#002 - Life Hacks 101

Speaking of which, Yusuf and Johnny from Prokin Fitness are here today. I was smelling my armpits. It's fine, that's really not the worst thing you've ever done on a podcast, is it? So yeah, we're talking about life hacks today.

Those of us who are addicted to trying to make our lives more efficient and optimal. We're going to try and come up with some interesting resources that we use that have made our lives a little bit more efficient. And then at a certain point in the day later, you go in bulk and take all of those things into capture and allocate them to a specific time in your calendar. So that's David Allen's Getting Things Done, right?

Just get it down on paper as fast as possible. Yeah, exactly. Just get it out of your head. Don't let your mind hold these ideas.

Because often what happens is you've got something and you think, Oh, I need to fix that nail in the fence, which is this example. And then for the rest of the day, even if you forget what the thing you have to do is, you've still got this general stress thought of, I need to do the thing. I remember there's something I've got to do. Something that's left, yeah.

And then you're having a terrible time. So I agree. Yeah, I think Apple products are fantastic. Like being able to sync just stuff like your notes, making a note on your phone and then appearing on your laptop.

I think 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the phones were the thing, but that syncing also wasn't a thing. And then when you do, when you first get, it's just such a game changer. I don't understand why people don't do it. I mean, iMessage, WhatsApp web.

You know what I mean? iMessage on your laptop is probably one of the biggest shifts in instant shifting quality of life. How much do you text on your phone? Hardly ever.

Hardly ever. Because I'm on my laptop. Well, because you're on your laptop a lot. Yeah.

Well, yeah. I don't want to restart the search every single text message. Better open my laptop. This is a laptop.

But yeah, that is what I do. I'm like my big area plan is to two huge apps. So I'll just like not dexterous enough. I just don't bother with texting on my phone.

You need the accessibility mode that my dad's on the verge of needing. Oh, is that why they have big numbers? I love it when I see people with big numbers. It's like the center for funny calculators.

I know. It's got the keypad entry system from a Nokia 3310, which does something that's worth a thousand pounds. Right, Johnny, what's next? Well, it's Apple was technically money.

The problem with Apple is it's to really cover all of the things it does for you. You almost have to think about this for an entire day because there's so much stuff. Like even even things like do not disturb mode, for example, note syncing, the availability of like so many different apps can be on your phone and on your laptop. Evernote, meditation apps.

Like I could run, we can run propane. I know you can't because you've literally moved things. But if I had to, I could run the entire business from my phone. But I do.

I run my business from my phone pretty much. The necessity for me to go on my laptop is very, very rare, really rare. So why do you have a laptop? It's more convenient.

I can work quicker. Typing is significantly quicker. I don't like the angle that my neck's at when I look at my phone. Like, yeah, you're hunched over it.

Relevant when you're sat at a desk, it's not good. And I found that what's this on the back of my neck? What are these muscles here? Traps.

Is that traps that run up to the back of your skull? Right. Okay. So I found that my traps are getting looser at the top, but my SCD and SCM, which is what runs on the front of your neck, is getting tighter.

And I'm absolutely adamant that a lot of that is due to spending time with my head tilted forward looking at my phone. For neck. Yeah, for sure. Because naturally with a laptop, your eye level is brought up a little bit.

I think those problems, like, more probably, most of us use a mouse, but people still sit and slouch and sit with you. Have their shoulders forward. Posture. Yeah, posture 101.

Google it. It's really good. I'm surprised you didn't just call it a bit.ly link. Right.

Come on now. I'm absolutely with you. So I'm told Google GLs are all safe, though, is that right? Yeah.

What's first up for you, then? I'm going to say the theme or the concept which encovers loads of things, but the concept of having a series of things that you do in order every morning before you do anything. What is the idea? A morning routine.

Yeah, but it doesn't have to be, like, it might just be one thing. I think for me, rather than just saying I have a routine of things that I do, it's specifically, like, because in the morning I'm so open to, I'll pick up, like, half asleep, you're making coffee, you pick up your phone, check email before you know it, you've been sucked into this situation at work or whatever. If I just make things as baby simple as possible for myself. Okay, so give me a morning routine.

