Jumpstart January Pt.2: How I Manage To Be Consistent In Producing High Quality Work
The single most impactful intervention you can make
Hello friends! 👋
As always, a warm welcome to our new community members and a big thank you to each of you helping share this newsletter.
This week’s topic is my favorite of all time, it is the secret juice to everything I’ve been able to do in short periods of time the past 18 months.
I am excited to talk about this, as we continue our series in creating transformations that can help making 2023 your best year yet!
Before we start; have you joined my 30-day writing journey?
I am writing a daily atomic essay on similar topics we discuss here as well as trying to write about new ideas too.
Let’s now shift gears back to our newsletter;
🤯 DON’T BLOW UP YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS FIRST THING IN THE MORNING
You will see me mention this over and over again.
Choosing to be creative before reactive may be the single most transformative thing you can do for yourself.
When we get good - restful - sleep, our body goes through a lot of processes to clear up the toxins and damage we accumulated during the day.
It also resets and re-organizes all the information we have collected that day.
When we wake up, we are in a peak state that we can use to create our best work - it would be very wise to keep it protected.
Unfortunately, due to the addictive nature of social media and instant connectivity, everyone tends to check-in with others before they check-in with themselves.
The problem with this is not the check-in itself, but once your consciousness gets access to the plethora of input a little device like your phone can get you, it blows up in series of endless patterns.
Neural networks that fire up on auto-pilot.
One funny (and sad) realization I always am aware of now is how I would unconsciously go from checking my WhatsApp, quitting the app, and right away head to my email (or instagram, or twitter, pick your poison).
And of course there is the endless scrolling everyone is guilty of.
Instead, we can harness the power of this alive, refreshed, and charged up peak state of mind to explore our deepest values, questions about what we truly want to do, who we want to be, and who we want to be with.
You’ll be surprised by the quality of work created consistently in such a peak state.
🔋 HIGHEST WILLPOWER IS IN THE MORNING
I mentioned how the body repairs and recharges during our sleep.
And I talked before about willpower being our superpower.
One of the things that gets recharged is that superpower, think of it like a battery with full juice when you’re up and gets depleted as the day goes on.
When your mind is peaking and clear, you will have no problem generating motivation for doing what you value, be it working out, quality work or even hobbies.
This is why I schedule all my fundamental activities first thing in the morning - my movement, meditation, planning, cold shower, and creative work all stack up after each other in an algorithm.
Before I check-in with my social media or finances or whatever reactive work I need to get into.
Note: if the previous night’s sleep is not adequate (shoutout to all running on 6 hours of sleep, or less!), then none of the above is possible.
This is why sleep is a sport for me, my day starts the night before by ensuring I protect my sleep and recovery so I can truly show up at my best in the morning.
📕 YOU ONLY HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR AM/PM BOOKENDS
This realization changed my entire perspective once I learnt it.
Here is how it goes;
Think of your day as a series of books shelved next to each other on a bookshelf, each book representing one of the activities of the day.
On either side there are the bookends that keep that stack of books tight and upright.
Similarly, in your day you have an AM bookend at the start, a series of events throughout the day that usually happen on auto-pilot, and a PM bookend in the end.
The AM and PM bookends hold the entirety of your day.
The only thing you have control over is your bookend.
Either the early hours of the day or the end of it, that’s when you can claim “your time” - when you don’t have to be reachable and responsive.
Whatever happens in between is very tough to control.
And the AM bookend is more valuable because it happens after a restful sleep, so best used for creative work.
While the PM bookend happens at the end of the day, so best used for activities that set you up for a restful sleep. So you can have another peak day the next day.
Back to you now,
What is YOUR idiosyncratic way of being creative before reactive?
If you’re a night owl and run on a different clock, how can you use your sacred hours to create work in a peak state?
If you’re a morning person but wake up too tired for any of the above, first thing you want to check is; are you sleeping 8 full hours consistently?
Hope you try the above to bring more autonomy and control in your life.
To be the creator of your life, not the manager of your circumstances.
With much joy,
Have a Super Sunday! 💪
Hashim
This is one of my favorite releases (me every week)- no seriously, it is very practical and brings up a fundamental behavioral pattern that could influence all the other behaviors, feelings and physiological sensations that we go through. My favorite part if the AM/PM bookends' metaphor- visualizing how the start and end of my day could be essential to hold the in-between, had made a dramatic change in my perception. Especially by noting that whatever happens throughout the day is automatic and out of control which is very true. However, I am still not fully convinced that having less than 6 hours of sleep makes it impossible to reach the highest morning willpower, or maybe this is my defensive self talking :) . It would be interesting though to try this approach of maintaining an 8 hours sleep and explore the changes- just to experiment and see how things might flow differently. Thank you!
This has to be my favorite article as of now. Very simple and most effective from first hand experience. I am guilty of falling of the wagon and it seems to be the one thing I don’t take seriously is my rest time which ends up challenging my morning routines. It all flows like domino pieces.
On the phon addiction, one act that I did that shocked me is when I think that I need something from my phone, say drop a note to someone or check the date of a certain event, I pick up my phone, see other notifications, engage with them (for a while), drop my phone and go back to what I was doing only to remember that I picked up my phone for one reason that had to do with what I was physically doing and I didn’t even do it because of the underestimated powerful distractions the phone has, that was a self awareness moment that made me laugh.