For the more difficult things to cut, you may not need to eliminate them completely, but rather put rules around them, like not doing specific things during certain hours, weekdays, or weekends for example.

High-Value Activities​ - To determine what you should keep versus what could be helpful to minimize or eliminate, we have to establish what your highest valued activities are first. This isn’t about moral values or ethical values, this is just about activities that you enjoy or that are derived from more general goals like prosperity, happiness, and meaning in your life.

If you value improving your business, impacting others means focusing on health and fitness, engaging in “peak experiences” (flow, travel, novelty, adventure), continuous learning, and quality time relaxing with friends and family. Those should be what you prioritize. Once you have your core set of activity values, you can begin eliminating or minimizing everything else. It may take time, but chip away at it and watch new time become available to you as stress and the feeling that you’re always in a rush fades away.

As we seek to restrict some areas of wasted time/effort, we find more freedom unlocked in the areas that are most important to us. We weren’t going to get into flow during those low-value activities anyway, so now instead of wasting those cognitive resources, we’ve freed them up to invest in higher-value activities and be more likely to get into flow and less likely to have our attention be pulled away by something we don’t truly need to be spending time on.

The exercise in elimination has many benefits, including:

• Reducing cognitive load
• Increasing depth and value in the pursuits you chose
• Feeling less busy, rushed, and overwhelmed
• Reducing feelings of regret which is directly correlated to time spent on a low-value activity
• Feeling more meaning and purpose

At this point, you may push back and revert to the excuse, “but everybody does it this way". I would encourage you to use your own brain and make decisions that make the most sense to you versus following what those paid to distract you want you to think is “normal.”

Optimizing Decisions​ - It’s helpful to think about cognition as a fixed resource. We only have so much quality cognitive and decision-making power on any given day, so what we choose to use that on can be extremely meaningful to how we end up performing. The cumulative effect of using those resources up on meaningless micro decisions saps you with energy that you may need later on for more important endeavors. The less friction we fill our schedules and lives with, the more we will be sharp, focused, and at our best when we want to be.

A great way to maximize these resources is through active recovery, exercise, a healthy diet, quality sleep, and taking short recovery or mindfulness breaks throughout the day. These all combined to help you build and replenish the internal chemistry necessary for feeling and performing your best.

Another aspect to consider is what the human brain is good at versus a machine or just a more automated process. Machines are great at tedium, repetition, information storage, information processing, objectivity, and speed. While human minds are great at empathy, creativity, relating, morality, intuition, flexibility, and symbolic cognition. When we look at what we do on a regular basis, it can be useful to “machine” decisions and activities that require the skills machines are best at versus saving our cognition for things and decisions that human minds are best at.

One of the biggest sources of this in the workplace for many people is scheduling. The time it takes is minimal but the energy and fatigue it costs a lot of people to have those back-and-forth emails about when they can meet or talk would be easily avoided with any number of scheduling apps or a more automated protocol.

Decision-making is incredibly expensive biologically and decision fatigue is a syndrome that leads to worse decision-making ability the more decisions we make in a given day. Increased stress, anxiety, headaches, digestive issues, and impaired self-regulation (which could lead to binge eating, alcohol usage, or being more easily irritable to those around you), are all symptoms that can arise if we stretch ourselves too thin and expose ourselves to an endless stream of decisions.

“No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision​ without paying a biological price.”

By systematizing or automating certain areas of our life, we can minimize the repetitive, unnecessary, and constant decision-making that plagues us. Research from Cambridge university suggests we make 35,000 decisions per day. The more we can streamline what we have to decide on a daily basis, and the more we can eliminate activities that don’t add value to our lives, the more we’ll free up bandwidth to do our highest quality work, access more flow, and be free to have the experiences in life that matter to us.

Quick Tips:

1. Identify your core activity values. These are usually activities linked to top-end broad goals people have like being prosperous, happy, and challenged. Aim to select five categories for activities that are in your top tier of value. An example could be: Work impact/success, spending time with family and friends, health and fitness, novel activities (travel, recreational sports), and learning. This is your list and whatever holds value to you should top your list, there is no right answer here.
2. Eliminate or minimize the rest.​ Once you have your core set of activities that you will prioritize, it’s time to minimize the rest. Things that are completely unnecessary and not enjoyable can just be eliminated cold turkey. For things that fall in the gray zone, start by limiting when you are allowed to do them. Online shopping for example can be done on Sunday afternoons only, rather than all throughout the week. Keep a notepad or notes section of your calendar during the week to write down ideas you don’t want to forget.
3. Set boundaries and rules to protect yourself. Now that you know what is most important and valuable, communicate your boundaries to prepare your friends, family, and colleagues with the potential that you will need to say, “No, thank you,” more often than in the past. Also, write down a few rules and guidelines for yourself as well to eliminate the cognitive load of those decisions and exceptions in the future. One example here may be that while working on big projects, you won’t be socializing on weeknights. This eliminates the decisions that need to be made for every invite and communicating this ahead of time may reduce the number of tempting invites in the first place.
4. Optimize your decision-making ability.​ Focus on making your biggest decisions earlier in the day when you are most mindful, and have rules in place for decisions that come up often. For example, commit to a consistent wake-up time, always take direct flights, maintain the same fasting window, pre-plan a fixed workout schedule, and determine your optimal work schedule such as hours per week, which days you work, where you work, etc.
5. Protect your cognition by protecting your health.​ Proactively set time aside in your calendar to take breaks, get exercise, meditate, and even have some time to be bored and unstimulated. Set up the needed parameters to get good sleep with a schedule and routine that supports this, such as disabling alerts and following a power-down ritual. It should also go without saying to eat healthy, engage in positive social interactions, and manage your stress levels.

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