So, okay, wake up, downstairs, coffee, journal. Phone's still upstairs. Phone's actually with me. Right.

So I'm trying to put less, like, physical barriers and just, I'm just not going to look at it. Journal, do the work, meditate, downstairs, make my girlfriend a cup of tea, make me potentially another coffee depending on how I feel. Back upstairs, roll my yoga mat out in the bedroom while Becca's getting ready. Mobility.

Do ROMWOD, shower, downstairs. What's ROMWOD, Johnny? That's mine. This is why it comes to so many things.

Prioritize with it, start with it. Okay, so your concept that you think that everyone should be doing is having a morning routine. Like a launch sequence for the day. I think, how do you briefly, in 60 seconds, how do you design one if you don't have, if you don't have to be mobile, if you don't have to run your own business, so you don't have to do, but if how do you just get up and get your day going quickly?

I think trying to not find a point where you get stuck in inertia is a big one. And the phone is probably the worst for that, and the TV is probably up there as well. I think things that make you feel organized and productive. Like I feel so, it's all, half of it may even be placebo, but if I've done those things by the time I'm, like, sat working, my mind's not thinking, like, oh, I said I was gonna, blah, blah, blah, this morning, like I said I was gonna meditate or something bothering me because I kind of dealt with that first.

So I try and get out of my own way mentally before doing things that require me to sit and focus and be disciplined. I think that you can quite easily work out what it is that you need to do in the morning. It's less about the things you need to do and more about the things that you shouldn't be doing, as far as I'm concerned. There's certain things that you can do in the morning that will make you feel better, but there's a lot of things that you can do in the morning which will make you feel a lot worse.

Like if you, there's so many people, so many of my friends that I know that will get up in the morning and they'll spend 45 minutes cycling around all of the apps on their phone, clearing off all of the notifications from the day before, like purely from a time efficiency perspective, as soon as you're traveling to wherever you need to go, you can do that then, presuming you're not driving. And therefore you're doing two things at once as opposed to one thing at once. Such a good point. I think if you compare the worst case scenario morning where you wake up and suddenly your agenda that you were planning to do in the day gets absolutely sidelined by all of the, whether it's the urgent but not important stuff that comes up and you end up, yeah, citing through the apps or just completely, and then two hours later you're like, well, I had plans for the day.

I've got nothing done that I needed to. I'm pretty certain we could do a full episode on morning routine and journaling. It's a big part of what I think all three of us rely upon to get our days moving correctly. And I know that it's a keystone habit for me if I have a good morning, the likelihood of me having a good day is by a factor of 10 more likely.

So if you wanted to do one on morning routine, drop us a message or give me a tweet or something. We'll put that together. I think as a little bit of a finishing point for that, the phone thing, it just comes back to it. We will be doing a number of episodes on how to not use your phone.

But the main, the best thing that I've done is I don't sleep with my phone next to me anymore. My phone is on the opposite side of the room next to the window. So I think when you go and turn my phone alarm off, I have to get up and out of bed, go turn it off at the window, then pull the blind in the window to let light into my room. And then even if I get back to bed, I can't go bothering you, and it will do a meta search for everything else and then come up with a routine that he thinks is good for your selection routines.

And yeah, I think when I started doing CrossFit, which is functionally a more demanding sport in terms of my range of motion, my mobility is still not good enough, but it was terrible from years of not looking after it. And now, if you can imagine the stretch that you do that you used to be able to do where you put your hands, one hand goes up and behind your neck and the other hand goes up your back, and I was never able to get my hands to touch behind my back, whereas now, quite easily from cold, I can fall into it. If you're just listening, you'll have to imagine how lovely that looked. But you can do it.

Can you do it with your arms? I'll do this one. Straight in. Nice.

You were miles away, right? And I still can't do is eagle arms. Yeah, I think that's because of the dimensions of it. But I'll put it into a play queue with either a read queue or a play queue.

This is done through Toby, which is Chrome browser extension. You then can split things into libraries of things to watch, things to listen to, things to read. You can then, if you want to, allocate them on the top of the bottom as to different varying grades of procrastination. Either it's full bait, like really procrastination, really procrast, full frustration, or productive on the top.

