The clever man may work smarter, not harder, they say.
But the creative man doesn't work at all.
To me, it's a shame that the average American has equated over work with a status symbol.
Or worse, they use it as a way to escape their responsibilities.
Because if you were serious about your work, you would optimize for creativity, not productivity.
You would go on walks.
You would train. You would exercise.
You would eat well.
You would do all of the things that lead to a quality mind that leads to quality work.
You would get enough sleep.
You would socialize.
You would push your limits in calculated ways.
You would understand that four hours of focused work, when done correctly, leads to much more results than twelve hours of scattered work.
The problem here is with a concept that I've talked about before called conceptual survival.
It's the fact that animals try to reproduce the information that's in their genes, right?
They try to reproduce physically.
Humans, on the other hand, they also do that, but we also try to reproduce the information in our consciousness.
In other words, we try to survive and reproduce on the conceptual level.
We try to reproduce our identity, our mental body.
And now understand that this is just a concept, a metaphor for understanding what is happening in your mind, because we write books to become immortal, in a sense, because we're impregnating other people with the ideas that we distribute and hope to catch fire and live on in someone else's mind.
We argue with others when they disagree with our political beliefs, and you feel that threat response when someone tells you something the political season just passed, and it's probably going to ramp up again soon, and you're probably not going to be in control of your emotions because you're not aware of how
your identity is trying to reproduce and survive by feeling threatened by the people that are challenging your beliefs so you feel as if you have to mentally attack them to win that game.
So what does this have to do with work or productivity at all?
Well, when overwork or working too much becomes your identity, often through unconscious repetition toward a goal you were assigned by society, then you constantly feel anxious when you think that you aren't being productive enough, that anxiety is your mental body trying to survive by getting you to
work more. But most people get productivity wrong.
They may not explicitly say this, but their actions show it.
They think productivity is about quantity, not quality.
They think that all hours of the day are equal, and they are the same person in the last four hours of the day as they are in the first four.
They think productivity is about working on all things, not the one thing that brings all of the results.
They fail to separate tasks from levers.
They fail to realize that person A can work twelve hours a day and make fifty thousand dollars a year, while person B can work one hour a day and make five million.
The difference is skill, leverage, and understanding.
Not how hard, long, or organized you work.
And the excuses that pop up here are, of course, your mind, again, trying to protect and reproduce its identity from the ideas that you've been conditioned to believe.
And so it spits out excuses of, like, oh, well, the person making five million working one hour a day can do all of it because of this, this, and this, and this, and they definitely started out there.
They started out making five million doing one hour of work a day.
Yeah, they started out doing that.
They didn't start out as a baby who then learned how to speak English or whatever language they speak and then evolved to where they are now.
They didn't go through a conditioning process that led to where they are because the life they live and the results they have can be replicated.
Maybe not exactly, but there is a sequence of actions you can take.
And that depends on the variation in selection ability of your mind, your ability to discover ideas within an unknown area, and then your ability to navigate between there in trial and error, eliminate ideas until you can select the right one that leads to the best results.
But you don't have a goal that you assign yourself.
So you're kind of navigating off in this direction when you should be heading in this direction.
So things are all fucked up.
But the secret and the thing we can start with is how to design a creative lifestyle.
So here's what we'll talk about in this video, why the quality of your ideas matter more than ever as AI fear increases, the four modules of a creative life and the template to plan your week, the routines of famous creatives and how Charles Darwin changed the world with minimal work, my personal routine,
why I do it, and how to create your own.
And with that said, this video is for those who want leverage.
This is not for those who are set on some more traditional style of work.
I'm not here to convince you to go my route, I'm just stating who this video is for and who will benefit the most from it.
If your mind isn't open to this kind of stuff, then you're probably not going to benefit from it.
The quality of your work depends on the quality of your ideas.
Therefore, the future of productivity is creativity.
And as the economy continues to bias creators and founders who leverage AI and technology, the way we work is changing.
Anyone can type chat GPT into their browser and have it spit out a book, newsletter, marketing asset, piece of art, code for a to -do app, or legal document.
And yet, there aren't a million bestseller quality books or production level software.
Work has become easier, but the fact that most people lack agency remains.
