About Schalk

I am a research scientist dedicated to the great 21st century sustainability challenge: how to quadruple the size of the global economy while bringing CO2 emissions below zero. My main occupation deals with technological solutions to this challenge in the form of novel clean energy conversion concepts. On the side, I also work on human solutions, i.e. sustainable living and deriving happiness from creation instead of consumption. I also have a mild obsession with healthy living to ensure that my research career lasts as long as possible and that I get to see how the story of the 21st century unfolds.

Posts by Schalk Cloete:

Schalk
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Reflections

Another weekend, another little bit of Amateur Creativity 🙂

Every once in a while, we get a beautiful still day with no external forces causing emotional turbulence in our lives. 

This Tuesday was one such day for me. Fittingly, it started with a beautiful still morning that caused no turbulence on the lake close to my home. 

After this lovely walk around the lake, I returned home and worked for 11 hours on a new paper. It was one of those precious experiences of “flow” where you get a lot done without any mental strain. 

When these days come, we need to embrace them fully and use them to kick-start momentum. Indeed, the next three days delivered another 30 hours of deeply focused work with very limited mental fatigue. I sent the finished paper to my co-author last night 🙂

We can’t all live next to a beautiful lake. And my lake very rarely looks as pretty as this. But we’ll all do well to be more aware of the beautiful things in our lives. They can bring out the best version of ourselves. 

If you had an awesome week, I hope these reflections motivate you to keep building the momentum.

If you had an awful week, I hope these reflections remind you that beautiful days will cross your path again.

Have a great weekend!

Schalk
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Productivity Tracker

My rather peculiar life choices are guided by a simple philosophy: 

Sustainable happiness comes from the freedom to create what you want, not the freedom to consume what you want. 

This philosophy drives me to buy creative freedom rather than stuff. And all of this creative freedom is great for productivity 🙂 

To measure progress in this area, I rely on this great little app called RescueTime. If you spend most of your time working on your PC (or if your PC is a huge source of distraction), you should really try it! It also works great on Android devices, although the iOS app is more limited.  

RescueTime automatically tracks the way you use your devices. Do some creative writing in MS Word, and you’ll grow some lovely deep blue “very productive” bars. Get lost in YouTube, and you’ll get some nasty red “very distracting” bars going in the wrong direction.

My month of June is shown below as an example: 

If you are brave enough to face a good dose of objective reality, RescueTime is for you. It tracks the time you are actually working, not the time that you are at work (which can be two very different things). 

It also mercilessly exposes every little bit of procrastination you get up to on your PC or phone. 

I’ve managed to use this cool data to drive myself to gradually higher performance over the past couple of years. My 1-year moving average for highly productive time should soon cross that 200 hour/month line 🙂

I’ll be back with another productivity update next month. Thus far, July has been awesome, so the positive trends should continue 🙂

See you tomorrow for the third edition of Amateur Creativity!

Schalk
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Recap: Morning Movement

OK, let’s wrap up our third weekly topic: establishing an early-morning exercise habit. 

The previous two weeks talked about establishing a consistent sleep pattern and getting an accountability buddy. Both these strategies make it easier to get out of bed bright and early each morning. 

This week’s habit ensures that we manage to switch ourselves on once we are actually up. In combination, these three habits can work wonders for your daily productivity!

The checklist

So, without further ado, here’s the summarized guide to establishing a good morning exercise habit:

  1. Select your movement of choice, considering the following criteria:
    • It should be easy to do regardless of the weather
    • One session should be quite short (10 minutes will suffice)
    • You should be able to see yourself enjoying this activity
  2. Get some equipment (e.g. a yoga mat) and instructions (e.g. a highly ranked app)
  3. Make space for exercise in your morning routine
    • This mostly means getting up 10 minutes earlier 😮
    • Never try to squeeze anything into your morning without deliberately making space first!
  4. Develop a 1-minute Lite version for crazy or uninspired days
    • It’s critical to stick to the habit even during your worst mornings

So, there you have it! May mastering morning movement motivate many marvelous minds 😀

See you tomorrow!

Schalk
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Yoga: the Habit That Finally Stuck

My yoga experiment started many years ago, mainly out of frustration about my lack of flexibility. In fact, like a true yoga dinosaur, I still bought my yoga instructional videos on DVDs! 