I didn't understand. You installed Toby on my laptop and I still didn't understand what it was until the other day. Toby is basically, it's kind of like a bookmark manager. So it's a combination between a bookmark manager and a reading list that is displayed nicely and visually on a new tab page.

So every time you open, every time you command T a new tab open on Chrome, you see the things that you potentially should be doing or some of the things that you can do to stop yourself from doing the things you should be doing. Yeah, exactly. So the purpose of that is that you've captured and you've eliminated the decision of what should I read, what should I watch, whatever. If you sit down, you've taken that micro decision out of every moment and you just have it there.

You have a queue that's ready. It's getting out of the head. It's the brain. The brain isn't tremendously good at remembering things.

It's good at decision making and doing. So it doesn't want to have to store the reminder of the memory of this is why, like, what should I be doing? It's get it in front of you, get it out and crack on. Totally.

And the other, sorry. How do you, so you talked about capture. Yeah. How does it go from, so Chris sends you a funny cat video.

How does that end up in Toby? So copy the link, add it into Toby. Okay, so that part's, you haven't got anything. Just manually collect, automatically collecting things in your work.

So I have with some things where if I'm listening to, actually, this is kind of the next stage. So, so you have the capture. It also means that it minimizes your procrastination. You're not going to be just randomly surfing the internet because you've got a list of things that are vetted and you want to be reading or listening or watching.

So lectures, audiobooks, that kind of thing is what I'm into. As I, so Toby is for stuff on browsers. MP3 audiobook player is something that isn't phone app that That sounds really snide. It is very snide.

But that's why it works. Yeah, it works very well. There's many MP3 audiobooks you can get or YouTube has a huge number of audiobooks for free. And if you use YouTube to MP3 converter, you can download them into an MP3, put it on your phone.

When you play, it'll store your spot. And there's also a sleep timer. You can adjust the speed as well. So it's a full.

It's a lot like Audible. It's not really Audible for when you've downloaded it yourself. Exactly. It's not really audible.

And I use Audible too, so, which is excellent. So. Is there anything on this not on Audible that you can get on MP3? Yes, there's a number of things that you can't get.

Audible's only got 200,000 titles. I'm aware that they're the main 200,000. Anyone who's releasing a book now is releasing on Audible as well. But 200,000 titles in the entirety of our literacy history history is not tremendously comprehensive, is it?

I would just would have thought the limitation for that is that they aren't in audiobook rather than they aren't in audio combination. So the reason I got Audible is for the modern titles that are harder to get through. YouTube will tend to have classics. So if you want to listen to like Aldous Huxley or, you know, any kind of old novels or anything like that, there will be some old school British man reading it out on there.

So you've got Toby for capture. Toby for capture. What's up next, Johnny? What's your next one?

Oh, wow. Where do you get Toby? Is it just Google like Toby Chrome extension? Yeah, exactly.

I had a really good one a second ago. I'll link it to that, which is just something that I decided to do. What was the thing I was going to say? But so with capture and the David Allen thing.

There's definitely. And this, this applies to anyone. I think you have stuff that is just accumulating in your life every day, all the time. Someone says something to you message pops up email, whatever stuff to do.

And I think like as much as we'd all like to always have something there to capture and write down, we don't always have that. So there's a, there's two things. There's a PDF and there's a podcast that David Allen's done, which is a guided brain. Guided mind sweep.

There's a podcast of him literally just talking and he goes through things. He's like, okay, professional life. Think about things that were said to you yesterday. Look at your calendar over the last week.

This sounds weird, but if you sit with a bit of paper, like a black document and just listen, the stuff that comes out of your head, like, like something that someone said to me 10 days ago that I would completely. The sort of thing that you just sat watching TV and suddenly goes, Oh God, damn it. Prevents that. I think a lot of the time when I'm meditating, I'll sit down and meditate and I'll have an idea that will come to me or a memory of something that I need to do for later in the day.

And it's that silencing of the amount of stimulus that we've got going on. So suddenly you're front of mind and you go, fuck. And then once I finish meditating, it's there. It is still there.

And I think spending a little bit of time with a bit of silence or actually rechecking through the last few days of inputs is probably a pretty good idea. If you don't get that stuff out of your head, it does create this background. Definitely. It just accumulates.

