In that talk, I mentioned approaches and tools. I wrote about some of them in previous posts, Motivation and Fighting Procrastination Daily.
It is time to update on them. Below is a brief overview of my daily flow, tools, gadgets, and decisions on what to use when. It is anecdotal, suitable for my boiling mind, that doesn’t stop, and if not offloaded, overheats and erupts. Tried to walk some teams through that, but due to time constraints and limited prior knowledge, it proved counterproductive. Here is the material laid out, with relevant links, for anyone who wants to dive deeper. I might create purpose-oriented short clips on some of the tools separately

Tool list

1. Erasable notes
2. Bullet journal
3. Life goals — Long(er) term document
4. Excel (with formulas) for prioritization
5. Obsidian — as a second brain, PARA and LLM enrichment
6. Digital note takers

• soundcore work
• mobvoi ticnote
• plaud note pro

Prior art

Use importance vs. urgency (Eisenhower / time‑blocking):

• Label tasks as: important & urgent; important & not urgent; not important & urgent; not important & not urgent (Stop Overthinking).
• Important & urgent → Do immediately; these are top priority, but watch for too many and ask how to prevent them (Stop Overthinking).
• Important & not urgent → Schedule deep, focused blocks when your energy is highest (Stop Overthinking).
• Not important but urgent → Delegate or say no; they don’t move your goals forward (Stop Overthinking).
• Not important & not urgent → Eliminate.

1. Erasable notes

Did it ever happen that, during a call, you really want to say something because you might forget it? We are always told to write it down. Handwriting has its cognitive benefits.

In the case of erasable notes, it is simpler:

• Do not interrupt
• Distill your thoughts into a coherent stream
• Close loops
• If someone addressed a point — even better, be happy to strike it out.

The result is that you can speak in short, concise sentences.

A call that can be wrapped in 7 minutes should not take the full 30 minutes allocated to it.

Previously, migrated the points that stayed open into either a bullet journal (point 2) or into Obsidian (point 5). With the advent of summaries/transcriptions or note-taking devices, it is redundant — and only makes me happy to erase that note at the end of a call — there is a satisfaction to it.

Application:

• Sift and erase after the call, end of day the latest
• In-call-reminders

2. Bullet journal (buju)

There is enough written about it on the official website, in the book, and in my post.

What goes into the start of your day is “important and urgent”.

The challenges are not in how to use it, but in the flow of information. Obsidian is digital and tempting to use; a markdown file has a lot of real estate to jabber about. A bullet journal is a handwritten, constrained format — this is a good thing. One day in a journal should not take more than a page. They are the core points of your day, the things that will mess up your week/month/life if you do not make progress on them. The monotonous repeating process of rewriting the same thing every time has its value. No digital copy-paste.

Our life and our work are not really separable — we simply spend a lot of our time doing our work. I would have 2–4 job-related things inside my bujo on a daily basis, core reminders. Would have 1–2 points from my non-core projects. This is where I would migrate one idea I want to address (example: write a blog). The idea would come either from an erasable note (point 1) or from a note taker (point 6, Soundcore). Migrated and fermented until it is ripe. The core reminder is inside bujo, the fermentation inside obsidian (point 5).

It is fairly important to go through the week/day; it is not a to-do for the day. See the last paragraph of this article.

Treat buju as a luxury estate; this is not your to-do. This is the short record of your life events that counts.

3. Life goals document

It used to be a Word document; these days, I have it inside Obsidian. Markdown is better, and having one index beats a separate document.

I have an Obsidian folder called “Design life” in it:

1. File — 5, 10, end-of-life goals
2. File - inventory of ideas, to be prioritized, or removed

There are way too many prioritization approaches to fit into this post; below are some from my Readwise highlights.

Clarify life areas and high‑level goals
Cal Newport suggests first listing a small number of high‑level goals in your professional and personal life (e.g., “be an effective parent,” “do impactful research”), not hyper‑specific targets like “a million in sales” yet, to avoid over‑narrowing too early Deep Work.

You also have “begin with the end in mind” at the organizational and personal level: envision 3–5 years ahead, then work backward to individual goals and make them measurable (“How would we know?”) Turn the Ship Around.

Start wide, then narrow hard
First, you “List Your Top Twenty Personal and Professional Goals” so you can see the whole field of what matters to you (Embrace the Suck — list top twenty goals).
Then you “Narrow the List Down to Five or Six Goals” (narrow to five or six goals).
This is similar to the “avoid-at-all-cost” idea in your Bullet Journal highlight, where everything outside the top few is deliberately deprioritized so it doesn’t quietly consume attention (avoid-at-all-cost list)

Converting your top 3–5 life goals into 3–6‑month or 100‑day plans (10 short, measurable actions, reviewed weekly) as in Kevin Roberts’ 100‑day plans (Legacy).

