Is there, the thing that comes to my mind here is once people hear this, once they get that like brutal awareness of what's happening, it dwindles. Like it just goes away after they finish listening to this podcast or watching it. Is there a practice, a system, something you can do to keep that top of mind and make the most of your time? What

you're referring to is what I would say is probably the most dangerous drug that we have in our lives, which is the drug of dopamine from information gathering. Dopamine from information is a dangerous drug because it convinces you that the information gathering is the good thing. You get the dopamine hit from reading Atomic Habits and you say, oh, I'm good at habits now because I read Atomic Habits, but you haven't done anything. You haven't gone and actually acted on the information that you gathered. And so what I try to do throughout the entire book and through any idea that I'm sharing is hit you with the information, but then also on the back end immediately with the action. And so for this principle, you get hit with this realization. Understand that time is your most precious asset. You need to treat it as such. The first action I would take for anyone out there is to do what I think of and what I refer to as my energy calendar exercise. Take a Monday. You just went through a Monday. Color code your calendar according to whether an activity was energy creating, meaning it lifted you up, market green, energy neutral, market yellow, energy draining, actually made you feel physically, mark it red. Do that for a week. This coming week, do that. At the end of the week, zoom out and look at this. You will have a very clear visual picture of the types of activities that are creating energy in your world versus draining energy from it. Your goal as a human being is to spend more time on energy creators than energy drainers because your outcomes will follow your ability to do that. When you are leaning into things that are truly creating energy in your life, that you're feeling a pull towards, your outcomes go 10, 100x. When you're trying to spend time on things that are draining your energy, your outcomes are always going to be 1x. You're always going to have those one-to trades that are going to keep you on that life life treadmill that everyone wants you to stay on. Yes.

I

know people

in the audience or whoever's listening is asking this now. And it was something I was asking myself in a previous life is with those tasks that you mark as energy draining or the things that are kind of a, those things could be a necessity in your life right now. What can you do about those? How do you think about those? If there's something you have to do every day, what's your advice?

So there's a couple things I would say. First off, question the idea that you have to do anything. Just ask the question. I'm not saying it's going to change the answer, but question it a little bit because there are a lot of things that we default to saying, I have to do that, that if you really dig a little bit deeper, you can slightly change the way that you do it. I'll give you an example of that. In my previous life, I worked in finance. I worked an 80 to 100 hour a week finance job, very traditional. The first time I did this energy calendar, I was still working in that job. And I found that phone calls and Zoom meetings were the most energy draining thing in my life. And my calendar was filled with them every single day, tons of back-to 30 minute phone calls and Zooms. Very energy draining. I asked myself that question, do I really need to do these things in the current format that they exist in? And the answer was some of them, no. Some of them I was able to do while out on a walk. And it turns out that that slight adjustment of going from sitting at my desk doing a phone call or Zoom to going on a walk and doing it made them energy creating because I love being outside. I'm much more creative when I walk. Simple adjustment that took something from being energy draining to energy creating. That changed the outcomes. I was significantly more attentive on those calls. I was more present with the people. I was more thoughtful with them. The outcomes of those calls improved. So asking the question, does it truly need to exist in the current format where it is energy draining, is a helpful exercise because sometimes the answer is no, and you can make a slight adjustment that will change its energy profile in your life. The second thing, and the second layer I would say, is you are never going to remove energy creating tasks or energy draining tasks from your life. What you can do is batch them more effectively in your calendar. The thing about energy draining tasks that's particularly damning is that they have a tendency to bleed into the energy creators. So if you have a really fun podcast conversation that you're excited about, really creating energy, it's stacked with like four energy drainers in between on the other sides of it, you're going to experience the good thing as a lot more negative than it actually is. What you can do is try to batch those energy drainers into windows during the day where you're saying like, okay, my afternoons are going to suck. My Thursday afternoon is going to be my call day. I know I really don't like doing calls. It's energy draining for me, but I have to do them. So I'm going to batch all my calls into a Thursday afternoon, or I'm going to batch my email processing from four to 5 PM every single day. And that's going to be when I really crank. What you're doing when you make that shift is you're engaging what's called Parkinson's law. It's the idea that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. So if you give yourself four hours to do emails, you'll take four hours. If you condense it into a single hour block, you'll crank through the entire inbox in an hour. Leveraging that on your behalf to condense some of these energy drainers into shorter windows than you previously would have been comfortable with is a really good way to free up space and actually like breathe life into your calendar. Yes.

Uh, for the people. Okay. I think it's an amazing thing. I never did this one in my previous life where you're saying that we can reframe where the energy draining tasks can turn into energy creating tasks if we think about how to kind of alchemize those things or turn them into some do them in a different way for the tasks that people are trying to escape because a lot of my audience they're either young and they want to do something good in their future something that they enjoy doing in their future and what they're doing now it could be school it could be part-time job it could be whatever they're doing it seems like a common thing for a lot of people is like hey i'm not in this situation that i want to be in i want to talk about that where how do you cope with that when you're trying to change? Because I feel like a lot of people get trapped in their head and that prevents them from getting

out faster. The way that you escape the bad is by doubling down on more of the good. If you think about the actual path to getting out of the life that you don't like, it's not by like eject buttoning out of the bad life and then you go build the good life. It's you find a way to build the good life while you're still here. Then you hit the eject button on the bad part because you've already built the good. That is what I did, by the way. Like I had started sowing the seeds of this entire new world that I was building before I hit the eject button on the thing that was sucking the life out of me. That is really the common thread that you see among people who have changed their life. They find a way to create structure around building the good while they are still living the bad. If you can do that, you start creating evidence of your ability to live and build a life on the good, and then it becomes much easier and more comforting and you feel the security to hit eject on the bad life that you're living. Plus, you have more energy around that whole experience when you're working on the thing that's going to change your life alongside it. And so what I would say is for that person that feels stuck, that feels lost, that feels trapped in their current life, find a way to dedicate 30 minutes or 60 minutes a day to building the life that you actually want to live. And the pushback of saying, well, I don't have time for it. You have to decide what you want more. I recently had a conversation with a 27-year who was telling me that he was in this situation, working nine to five he hates, wants to go build something of his own, go create this life. And he said, I don't have time to go build that new thing. And I said, like, walk me through your day. And he walked me through his day. And basically, at the end of his day, he has this hour and a half hour block of like Netflix and chill effectively. And so I told him, why don't you take 30 minutes of that and deploy it into starting to build this new life that you're trying to build, you know, start working on the new thing. And he said, no, I can't. I need that time to unwind. And what I asked him and what I'll say now is, do you need to unwind more than you need to change your life? And I don't mean that to be harsh. I just mean it purely tactically. You have to decide if you are willing to do the hard thing necessary to go and create the change that you want to create. That is going to require pain and struggle. You are going to have to do the hard thing now that you don't want to do to get to the other side of this. That is going to require you to endure the pain of not having the amount of time that you want to unwind. It's a sacrifice necessary. You have to create that structure in your life where you currently are in order to build that life you want that exists on the other side of it.