If people weren't already motivated to build their own thing in the past ten years, they're still not going to be, and they may be taken advantage of by those who are.
There's a major lesson here where I'm going to be going over my thoughts on this whole AGI and AI thing.
If you're not on Twitter or you're just not aware of how OpenAI released the benchmark test for their new model 03, some people are screaming AGI is here, some people are screaming that jobs are going to be replaced within five years, and so it's a pretty uncertain time for a lot of people, but with that AGI
is not AI, AI is what we have right now.
People are still afraid of that, but what they don't realize is that while AI makes things significantly easier, and yes you can go and write a book, that doesn't mean that people know how to, at all, still, and that doesn't mean they'll go do it, and that doesn't mean they'll publish the book, they
still don't do. The gurus and entrepreneurs of the world have been screaming at you to just start for the past eight billion years, and you still haven't, and it doesn't matter how easy it is to do now, while it's still not easy, I'm just saying there's not much to worry about if you're just a person who acts
on their own interest.
If you're just floating along through life, then yes, there is a lot to worry about, but that hasn't changed, there always has been.
The reason I bring this up is because productivity is through the roof.
AI can do anything, right?
Kinda sorta, but if productivity is through the roof and it's going to continue going through the roof, then the thing that matters more than ever is creativity because productivity is nothing without creativity.
Let's take a writer as an example.
I don't think the current versions of AI and for the foreseeable future until we reach actual AGI, like actual human -level capabilities and intelligence of being able to choose its own goals, discover new goals, and act within any domain of life, or medium of life, physical or mental, I don't think
the current version can replace writers or designers or whatever it may be because I'm not talking about the tool by which someone creates.
I mean, the essence behind what that thing is, what the writing is, what the designing is, it's the human desire to create, sifting through 100 ideas to find one, constructing a creative narrative toward a goal, capturing the attention of a group of people, deeply relating with them through conscious
experience, documenting high -signal information for future generations.
Now, I'm not against AI in the slightest, we actually have some really incredible features going into Cortex next month at some point, but the thing is, if you aren't a writer or don't learn from a writer, your AI outputs are probably going to disappoint you.
Good luck building anything if 1.
You don't know what you want to build, and 2.
You're still too lazy to learn even if AI makes it easier, even though it's been easy for the last ten years.
People are saying, oh, you can access any knowledge at the tip of your fingertips, you have a PhD in your pocket, you've already had that.
You're just not going after the information.
If you can't type it into Google, you're not going to type it into chat GPT no matter, like, what the difference in the level of information is there.
If you wanted to find it in the past, you would have found it.
And now that it's one button click away, it's not that different, and it's only attracting more lazy people who aren't going to take it that far.
It really seems like this AI stuff, the marketing strategy at least, or how people position it is just the get rich quick scheme of literally everything, oh you can do it all with AI now.
But we all know where those things lead.
The thing here is that AI, maybe not AGI, but AI, what we have now, lacks executive function.
It is a tool that needs a master.
It is a system that achieves a goal that it is assigned.
It is a specialist that needs a generalist.
And when so many people have been turned into tools by their parents, schooling, and repetitive task oriented jobs, it's no wonder why people are so afraid of being replaced.
It's because they are going to be replaced unless they start acting like a human.
Agency, conscious experience, risk, mistakes, discovery, perception, struggle.
Now as an example as to how you can use this, I like to think of James Patterson, who uses a ghostwriter for his books.
If you don't know who James Patterson is, he's a pretty famous author.
The author, James, still likes to create the plot.
He's the storyteller.
He likes to craft the narrative.
He still creates the tone and the style and makes sure the final output is up to his mind's quality.
And on top of that, James Patterson has a big picture awareness of the sales, the distribution, the community, everything that's going on in that space that actually made the book a success.
Because it's not as simple as, oh I'm gonna write this book as James Patterson, put it on Amazon and just let it sit there.
A ghostwriter, or AI, in this context removes the amount of time and labor it requires to produce said writing and the auxiliary task to get that in front of someone else.
The master still has to be a generalist.
They still have to be an entrepreneur.
They still need the vision, story, and value.
But how do you make those things impactful?
Because can't you just ask chat GPT for the ideas, the vision, the story, the value?