Asking Thiel‑style: “What would it take to do the 10‑year goal in 6 months?” to surface bold, high‑leverage actions (Tools of Titans).

Prioritize and execute, one big thing at a time
Jocko’s principle from your highlights is simple: stop trying to do everything simultaneously; identify the single biggest priority problem and execute on that before moving on Leadership Strategy and Tactics.

4. Excel — prioritization

This is probably the most confusing of them all. Attached a template. If you suggest I store it somewhere else, please write in the comments.

This is an attempt to put an empirical value on the goals listed above. Clearly, you have to focus on the top 5.

The thing is, in life, if you see through a straw, don’t be surprised if you poke the eye.

Some things have to be addressed on low fire. Sometimes, because they take time (getting good at something) and others because they are part of the larger cause (making sure you can pay your children's university fees or teach them how to pay for it themselves).

The goals triad consists of: duration, hurt rate, and urgency. Similar to the project triad: risk, cost, time.

Each metric is on a Fibonacci scale — none are linear.

• Duration: because the longer the task, the less clear it is
• Hurt rate: because pain is not linear (the difference between 39 °C fever and 41 °C fever is not the same)
• Urgency: Not paying your taxes is not the same as not paying your grappling gym.

Because we would fall back on our habits and reuse the same numbers, the number of appearances is limited for each metric. the idea to avoid everything to be 1 (lowest) or 610 (highest)

This is how it looks when you start

And once you start using it

There are two sheets in that template.

Sheet 1 — These are your goals,

• What hurts me — Goals — column A
• Why it hurts — Column B — then you write the textual reasoning, detached.
• Hurt grade - Column C: You go only through the column, detached. Go for a walk, forget about it
• Urgency rate — Column D, You go only through the column, detached. Go for a walk, forget about it
• Duration-Column E: You go only through the column, detached.

You have a priority in column H.

“There is a big difference between ‘simple’ and ‘simplistic.’”
 — Juval Löwy, Righting Software

2. Example sheet “Goal 1” is where you take a goal and break it down. Back in 2016, this was a comfortable approach to track the progress of a longer-term goal, with the allocation of bruto time (estimate) and neto time (invested). Since then, we have Toggl Track, Wakatime, and many others. I would feed it into LLM from Obsidian these days to keep up with the actual tracking. The reason I left it is to show the breakdown and the need to track net vs. gross time.

5. Obsidian

It is not about the tool. You could use many of the others available (Notion, Tana, saner.ai). It is about how you structure your knowledge.

The original structure is based on

• How to take smart notes by Sonke Ahrens,
• Then extended by Building your second brain by Tiago Forte, (thanks to Syed Ali for the reference at the AMC course).

The gist of it is that I have a PARA folder with Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive. The modification is that within a project, the project itself could be a PARA.

Sources of notes

• Obsidian web clipper
• Daily notes — a core project would include them. They are organized in a canvas and processed at the end of the week. Unresolved points from erasable notes (1) or note takers (6) will flow into daily notes. Meeting notes, or points ot address on a specific weekday — will go there as well.
• Duplication of notes from buju(2) — to have a single overview of the ongoing day.
• Readwise sync
• Hand-typed notes, the old-fashioned way.

The 2025 modifications around the process are LLM processing and linking. It got famed as the Karpathy method, a tutorial followed

My modifications

1. Smart Connections has been a community plugin way before that post. It has its downsides. To actually try anything, you have to become a pro subscriber — not cool. But the smart lookup gives you a taste, making you hungry to use it.
2. My life is too interconnected to isolate it into folders, if I need to subtype I have a CLAUDE.md file in a subfolder.
3. I am not shy about adding Python scripts into the process (it is a git, remember?) — for example, music folder scanning with results based on my favorite artists via a fuzzy search, run by Codex.
4. I have a birds-eye view of each project, and a project of projects if needed.

Below is a real example of ad hoc thoughts from Soudcore work on the go: this approach to process the notes with LLM between vaults, which I have yet to confirm

Obsidian for personal use and for work, if you use Obsidian for work and you just store the vault, not on the synk, but on your OneDrive, for example, which is from the company, so that’s totally fine (legality wise).

If you create a link from personal to work, Obsidian, the link will open based on the Obsidian schema. It will open up between the two (vaults).

That would work. But same as in software, duplication is fine.

So some content you will just duplicate and that’s fine. No problem with that.

The reason I use Obsidian, and not any other tool

1. It is git, local, and available offline
2. markdown files
3. An extensive community with lots of plugins

6. Note takers

We live in interesting times. There are devices that translate, summarize, and transcribe voice to text. Fireflies and MS Teams transcription are very common work tools. But what about personal note takers? They are cheap (to buy) but not cheap to maintain (subscription). But, before everything:

Notify the participants if you use one. Soundcore work, will have a yellow light indicating it is recording. Your company policy probably does not allow to store company knowledge on non company device, meaning usage of such device in work environment is mostly prohibited.

