Western work culture has been like this:<ul><li>80-hour work weeks.</li><li>High-pressure environments.</li><li>Little time for rest and recovery.</li></ul>Why do people waste an entire day and only have a few hours for themselves that also includes preparing for the next day?This has been a talking point for a long time now. 4-hour workdays, singular focus, and meaningful work are becoming the norm in our little pocket of Twitter — and we are creating a future of passionate individuals that produce world-shifting creations.

The Premise

Ancient Romans, Ancient Greeks, Steve Jobs, Charles Darwin, and an infinite list of visionaries, strategists, and innovators attributed their success to surprisingly low “work” times.Writers from multiple domains, like Hemingway and Tarantino, would spend the majority of their days lounging by the pool, spitting games with girls, and doing everything aside from what they deemed “work.”

Less Work Is More

Imagine going to the gym for 8 hours trying to be as “productive” as possible. You would try to max out on main exercises like the nervous system taxing deadlift, then go on to do accessory movements. In one day, you would run out of exercises to do. Would you be able to come back and give it your all the next day? How about 5 days in a row? Would you be able to tough it out until you can use your paid vacation time to recover and do it all over again?Your body would be decimated without rest and recovery.

Importance Of Rest And Recovery

While corporate culture is handing you a pretty paycheck to incentivize sustained intensity, we must push back.Intensity isn’t sustainable. It’s not rocket science. Sustainability, consistency, and creativity must be prioritized before we even mention the word “productivity.”

Push Back From Capitalist Demands

Fill your brain in the afternoons with books, learning, and socialization.Empty your brain before bed with journaling, planning, and meditation.Use your brain in the morning with creation, output, and focus.

Your psyche is wired for survival. If you have attachments to the external world — relationships of any form — that threaten your identity when the relationship is challenged, then you will not be able to act authentically. That is to say, you will have difficulty opening your mind to reality to leverage nature. Your attachments — or perceived needs — will act as obstructions that slow the flow of your productive and creative energy.You cannot be your true, authentic self if you need something that you do not already have.

A Word Of Caution

Productivity is related to the balance and degree to which you engage in deep play, deep rest, and lastly deep work.For value creators, those that intend to put good out into the world, you must adopt the habit of conscious study. Without expanding your worldview, mind, and knowledge through exposing yourself to novel perspectives; how do you plan to create? Creativity, in some aspects, is about pulling from multiple sources and mashing them together. Like deconstructing a topic, learning about its parts through study, and building your own creation as you would playing with legos.

Fill Your Mind

When aligned with your vision, values, and goals you can consume information with the intention to understand and apply. This can begin to act as a vessel for raising your consciousness. You start to gain clarity on your life’s work through exposure to the information that aligns with you the most. If you don’t know where to start, re-read the book that changed the way you think, it will do it again.

Consume Information To Raise Your Consciousness

Aside from movement and exercise being great for your health, there is something unique about walks. Ancient masters swore by it, industry leaders took them religiously, and the world’s most respected creatives made them a part of their everyday routine.The ideas flow in a steady stream. From the  subconscious to conscious. Sometimes you just need that one word, letter, sound, example, anecdote, or story to bring up a thought that leads you down a rabbit hole of questioning and exploration.

Going For A Walk

When you get out of the house you become less prone to familiar distractions that will impact your study just by being in that environment. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to block out the distractions. You know they are there and they will occupy creative energy.Filling your mind can be done at any time, and may be scattered throughout your day, but for the sake your own experimentation and clarity; start with doing this in the afternoons. If you do not have time to do this in the afternoon, sprinkle it throughout your day. I will give personal examples below.

Reading In The Sun

In psychology, there is something called the Default Mode Network. From the book Rest, this default mode network is “a series of interconnected sections that activate as soon as people stop concentrating on external tasks, and shifts from outward-focused to inward-focused cognition.”When “activated” through restful, meditative, or open activities the brain is not any less active than it would be when engaged in something like focused work, or something that demands narrow focus and concentrated attention.

Empty Your Mind

When your focus is open, your subconscious mind is still working hard and munching on problems. Many programmers understand this well. They will often work on a project, encounter a bug, struggle to fix it, “give up,” and go about their day. At the most unexpected time, the perfect solution will pop into their head and the excited programmer will rush to open their code base to test it out. Shower thoughts is another example of this.

Shower Thoughts And And Open Focus

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

How do you empty your mind?By immersing yourself in the present moment. Flowing with the river of life and the highs and lows that it presents.There are many ways to make this easier on you to grasp, but understand that all of these means lead to the same end:<ol><li>The Gym</li><li>Nature</li><li>Meditation</li><li>Physical mediums</li></ol>

The Present Movement

Gym bros talk a lot about “mind-muscle connection” and other things that are just short for anchoring your attention in the present. When you are at the gym, be a silent observer. Observe the voice in your head that tells you to quit. Observe how the muscle feels as it contracts. Observe the blood flowing quicker through your body.This works for any exercise, not only the gym. Elevated bodily functions that are easily observable make it easier to treat the gym as a meditation practice.

