The mindset cheat sheet part one: productivity
Tools for productivity, confidence and happiness from over 50 books.
Brief Introduction
A few years ago, I became interested in understanding the mechanisms through which we can manipulate our mindset and emotional state in order to improve performance and our everyday, lived experience. It all began with studying mindfulness, then going deeper into neuroscience and more niche fields like sports psychology.
I read over 50 books (and countless research papers) on these topics and after a while, I began to see common themes repeating again and again. It was fascinating to see mindfulness teachers, professors of neuroscience or philosophy and coaches to elite athletes converge on the same approach to mindset, and often, a very similar view on big questions related to meaning and happiness. Learning and applying these principles has helped improve my mental wellbeing more than anything, and I wanted to share them with anyone who might benefit (which I believe is everyone).
It took a few months to collect hundreds of pages of notes, summarize and organize the information in a document that I call my “Mindset cheat sheet”. I will share it here in its entirety, but because the original document is very long, I decided to break it down into three main categories and post each one at a time. This will be a three-part series of posts with the following outline:
Part one: Productivity 🤓
Morning routine
Prioritization
Habits
Procrastination
Part two: Confidence 🥳
Growth mindset
Motivation
Just START
Journaling & exercises
Part three: Happiness 😄
Meaning
Values
Being present
Purpose & finding your path
These posts will be on the longer side, but I will make them easy to follow by providing everything in a bullet-point format. For simplicity’s sake, I decided to keep the original, direct quotations from each author and then add a brief “practical steps” summary at the end of each category. The most often quoted authors include: Oliver Burkeman, Sam Harris, Gary Keller, James Clear, Josh Kaufman, Nat Zinsser, Nicole LePera, Tara Brach, Brad Stulberg, Adam Grant, Naval Ravikant, Michael Easter, Brad Stulberg, Tim Grover, Tim Pychyl.
Part one: Productivity
Morning routine ☕
Work on your most important project for the first hour of each day and protect your time by scheduling meetings with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments can't intrude.
Do your most important work—your ONE Thing—early, before your willpower is drawn down. Think of willpower like the power bar on your cell phone. Every morning you start out with a full charge. As the day goes on, every time you draw on it you’re using it up. It’s a limited but renewable resource.
If you want a simple formula for having a good day, then get a workout done and do your most important task before lunch.
Practical steps ✅
Start your day with meditation/ breathwork + journaling + fuel + workout
Give yourself 30 minutes to 1 hour to take care of morning priorities, then move to your most important task.
Prioritization 1️⃣
Choose to pay attention only to things that matter the most, and ignore the rest. The essence of prioritization is deciding not to do something. If everything is a #1, must-do priority, you haven’t really prioritized anything, since you haven’t made a choice.
The only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.
Stand firm in the face of FOMO, because missing out on something - indeed on almost everything - is basically guaranteed.
SAY NO - including to things you WANT to do.
When you strive for greatness, chaos is guaranteed to show up - embrace it. When you focus on what is truly important, something will always be underserved.
Multitasking is a myth - our brains are only capable of truly paying attention to one thing at a time. Distraction undermines results.
Serialize: focus on just one big project at a time and train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating anxiety by postponing everything you possibly can except for one thing (in time satisfaction from completing the thing will override anxiety).
If you can’t decide, the answer is no. If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
Practical steps ✅
Use a OKR framework to help you decide what your #1 priority is.
Block an hour each week to review your annual and monthly goals. Plan your week and month in advance and then plan your day accordingly.
Use batching to group similar tasks together and then tackle them all at once.
Time block in your calendar to center your time on your most important work.
Use the “Focusing Question”: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do / such that by doing it / everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
Habits 🔁
Repetition is what creates change, not insights.
The mere repetition of a behavior causes our nervous system to believe that the specific action and the context in which that is embedded is important - for better or for worse. Choose what you repeat wisely.
The trick to success is to choose the right habit and bring just enough discipline to establish it - it takes an average of 66 days to acquire a new habit.
Focus only on installing or changing one habit at a time, and start with small increments. Building on momentum makes it much easier to make the habit stick.
Create a snowball effect: hold yourself accountable but don’t beat yourself up. Stop feeling guilty that you miss a workout, or you’re a few pounds under/overweight, or you had a cookie. Let it go and just start the next moment you can to engage in positive behavior. That truly is the secret, just start.
There are times when life throws you such unexpected curveballs when none of our prior strategies work. When this occurs, sometimes our best bet is to surrender. Particularly when the world around us feels big, confusing, and overwhelming, it can be helpful to scale back, going small and minimal. Routines serve as bedrocks of predictability, creating a sense of order amidst disorder.
Practical steps ✅
Pick one thing. Cultivate a desire. Visualize it.
Plan a sustainable path: identify your needs, triggers, and substitutes.
Use friction: one of the best ways to reduce temptation is to apply friction, not willpower, to the behaviors you want to reduce because so much of what we do is driven by autopilot.
Create accountability: tell your friends, join a group
Track meticulously: what you measure gets managed
Connect with your future self: one of the reasons humans are notoriously bad at choosing long-term rewards is the concept known as “temporal discounting,” or assigning lower value to rewards paid out in the future than those available for immediate gratification. Connecting to your future self can help you avoid discounting the delayed rewards.
Use mindfulness tools such as breathwork to help you make better decisions during times of stress and tip the scales towards long-term rewards.
Procrastination 🤔
Procrastination is not so much about time management, but the need to self regulate emotions.
Connect with your future self: economists have long known that even though people prefer big rewards over small ones, they have an even stronger preference for present rewards over future ones—even when the future rewards are MUCH BIGGER. It’s an ordinary occurrence, oddly named hyperbolic discounting—the further away a reward is in the future, the smaller the immediate motivation to achieve it. Their “present bias” overrides logic, and they allow a big future with potentially extraordinary results to get away.
If you're procrastinating on something because you're worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax - because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good job, so you might as well make a start.
The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise - to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.
Your own need to do other things instead of your ONE Thing may be your biggest challenge to overcome; when stuff pops into your head, just write it down on a task list and get back to what you're supposed to be doing. In other words, do a brain dump.
Practical steps ✅ for emotional regulation:
Do a body scan or breathwork exercise (move from reactive to reflective).
Practice non judgemental awareness - recognize and allow thoughts and emotions and don’t identify with them.
Do a lovingkindness meditation to offer yourself compassionate self-support.
Do a brain dump and write down everything that’s on your mind.
Break your task into smaller ones and start with the smallest thing you can accomplish.
Stay tuned for part two - Confidence, and part three - Happiness, coming soon. In the meantime, drop me a line or a DM and let me know if you found this post useful.