You can, but unless you want to be at the whim of how AI writes by default and the baked in bias, you will still be doing what most other people are doing.
You will still lack agency.
You will still get lumped in with the homogenous output of the bias model and as markets go, you will be a commodity.
You won't be able to sustain any kind of meaningful result because you don't know what leads to the meaningful result.
You don't need, you don't know the inputs of the AI that leads to the outputs.
Everyone's saying that prompt engineering is the greatest next thing to learn, but in order to be a prompt engineer, you're still learning the exact same thing that allows you to write the prompts in the first place.
If you want to be able to write good writing prompts, then you need to understand writing.
You don't have to understand and actually do the writing, but you need to understand the big picture, everything that goes into that skill.
And again, can you ask AI for that?
Yes. But then you're at the whim again of the bias of the AI.
It's not unique. So what's the answer here?
What is the answer to all of this?
It's something called idea flow.
Robert Greene reads a hundred books before he writes one.
Founders have a thousand ideas before one changes everything.
Creators post a thousand times before one makes them an overnight success.
More ideas lead to more exponential events.
Nothing happens, then everything happens.
You don't find these ideas by asking chat GPT to give you a list of 100 ideas because guess what?
You're still missing the overarching vision and story.
You're missing experience.
You're missing meaning.
You're missing purpose.
The point I'm trying to make here is take two people who know nothing about whatever we're trying to accomplish.
Let's say I'm trying to accomplish something and I'm worried that other people are going to take my place.
Let's take two other people that have absolutely no idea what I know and have them type in.
Be like, hey, find 100 ideas to do something.
What are you going to do?
You don't know because it's in my head.
So you type those ideas in and you're going to get relatively similar responses.
The thing with this, there's a distinction between problems that can be solved outright like physics or an explanation or something that's hard.
I created this cup.
This cup is a cup for something like that's so personal and evolving like an idea that strikes you at the right point in your human experience is very difficult to find because you're navigating this vast unknown landscape.
And then even then that idea 10 minutes from now could be useless.
If AI is so good that it could teach you exactly how to write, why would you go and buy something like my course?
One, because it's my process that I've created through experience.
Well, couldn't I just find that and figure it out through AI?
Sure, maybe, but is that going to teach you how to master writing or do you still actually have to do the thing?
And then after that, is that the end of your education or does it continue going on because knowledge creation is infinite?
Is that just one stopping point?
Why are you looking at AI as this thing that's just going to solve all problems in your life when problems never cease to exist, even when AGI is here and the curve goes exponential?
Problems are infinite.
They still go on. Progress, knowledge problems are all infinite.
Just because you don't know what they're going to be, doesn't mean that they aren't going to be there.
Again, AGENCY and being able to give yourself permission to solve problems and not rely on anyone else, ever, in, never, ever, ever, ever, to give you a problem to solve or a goal to achieve because you will be replaced.
Schools, jobs, etc.
Everything. Rejected.
Back to the point of idea flow.
You're missing a forward moving lifestyle designed to achieve your vision from which you can extract and connect ideas to create value.
You're missing the context.
People don't follow you because you have information.
They follow you because you have lore.
Because you have perspective.
When AGI has all perspectives, it effectively has no perspective.
Unless it's the one you give it or assign it based on the situation it's in, but by then, as we'll talk about in the next video, it's no different from you.
The ability to compute or transform or variation, selection, attention, all of these different things.
There is no difference between the capability of that of an AGI and that of a human.
And even then, you still have it in your pocket.
You aren't going to be replaced by AGI.
You're going to be augmented by AGI.
Okay. Let's talk about how to actually create this lifestyle that leads to more idea flow.
Honestly, the most important thing in your life for being creative and therefore having the quality ideas to be more productive in a more efficient and leveraged way.
We'll start with this previous quote of mine.
Fill your brain in the afternoons with books, learning, and socialization.
Empty your brain before bed with journaling, planning, and meditation.
Use your brain in the morning with creation, output, and focus.
The thing here is that people tend to give me a crazy look when I say that I work only four hours a day.
If you've watched my previous videos on this, you already know what we're going to talk about here.
Because on the surface, I look like I get a lot done.