1. The Gym As A Meditative Practice

From a psychological lens, nature presents the perfect formula for flow. On a hike, you order your consciousness by having a vision of how you want the hike to go. You construct a hierarchy of goals in your mind that allow you to gain clarity on the climb. You may have a water intake goal, distance goal, health goal, or just the goal to have a good time in nature. From there, you begin your ascent up the trail and are faced with a challenge. Even better, you planned the hike to match your skill level and you don’t have to incessantly think. Hiking becomes an art form and you kick into flow.

2. A Hiking Trip In Nature

Conscious meditation (obviously), conscious walks, conscious listening during a conversation, conscious writing, and conscious creating.When you are just starting out, and even when you are deep into the space, you are just doing the activities that people tell you to do. Most people are meditating unconsciously, which is a funny example. They are mechanically going through the motions because it has become habitual. They aren’t getting the benefits they would get if they simply prioritized consciousness at any given moment — not just during meditation.

3. The Always On Meditation: Being Conscious

Everything that is not absolute truth (unknowable or unspeakable with words alone) is relative. Relative means that there is a relationship. Cause and effect. Polarity. One thing cannot exist without the other. During meditation, can you follow a thought to another thought to an event until the lines are blurred and you glimpse into Infinity?

Everything Is Relative

Another way to order consciousness or create clarity is to express the unorganized thoughts that are in your head. This is done through writing or speaking.One such method is brain dump journaling. How do you brain dump journal? First, by writing out every single thing that you can bring your attention to in your mind. Once you have all your thoughts, reactions to feelings, emotions, and tasks written in a chaotic fashion on your paper — you can start to organize them.This is where connections are made and clarity is gained.

4. Physical Mediums

Using your mind comes last as we have filled and emptied our minds. By filling our minds we have expanded them, broadening our awareness and allowing The Law of Inspired Action to come into play. This gives us fresh creative firepower for when we use our mind. By emptying our mind we have allowed the Default Mode Network to come into play. Our subconscious mind will deliver insight to our conscious mind and we can order said consciousness through brain dump journaling.

Use Your Mind

There are 3 main things that come into play when getting into deep, focused work:<ul><li>Leveraged familiarity</li><li>Ordered consciousness</li><li>Connection to The Unknown</li></ul>Our goal with focused work is to eliminate distractions, get into flow, and produce quality work in the short amount of time that our finite creative energy allows.

Deep, Focussed Work

Leveraged familiarity is a soft morning routine. The human brain loves to conserve the energy wasted on familiar things. Hence why habit formation is so popular, like putting certain and preferably beneficial aspects of your life on autopilot. As with most things, there is depth to the term habits. There are mental, emotional, physical, and financial habits that could each be broken down even further to take a peek into how robotic we truly are in our unconscious lives.

Leveraged familiarity

There are 3 steps to unlocking deep focus:1. Goal (direction)2. Plan (clarity)3. Reduced friction (action)A desired outcome + knowing how to get there + simple execution will put you into a distraction-numbing state of flow.

Unlock That Flow Mode

Everything about productivity in a nutshell.

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The 3-Part Daily Routine For Maximum Productivity - Dan Koe

Try making a list of tasks you want to tackle the next day — especially if you find that worrying often keeps you awake. Writing a to-do list can not only help you be more productive the next day but can help establish peace of mind for you to sleep better. The next day all you got to do is, make some essential changes to the list and get to work!

Make your To-Do list for tomorrow 

Reflect on your day — This will take no more than 5 minutes a day but can have a tremendous effect on your personal development. Consider what worked and didn’t work today. This helps you appreciate your accomplishments, and shape a better tomorrow. Start by acknowledging one or two things you wish had gone better, and end your reflection by thinking of a few wins you had. Even if you had a bad day, make an effort to end by thinking about something good that happened. Write lingering thoughts or reflections in your journal. This keeps you from going to bed with a head full of worries.

Reflect on your day

Do some reading — A better alternative to looking at your phone is to read a book. If you find it hard to get yourself to sleep, add this to your night routine. Not only will you bring the essential practice of reading daily, but you’ll also learn new stuff, get inspired, and/or come up with new ideas. It will help you calm your mind and get ready to sleep.

Do some reading

Write down at least 3 things you’re thankful for each day. Making expressing gratitude a part of your routine can help you lead a healthy and happy life. The more you make an effort to notice the things that you feel thankful for, the more you prime yourself to just naturally feel grateful instead of having to work at it.

