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A day in my life

Jul 24, 20234 min read

Archive from 2023-07-04

How you spend a day is how you spend your life.

Discipline = freedom

--- Jocko Willink

It’s important to build a structure of life. Because motivation is an emotion, and the good ol’ limbic system (in charge of emotion) is less reliable in making you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do (that’s pre-frontal cortex’s specialty1).

Here is the routine I try to stick to.

  • Wake up by sunlight, usually around 5 or 6.
  • Morning mantra, which is going through rules and a list of trauma, recording sleep and weight.
  • Make bed, bathroom stuff, breakfast.
  • Gym, kettlebell exercise.
  • Office, > 2hrs of single task.
  • Break, emails and messages, lunch if hunger kicks in.
  • 2nd working block.
  • Home, cold shower, nap or audiobook or podcast, eat.
  • Reading, floss and bathroom stuff.
  • Night mantra (going through rules and record the day), bed within 3 hrs of sunset.

Some side bars worth mentioning.

  1. The routine gets updated constantly.

    I find myself always struggling with sticking to one or more things in the routine, or discover new information that make me want to try new things. As a result, this is a constantly changing design of my life.

    For example, I tried one meal a day for some months earlier this year, but have switched to the Slow carb diet about a month ago after reading the 4 hour body by Tim Ferriss. I was running 6 miles a day, 6 days a week (Mon to Sat) for the first half of the year, and have switched to the kettlebell swing, again, after reading Tim Ferriss.

  2. Five things that are crucial to me: sleep, diet, exercise, journal, mantra.

    I view them as the pillars that build my life, structures that mold me into a functional human being, and the best medicine for a healthy life, and I try to make sure I don’t skip my meds.

  3. I try not to pin each item down to the clocks, like wake up at exactly 6 am, work for exactly 3 hours.

    I find it stressful if I’m constantly checking the time. It’s a sign of me wanting to get out of the thing I am doing, and if that’s the case I need to rethink if I am doing the wrong thing.

    I like Kevin Kelly’s comment that “productivity is for machines, what humans are good at is wasting time”. And I think the paradox is true that the more you rush, the slower you go.

  4. Life is full of edge cases. It might be all about edge cases.

    Things go wrong pretty much everyday, and that’s the fun part.

    I like the idea from James Clear of treating your daily behaviors as casting votes to validate the type of person you’re trying to be. I don’t have to win all the votes, I only need the majority.

    Each day, the focus is to try to show up and cast the vote - especially on the bad days.

  5. If you want some thing to happen, crop out a chunk of your time in your day and make it happen.

    Another idea from James Clear that I like, if you want something to happen, take time to do it, or else you should release yourself from the desire/ fantasy that it’s gonna happen some day.

    It doesn’t make sense to continue wanting something if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get it.

    If you don’t want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire.

    --- James Clear

I love the A day in my life video by Lex Fridman. I borrowed some of his routines, and sometimes when I struggle with sticking to the routine, I’d rewatch his video to gather some strength from it.

Life’s short.

We’ve got about 4,000 weeks; 30,000 days; 80,000 working hours.

Make them count.

Footnotes

  1. People have proposed that PFC (pre-frontal cortex) should be included in the limbic system, and my instinct is that it should be included. But here the limbic system is the classic model - the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, etc., not including PFC. ↩

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