I mean, I post videos every week, newsletters every week, content three posts a day on all platforms.
I'm managing and building a software company.
I've written a book.
I'm writing two more books.
Not at the same time.
I built 10 plus products.
It's a lot. But my question is, what's so crazy about that?
Because, I mean, you don't know how I started.
I started on social media by writing posts and replying to people in between video game matches.
I would play teamfight tactics or League of Legends and reply in between messages.
That's how I worked.
And if I were to add up those hours for what got me started and growing, it was probably around an hour a day, maybe.
Now we'll go over my daily routine towards the end of this video, the last section.
But I want to make a point that I write for the first two hours of a day and then I do administrative tasks.
We know that if you've watched previous videos of mine.
The thing here is that there is a lie somewhere in there.
I've never really considered reading, walking, napping, or training as a part of my work.
I read to hunt for ideas, I walk to make sense of those ideas, I nap because I like to and I train because I enjoy energy and health.
The quality and quantity of my work would not be possible if I did not do those things.
I'm not optimizing for more, I'm optimizing for the right amount that brings the results I need to actualize my goals.
I can do less work with more impact than most, working 12 hours a day with those simple habits.
Again, creativity is the fuel for productivity.
So if those are taken into account for how long I work, then I've been lying to you all along.
Technically I work all day, 24 hours a day, because even my sleep fuels my work.
My work is the most enjoyable thing in my life.
It is my mission, it is my entire day.
With that said, you're drastically overestimating the amount of work you need to do to just start.
Be rational for a second.
You know that people also have responsibilities like you.
You know that people don't start with 12 hours, they start with 1 hour in the morning.
You just love to make excuses about how your situation is special.
The question now is how do I make the most of that 1 hour of focused work?
And it's by designing a creative lifestyle and titrating the time spent on those activities up as you're able to transition to doing it full time.
You need 4 habits. Think of these like modules in your day.
You don't have to do them in order, you just have to do them.
Before habits or modules that you're going to be implementing throughout your day, however you please, are clear, consume, connect, and create.
You clear your mind, you consume to learn something new, you create to piece that together, and you connect everything so that you notice those novel connections which read new ideas.
After we talk about these, I'll actually walk you through a little daily planner that you can use to schedule these things, and it has tasks within it, so we'll go over that.
But the first habit is clear your mind.
And my favorite way to do this, personally, is to align it with my work.
So generating ideas for my work.
You can do this by writing 5 to 10 ideas.
If you don't know what to write, you can practice using this also as a journaling experience where I like to reflect on my past or my past week and think of either negative things that happened or experiences I don't want to experience again, and I'll turn those into 5 to 10 ideas.
If I don't hit 5 to 10 ideas, then sometimes I'll just brainstorm more on top of that of whatever comes to mind.
Think of it like a brain dump.
The second habit is to consume.
Plain and simple. You can't create if you don't consume.
I'm not talking about consuming endless content on social media like a mindless zombie.
I'm talking about learning.
Hunting for ideas for your work.
Like your ancestors did in the physical, you do in the mental and digital.
Read a long book. Read a long article.
Scroll a curated social timeline for 5 minutes.
Study that course you bought but forgot about.
Listen to a podcast or lecture.
But don't forget an absolutely crucial step.
Have somewhere to capture those ideas to a relevant project you're creating.
Habit number three is create.
The core human desires are to create, expand, and transcend.
Anything else is either a distraction or a lesser purpose that pulls you toward those desires.
To create is to account for a crucial function of the mind that most people miss out on.
Everyone consumes information, they gain mental fat, some people write down information or clear their mind so they cut down mental weight, but few people synthesize that information into something that helps and impacts others.
They have the strength, metaphorically and mentally, to save someone from a car crash.
Creating something is how you build mental muscle.
In other words, those people are missing out on how they contribute to the world.
They're missing out on a very crucial key to purpose and meaning.
So you need a project to build.
A project is a structure for your mind to become a magnet for ideas.
Now the fourth habit is to connect.
Because when you have a meaningful project to build, not when assigned to you by parents, teachers, or society at large, you see life in a completely different way.
When I write a book, it's completely different from a social post, for obvious reasons, but my mind expands to match the frame of that book.