Practice gratitude journaling 

Take care of your hygiene — Don’t forget to brush your teeth and wash your face before bed. This practice is extremely important, it helps you regulate your hygiene, and does not allow acne or bacteria to form. This is basic. Start from the simple practices and then curate a skin routine for yourself.

Take care of your hygiene 

Regular meditation practice can help you relax physically and mentally. Mindfulness meditation, in particular, may help improve your ability to release the day’s stress and tension in preparation for a good night’s sleep. Meditation can also help reduce behaviors that keep you up, like cycling through anxious thoughts.

Meditate 

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Following are some of the best evening habits to clear your thoughts and set your mind for the upcoming day before going to bed.

Last Tuesday, I wrote about habits you should include in your morning routine, so I figured, today we’ll discuss about habits you should have in your night routine! You’ve probably heard a lot about…

6 Habits To Include In Your Night Routine.

A ritual is an activity that eases a person into a focused mindset.  In Zen monasteries, even activities like bathing and eating are ritualized and given the complete attention of practitioners. This encourages a mindful approach to tasks. Rituals can be as simple as taking a walk at a particular time of day, baking bread, or cleaning your space.

Rituals can enrich your life

Routine implies a rigid sense of structure, with time management and prioritized productivity. A ritual might resemble an everyday routine. But instead of limiting yourself to a defined ideal, you focus on the specifics of the process. For example, rituals can be an artistic process, a meditation, a communal celebration, or a simple act of observation.

Ritual vs routine

A ritual may seem overly simplistic or devoid of meaning to outsiders. Artists are inseparable from their creative output. For example, writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras always wears a distinct “muted blue ultramarine” shaded garment when working, as picturing the colour helps her concentrate and enter “a somnambulistic trance.” Likewise, the novelist Toni Morrison would wake at 5 am, make coffee, and watch the sunrise.

Your ritual might seem silly or odd to others

Whether it's a daily or celebratory ritual, experimenting can help to find a ritual that feels good to you. The intent is key. Ensure to have some context for the ritual or an idea of why you're doing it. What is important is the mindset that you bring to the practice.

Experiment and have fun with rituals

What’s the difference between a ritual and a routine? Rituals can help you approach basic tasks with more mindfulness.

Why we need rituals, not routines

You can choose different wording if you like, but I always write the date and time, and then "Today, I..." And then write down the most important things you accomplished that day.
You can write down as many or as few items as you like, but make sure to include the things that are most important to you. And be careful to only include the positive. Only include what you did get done.

Write: "Today, I..."

Again, you can choose different wording if you like. But the important thing is that you choose one priority for the upcoming day. Even though there may be several important things you have to do tomorrow, you must pick the single thing that matters to you most. 
It can be challenging to do but it's an important exercise because it forces you to think through what really matters most. What's the one thing that, if you get it right, you will feel that you've won the day?

Write: "Priority for tomorrow:"

Why? Because research suggests that the last thing you pay attention to before sleep will stay in your mind. This is the reason you should try to avoid reading the news at bedtime.
Giving yourself a jolt of positivity is useful any time of day, but it's a particularly powerful thing to do right before you go to sleep because that too will stick with you. It's sure to better your mood and increase your motivation, and that effect might even last through your mood the following day.

Make this the last thing you do before bed

Make it the last thing before you turn out the light.

This 5-Minute Bedtime Routine Will Make You Happier and More Productive

A bedtime routine is a set of activities you perform in the same order, every night, in the 30 to 60 minutes before you go to bed. Bedtime routines can vary, but often include calming activities like taking a warm bath, reading, journaling, or meditation.

What Is a Bedtime Routine?

Humans are <a href="https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-hygiene/bedtime-routine-for-adults">creatures of habit2 </a> . Like other routines, bedtime routines help our brains recognize when it’s time to sleep. By performing the same activities in the same order every night, your brain will see those activities as a precursor to sleep.The importance of bedtime routines stems back as far as childhood. <a href="https://www.sleepfoundation.org/children-and-sleep/bedtime-routine">Bedtime routines help children </a>connect with their natural circadian rhythms and practice healthy habits that promote good sleep. Bedtime routines have been found to have <a href="https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-hygiene/bedtime-routine-for-adults">profound positive impacts6 </a> in other areas of children’s lives, eg. better memory, mental health, and attention.

Why Are Bedtime Routines Important?

Skin health beauty, general health, and mental clarity. Getting enough sleep is like being sober.

A bedtime routine is a set of activities you perform in the same order every night before bed. Learn why bedtime routines are important, and get tips for creating yours.

The 3-Part Daily Routine For Maximum Productivity - Dan Koe

6 Habits To Include In Your Night Routine.

Why we need rituals, not routines

This 5-Minute Bedtime Routine Will Make You Happier and More Productive

How to Build a Better Bedtime Routine for Adults | Sleep Foundation

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