Predictably, my practice was very hot and cold. Sometimes I would get inspired and practice regularly for a week or two. Other times, my DVDs would gather dust for weeks on end (as is the fate of most DVDs nowadays).

My breakthrough finally came when I fully committed to my morning routine. Yoga was a natural candidate for inclusion, mostly because it wakes up the body and can be done whether it rains or shines.  

Thus, yoga soon claimed a slot quite early in my routine right after my rather odd 2-minute habit of scoring the previous day (we’ll get to that in a couple of weeks).

Which brings me to another important point about habits… Routines tend to work well because the start of one habit is triggered by the end of another. 

For me, filling in the last number on my scorecard is the trigger to turn off my wake-up music and put on Rodney Yee. And when Rodney says “Namaste” at the end of the routine, it’s my trigger to sit down for a few pages of an educational book.  

So, that’s how, after years of trying, my yoga habit finally stuck. I gave yoga an honorary position early in a string of habits that naturally cascade like a chain of dominoes every morning. 

We’ll be collecting some more dominoes for your own habit cascade over coming weeks. I hope morning exercise has already earned its spot 🙂

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Morning Exercise in the Real World

So, now that you have a yoga mat (or have dug the old one out of the closet), we can talk about using it. 

The internet has all the instructional material you’ll ever need. Just try putting “yoga” (or any other kind of exercise) into the app store on your phone and see for yourself. Go ahead, try one.

So, now that you have your mat and something to do on it, we can talk about the real issue: Actually doing it.

Consistently.

Every morning. 

It’s absolutely essential that you do not try to squeeze morning exercise into your already hectic morning. Instead, rearrange your hectic morning to open up the required space. 

This will probably involve getting up a little earlier, which has hopefully become a less frightening prospect since our first post.

But there will still be those days when life just get in the way of establishing this great little habit (a special shout-out to all those with small kids).

These are the make or break days, especially early on when you’re forming the habit. On these days, shorten your 10 minute session to 1 minute: one sun salutation, one plank, 10 push-ups, whatever.

Just don’t skip it.

Remember this key fact of life: a habit is formed by repetition, not by time. A one-minute repetition will help almost just as much as a 10-minute repetition.  

To summarize:

  • Make space in your morning
  • Religiously fit your chosen physical activity into that space every morning
  • Have a Lite version for those totally crazy or totally uninspired mornings

Like most good habits, it takes a good dose of dedication to form. But once it’s formed, things become decidedly easier. 

Tomorrow, I’ll share my journey to totally habitual morning yoga. See you then!

Schalk
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Ritualize Early Morning Movement

I’m super inflexible. So much so that getting to the point where I can touch my toes ranks among my biggest accomplishments to date (see that smug expression on the right 🙂 ). 

This, in combination with my highly rational Western mindset, should make yoga one of the last things on my radar. 

But believe it or not, I do 10 minutes of yoga every morning. And I mean every morning, regardless of whether I had a late night or am out travelling.  

My yoga practice would probably stress out some hardcore yogi’s (at least those yet to find true inner peace). Indeed, I do sacrilegious things like putting the instructional DVD on at a higher-than-normal speed and thinking about work during my session. 

But the important part is that it works for me. It’s a highly convenient and ritualized practice that wakes up my body in a healthy manner. 

Which brings us to our third…

Monday 1-minute action Buy a yoga mat

 

And make sure it’s a nice and comfy one 🙂 Using it on a regular basis should be as easy and natural as possible. 

Also, you can replace yoga with pilates or planking or aerobics or belly-dancing or whatever you think you’ll be able to do every morning. As long as it’s highly convenient and ritualized, it’ll do. 

We’ll delve deeper into the practicalities tomorrow. See you then!

Schalk
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Week 2 of Getting 1% Better

People tend to overestimate what they can do in a day or a week, but underestimate what they can do in a year or a decade. 

That pretty much sums up the whole 1% better philosophy. 

The fact of the matter is that the magic of consistency happens slowly, painfully slowly at times. As a result, most people give up before seeing any meaningful results. 

Our mission on this blog is simply to keep on doing the small things right, day after day, week after week. Such consistent positive action is guaranteed to deliver great results in the long run. 

Here are my top three 1% improvements over the past week:

  • We got two peer-reviewed papers accepted in high-ranking journals. This is a rare privilege indeed 🙂
  • I started an important collaboration to bring specialized expertise about advanced gas turbines into our research work. 
  • Thanks to some good weather (finally), I managed 36 km of rollerblading this week. 

