23 Ways to Make 2023 Your Miracle Year

 To identify what to prioritize and what to attempt to delegate or delete from your days, use my Energy Calendar Technique.

• For one week, at the end of every weekday, go through and color-code your calendar from the day. Green for Energy Creating, Yellow for Neutral, and Red for Energy Draining. At the end of the week, look at your calendar and assess the trends: What are the common energy creating, neutral, and energy draining activities? Energy creating should be prioritized, while energy neutral and energy draining should be delegated or deleted over time.

Go into your calendar and add at least two 15-minute blocks for absolutely nothing. During these windows, don't check email or get anything done. Go for a walk, read something non-work related, sit and stare into space, whatever. Prioritize and protect these short bouts of rest as a key part of your daily systems, not a reward for your efforts. Growth requires this balance.

These windows should become sacred windows of progress on the important long-term tasks (not the urgent short-term ones). If you are like me, you might need a forcing function to shut everything down, so use an app like Flow to force the issue.

The simplest way to action this is to default to 25-minute calls/meetings (instead of 30 minutes) and take a simple walking or breathing break during the 5 minutes. Most calls/meetings have 5 minutes of wasted time on pleasantries (or terrible talk about the weather...), so just cut that and get straight to the point. Everyone is better off for having the breaks.

With Spaced Repetition, information is consumed at increasing intervals until it's committed to long-term memory. If you first consume some new information at 8am, you'd have Rep 1 at 9am (1 hr later), Rep 2 at 12pm (3 hrs later), Rep 3 at 6pm (6 hrs later), Rep 4 at 6am (12 hrs later), and so on. The memory is reinforced at increasing intervals. Your brain is a muscle—each repetition is a "flex" of that muscle. By steadily increasing the intervals between reps, you are pushing the muscle with a steadily more challenging load. You're forcing the retention muscle to grow.

Learn the difference between urgent and important. Work towards delegating or deleting the unimportant tasks that are draining your time and mental energy. The goal is to spend more time on important tasks that further your long-term values, missions, goals, and principles.

To feel energized as soon as you get out of bed, try using my 5-5-5-30 Method.

When you wake up, do 5 push-ups, 5 squats, 5 lunges, and a 30-second plank. You can do it while you are brewing coffee or right when you get out of bed. It will jumpstart your metabolism and give you a boost of energy to start the day.

You don't need a fancy morning routine—just go for a walk. The sunlight, movement, and fresh air have a direct positive impact on your mood, circadian rhythm, metabolism, digestion, and more. Leave your phone at home (or put it on airplane mode). Let your creativity flow.

PLP stands for Pull-ups, Lunges, Pushups. On Day 1, you do 10 reps of each, on Day 2, you do 11 reps of each, on Day 3, you do 12 reps of each, and so on, all the way up to 69 reps. The slow, steady accumulation of volume creates impressive progress (I've gotten leaner and more dense from doing it in the past). Make sure to take care of your soft tissue quality if you do the challenge—use a foam roller and massage your shoulders and lats to avoid injury. You can also add PLP to your normal workouts to layer in a challenging, growth-driving element.

11 minutes of weekly cold water immersion (showers or full immersion) has been shown to have a whole host of mental and physical health benefits. I have personally experienced this over the last year, and can honestly say that the 4-7 minutes of daily cold exposure has changed my life—an incredible energy boost and dopamine surge that lasts for several hours. Do one hard thing in the morning that makes everything else feel much easier.

Develop a simple Power Down Ritual to more effectively separate work from your personal life.

A Power Down Ritual is a fixed set of actions and behaviors that mentally and physically mark the end of your professional day. An example of my fixed sequence might look something like this: Check email for any final requests requiring action, check calendar for the following day and complete 15 minutes of prep work for initial priority tasks of the following morning, update any task lists for progress and confirm open items for next day.

As time passes in any relationship, it becomes easy to take the good for granted and focus on the stress or tensions. Don't fall into this trap. Highlight the good and watch the amazing impact it will have.

Figure out what role you need to play at different times and set alarms with labels that provide a nudge to "turn on" that character when that time hits. It's a simple behavioral intervention that can go a long way.

Do the new thing for 30 minutes per day for 30 straight days. 900 minutes of accumulated effort will yield surprisingly significant results. You can get started learning a new language, dramatically improve your physical fitness, pick up an instrument, or build a writing/reading practice.

Identify a topic, try to explain it to a 5-year-old, study to fill in knowledge gaps exposed by the explanation, and iterate on the process accordingly. Teaching is the most powerful form of learning. Progress to teaching as quickly as possible and you will cement your learnings and highlight the gaps that need to be filled.

Create an automated direct deposit for a small amount of money into an investment account every month.

Never look at the account. Don't pay any attention to it. A $100 monthly investment into the S&P 500 for the last 10 years would be worth ~$20,000 today. Let it compound.

When you have to think about these tasks every month, there is a small cognitive burden that reduces your capacity to focus on more important projects and opportunities. They are all easily automated (most of the services offer automated flows) and the digital systems tend to be accurate. Do quick accuracy checks once a quarter but avoid looking otherwise.

Once you put something in your shopping cart, walk away from the computer and come back 48 hours later. If you still want it, buy it. Most of the time, you'll realize you don't need it. Invest that money instead and watch it compound.

The year ahead holds almost unlimited potential energy. It's your job to convert it into kinetic energy through movement and action. I hope this piece gave you a few ideas on which you can act and start working towards creating your very own Annus Mirabilis.

As always, until next time...stay curious, friends.