How to save the world by building a more efficient life
Season 1 – Supermorning
The first season of Supermorning featured shorter daily posts. Well over 200 of these posts combined to describe a happy, healthy, wealthy, productive, and sustainable life.
This was one of my more productive weeks. I invested a good 90 hours into productive activities, but still managed to sleep well, ensuring that I feel as fresh now as I did at the start of the week. The little red bit at the end of my Graph of Life below shows the healthy upwards trajectory over the past week.
All you need to know about this graph is that it heads upwards if I have a great day and downwards if the day is just good. I’ve not had a bad or even just an average day for the past 11 months 🙂
Did you have a good week too? Answer the three simple questions below to find out. If you answered any of the top two boxes for all three questions, chances are that you made your 1% gain this week 🙂
If it was not such a great week, think about what you can learn from the experience and then resolve to put it behind you. Any proactive actions you can take to ensure that you make your 1% gain next week?
One of the founding principles of this blog is that I can only share ideas and strategies that have proven to yield great results in my own life. Hence, the results of implementing these ideas will be shared on the first Saturday of each month.
Streaks
We start with the most direct measure of the superpower of consistency I can think of: streaks. As outlined earlier, I track four streaks. And I’m happy to report that all four are still alive:
Good days. According to the methodology outlined here, I’ve now had 341 consecutive good days! Less than one month to go before I reach a whole year without a single bad or average day 🙂
Morning routine. My morning routine has stood strong for the past 128 days.
Music practice. Yesterday, I reached the milestone of practicing a bit of music for 100 days straight.
Supermorning. This blog has now seen 62 consistent posts.
From the health and productivity data below, there are three more streaks to track:
Healthy days. It’s now been 3876 days since the last time I was sick. More about this 10-year journey can be found here.
Days at ideal weight. Although there have been a few close calls, this streak is now 147 days old.
Highly productive months. This little streak of spending more than 200 hours per month on creative work on my PC is just three months old.
Health
My mission to stay at my ideal weight, defined as a smart BMI of 34/70, is tracked below. The thick line is the 3-month average of my weight. This line needs to stay within the dotted orange lines. I should get it a little closer to the center of the range, but so far, so good…
Next, my metabolic and biological ages (defined earlier) have not changed.
Wealth
As discussed earlier, I’m conducting an interesting financial experiment: living only off my investments and saving all my income into a dedicated research fund.
My investment portfolio for covering my living expenses is tracked below. August was an interesting month with a substantial drop in stocks, compensated by a sharp rise in precious metals.
As a whole, my investments went up just enough to cover my living expenses. The result is that my financial resilience (number of years my wealth can sustain my lifestyle) did not change much.
Savings towards my research fund have thus far only reached 5% of my €100000 target. Long way to go…
Productivity
August was a good month in terms of productive hours. Overall, I reached 235 highly productive hours (creative work on my PC) and 122 productive hours (meetings, exercise, reading and music). With 8 hours of sleep per night, that’s a full 72% of my waking time spent on productive endeavors 🙂
The trends are still going in the right direction:
So, overall, August was a good month. The principles covered on this blog held strong even as Norway returned from holiday and the regular ups and downs of office life resumed.
Having a Supermorning is key to having a great day. And a good night’s sleep is key to having a Supermorning.
Sadly, the world is in the midst of a sleep-deprivation epidemic. Some are too busy to sleep, some are too stressed, others just lead lives that are too chaotic.
Whatever your reason is, better sleep can probably help to fix it (ironic, isn’t it?). You just need to break the cycle.
So, let’s do just that…
The checklist
Here is the simple 1-2-3 to getting a good night’s sleep:
Give sleep the respect it deserves.
Recognize the central importance of sleep by watching the TED talk below.
Install the Sleep Cycle app on your phone as described on Monday.
Commit to giving yourself enough time in bed.
Establish an evening routine in the hour before bed.
Monday’s post briefly mentioned our modern sleep-deprivation epidemic. The TED talk shared in that post (repeated below) should be a major wake-up call about the importance of quality sleep.
Now, the question is just how to get ourselves sleeping soundly every night.
The first step is to give sleep the priority (and the time) it deserves. This was covered in Monday’s post. Yesterday, we looked at the next step: smart choices during the day and, especially, during the evening.
But there is still one deeply fundamental element missing: a general sense of being in control of your life.
Taking control
If your mind is constantly in fight or flight mode, you’re going to struggle falling asleep (and staying asleep). For obvious reasons, the mind has evolved to be on guard whenever we feel threatened. And being on guard is clearly incompatible with falling asleep.
Our modern world has eliminated most physical threats, but it has introduced a huge amount of complexity and information overload that seems to have a very similar effect. To feel safe, we need to take control of this wonderfully complex life.
As you probably know already, there’s no quick fix. In fact, reaching a point where you feel fully in control of your health, finances, and creative powers takes years of careful planning and execution.