It's just, there's something that I need to do, but I can't remember what it is. It's just a, it's just a chronic version of that. So doing, doing that like a couple of times a week, I think just really helps. Where can people find that?

If you search David Allen, Google David Allen guided mind sweep. There's a, there's literally, there's a PDF that I've got saved on my desktop. You just look down the list of things and you're like, fuck. And it makes you feel so basic because you're like, that's obviously just sat in my subconscious ready to, ready to pop up at some point.

But it just needed triggering. Okay. Next up, I'm going to do optimize. Hey guys.

So optimize.me is a website by a guy called Brian Johnson, who is not the lead singer of ACDC. He might be. Well, he might be. I'm pretty certain he's not unless he's leading an outlandish double life as a bald American guy that's a life coach and also a from the rocker from Newcastle.

So it's a website where he summarises books and concepts. There's so much. I think he's taught 500 book summaries now. Yeah, there's a lot.

His intention is to do a thousand. That's his goal to do a thousand. He's done 500. A lot of them are nonfiction, self-help, personal development, spirituality, but it goes full range of topics.

He's done ones on breath methods, endurance running, bodybuilding, a lot of stuff like all the classics in terms of personal development. David Allen's books on there. We've been talking about how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie. So you get masterclasses as well, isn't he?

That's what's really good. I think Johnny, that when you were on Optimize, that's what you liked. So if you can imagine that this guy is doing around about every week to every five days, is releasing a book summary, and then around about every month to every two months, he will compile around 10 key concepts within a field, and he'll then release a masterclass. So if you can imagine that he skims the top filtering of the best stuff out of each book and then skims the top filtering of each book into a concept, and that is what creates the masterclass.

So if you're the sort of person who maybe struggles to read or sit themselves into a book for an extended period of time, which was me, is me still, was me specifically a year and a bit ago and still is me now, this is really, really useful because you just get the key take-home points with some really, really good examples. So I'll go through 10 key lessons within a particular concept, usually from 10 separate books, maybe a couple that don't cross over. So let's say reading 101, nutrition 101, sleeping 101, depression 101, how to make a habit, anxiety, everything, and all of this stuff is backed by whichever book he's been in. So you get the best of the best displayed in maybe a 90-minute either MP3 or a video.

And the amount of resources that you get with it is really impressive. There's a workbook that's attached with each masterclass. There's a poster that comes that's attached with each book. You can either read a blog version of most of the book summaries, which is the transcript from the audio version.

There's also a video version. There's a mobile partner app which saves your position that you have if you're doing it on desktop. The desktop thing's really good. It really is a pretty powerful and overwhelming resource once you get into it.

I do feel like his demeanour is probably a bit testing at times and that might be one of the mitigating factors in why you stopped doing it. I'm not too sure. Yeah, I think his... So a lot of the books that he covered are not really of interest to me.

He's started... Recently, he's done every single one of the Harry Potters. Right. Really?

That's interesting. That's not the sort of thing I want to read a summary of. Is it? Maybe it is.

Obviously, it is. I'm not sure, but I think there's a lot of very niche diet books that he was covering. Yep. Like...

The belief system. Yeah, and like things about move your DNA and all this sort of thing. I get why he's doing that, but it's just not interesting to me. And then I found that a lot of the masterclasses...

So this is going to be my next one. But there's a lot of tidal waves of information. It's terrible. Like you watch a masterclass and you're like, fucking hell, like it's going to take me a month to just apply all of that.

To disseminate 90 minutes. And it's like there almost needs to be a syllabus and a curriculum to say if you want to actually do stuff with it. It's like a three-year course, isn't it, realistically? This is...

We come back to watching things on multiple times speed, which is... We can go through that. Well, my point about Brian Johnson, which is also my next thing, which is that I signed up for Optimize as well. I think we've all got an account at one point.

We all have accounts. Absolutely. His demeanor is a bit difficult and the masterclasses is too much of a wave of information. And that's...

For you to say that. For you to say that there's too much information. I've made it my business over the last five years to assimilate large amounts of information. Well, not by choice.

So for anyone who doesn't know... It's literally your business. I am a medical student and people describe studying medicine like drinking from a firehose. So the goal is to try and just catch as much as you can and it's very stressful.