I notice more in my everyday experience the information I consume and the conversations I have because I have an anchor for those ideas.
My mind can zip through complex reasoning and make sense of ideas I couldn't before because I can articulate novel lines of thought that AI can't because I would have to train it on that same frame to come anywhere close.
Unfortunately, most people don't optimize for pattern recognition.
By doing so, they rarely become curious or obsessed.
They have an invested energy into a project that encourages their mind to take a new shape.
So the solution to this is this template or planner that I have for you.
So here we're inside of Cortex.
You can get this with the link in the description.
You're going to have to sign up for Cortex first, and then when you click on the document you'll see a duplicate button up here where you can duplicate it to your workspace so then you can start filling it out.
Now once it's actually in here, it's probably smart to duplicate it again because you can use this as a weekly template.
Now I'd encourage you to read through the instructions and you can look at the example of how I filled it out before, but in a nutshell it's pretty simple, right?
You have days inside of what we call elements.
If you want to access elements or create a new one, you just type slash.
You can go to elements if you'd like or you can type new and then new element, create one here, so on and so forth.
These are just little organizational blocks, but you can open this and you can see, okay, brain dump.
Clear your mind, turn thoughts, reflection and experience into five to 10 ideas.
So you brain dump those at any time in your day, right?
This is modular experiment with doing these things at different times of the day.
Sometimes it helps to do them at night, so you write down five to 10 ideas so that you have something to wake up to and work on.
The next thing is learning so you can connect sources that you're consuming.
You can add PDFs to your library inside of Cortex soon.
What we're working on is being able to save any link or file.
Cortex is actually going to see a pretty big update with that, so it's going to be less about note -taking, only having documents, but you can put images, files, anything, YouTube videos, whatever it may be.
But here what I can do, let's say I'm reading a book by David Deutsch, which I kind of am.
Or if this is who I'm learning about this week, then I can save it here.
I can open this and I even have a PDF here that I could start reading inside of Cortex, but that's what you're consuming.
You can also just add specific documents, like if I wanted to create a new document about notes on creativity, then I can create that here and I can fill this out if I'd like right here pretty quick.
Now the next thing is just projects.
So what are you working on?
For me, I'm working on a newsletter relating to artificial intelligence.
So that's up here in my favorites.
I can open that. I have my specific newsletter outlined for it.
I have these things saved.
Again, I was reading that by David Deutsch, so on and so forth.
So you can see in the example up here that I am writing a book, a newsletter and social posts for that week.
And these are all also up here.
So this just helps me keep track and really open them fast in order to see them so I can start working on them inside of Cortex.
So if you don't know what to do in Cortex or you signed up before and you're like, well, OK, I can create a note.
I can create a document.
You're missing out on the deeper power of Cortex to work on all of your writing in one place.
And once we have AI and man, it's going to be an absolute game changer.
But the next thing is tasks.
So you can add and structure your priority tasks here if you'd like.
So things like just when you're going to work on things, if you're going to go on a walk, when you're going to eat, you can structure your day.
And then you repeat this process each day of the week inside of these elements.
And then if you wanted to, you could organize these and like planning December twenty twenty four.
And then I drag that template inside of here and I would name this.
Week to December, planning or something like that.
And then every week I just duplicate these and I can organize by each folder.
Now the last thing I want to mention is that whenever you have ideas, you need somewhere to capture them.
Right. And so you can do that in capture on your phone or inside of Cortex itself.
But the cool thing about our capture is that you can capture to a specific document.
So if I type at week to December, then I can cop.
I mean, I can write ideas specifically for this thing.
You should see how I have this set up for my book.
Right. I save ideas to each chapter every single day that come to mind as I'm consuming things.
If you write newsletters or social posts and you're not capturing ideas to where you're going to write those things, you're missing out on quite a bit.
And we're also testing voice transcription right now.
So there's a lot coming to help with this mobile desktop offline mode, all dropping in January.
We're going to start seeing a very big uptick.
So if you haven't hopped on the Cortex train yet, I would encourage you to at least try it out, especially throughout January.
And it's free. The AI stuff is going to be paid, of course, because it's very expensive.
But the base features of the app, it's all free.
You get it. It's free.
