This is Optimal Living Daily, episode 282, conserving mental energy by Steve Pavlina of StevePavlina.com. Get ready to maximize your potential with Optimal Living Daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week. Your Optimal life awaits. Now here's your host, Justin Mullick.
Hey, hey, hey, welcome to Optimal Living Daily, the vlogcast, podcast, and audio blog. Sometimes audio book but not today. Today I have a post from Steve Pavlina on productivity and mental energy. I love these kinds of posts.
But before we get into it, I do give away a book on the first of every single month to a random person on my mailing list. So if you're interested in that, just listen through to the end of the episode to hear how you can be a part of that. But for now, let's jump right into the post and start optimizing your life. Conserving mental energy by Steve Pavlina of StevePavlina.com.
In a vanity fair profile piece from 2012, writer Michael Lewis shared some of President Obama's productivity habits. One of those habits involved routinizing mundane daily decisions. Since Obama has to make many difficult, high-level decisions each day, he doesn't want to waste his mental energy on smaller decisions. So he puts the mundane choices on autopilot.
For instance, the article says that Obama only wears blue and gray suits. He keeps his wardrobe choices simple so he doesn't bleed off mental energy fussing over what to wear. Obama follows the same structured daily routine when he's in the White House. At 7 a.m., go to the gym and exercise for 45 minutes, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, glance through the newspapers, review the daily security briefing, and then head to the Oval Office.
In the evenings, his family goes to bed around 10 p.m., but he stays up till 1 a.m., working solo, including preparing for the next day. Much of his actual work involves making decisions. The easy decisions are made by others, so the ones that reach him are usually the tough ones. They're the types of decisions that don't have obvious correct answers.
Such decisions require careful thoughts and often involve difficult trade-offs and significant risk. Making these decisions is a key responsibility. To conserve his mental energy for thoughtfully considering options and making decisions, Obama does his best to avoid wasting this energy on low impact decisions like what to eat or what to wear. He either lets other people make those simple decisions for him, or he makes those decisions once and puts them on autopilot, so he doesn't have to think about them repeatedly.
How much mental energy do you use to wander on low priority decisions each day? Could you make those decisions once and put them on autopilot? Here's some examples of mundane decisions you can room nice. Sort your clothes into reasonable, predetermined outfits and wear them in the same order again and again.
When an outfit wears out, replace it with something virtually identical. Eat the same meals every day, such as having the same formula breakfast, lunch and dinner. This simplifies your shopping list too. Pay your bills on the same day each month.
Always listen to audiobooks or podcasts while driving, thereby putting some of your self-education on autopilot. Purchase new audiobooks once a month on the same day. Exercise every day at the same time and for the same duration. Run your errands at the same time on the same day each week.
Week day evenings are often great for shopping errands while most people are at home watching TV. Pick a brand of phones, computers or tablets that you'll stick with and decide in advance how often you'll upgrade. Only investigate and purchase a new model when your upgrade appointment appears on your calendar. Always repurchase the same soap, shampoo, deodorant, et cetera.
Do your dishes at the same time every day. Decide in advance how often you want to clean your home and in which order you should do the cleaning steps. Stick with that recurring appointment. Use the same hairdresser and get the same haircut you did before.
Always tip the same percentage. Begin each workday at the same time. I'm sure you can come up with plenty of other ideas along these lines as well. Now this may sound like a very boring, uncreative approach.
No argument there. That's the point. When you avoid investing your creative energy and low impact decisions, you free up that creative energy to be put to good use elsewhere. If you observe that you lack the drive and focus to consistently invest in high level creative work, one reason may be that you're wasting too much of your best creative energy on low level decisions like what to eat, what to wear and how to spend your time each day.
It's well established that your daily mental resources are limited and fitigable. Relative to other parts of your body, your brain is a resource hog. Parts of your brain tire easily. And as their fatigue level rises, your access to their associated mental resources diminishes significantly.
Some make sense to be conservative in your use of such resources. Runeize your mundane daily decisions so you can wisely invest more of your precious mental energy and your high impact goals and projects. Don't train your focus, concentration and creativity on small low impact choices. Hold yourself to a higher standard and adopt a more intelligent use of your mental resources.
You just listen to the post titled Conserving Mental Energy by Steve Pavlina of Steve Pavlina.com. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on. Superpower finally takes the guessing out of it. One simple lab test covers over 100 biomarkers and their app gives you a complete picture of your heart, liver, hormones, metabolism, even environmental toxins.
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I don't even think it's an argued thing really, but I'm a huge fan of limiting decision making on small things. I've heard others like Tim Ferriss talk about it too. You only have so much decision power and mental energy in the day. And every decision you make is taking away from that power.
So if you eliminate a lot of that wasted decision making, you can save that mental energy for more important things. And I tend to wear the same seven or so articles of clothing and I love it. It's so much easier if you get yourself to not feel self-conscious about it, you'll realize no one really cares or even notices. And now at the top of the show, I mentioned that I give away a book to a random person on my mailing list on the first of every month and it's gonna be more soon.
If you wanna be a part of that and also hear from me personally, often with pictures, and get some really useful spreadsheets and video tutorial, all this stuff for free, come by oldpodcast.com and enter your email address there, or you can just text the word optimal to the number 44222 for Fastaway to join. Either way works and once you're in, you'll get your digital downloads from me automatically and you'll be entered into those books every single month. And that's it for today. I will be back tomorrow with a minimalist Monday.
So I'll see you there where your optimal life awaits. Hey, this is Dan from the Optimal Finance Daily Podcast, which is a lot like this show, except more focused on personal finance. Justin hand picks the best posts he can find from blogs and authors like Remit Safety, Mr. Money Mustache and more, and I read them to you five days a week.
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