually make progress in them. It’s what has helped me proceed with attracting new website hosts.

As discussed at length, I gave up drinking a while back as part of a year-long experiment. That’s been going great overall. Life is, perhaps, less exciting, but boy is it more productive (and easier in general).

I’ve been able to almost entirely eliminate social media and other time-wasters from my life. I’ve also kept up quite well with avoiding the daily news.

I’ve finally started watching Spanish language television instead of just YouTube videos, and honestly I think the benefits are immediate and tremendous. I now feel frustrated that I hadn’t been doing it all this time.

I’ve been reading more than ever, and exclusively in Spanish. I’m blasting through the end of Harry Potter and it’s exciting to see how much easier it gets over time. I’m looking forward to moving on to other books.

I’ve also been keeping up with my other studies and vocabulary, and have basically not missed a day in quite some time.

Not everything has gone perfectly, and it’s also easy for me to feel like I’m doing a bad job at things.

Honestly, after writing this blog post, my biggest take away from writing this post is that I need to do these more often. I would have said that I’m struggling quite a bit before writing it. But I’m really not.

I probably haven’t put enough effort into meeting new people here in Buenos Aires, and so I’ve been a bit of a hermit, which feels like a waste of being here. But then again, I’ve been pretty productive and things have been going well.

I just need to keep up what I’m doing, because it’s actually working well.