The techniques below can be adjusted to corporate note takers, fireflies, or similar

Once I learned about these, I selected the top three and ran them side by side.

All of the devices have:

• a web platform — that allows export to markdown (and copy to Obsidian)
• speaker identifier
• summaries with multiple levels of detail

None of the devices have APIs or integrations with Obsidian; therefore, it is exported as MD files manually from the web.

1. Soundcore work

This is what you will see on my neck daily, especially while driving. Because it is so tiny, it is a great reminder tool. Recording a few seconds of an idea, merging them at the end of the day, transcribing, exporting to Obsidian, and executing on it. This is not what I would use for an actual call. Has a huge amount of minutes on the free tier. The only device I turn on while hiking, ideas are pouring out in nature.

2. Mobvoi ticnote

On par with the capabilities of Plaud Note Pro. But has many more minutes on the free tier. Very good speaker identification. Smart clipper — a great feature to remove silence and reduce transcription minutes. Very useful chat with notes.

3. Plaud note pro

Has a auto silence clipper as well, with a much bigger community. Ask Plaud is advanced. But it is unusable without a subscription, which will cost you double the device price per year. Use it for the important calls, not the more mundane ones.

The flow is the same with all devices.

1. Remove silence
2. Transcribe and summarize
3. Export to markdown

• transcript (it is txt, rename the extension)
• summary

3. Copy the MD to the Obsidian folder, same as with the Obsidian web clip, folder per device. So I could get back to the device interface for an in-depth query.

4. Process the inputs summary with LLM, identify links to your daily notes, and to areas and resources.

The fusion

All of the above is useless unless you process it

Review and reorder regularly
Your highlights emphasize that planning without review is useless and that people often over‑value “just doing” versus thinking and planning ([How Big Things Get Done; Embrace the Suck.

Minimal review loop:
- Weekly:
1) Reconnect with top 3–5 life goals.
2) Check whether last week’s tasks mostly served those or fell into “not important but urgent.”
3) Re‑plan next week accordingly.
- Quarterly: Re‑evaluate your top 20 list; re‑choose your “top 5” and re‑affirm what goes on the Avoid‑At‑All‑Cost list.

In my calendar, I have a weekly block of SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) to process the incoming raw data. The Debrief by Echelon Front is a good formula

1. If any erasables are left, migrate to buju or daily obsidian (depending on significance)
2. Read the buju, migrate to next week, analyze for debrief, be happy to strike out things that are not really important. Important: brings you closer to your goals.
3. Read daily notes in Obsidian — at this stage, they include links to your conversation and summaries — if needed, dive in. The real outcome to decide:

• won’t do
• next week
• later
• follow-up, communicate, coordinate, do not forget

Act on the minutia, over a scoped time block: meetings next week, some chat reminders, and reminders through the week.

4. Create a folder Week X under the Resources folder (you might have a project X folder, which is a PARA itself, and has a resources folder)

5. Take all of the daily notes and move them to the week folder

6. In Obsidian canvas: if done right, you will have missing links to the daily notes, click create and populate the reminders throughout the week: preparation for a call, prior coordination, notes to address, etc

Once in a while, look back at your goals and align. What you see above is a funnel of raw information flowing from multiple sources and processed into knowledge

Summary

It is an anecdotal process. It can be extended or reduced to any flavor. Similar to the rate of change in AI, this process has changed and is not what it was in 2016. The outcome of a process to make your life better.

What is better? Having more time for the important things. Living a meaningful life. Having the fewest regrets at the end of it.

Information to knowledge — my flow 2026 was originally published in Lead oneself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As humans, we are creatures of habit and this can work in our favor. However, it’s crucial that you choose your habits wisely. Humans are creatures of habit. It works in many ways. It's up to you to choose your habits. I will walk you through the wisdom of the web and provide you with behavioral tools and some SOP to be a better self.

Thinking it through (not too much)

Analysis paralysis is as big an adversary as procrastination. Have you felt the urge to do something (i.e., having dopamine) while still finding yourself sketching how to approach that matter better? Instead of action, you find yourself reading about the many ways to optimize the execution,

“One more time management article — and I am going to do that thing.”

I discussed day planning before — yet in this prose, we are discussing a close-ended/bounded predetermined template. executionThe more details there are in your execution, the more resistance you will experience trying to execute. You want your steps to be

• printed out
• time-bound / time stamped
• rational
• short
• clearly defined
• have some degree of optionality

Before I break down each point, here is one crucial step.

A productive morning routine begins with adequate sleep. Without sufficient rest over several days, you will return to your old, wicked ways.

