Underrated productivity hack: move slower.
When you move slower your mental and physical state calms.
When you’re calm your mind thinks more clearly.
When you think more clearly you get more done.
I help busy people do inner work.
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Underrated productivity hack: move slower.
When you move slower your mental and physical state calms.
When you’re calm your mind thinks more clearly.
When you think more clearly you get more done.
Step 1) Stop agitating it. Every disturbance clouds the water and sends ripples of distress throughout. This causes the pond to become cloudy and mudded.
Step 2) Filter the water. When a pond is still, most of the wandering particles will settle and the water will clear. But, running the water through a filtration process will expedite and enhance the process of clearing the water. Filtering also removes particles from the pond altogether rather than simply allowing them to settle to the pond’s floor.
Why should you care?
Because a pond is often used as a metaphor for the mind.
And understanding what disrupts and clears a pond can help us understand what disrupts and clears our mind.
So, how can we follow this same two step process for our mind?
Step 1) Stop agitating it. Every disturbance that you allow in through your senses will cause your mind to cloud and become mudded. Every hateful, demeaning, negative, hurtful, upsetting, gossipy, self-limiting, comparison-oriented thought does this. Exposing yourself to more of the opposite helps; meditating helps; blocking sources that agitate you helps.
Step 2) Filter your thoughts. Writing is thought filtered. When you start writing regularly, you’ll think more clearly, act more deliberately, and understand your emotions more than ever before. You could do gratitude themed writing in the morning, reflective/day-planning/goal oriented writing in the evening, thought-releasing journaling during the day, or just write to a blog like I do about whatever is on your mind.
You’d be surprised at how effective this process is at clearing your mind.
And just think about how much easier it will be to see the content of your mind’s pond once it’s finally cleared…
I was recently interviewed on The Begin Within Podcast by Justin Furtado.
I had a great time and really enjoyed the space Justin created for our conversation. We talked about developing a writing habit, the keys to being a great leader, and tapping into self-improvement that caters to each individual. I hope you’ll check it out!
You can listen below, on most other podcasting platforms, or if you’d prefer to watch us chat with your eyeballs, you can watch on YouTube. The conversation is around 51 minutes long.
Thanks and enjoy! :)
Let me assure you that approximately none of us start “good” at anything.
Take meditating for example. Expecting to be “good” at meditating when you first start is like expecting to be “good” at Martial Arts when you come to your first class.
The point isn’t to arrive “good”—the point is to start where you are and improve.
Besides the rare few who are “born enlightened,” I’m of the opinion that all of us have busy, irrational, crazed monkey minds which make meditating exceptionally hard.
…Which is precisely why we should be spending time practicing it.
What we need to do isn’t *not* meditate because its hard. What we need to do is better manage our expectations.
Meditating isn’t about closing our eyes and being able to experience a magical ceasing of all incoming thoughts. Not a chance.
It’s about stopping the flow of incoming information and allowing what’s there to settle.
When I meditate, I spend probably less than a minute out of twenty actually free from thinking. This is an excellent day of meditation for me.
In fact, any day I practice meditating is an excellent day of meditating—because I practiced it.
Get it?
The practice is the reward. Just like in Martial Arts. What are belts but an external motivation tactic to encourage training?
The end goal (black belt) is simply a motivation tactic that’s designed to get you to practice.
So, if you want to become a “black belt” in meditation (or anything), humble yourself and start practicing like a white belt.
“Out of sight, out of mind” can be an excellent model for improving the overall quality of your life.
Put what you want IN your mind, IN sight.
Take what you DON’T want in your mind, OUT of sight.
As obvious as this might sound, I can’t tell you how many people keep what they don’t want in their mind in sight and keep what they do want in their mind out of sight.
Look closely at what you allow to stay in (and out of) sight for the entire duration of a typical day and adjust accordingly.
And not just physically—digitally, too.
Don’t underestimate this.
If you want to have better evenings, take better care of your mornings.
And if you want to have better mornings, well, take better care of your evenings.
This is to simply say: everything in your day is interconnected.
Morning to night, night to morning; task one to task two, task two back to task one again.
Once you recognize this, you’ll see why now is as good a time as any for improvement.
Where you start improvement in the timeline of your day is irrelevant. THAT you start is what matters. Waiting for the “right moment” or a more “convenient time” (like, New Years) is merely an excuse to not have to change or do the work.
The idea that the future will be better for improvement in some way is simply false. You know when the best time for improvement is? Yeah… NOW!
Because how you handle this moment will be directly correlated to how your next moment will feel. And, mind-bogglingly enough, how all of your future moments will feel, too.
Because just like we’re only six degrees of separation away from each other, so, too, are the events of our lives only a few degrees of separation apart.
Think about it: you could probably trace the key events that happened in your life, that led you to the feel of this exact moment, on your fingers.
So why not create a new event today that will position the future you in a better place?
After all, further delay on improvement will only continue to delay your improvement.
And why on earth would you want to do that?
Momentum is either your greatest ally or your greatest foe.
Learn how to use momentum in your favor and the tasks of your day will topple over seamlessly, one to the next, like a perfectly aligned series of dominoes.
One push and momentum will take care of the rest.
Ignore momentum and the tasks of your day will topple and stop erratically, requiring you to keep re-pushing the next series of dominoes again and again and again.
For me, getting out of bed in the morning is the initial push of my dominoes which hits:
The dominoes are beautifully ordered and adequately spaced. All I have to do is get out of bed at the right time and the rest feels automatic.
There’s no guessing. No setting up dominoes as I go. No reshuffling the dominoes after I’ve already tipped the first one… It’s all premeditated, sequential, and intentional.
And once I arrive to work, of course, the next chain of dominoes gets pushed—and so forth, as the day goes on.
Where most people run into momentum issues, is when they don’t take the time to properly set up their dominoes (tasks) ahead of time and/or don’t have them properly spaced out (time management).
If you look at your day in this way, I suspect you’ll find where the missing “dominoes” and irregular spacings lie. Adjust accordingly.
Having momentum as a foe, to be frank, is a stupid waste of time, energy, and effort.
Starting from stopped is always harder than keeping the momentum going.
Momentum, meet reader. Reader, meet momentum.
Now, be friends.