But luckily, the brain cares much less about where you are than about where you’re going. In other words, if you’ve given yourself several good reasons to believe that the future will easily outshine the present, you should sleep much better.
It may sound cheesy, but a proactive personal development journey is the key to feeling at home in this overwhelming and rapidly changing world.
Sleep really is just a nice side benefit of such a journey. But it’s an important one 🙂
See you tomorrow when we wrap up this week’s topic!
There are several well-known sleeping hacks that most have heard about, but few manage to implement.
I used to be in the same boat until I finally figured out the right strategy: go all in! Yes, I just implemented everything at once. This resulted in such a clear improvement that I just had to keep going.
All these ideas are summarized below in a quick 2-minute read. Maybe it can entice you to go all in too 🙂
Things to do
If you want to sleep soundly at night, you need to use both your body and your mind actively throughout the day. Be fully present in every moment, get stuff done, and get some physical exercise.
Then, when evening comes, you need to formally slow down:
Give yourself one hour to wind down before bed.
Start a relaxing playlist or some other relaxing audio to queue your wind-down.
Choose some wind-down activities such as reading, yoga, meditation or taking a slow walk with your relaxing music.
A warm bath or shower will also help.
Do this regularly to turn it into a habit.
Things to avoid
Stimulants of any kind (coffee, energy drinks, etc.) should be avoided for several hours before bed. Heavy eating and alcohol are two more no-no’s. They may help you fall asleep, but your sleep quality will suffer.
Then, when you enter that golden hour before bed, the key things to avoid are:
Working or worrying about work.
Any kind of screen time, be it TV, computer or phone.
Any eating or drinking.
Bright light or loud music.
Once you put your mind to it, all this is actually quite doable. Getting every night perfect is not going to happen, but getting most nights right is certainly within reach.
It also helps to track your progress. If you installed Sleep Cycle yesterday, this becomes very easy. You’ll know you’ve arrived if your sleep quality is consistently above 70% with an average score over 80%. My previous week is shown below as an example.
I wish you a pleasant day, followed by an even more pleasant night!
Win the morning, win the day. Good advice, but not quite complete…
Here\’s the full (albeit less catchy) version: win the evening, win the night, win the morning, win the day.
Indeed, getting up fresh and ready for the day is much easier if you gave yourself a good night\’s sleep. And your sleep quality is heavily influenced by the choices you make in the evening.
This week we\’ll discuss some ways to boost your sleep both in terms of quantity and quality.
To do this, we need a convenient way to measure our sleep. Luckily, there\’s an app for that!
Monday 5-minute action
Install and set up Sleep Cycle on your phone
Sleep Cycle is an awesome little app that tracks your sleep both in terms of quantity and quality. It can also serve as an alarm that wakes you up when you\’ll be least groggy.
All you need to do is to press start every evening when you get in bed. The app then listens to your breathing and movements and gives you a sleep quality score the next morning.
Getting some cool data about sleep is important in our modern society with it\’s sleep-deprivation epidemic. Have a look at the interesting talk below for some more detail.
Then join me tomorrow when we\’ll talk more about shaping the evening for sound sleep.
For me, it was a pretty good week. I had a little stumble over a couple of half-price chocolates at the start of the week, but recovered nicely afterwards. You can see the dip and recovery in the little red bit at the end of my Graph of Life below.
All you need to know about this graph is that it heads upwards if I have a great day and downwards if the day is just good. I’ve not had a bad or even just an average day for the past 11 months 🙂
So, how was your week? The three simple poll questions below can help you decide. They’re formulated from the understanding that we really only need three things to be happy: good health, a feeling of progress, and positive relationships.
If you ticked any of the top two boxes in all three questions, I’m pretty sure you made your 1% gain this week 🙂
If not, what can you do to make sure next week is better? Resolve to take at least one action to help you make your 1% gain next week.
We’ve reached the end of another month! Time to continue the never-ending search for perfection and make another small adjustment to the blog structure.
Readership stats suggest that the removal of weekend posts over the past month wasn’t such a great idea. I’m therefore bringing them back for September, but I’ll keep them light (it’s weekend after all 😉 ).
The 1% better series will make a comeback on Sundays (in a lighter format). On Saturdays, I’ll simply share the best YouTube videos I’ve ever seen.
This week’s video is a beautiful time-lapse taken over a 1-month journey across the ocean. I think it’s a good way to start the weekend 🙂
A few weeks ago, I was treated to another quiet morning with some beautiful reflections on the lake close to my home.
The picture below reminded me of the power of compounding and, just like the Force in Star Wars, how it has a light side and a dark side. Life is rarely stagnant. Most of the time, this powerful force has us either spiraling up or spiraling down.
Some people spend more time spiraling up, others spend more time spiraling down. This is one of the key reasons for the vast inequalities in our society.
See you tomorrow!