Good sleep starts with going to bed early. Think about how easier it is to go to bed early versus waking up after three hours of sleep and pushing it through. Sleep quality varies a lot based on the time frame. Listen to Andrew Huberman’s episodes on sleep. Measure your sleep. Personal core takeaway — sleeping 22:00–05:00 is not the same as sleeping 00:00–07:00. Until your body gets used to the routine (14–28 days), you must start getting to bed on time — and drive the rest from there. Luckily — it is a positive self-propelling process; pretty fast, you will start feeling alive and energetic, sharper with more dopamine (aka motivated) to keep going. After some months — you will ask yourself two questions.

1. How did I live before?
2. How do others live their lives?

Printed out

Not digital. I love digital, and I manage my second brain using obsidian (zettelkasten method) — yet we all know devices can do alot of damage. The temptation to press on that one notification, check email, and catch up on the “so important” X, will crash you. The dopamine reward pendulum will start — especially in the beginning, you are done before you even start.

Printouts mitigate this behaviour. Paper, better laminated, with 5–7 steps of your morning routine, will do wonders. Can you do it from memory after some months? You could, but that is one more pushback; at some point, steps will disappear, corners will get rounded, and you will get back to — your old, wicked ways.

Time-bound

For the ones working from home or self-employed, the opposite side of that pendulum — and you will reach it — is extending that morning routine way too much.

A personal example, at some point, I was training for 60–90 minutes, meditating for 30–60 minutes, planning my day for 30 more, and some coffee, suddenly I had 3–4 hours of a “routine” — it was fun, but it is no way to manage your time.

Perspective — a concentrated bout of work (Cal Newport) is 90 minutes. Huberman claims that four, even three bouts a day are a stretch. Lex Friedman is probably the only person doing four bouts, and the guy is a machine (single, no children, less points to him. Might be not human even). You should experiment with what works for you; 5-10 percent of your active day is balanced and sustainable. Why 10 percent? Think of a standard workday, 8–10 hours, and compare that to the time allocated for lunch, ~10 percent. Compare that to your TV habits. Compare that to a movie’s length (not the new over-extended ones). Subconsciously, you can come to terms with this duration, it is no sacrifice, at all.

Rational

In the beginning when you start motivated. Well, cramping all your ambitious goals in the morning might work for a couple of days. Unless you are financially independent, with no other obligations, you have some business to attend to. The day-start routine is a tool — not an end goal. Start with a threshold low enough that you won’t have any excuses to do it.

Every

Single

Day

Slacking even once opens up that doomsday gap — where all your future (not motivated) days disappear. Returning to do something is way harder than maintaining it 100% of the time. You heard me 100% of the time.

Funny fact, suppose when you press a button, you get an electric shock 50% of the time or 100%. Which is worse? Based on experiments — 50%. When you know that “this is how it is,” you come to terms with it and have much less resistance than where you have a cognitive restrain or conditioning for an action.

Short and clearly defined

I have dealt with that above but think of each subtask of your routine to be itself - a short one — few minutes for each component. Even if you have a longer one — break it down.

It has to do with the reason why when dealing with life tasks, it is better to break them down — in this case, less resistance, clearer goal, “let’s get over with it” state of mind (don’t get me wrong — you must learn to enjoy the process).

Some degree of optionality

This is the only tricky one here. We are not machines, for the good or the bad. Even Lex and Jocko. We do break down; life happens around us. Have contingency in life in general. In this case — think about what your is alternative (A in PACE). To me, it was taking into account my rebellious nature. When the plan is so strict, I have no say, I revolt, I rebel. Don’t leave any openings.

If you frequently travel, have a backup routine.

You will get sick — have a backup routine.

You will get injured — plan a backup routine.

You have a vacation — do the same routine, no excuses.

Summary

Here is how my routine looks like these days.

4:34 — wakeup

4:35–4:40 — cold shower before brushing teeth. (Plunge is good, but that would create too much friction in the first few minutes of waking time)

the point here is that the shower is before brushing teeth, a wake-up call to all of the body. Doing the shower after gives some negotiation leeway — we do not negotiate.

4:45– 5 minutes of non-stop activity, 1 minute each, no pauses between (thanks to Mike Glover)

• jumping jacks
• pushups
• inclined abs
• burpees
• squats

4:55 — one of — stretching / knees over toes / Indian clubs

5:15 — brew coffee, still not consuming it. (Don’t consume coffee in the first 60–90 minutes of your waking time)

5:20 — meditate.

5:40 — get the coffee from the brewing machine, make your day plan

• goals
• time slots
• constraints

06:00 — Execute, execute, execute

Important (!!!) when the sun comes out — light exposure.

Endnote

Answer to the two questions at the beginning

1. How did I live before? I didn’t. Existing and living are not the same.
2. How do others live their lives? They don’t.

Routine — Morning was originally published in Lead oneself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We know that brain and body are connected. The body oxygenates the brain. How do you know that it all works well together? You take blood tests. Another way you go out into the woods and check that your training is still up to par.

