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May 2, 2022 - January 4, 2023
In the most connected time in history, we’re quickly losing touch with ourselves. Overwhelmed by a never-ending flood of information, we’re left feeling overstimulated yet restless, overworked yet discontented, tuned in yet burned out.
We live in an age where technology promises us near-limitless options to occupy ourselves, yet we’re left feeling more distracted and disconnected than ever before.
Mindfulness is the process of waking up to see what’s right in front of us. It helps you become more aware of where you are, who you are, and what you want.
We tend to follow the path of least resistance, even when it leads away from the things we care about.
Leading an intentional life is about keeping your actions aligned with your beliefs. It’s about penning a story that you believe in and that you can be proud of.
Studies have suggested that we have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day.8 For context, if each thought were a word, that means our minds are generating enough content to produce a book Every. Single. Day.
For most of us, “being busy” is code for being functionally overwhelmed.
We need to reduce the number of decisions we burden ourselves with so we can focus on what matters.
By externalizing our thoughts, we begin to declutter our minds. Entry by entry, we’re creating a mental inventory of all the choices consuming our attention. It’s the first step to taking back control over our lives. Here is where you can begin to filter out the signal from the noise.
From the boardroom to the bathroom, technology has flooded our lives with more content than we can possibly absorb, washing away our attention spans in the process. Studies suggest that your concentration suffers simply by having your smartphone in the room with you, even if it’s silent or powered off!
When we write by hand, we’re forced to be more economical and strategic with our use of language, crafting notes in our own words. To do that, we have to listen more closely, think about the information, and essentially distill others’ words and thoughts through our own neurological filtration system and onto the page.
How we synthesize our experiences shapes the way we perceive and interact with the world. This is why journaling has proven to be a powerful therapeutic tool in treating people who suffer from trauma or mental illness.
Studies suggest that the act of writing keeps our minds sharper for longer.
True efficiency is not about speed; it’s about spending more time with what truly matters.
There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. —PETER DRUCKER
Productivity is about getting more done by working on fewer things.
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. —ALLEN SAUNDERS
Breaking down long-term goals into smaller, self-contained goals can turn what seems like a marathon into a series of Sprints.
Breaking down goals into Sprints mitigates the risks of being overwhelmed and fatigued.
Momentum helps you cultivate your patience.
Successful or not, Sprints provide you with room for reflection. In addition to Daily Reflection (this page)—which you can apply to your projects, not just your Daily Log—you have an opportunity after each Sprint to pause and reflect on the experience thus far. For example: What am I learning about my strengths, my weaknesses? What’s working, and what isn’t? What could I do a bit better next time? What value was added to my life?
In Japan, there is a concept known as kaizen. Kai roughly translates to “change,” and zen translates to “good”—thus, “good change.” Another translation, perhaps tellingly, is “continual improvement.”
The Deming Cycle provides us with a four-stage framework for continual improvement: “Plan → Do → Check → Act.” Let’s break that down.
Plan: Recognize an opportunity and plan a change. Do: Put the plan into play and test the change. Check: Analyze the results of your test and identify what you’ve learned. Act: Act on what you’ve learned. If the change didn’t work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned to plan new improvements. Rinse and repeat.
In the end it’s not the years in your life that count, it’s life in your years. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”43 In other words, our perception of time changes relative to what we are doing.
SCHEDULING: DON’T PUT IT OFF, PUT IT FIRST Our attention span drains throughout the day. When we do something has a large impact on how well we do it. If there’s something you find yourself putting off, then you’ve identified your chore. Procrastination indicates that it may be the most challenging Task on your list, because it worries you or doesn’t interest you.
The Romans had a phrase, memento mori, which roughly translates to “remember death.” Legend has it that when the generals returned victorious from battle and paraded down the street, they had a servant whisper this phrase into their ear over and over, to keep them humble and focused.
Embracing the reality of impermanence can make the time we have significantly richer.
Adding this lens of impermanence to your Reflection can provide clarity by reminding you of what’s at stake. We remember death so we don’t forget to make the most out of our time alive.
A helpful metaphor shared by one of my teachers was that if thoughts were cars, meditation helps us stand on the side of the road rather than getting stuck in traffic.
Just because you’re driving at full speed does not mean you’re going in the right direction.
Celebrating small wins can produce dramatic improvements in our self-perception and attitude. We tend to ruminate over all the things we got wrong, unaware of or ignoring all the things we got right.
Studies show that we need about five compliments to balance out every negative remark made toward us. That’s because we remember negative events more intensely than positive ones. Introducing a gratitude practice—a simple process of regularly taking stock of what you’re grateful for—is a good way to counteract your negativity bias by fostering an awareness of the positive things in your life.46
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Knowing what we can change begins with defining what’s in our control.
To Stoics, a critical part of the solution was “to know the difference” between the things we can and can’t control. According to them, we can’t control the world around us, nor the people in it. It’s our futile resistance to this truth that can leave us frustrated, devastated, or at a total lost.
Mark Twain once wrote, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”49 Worry has a way of holding our attention hostage. This is especially true for things we can’t control due to the elevated level of uncertainty.
Worry baits us with the promise of a solution but usually offers none.
As the Dalai Lama once said: “If a problem can be solved, there is no use worrying about it. If it can’t be solved, worrying will do no good.”50
By identifying what is out of our control and letting go, we can reclaim our attention and reinvest it into the things that are.
As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. —MAHATMA GANDHI
Seth Godin once wrote, “You’re either the person who creates energy. Or you’re the one who destroys it.”52
Bettering yourself leads to bettering others and—if we play that ripple effect all the way out to its infinite potential and multiply it by every willing soul—to bettering the world.
Self-compassion can start by asking yourself a simple question: What would I tell a friend in this situation?
Asking this question interrupts our inner critic and makes us switch gears into problem-solving mode.
If you know the why, you can live any how. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
“The happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything, but they make the most of everything.”
What stands in the way becomes the way. —MARCUS AURELIUS
it’s all too easy to start feeling as if we’re being held hostage by our circumstances.