So again, if you want that template or you want to sign up, the link is in the description for both Cortex and the template itself.
The ultimate goal is to have a life so beautifully designed that work, rest and play cease to exist.
The entirety of your life is channeled into one singular yet evolving vision.
Now I want to preface this with the fact that there is no right way to work.
I probably said, should have said that at the beginning of this video, but here we are.
Clearly, Alex Hormozi, who recently went on vacation, I'm proud of him.
Look at his Instagram post.
Good. He does very well, working 12 hours a day and having this hustle and grind mindset.
But that's his identity.
That's what brings him fulfillment.
For a lot of people, that's not theirs.
So Hormozi is very successful, but so were some of the world's most famous creatives who barely worked at all.
The point is to experiment, to collect various perspectives, experience them, and discard the pieces that don't work for your unique set of goals, interests, and values.
It's called lifestyle design for a reason.
You don't simply copy someone else's design and expect it to make you rich.
How can you call yourself a creative if you don't apply the creative process to the main thing that influences everything else?
So before we start, I'm going to display a graphic, but I recently picked up this book after seeing the graphic online and I'm like, okay, where did this come from?
What's the source? It's this book, Daily Rituals by Mason Curry, and it's pretty good.
I've been listening to it on audiobook on my walks and taking some notes, but it's one of those books that's just like a good source of inspiration to experiment with different things.
But this graphic absolutely blows my mind.
It's really cool to see how different creatives structure their days in terms of their sleep, their work, their day job if they have one, their food and leisure and exercise, and etc.
But I want to focus on Darwin's, Charles Darwin's daily routine because I find it fascinating and I actually pull a lot from that even though I didn't realize that until I saw what Darwin's routine was.
So in the morning, he starts his day with a short walk at 7am followed by breakfast.
He would start his first and most productive work session from 8am to 9 .30am.
Following that work, Darwin would take a break to read letters and spend time with family, then returning for another work session from 10 .30am until noon.
By this point, he considered himself to have done a good day's work.
Now Darwin would take his second walk of the day around his famous sand walk, which is a quarter mile gravel path that Darwin created specifically for thinking and reflection.
After lunch and reading the newspaper, Darwin would rest and listen to his wife read aloud.
At 4pm, he took his third walk of the day, usually around the sand walk again, sometimes with company.
My point with sharing this with you is that Charles Darwin, of all people, worked surprisingly little for the amount that he accomplished in his lifetime.
He accomplished more than most of the productivity of CEP's people today.
What's the difference?
Ideas. I didn't want to do this, but I think the idea guy meme is actually becoming a thing and I'm helping create it, so I apologize for that, but I think it's the right way to go.
And as you could have guessed, I love that Charles Darwin's routine emphasizes the importance of walking because those times of deep thinking were an integral part of his work.
Focused work sessions, paired with regular walks, allowed him to achieve a balance of intense intellectual work and periods of rest and contemplation.
Darwin wrote 19 books and developed his theory of evolution with this routine.
Imagine if this guy had AI.
So we went over Darwin's routine and I will just share my routine because maybe that holds some value, maybe it provides some inspiration.
I like to slice my days into three parts.
Low entropy, so little room for uncertainty or chaos, clear mind, deep focus, high intention.
Mid -entropy, so allowing myself to interact with people in my phone.
And then high entropy, so controlled chaos that results in a plethora of ideas I can utilize the next morning.
I wake up naturally around 5am and then in the warmer months I'll go on a walk in the colder months when it's winter arc season, I will get straight into work.
When I do go on a walk first thing in the morning, the thing that I'm focused on, it's a walk for intention.
I'm not listening to something, I'm not bringing my phone, I'm simply thinking, what am I going to write about when I get back?
Like I'm already writing in my head, I'm getting my mind warmed up to the writing process of flowing through ideas so I have the gunk out before I start writing.
When I get back from my walk, my first 90 minute work block is focused on my highest priority, highest lever moving task.
Usually, this is something new, right?
This is a book, a product, or a business.
It's something that can be built once and then sold multiple times.
It's not something that I'm going to, it's going to be a part of my day forever.
It's not something that I'm consistently doing.