Here is my excuse to show you some great photos of a rucking I did this weekend.

I went to El Meliche in Andalucia. With 27Kg rucksack.

I started the route at 5:40, and by my second stop at 08:00 was on the highest altitude point (500m). There are multiple ascends and descends through altitudes in the range of 200–500 meters through the route

Especially since I decided to do some shortcuts, luckily, I always have protective gloves with me.

Descends are pretty steep, this is the price of getting down to a “river”.

It is far from the hardest track I have done recently. The average pace of 3.6 km/h indicates that too.

My regular pace in this kind of load and hike is 1.8–2.1.
There are almost no people on the route, which is excellent.

But once again, I validated myself — what I am doing (training-wise, diet, concentration) is the right path. Find yourself an evaluation metric and every specified time execute it.

Full photos

Here and Here

Personal metrics was originally published in Lead oneself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It would be hard to optimize what you do not measure.

Body and mind are connected. Focus levels depend on your physical activity(or exertion), diet (or lack thereof), sleep, planning, light exposure, and many more.

Some of the things are intertangled; others are not. Damaging one can cause a chain reaction. This chain reaction is recovered only by triggering (changing) another aspect of your life.

Feel free to ask in the comments on particular scenarios.

In this (short) article, I am addressing the use of devices to measure your life/sleep/stress/extortion balance.

I have selected these after many iterations of different devices. Each one I purchased and tried for at least a year.

I have no affiliation with any of these; I Purchased them all at my own expense.

* Oura ring

* Whoop band

* Garmin Fenix

* Withings sleep mat

* Withings blood pressure monitor

I assume you know that you must train daily (160 cardio, 5 hours strength) weekly.

Yoga/stretching three times. Cold exposure ( at least 11 minutes weekly). Heat exposure (around 60 minutes in one bout weekly)

Oura ring

I did not yet find a better sleep monitor than oura ring. My performance levels converge very well with the sleep feedback I get from it.

Every time I experiment with sleep — this is my go-to tool. The most reliable and consistent metric I have on the sleep screen is deep sleep. The rest of the devices jump all around. Based on my (not objective) feeling and performance, this is the one that clicks the most.

My point of measurement is the 10 am jiu-jitsu class. When oura show my sleep quality as strong, my rolling partners attest I am strong on these days as well.

If I add or subtract nutritional or exogenous vitamins — it aligns perfectly.

Ate a pizza or sugar the night before? Don’t expect your sleep quality to be above 70.

I ate too close to bedtime (and didn’t compensate with a walk or at least squeezed lemon?); prepare for feedback of lousy sleep. You will feel it, but the feeling is not objective and frankly not important.

You can and should push through, but the moment you start to trust the ring, you can find what vitamins work for you and plan training or focus.

If there is a presentation in one week, you would want to plan your sleep and nutrition at least a week before — to reach peak clarity on the day of the presentation( hint: don’t eat pizza)

Whoop band

The champion of activity.

There is a sleep measurement, but I do not trust it much. It often shows relatively low sleep performance (49%) while I am an outstanding performance. I would speculate there is too much weight on sleep duration, but the actual sleep analysis feels random.

But the activity measurement is excellent. Recently the team added an apple health sync, which is synced all over the different apps.

The variety of activities is comprehensive, and precision and extortion levels are pretty good ( though I do not see them as good as the ones on Garmin Fenix). It can be worn during impact sports as well, with a sleave ( and recently with smart clothing that I don’t want to use)

I love the target stress level as a minimal expectation from myself. I also use it to extrapolate my ability to concentrate and perform cognitive work. That said, it is not a scientific method to measure cognitive expectation.

The auto-detection of activities and meditation/NSDR is purely brilliant. I always forget to do that on Fenix, and this way, I have a device that does it for me ( eventually, everything is integrated into Strava/apple health)

Withings sleep mat

My reference point for sleep. Hard to beat a device below your back that catches every move.

It catches snores as well. Get a few days into a bad diet, and you will start seeing the consequences.

It doesn’t do anything besides sleep, but it does it well. Sleep depth is consistent with performance levels and mostly diverges with oura ring for only a few minutes. It is integrated very well with other withing s devices ( scale and blood pressure monitor), exported to apple health to fuse a result.

Withings blood measure

You know that blood pressure is the indicator of the health state (coupled with blood work)

You can’t cheat that, a week of sugar? Expect high blood pressure (you don’t want to know your glucose level at that point).

It can also be a pretty good indicator of mental exertion; doing it immediately after waking up or after meditation helped me align expectations well for the upcoming day.