My daily consistency tracker (below) continued upwards, although at a slightly lower pace than last week. Still a very satisfying week though. 

So, did you grow your 1% this week? I really hope so!

See you tomorrow!

The graph shows my cumulative performance against a target of 35 points daily. Until recently, I’ve only been averaging a bit more than 33 points per day, hence the slow downwards trend. 33 points per day is still good, but I really want to get back above the 35 point target! A couple more weeks like this one should do the trick 🙂
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Wonderwall

We’ve reached another weekend! That means it’s time for another bit of amateur creativity 🙂

This week you are treated to my rendition of the Oasis classic, Wonderwall. It’s one of the first songs I learned on the guitar and I enjoyed digging it out of the archives 🙂

While practicing this song, I found myself wondering what “wonderwall” actually means. The word means a crush or infatuation. But apparently the writer said that the song is about “an imaginary friend who’s gonna come and save you from yourself“. Some degree of mystique is important for a hit song, I suppose. 

The video was shot on a lovely scenic spot close to my flat. It was a beautiful sunny day with no wind, but I forgot that such quiet days mean many flies buzzing around your head. Quite the test in concentration!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it and I’ll see you tomorrow morning!

Schalk
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Health Tracker

Health has long been one of my top priorities. Ever since a couple of health scares many years ago, I’ve been on a real mission to optimize this area of my life (the full story is available here).

As a result, I’ve not been sick for over a decade 🙂

But despite my good health, I never managed to get down to my ideal weight. It was not until I finally cracked the consistency code nine months ago that the weight came off (see below). 

The graph also shows the narrow corridor of my ideal weight, which I define as a smart BMI of 34/70. 

Aside from my weight, I also track two less straightforward metrics: metabolic age and biological age (see below).

My body composition monitor tells me my metabolic age (mainly from measuring my body-fat percentage).  Things like heart rate and waist measurement are used to calculate my biological age with this calculator. 

All I can say about that is that it’s fun to have an (almost) 35-year-old’s experience in a 20-year-old body!

Finally, I have a funny little animation composed from four fortnightly pictures of me flexing. I hope it will provide a good laugh and a little inspiration 😀

The aim of this is not to show off my annoyingly asymmetric sixpack, but rather to visualize how my body changes over the years. Indeed, I plan to take such a picture once every two weeks for the rest of my life! 

It’s also a nice illustration of what consistency can do. No gym membership, no weight-loss diet, no drugs. Just consistently sticking to my healthy eating habits combined with moderate daily exercise. 

See you tomorrow!

Schalk
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Recap: Accountability Buddy

Awakening your own superpower of consistency demands that you master your mornings.

Early morning is the only period of the day when you have full control over your time. And this control can be leveraged to proactively steer your life in the right direction. 

Those who don’t take proactive control are simply blown where the winds of life take them. As they inevitably crash into life’s many obstacles, a primitive “fight or flight” mode kicks in, sapping tons of energy for little or no reward. 

Breaking free of this mold requires a strong catalyst to push you to take action and claim your mornings. An accountability buddy could be that catalyst (it was for me). 

The checklist

So, here’s a simple guide to finding and maintaining a good accountability buddy:

  1. Select someone who can fulfill this role. If someone doesn’t come to mind right away, maybe some options listed in Monday’s post can help. 
  2. Ask this person to try this experiment with you. If they hesitate, suggest a week-long trial period to give an easy out if it’s not working. 
  3. During the conversations, focus on the following:
    • Keep it short. Be conscious of your accountability buddy’s time and end the conversation while both parties are still enjoying it. 
    • Keep it positive. See it as your mission to give your accountability buddy a more positive outlook on life. 
    • Show genuine interest. Keep track of important developments in your accountability buddy’s life. Ask for their opinion on important subjects and think carefully about the insights they share. 

Alternatively, you could simply leave a short comment on this blog every morning. I’m very interested to hear more about any practical challenges you face with these suggestions. You could also just say “hi” 🙂

In time, I hope that we can get several people commenting each morning. This could turn into a nice little community of accountability buddies making sure that everyone’s up bright and early!

I really hope you give this a go! In my experience, it sure is worth it 🙂

See you tomorrow!

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