It's something that I'm doing in kind of like a sprint, but I'm doing it first thing in the day so that I ensure that it's making progress because since it's not a consistent part of my day, I know that knowing me that's easy for me to fall off of doing.
So after this work block, I will go and just eat fruit, right?
I'm not eating too heavy of a breakfast right now.
This all, all my diet stuff changes quite frequently, but I'm just trying fruit right now until noon.
So it's like, kind of like modified intermittent fasting with just fruit to boost metabolism a bit more.
And I've been really enjoying it.
I've been wired like when it's time to work.
After that, I sit down for another 45 to 90 minute work block.
And this is when I do high priority tasks that grow and maintain my work.
For me, this either involves writing one section of a newsletter.
So 20 to 45 minutes, writing as many content ideas as possible, which is 10 to 30 minutes and cross posting to various platforms, which is 15 ish minutes.
And this is highly dependent on how well my mind is turning out ideas.
On Tuesdays, I replace this block with recording a video like this one.
And this is also a process that I teach inside of To Our Writer.
How I write post or ads newsletters, et cetera.
And the other thing here in the context of like Cortex, right?
When we're not launching anything, we're not building anything, yes, that takes up more of my time.
When we're in a maintenance mode, my role at Cortex is the same as it is in my personal brand because it's a product.
So I'm the one that generates traffic for and markets it.
And idea generates and strategizes all of these things.
That's my main value source for Cortex.
So after that work block and then more fruit as like a kind of lunch, then like Darwin, I also feel like I've accomplished quite a bit and I don't need to worry about work the rest of the day.
So at this time I'll go on a second walk, usually shirtless if it's not too cold, because I want midday sun, which helps with sleep and light health and it's extremely important.
And on the walk, I consume some form of like an audio book or a YouTube video or a lecture.
If sometimes I'm going down this rabbit hole and I just want to keep learning about one specific topic, sometimes I don't know what to watch at all.
And I just scroll until I find something interesting.
I pick it and I watch it and I usually get something out of it.
This walk specifically is when I like can get my best ideas because I can spend the most time focusing on a problem because I don't have to focus on work anymore.
And so this is the walk that sets myself up for the next morning of work because I'm capturing like crazy inside of Cortex capture connected to my projects.
Because the thing with that is you can write those in Apple Notes.
You can write them in Notion.
You can write them wherever they're not connected to your projects.
They're not organized.
These little sentence long independent ideas.
You can't organize them in other apps.
And then after this walk, or even sometimes on this walk, this is when I do more administrative tasks like answering emails, messaging partners or friends and things like that.
Then I go to the gym and that marks like a crucial distinction in my day from I'm working to I'm done with work if I want to be.
And so the question that arises here is like, well, what do you do for the rest of the day?
And it's like, well, but a lot of things I read, I nap, I walk more, I go run errands with my girlfriend, I'll go get dinner with my friend.
I'll have meetings.
So sometimes I do work and sometimes I kind of just pace back and forth.
Right. Sometimes I'm laying on the couch and I have an idea.
So I come to my computer and I write it down.
Then I get caught in writing for 30 minutes and I go back to the couch and I go on a walk and I kind of just leisure around.
It's called leisure for a reason.
And if I have nothing to do and I'm bored, then I'll probably just work more.
But it's not a requirement.
That's the point is it's not a requirement for me.
And it's not the default thing I do at that time.
And then at around 5 p .m., we dinner pretty early.
We'll go I'll go to dinner with either my friend and girlfriend.
Or just one or the other.
And at this point, unless I have something extremely pressing to do or I have a strong desire to do, I don't really work after this.
Of course, sometimes I'll get on my phone and I'll read and I'll think of ideas.
And I do have a lot of good ideas at night.
But most of the time we just lounge around.
And with this, people always ask like they want me to put it into this like perfect little box for them to understand when that's just not how life is.
It's like this is a guess at what my day looks like over the course of like maybe six months.
But these things change experimentation like they're supposed to change even with minor nuances.
I can't give you the exact like, oh, this, this, this is what leads to making a billion dollars because you can't.
That's impossible to find.
You have to discover it.
That didn't really make sense.
Fine. Discover whatever.
That's the end of the video.
Thank you for watching.
Like, subscribe, check out Cortex.
Bye.