The BMI is not a reliable metric, unlike the blood pressure. Same as the sleeping mat — results are tracked and displayed in a very clear format on the Withings app, and it is very comfortable to see the clear correlation between weight fluctuation and blood pressure. If you gain weight ( while your body fat stays the same ) and your blood pressure remains the same or better, you improve or even get younger. But if blood pressure starts to go out of (your own) normal zone, you are probably taking on a bad habit.

#### Garmin Fenix (7)

Fenix is a recent addition to the toolset and the only one below the year mark.

I have used the apple watch for years, especially the oxygen metric. It is fine in the office and integrates brilliantly with the phone. What I do not like about the apple watch is that (a) there is a lack of innovation, and (b) it is very brittle. With the type of activities that I do, it is simply not reliable. I don’t want to waste attention on remembering to switch from apple watch to a durable watch.

Garmin has a consistent oxygen meter ( oura 3 and whoop 4 have these as well), it is quite reliable, and I would say all devices show the same values.

Sleep analysis is on the spot and better than the one of whoop. It is subjective, but I interpolate with whoop and oura — and ultimately with my performance of the day in physical and cognitive activities

It is the device with the best battery, even when I switch on continuous monitoring.

Garmin is the only device that can reliably measure strength training and reps. That said, there is no reps auto detection, and I simply forget to trigger it between the sets, so as good as it is, its usability of it renders it worthless.

Summary

Measure your body, activity, rest, and sleep.

Measuring is knowing; many times, I would still press on and carry on with whatever I need. At least I know why I feel weaker and could justify using some vitamin help to force myself to move. I mean by that dopamine increase ( as @hubermanlab calls it — the hormone of go), it can be breath practice, caffeine, GABA or acetyl-L-Carnitine.

Please don’t use Ritalin/ to boost your dopamine unless it was prescribed by MD ( and even then, think about it carefully, it is essentially the same as cocaine).

In another post, I will summarize how to boost your go power with practices I gathered and tested for the last two years.

Physical (and expected cognitive) measurement gadgets was originally published in Lead oneself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The text below starts from the daily and builds to the multi-year process. Someone who starts adapting to an organized and meaningful way of living will have no benefit from imaginary plans.

How to run a marathon? One step at a time

Once you learn to consistently focus on the one thing that you are doing now, you can move to a daily plan, then weekly, and so on. Here are some auxiliary processes as scaffolding; it is best to apply those when you feel ready.

I do not claim to invent anything — integration is key. Through (many) years, I have distilled a strategy that integrates many approaches from the worlds of software, fitness, and processes that are grounded in psychology, neurology, and physiology. A list of resources, methods, people that led me to this process

• Pomodoro technique — among the first techniques I discovered
• Deep work — Cal Newport
• Bullet Journal and the book
• Andrew Huberman
• My mind

General notes

I use (mostly) handwriting. It is the bullet journal that opened my mind to the value of handwriting. There are a great many tools for personal and corporate TODOists. Due to my professional occupation, I am proficient in many.

Where planning by hand won’t cut it, (long term goals) excel sheet fills the gap.

Technological clutter can easily distract from getting the most out of available time — the only true goal.

If that did not convince you — every time you look at a device — the chance to get distracted by some “important” notification is adding up. Go analog.

The immediate task at hand

Post a note in front of you of what you are doing now. Every time you start to drift — look at it, refocus.

Put a timer with blocks of time. I use 30 minutes blocks. Pomodoro technique focuses on 25 minutes with 5 minutes break. Cal Newport’s deep work explains well that it takes around 15 minutes to immerse into work — and highly capable people can stay in a deep work process for 90 minutes. Aggregating that thought leads to a conclusion: have three blocks of 30 minutes. I do not put the timer in front of me but rather a hand watch.

A visual timer can be a distraction — it is (yet) another movement in front of the eyes that (over)loads the cortex. A visual countdown timer adds to the anxiety, at least to some people.

Note: Pomodoro technique dates to more than 15 years ago. Before smartphones, before IG, before endless scrolls that led to ADHD. Huberman Lab episode states, “16 minutes of smartphone for youth, and 2 hours for a grown-up — cause ADHD-like effects.”

Note 2: This post does not mention exact physical mechanisms to enhance focused work.

Phone — outside of the room. The phone is on do not disturb, always. Huberman turns it off; for many (9 to 5) employees, that is not an option.

Day plan

Break the day into aspects.

Physical (conditioning);

Nourish your brain with a good blood flow — this is the only way to be effective with cognitive work. Do it before you use your brain. It takes a while.

Training will boost your brain for the next 24 hours, at least. Train not only before mental work.

This part is where your feeding window goes, meditation, yoga, NSDR, cold exposure.

Investment;

I changed this rubric name many times. Obligations have a negative connotation impact on subconsciousness. Work, for some people, could be negative as well; potentially, it could become a throw-all-in-basket. Investment is everything that brings you closer to your life goals. Earning money for food, writing a blog, catching up on that blog post you intended for some months now, coaching your children in math? That’s where most of your day goes. Proportionally to page size, it has the most space (A4); see below.