But yeah, the problem is every book that is summarised, we have to remember that somebody's life work, somebody's life research project or whatever. And he's trying to... That's why he's put in 10 of them into an hour and a half. That's 45 minutes.

And there'll be like 11 points that each have four or five books to support. So what happens is you don't get the time and attention, you don't get the time and exposure when you're listening to summaries to really fully assimilate the information and integrate into your life. And that was the... It's great because you're hearing, oh wow, these are all fantastic ideas, but it's...

If you get stuck in that, it's just quite masturbatory because you're not really... It's just a bunch of like inspiring self-help stuff. It turns into cliche sayings and headline concepts rather than understood, applicable habits and changes, isn't it? Exactly.

And that's interesting. So what's up next? So my workflow to solve that is I've gone back to listening to full audiobooks, giving myself full-time under exposure. I'm not doing two times speed as much or three times.

You're going to have to explain why you were even doing that in the first place. Just simply the mindless acquisition of efficiency and cramming more information in one. So if you natively has a speed up speed, right? Yeah, but I've got a little hack for that as well, which moves it up to four times speed, but I'm...

What do you mean you listen to four times speed? Can you actually understand it? It depends on the speaker. Some people...

But a normal cadence... Could you understand anyone at four times speed? Only non-technical information. When you start learning like physiology of urination and you're listening to it at four times speed, you're like, hang on, I'm just going to have to listen to it four times on four times speed.

So what's the point? It's imagining that you sat in your room... Anyway. The slow realisation.

Being beaten by urination. The flatmates would always like, they'd come in and just hear like... And then we'd take the space... Verbal diarrhoea.

So it's flattened down. Yeah. Audiobooks. And then take notes and summaries as I go along, just in a little Apple Notes file on my phone or whatever.

Just some of the key points. Put that into an Evernote file and then set a reminder through Evernote, which gives you an option to set notes to have a date to remind you when to send you an email and a push notification to then be the review. And so then you can take the actual points that you've taken in context and you've learned in a bit more of a structured skeleton and then try and action them individually. And once you've done that, you clear the reminder and move on to the next thing.

And I think Johnny is the best person I've ever seen at just implementing information. I just mindlessly index information. I've got hundreds of book summaries, hundreds of stuff that I've summarised. I've never seen anyone's collection of work that they've done themselves.

That is so vast. It's crazy. It's vast. And it's helpful that sometimes, you know, with Q&A with my clients, for example, I very often...

I can't think of many times where I've not had an answer for a question that the client has asked me because of the... Such a broad field to draw from. Yeah, which is helpful. How many notes?

So I've got 2,300 notes on Evernote. How many notebooks? Let's see. You might as well do Evernote straight after this.

Just let it flow into Evernote because if anyone doesn't know how Evernote works, they're going to be confused. It's an external brain. It's a prosthetic brain. It's the USB drive for your thoughts, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. 58 notebooks, 2,345 notes. How would you feel in a single word, if you can, if Evernote went down forever? It has in the past, so you have to take backups.

Okay, so let's say in one irreversible... loss of your backups and all of them. I'll just have to start again. How would you feel?

It's the same way as like your house burning down. Like, the thing is... Would you rather your house burned down or your Evernote? That's a tough question.

It really is. I think when you and I travel together and we both have our laptops with us, I don't know anyone else who feels like I won't leave a laptop in a car or like carrying my backpack with my laptop in. You're worse than me. And it's because there's all of Evernote in there as well.

Luckily, Evernote is backed up by Sync.com. Right, take us through. Do 120 seconds on what Evernote is. Okay.

Evernote is a way to... It's a word processor, but also a way to index any of those documents into folders, subfolders, tags. You can find any of those notes in very quickly. The search function is very powerful.

So most people have been exposed to notes on iPhone or whatever the equivalent is on Android. And it's a very, very, very effective What was it? It was 23. And you just shout, is it 0 or 23?

You shouted, um, tomorrow, probably, because that's because that's when you, you convert the numbers to syllables, which, but anyway, do you ever feel like you're on Rahema? Like on conveyance. Well, the number was tomorrow, but allowed me to with the, but that's the different system, that's a bit more upfront learning investment. Just explain as a concept, that's your framework.

