Something I've been wanting to do is to put together a proper morning routine. I want to field test a bunch of things to see what works for me.

This guy has some cool ideas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PliFBr__T7Y

Jason Shen takes cold showers every moning.

What are you guys doing currently? What's some cool ideas?

Great post in Derek's blog.

"When you're surrounded by successful people, it feels so easy, it's obvious. Their attitude and actions rub off on you.

But I meet so many people that feel that success is so far away, so impossible to imagine, that they act accordingly, aim low, and complete the self-defeating circle.

I know much of success is luck, but I never realized how much the mindset of success comes from who you know.

Luckily, who you know is up to you, not luck."

This article is brilliant and should be read by all: bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html

Then, read these:

http://sebastianmarshall.com/refuse-to-be-outworked

http://tynan.com/lovework

http://sebastianmarshall.com/community/42500

A structural fix is something that you pay for up-front and which then continues to serve your life with zero or little in the way of ongoing maintenance costs.

Some examples, feel free to add more:

-If your computer is swapping (you hear the hard drive churning) during normal usage, get more RAM! Getting an SSD hard drive is also a good idea. Swapping out to disk is like sending a sailboat across the Atlantic to fetch your stuff, whereas RAM is like getting it from your pocket.

-Buy everything you can find that can optimize your sleep. Some ideas: blackout curtains for your sleeping quarters, Zeo device, supplements known to aid sleep (melatonin, zinc, stuff like that), Philips Golite, earthing mat, etc.

-Get a good digital scale with bodyfat measurements and all that jazz. Make a habit to enter it into a suitable tracking tool. Hacker's Diet is good for weight. Even better if it auto-tracks the data for you.

It would be pretty awesome if we all had plenty of mental energy to stay motivated and disciplined all day long, to be highly productive and highly creative whenever we needed, and to always feel vibrant and optimistic about the future.

However, the more you try to control elements of your life – whether it is to improve your health, wealth, social life or whatever – the more apparent it is how finite and scarce this “mental energy” can be.

In particular, it seems that whenever we use willpower – in any form and for any reason – we are using up resources from this pool of mental energy, much faster than the pool is replenished.

Psychologists have carried out plenty of experiments that strongly appear to confirm this model of willpower – Jason Shen and Sebastian recently put together a great post about it here: http://sebastianmarshall.com/developing-willpower-by-jason-shen which is very much worth reading if you haven't already!

Psychologists have also shown[1] that decisions on matters that affect us can deplete the same mental resource as willpower. In some sense, these decisions and willpower are the same:

For me:

The Non-Designer's Design Book - Robin Williams

The Eight-Circuit Brain: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body - Antero Alli

Angel Tech - Antero Alli (parts of it, as part of assignments in the above book)

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

I went over my managerial accounting homework yesterday and discovered something interesting.  The problem was a standard expected value problem in which given 3 choices with multiple possibilities, we were to decide which choice was optimal.

After calculations there were 3 options: choice A had an EV (expected value) of 20k, choice B’s EV was -4k and choice C’s EV was 14k. 

What shocked me was that although the answer A was correct, the solution still recommended option C because it had the lowest coefficient of variation (the lowest risk per dollar invested). 

I thought about this for a minute.  Why do we care about risk? Isn’t EV just EV, period?  Why would I choose anything with lower EV? 

I thought about my past involvements with risk/reward scenarios such as poker or fantasy football and came to the conclusion that humans, (especially myself), are inherently bad at understanding risk.  I think this is because of the limited amount of time we are given.  Risk is a negative factor because we are given a set amount of time and we literally don’t have enough time to see the risks play out.  After all, we only have 16 games of fantasy football before a champion is determined that season.

2013 has been a tough year for me productivity wise.  After accomplishing close to all my 2012 goals, I ratcheted all my goals for 2013 without considering environmental changes.  Needless to say Sebastian's latest posts have come at a good time.

The problem is I mentally associated my previous productivity pattern with the norm, and although I can allow myself to ratchet back down, (for instance allow myself to watch 4 hours of television a day), I can't help feeling that this is disappointing.  

My weeks consist of a few highly focused, productive days, followed by a few days where I just sit on the couch watching The Walking Dead.   This suggests to me that my problem isn't a result of bad ratcheting, although that may be a factor, namely, setting my goal to 4 hours of tv a day and then slowly decreasing that amount to 3 hours and so on, won't fix this.  I think there is a structural fix that needs to be done with emphasis on environment.  I also think that if I squeeze out all my will power, and create a string of successful days, that the solution will stay permanent (yes, i also believe that will power is a limited resource).  

So for now, I will change 3 things:

1.  leave the house.  Aside from eating, sleeping and other general needs, I will be spending the rest of my time outside the apartment.