Cognitive (conditioning);

You allocate time to improve yourself; no one else will. This part is the daily place for courses, training, and reading. Everything that will move you towards your weekly/monthly/annual goals (see these types of planning further).

Logic;

Cognitive rubric vs. Investment rubric? Investment is what you do for the now (your boss, client, children), and Cognitive is what you do for the future (to get the next job, next client, improve your health).

The number to the left of the task is the estimate for execution. Two columns are the expected start and end time — all three written by pencil.

If a task gets deviated by more than one hour, reprioritize and assign new start and end times at the end of the current task.

Done tasks, cross out with one color ( I use a positive color like green or cyan), subconsciousness is strong — better be ally than foe.

Inevitably some tasks will need to be pushed out due to other priorities that pop up, other tasks that took more time than expected, and are simply not relevant anymore. Cross these out with a different color; they come from the weekly plan anyway, no need to migrate them

Note on cluttering thoughts. Pomodoro technique has some great insight about thoughts during task execution. I have a separate draft notebook where I drop all the things that pop up. One would be surprised to learn how unimportant these things are. It is a mind game to get distracted by this nonsense. Drop it out of your head on a sheet of paper and move on.

Weekly planning

The baseline template is a bullet journal.

I have a word document where I keep my long term goals and where I have

• an inventory of tasks that are aggregated from the daily journal
• derivatives of monthly tasks
• monthly tasks(duplicated in digital format from my bullet journal)

Review your week and use the bullet journal migration to move tasks to the inventory. Assign tasks to the current week. Don’t assign too much. I have some excel sheet calculations to guide me on where to stop. When copy-pasting from a word document, excel uses the brackets to calculate the times.

As you can see, you can both plan and track execution throughout the day.

It might overwhelm you at first. For the first few weeks, use word document only. Discipline your mind, and allocate time for planning. Tracking of execution can come as a second step. Remember, what is not measured cannot be tracked.

Monthly

I still manage a regular bullet journal, and some things (primarily personal goals) get duplicated during the migration process. If they are not worth duplication, they are not worth execution. Whilst bullet journal tracks my current events. The daily notebook is a structured planning extension. I have three components to my life; someone else might have a different number. The above process helps to break and balance these down.

• Go through the regular bullet journal migration process
• Check your annual goal derivatives
• Has any derivative of the annual goal changed? New ones appeared? Anything is irrelevant (i.e., opportunity window closed)?
• Where are you towards your goals

This text becomes too lengthy and out of the timeframe allocated to it. I will make a follow-up on the monthly, annual, and multi-year processes.

Digital devices in general

Notifications — minimized on all applications, both on the phone and computer.

These days both Windows 10/11 and macOS have the option for focused mode. Remove notifications permissions for all your Instagram, Twitter (better use only the web version), youtube, and everything you possibly can.

I understand that some things have to stay on, like Whatsapp — mute all the groups and check it only after the 90 minutes of deep work.

Fighting procrastination daily was originally published in Lead oneself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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By nature, I am among the laziest, spoiled, fun-seeking persons.

Sometimes it takes me one to two hours to push myself out of the door on cold days. Who wants to go out running and then do cold water exposure?

What works for me are biology and discipline. Going cold turkey training will hold for a couple of weeks. At best. After that, the sugar (and flour) dependent energy will run out of the body, the body will start to be in pain and give up.

Preparedness using the mind — that’s what works. Waking up early in the morning starts with sleeping early in the evening. Sleeping early starts with regimen adaptations — vitamins to help sleep (5-htp is terrible). It is the understanding of the biology of depleted glucose, affecting the imaginary willpower. Motivation can get one started at best.

By seeing through biology, points of weakness can be anticipated and countered. During the first 60 minutes of the morning, coffee will cause an afternoon crash, lead to a nap, not getting asleep, and sleeping late — and missing training. Rollercoaster. I will have to write a separate post about dietary discipline aggregated from some brightest minds.

Sometimes — the body is fine, rested, and well-fed with the right ingredients. It simply complains, the excuses start to pile up. Especially when it is the second (third) training of the day — this is where the plan and the discipline kick in; there is no motivation, only discipline.

I had this in my annual priority planning. Pay attention to the year at the bottom.

Do you think that I attended to it even though I came to a logical conclusion that it is the fourth most important thing in my life (i.e., being motivated)? No.

Only in 2017 did I start to try and keep that process. The vital take out — I began to set up applications and regimens to push me to it. Did I mention already that motivation can bring one only so much? Two months in — my weight did not change even after six gyms a week and three jogging training. At that point, an understanding of alcohol came into play. Four to five months later and 10 kilograms less, it was much easier being “motivated.”