Okay. And then a bun becomes a lamp. What's the reason for attaching something visual to it? Because memory works on resonance.

Um, whereas we think it works on just sheer attrition or like repetition. Like even repetition, even stuff that you think you learn in isolated facts is always hooked onto some existing thing within your structure of your brain. So the way that you have like electrical circuit, um, resonance. So you have like a guitar string.

If you play a frequency, that's the same frequency as that, the guitar string starts to vibrate as well. So you need the existing thing in your brain and then the trigger to go and retrieve that. Okay. So just a more efficient way of finding what it is that you're looking for.

Now you already have the numbers 1 to 10 in your mind and you already have the ability to rhyme in your mind. So 1 and 1. That's conceptual. That's yeah, that's conceptual.

You can generate that at any time. Whereas you, you want the trigger to find out what the object one was. And so you say, okay, 1, bun, that's the, the hook, that's the retrieval system. And then that will resonate with the image that you created.

Of the lamp. With the lamp and then that comes back and completes the circuit. Okay, so that's, okay, so that's, you have 10 things. You want to remember 10 things.

That's the framework you use. Yeah. Do you always use bun for 1? I don't use that system.

That's just like, that's the basic. That's the entry, that's the entry level one. Once you've, once you've got your fourth and degree blackout, you actually forget the numbers altogether. Well, location is a good way to do it.

So you'd remember, you think of a room that you know. So you come into the room, you walk clockwise around the room, identify 20 objects within the room. The first object has, identify five pieces within the object. So like, let's say it's a laptop.

You think like the top bit, the camera, the screen, the keyboard, the trackpad, and the USB port. So those are the different objects. You then zoom in, you attach another object to each of them and you create a chain for each part of the object. So then one object has the capacity for 125 bits of information.

And so that's one object within a room of 20 objects. So then one room has 125 times 20. Quite a lot. Capacity for bits of data.

Can you tell us about the time that you went into the gym with your ballet doll? Just to bring everything back down. I had some of the shorts that doesn't really have a proper fly. So it's very easy to just slip out.

And so I walked into the big crowded room in the gym. I was in there for a good 10 minutes and then I realised that I had to come out to play. It's a problem. Now I'm on the sex offender's register.

That's not really a life hack, was it? I'm not really good. Luckily, you're fine. Just because you would have had to have notified us before the podcast began.

Because you're both vulnerable adults that you interact with. Absolutely. At Rag Johnny you're up on sex. So again, related to consuming media.

I see all the time, and I nearly did this for myself. People setting a goal, which is like, I'm going to read this many books this year. Or I'm going to do this many whatever. Consume this amount of information.

And I think something that I, a question that I used to have, which is related to what you were just saying, is like, read this book, you take these notes. And I'm like, what do you do with those notes or what's the point of that unless you're reading it in some way? Like unless the book is in and of itself just a pleasure read. Like most people read self-help books because they want help with something to do with themselves.

So not having a way to apply that was something that I struggled with for a long time. So the way that I changed reading is something related to something that I got from a guy called Garrett Wright, which I'll talk about in the next round. But it's simply just reading to the point of having what he calls a revelation, which is just something, and you have this all the time, you read or consume information of something that for whatever reason, maybe it has an impact on you, resonates with you, makes you then like triggers a chain of thoughts, you raise it to that thing. And then once that happens, once it might take two minutes, might take 40 minutes, stop reading, go to Evernote and I have notebooks for themes.

So like discipline training mindset. Exactly. And in each of those notebooks or each of those notes is just a series of pieces of information. I write down the thing that I heard in bold and then just a few notes in my own words beneath that.

And then I'll put if there's something associated with it, usually there's an action associated with it. Like, for example, today it was change some change the about page on brokenfitness.com related to a podcast that's completely unrelated to marketing anyway. But that then goes in my Trello. So I add it to my Apple reminders, which is synced with if this and that through Trello.

And then I know that I have a process in the morning when I prioritise my day that I'll at some point get through that. We're still talking about getting things out of my head again, though. It's the same thing, but it's a way of making sure that things that I put into my head actually stay stuck in there. Absolutely.

