Hi everyone 👋,

Since summer 2023 I am neither studying at a university nor working for a company, so I had to learn how to organize my life and productivity myself. I write about that topic regularly in my newsletters.

One thing that I started doing since the beginning of this year is recording every day how happy I am with my life, my health, and my work on a scale from 1 to 10. Through that I now already found out something I didn’t expect: My routines require a period of roughly 1 week for me to become stable after a major distraction.

Perhaps it’s not clear what I mean by that, so let me explain a bit.

By routine I mean things like my daily workout, controlling the calories I consume, working 8+ hours a day, limiting my gaming, getting to bed and sleeping on time etc.

And with major distraction I mean something like visiting my wife for a few days or traveling somewhere.

What happens during those major distractions is that my mind loses it’s momentum that allows me to get much done on regular days without much effort. After a trip to London it requires a lot of effort to get into my rhythm again and the first 5-7 days are always a big struggle until I am able to kick out bad activities and focus again.

That means when I do a trip to London for 5 days, the actual loss of productivity is probably more like 10 days (I tend to work on weekends too when I have no appointments).

As a conclusion I already told my wife Xi that I don’t want to do big trips (=major distractions) for the first 3 months after our trip to China (in April), so I can get more work done.

Perhaps tracking and improving productivity is not everyones interest, but if it is yours I recommend you try out tracking it daily for a few months and you might find out things about yourself that surprise you, just like I did 😄

Greetings from Olten

Gregor