Why cold-time is not a friend of yours? # Issue 29
Good morning folks,
Whist reading Motivational Myth by Jeff Haden - I came across an interesting point 'Obsess about leveraging your "edge" time', which expressed that we should identify downtime within the scope of our day and then schedule in productive activities. Hence, the name 'productive edge'.
This was a starting point for which I cascaded into thinking about cold-time VS hot-time within my own day.
Let's provide definitions for clarification.
Cold-time - time that could be used to accommodate a productive activity. This could be reading, writing or a hobby that you enjoy practising.
Hot-time - time that has already been scheduled to carry out productivity activities.
I've fervently believed that time is a valuable commodity that should not be wasted. To view our cold-time as optionality is ignorant and hypocritical. We often find ourselves in the following situations that are defaulted for most of us and these cold-time includes:
Lunchtime hour - How do you spend your lunch hour?
Driving back and forth from work - Do you listen to podcasts or audible?
Sitting at the airport - How do you spend your time during a layover?
Let me know how have you spent your cold-time
The optionality to choose cold-time and convert it into a hot-time can be viewed by exercising what you enjoy doing. This could include reading an article during your lunchtime or listening to your favourite book whilst going back and to from work.
Often within the scope of the day, we have chunks of 15-minute, which we often unconsciously allocate to our screens in consumption of non-essential activities that add no value. Or spend hours going through the mindless motion of scrolling on our social media like TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram. Trust me I'm calling this out because I've practised this. And, at times I've spent hours looking through the crap that adds no value to my growth. All this cold-time wasted doing non-essential things.
Even as I'm writing this newsletter - I spent the last hour just watching Logan Paul's YouTube video.
With this realisation and the importance of converting my cold-time into hot-time. Here's what I propose:
Lunch hour - make it your default hour to practice a default activity. I use this hour to accomplish my writing or scripting for my YouTube videos.
Driving back and forth from work - I've built into myself the habit to listen to non-fiction books on audible or a podcast on Castro.
My 15 minutes chunks are now spent learning music theory because learning to play the piano is something I enjoy.
Well, that's all for this week. I'll catch you next week.
Abhishek
P.S. Visit my home on the internet: 🏡 abhisheknair.org
Snippet of Value
Article - Measure: a mental model for decision-making, making a decision should either be based on magnitude or measure. A decision made based on magnitude is counterintuitive because it doesn't account for the measurable value of the item. Here are a few examples that I could highlight buying an iMac is based on the grounds of its measurable value because it will last me a while, and can help me edit videos with its in-built software program.
Podcast - Transformative Principal / Jethro Jones, Be driven in what you're focused on - your path to mastery should be driven by your internal pursuit. Don't sit around and waste your time. And, often this is achieved by focusing on a problem that needs to be solved. And, that's how you push yourself to fall in love with mastering that problem.
Book I’m excited to start reading is - The effective executive by Peter Drucker.
Podcast - Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy (#473), Tim mentioned a tweet that was written by Naval - “How effective we would be if we weren’t anxious anymore”- human beings are anxious mammals. We waste so much energy through anxiety. To live in a state of calmness is like a superpower. So take the mental responsibility to guide our mental state. This is achieved through self-examination and the basic form of it is meditation or going for a walk. Because an unexamined life is like living with the problem and that’s why we either dislike or are impatient about practising meditations.
Share your favourite snippet 🙂
Kindle Highlight
I like to work while the world is sleeping, and share while the world is at work.
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