There is only so much that motivation can do. Two years later, and 6 kilograms more, I had to revisit my diet and regimen. I took a different approach, adjusting the feeding plan, schedule (intermittent fasting), and the most challenging drug.

Without the composition of all the parts aggregated, I would never be able to wake up every day at 04:30 and train for 1–2 hours, work, train once again, work, study, and attend family.

I am fighting many addictions every day. There would never be enough motivation for that, I have failed, and unfortunately, I will fail. I learned to get up, every time, after every knockout, and keep going. I am using the most powerful tools I have — my mind and my experience.

Motivation was originally published in Lead oneself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Through several recent years I tried to see how it is possible to increase efficiency, and in this post I bring some tools that helped me out through the years.

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

More and more people complain they do not have the time to do the small things, learning a language, reading a book for fun or knowledge and much more. A hack that works really well for me is having an audiobook on my phone (at first it was a media player back in the day ) and an earphone, every time you have few minutes about “to get wasted”, like waiting for a bus or in a line at post office, you can turn it on and listen to it, whatever it is the excellent language learning series from Michel Thomas or some good audio book. What is important is that you make use of your time.Also I would definitely advise having a good player for the cause, first of all because it automatically rewinds few seconds back from last stop point ( you will thank me for that) and the other because you can variate the playing speed ( see below)

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Albert Einstein

Not everything is possible to comprehend by audio book and definitely not everything available in that format, get a book , whatever you prefer the old style heavy weight paper, or an ipad or an ebook, just get a damn book that you can carry with you. The last part is really important, when you are about to get “wasted” sitting time just pull that thing out and read it, I prefer an ebook , it takes time to get used to it but I can carry loads of technical literature with me and read it instantly.With variety comes responsibility, you can easily start jumping between books and chapters — put a goal, specially with technical books, mark the chapters that you aim to read and do not skip until you done.
small side note here, people would claim it is better to get some actual work done, with their laptop, after more than 10 years trying to do that on trains, busses and plains, with every technology aid possible — it is called an inefficient time, you most likely to make mistakes and about to actually add more work of finding errors than to actually achieve anything done
If you sum up the time you gain by using the two above you might find out that you gain up to two hours a day of study time, of course depending on your lifestyle.

When you start to consume info in the described manner, you are getting addicted to knowledge, and seek to improve that, something like

So here are two suggestions for that

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
― Ernest Hemingway

There are a lot of techniques for speedy reading, one that works for most of people is described well on Tim Ferriss Blog, I won’t duplicate all that is written there already but can say that from experience of several people I personally know — you get almost instant result, and after couple of months it will become your second nature.One of the side benefits of that, you learn to concentrate better, in the world where multi tasking is a disease we all have , it is an important skill, in this technique you practice to stop day dream but focus. There is also a video explanation here.

Another hack is something that I was still doing at my university years, instead of going to lectures we were watching the recorded videos (yeah it was still with VHS tapes) and one of the coolest thing was putting the video at double of the normal speed, this way you could get a 3 hours lecture in less than 2 hours(yes you need to roll back sometime).now on the TED and Youtube talks people don’t even think it is possible to do that, so it is possible, again to avoid the copying here is a link that describe you exactly how.

To be able to follow those though you actually have to be in a good physical shape

Mens sana in corpore sano

The time that you saved , first of all will make you feel better , because you feel that you achieved something besides your actual work, and guess what — now you have time, make sports, I mean like really make sports, do some jogging

TED: Ideas worth spreading

do gym , or some martial arts or ballroom dancing, just go out and do things.

With our daily life we have a lot of tension, I do not like to call it stress, because it is a normal way of life now, but we always concern ourselves with our work, money, things we do not have time to do or time for the really important things like time with kids.It seems at a glance that what I described above is something that adds even more tension in your life ( though even at that point I dispute — the feeling of actually achieving goals boosts you with fresh energies) but there should be a moment to just calm down and disconnect. I Have been trying for that cause to get out to quiet places, but I guess it gets harder and time consuming with the years, so yes every few months try and go to vacation,just a small road trip to the nearest forest, or change of environment, you don’t have to go to caribbean.

When you work work, when you rest rest

don’t try and mix those up, nor during the week nor during the day, so have a schedule and work by it ( I will write my planning in another blog post, it is affected by agile methodologies for groups) but don’t try to make both( remember multitasking is tiring and this is what makes you feel tired and not the act itself), but one thing that works recently more and more for me is those 5 minutes meditations, at first I started to try it just because of the side effect of getting asleep (as stated above — you can read from your ebook to get asleep), but now I realise that during the peak of the day when you start feeling that your mind is unrestful — just make this small 5 minute practice and it will help you come back to your balance.

In the end of course remember though

The most important time you spend is with your loved ones

Performance hacks was originally published in Lead oneself on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.