And what was interesting, did you see the Tim Ferriss thing? I think it was what he did last week. And he talked about how he deals with information overload. And one of the things that he says, he uses his tagline, the good shit sticks.

And it's like, you do consume a lot of information if you're in any way inclined to reading a lot or chasing down the sort of self-help rabbit hole, so to speak, as I guess we are, that you do end up becoming so overwhelmed with information that you can't pull it back out. And you worry, well, I've read this book and it was a thousand words, a thousand pages long. And I think, oh, God, what have I got out of the other side of this? And Tim Ferriss's piece of advice was, if it's not, if you read all of those pages and nothing comes out of the other side of it, then don't worry.

And if you read one book and you get 10 concepts out of it, then that's fine because the good shit sticks. I think that's a really like, I really agree with him. I think the only part of it that I disagree with, and this might just be visibility or my inability, is there's definitely notes that I've made on previous books and I look back over them and I'm like, oh, I've forgotten them. And so what I'm trying, what I'm trying to do is just, by the time I finish a book, I've either already applied everything that I've learned from that book in some way, or I have, you know, at some point in the next couple of months, it will be applied.

I'd far rather have like one book a year that's totally improved one part of my life, like relationships, productivity, whatever, sleep, whatever, than have 10 books that I forget about. That's an important thing, like making this balance between acquisition of information and application. And some people are too far one way, some people too far the other way. I'm too far in the acquisition, not in application.

Some people read a book every five years and so maybe they need to. Let's do a full round. We'll do a final round for this episode and we will do a full round on the most basic one that you can think of. So my most basic one to get started would be prepping your food.

Okay. And it's something that not everybody does, but the benefits of prepping your food are so ridiculously large from an economic perspective, from a time perspective, from a dietary control perspective, from a mood perspective. If you get up in the morning and instead of eating your breakfast whilst watching the TV, the time that it takes you to eat your breakfast, I promise you, if you have a coffee, wait for the coffee to cool and have a normal size breakfast that doesn't take too much cooking, you'll be able to wash up yesterday's washing up, cook your food for the day and pack it by the time you've eaten your breakfast and had your coffee. It takes about half an hour to 40 minutes or so.

And by that time, you've done two things that you needed to do on the morning, but one of them will benefit you for the entire rest of the day. So batch cook your food together. Make sure that you've got chicken defrosted in the morning or you've got your meat for the day. You've got some sort of carb source, potatoes or whatever it might be, and then throw some vegetables in and you can just boil everything away while you're thinking about your day and you're cooking your food.

I really admire how consistent you are with that. It's just habit. It's just force of habit for me now. And it's been so drilled into me that when I see people, some Like, I forgot how many.

Coffee current number scales syncs wirelessly with the cloud, phone, it's just logged and graphed and things. So this is a Withings. Withings, I think they're now owned by Nokia. Yeah, yeah.

You used to have got one for free. That's just top it from the theme. Oh, I've got the Withings suite for free. So the suite you had as well?

The watch. Yeah, you got the watch off me. It's an active, I suppose the watch isn't active in tracking. So that's the next thing, which is Fitbit or some kind of fitness watch.

Mine, that I'm currently wearing doesn't tell the time, but just, it's just accumulating data on me, just in case I need it. So sleep activity, basically. That's a watch that doesn't tell the time. It's, yeah, yeah.

And actually, it's really late. So the watch that does the fitness watch made by Fitbit that doesn't tell the time is actually the cheapest and the best one. Because you can wear it in the shower. Can you?

You can. Do you like to know what you're doing in the shower? That means about, so the time that I used to, it doesn't track heart rate. The time sex doesn't do anything.

The time that I used to forget to put my Fitbit back on again was always in the shower in the morning. Do you find that the number of steps that you take is an important part of your training as a power lifter? Yes. Is that because that's the only cardio that you do?

It's an easy way, it's an easy way to average out and say right, I'm doing 8,000 steps. If I do 12,000. So it was crazy. On the next episode, the first one that I will do will be something called Sleep Cycle and the data that I get out the other side of that is insane.

And I have a look at a graph that shows as soon as I break 8,500 steps in a day, my sleep increases by 10% or more. That's cool. Crazy. Thank you very much for your time and we'll be back very shortly with a new episode.