Support
“Everything should support you”
This is a tricky realization - which is very obvious in retrospect.
I’m going to use an analogy I know very well. Building your body.
If your goal is to “build your body” so your muscles are bigger and more developed
Goal “Building a muscular body”
And you want that quickly (which is very possible if you know exactly what to do and not do).
then everything you do, should support that goal.
- You must eat well. And enough quantity.
- You should eat at the right times. With the right composition.
- You must exercise X days a week for X minutes. So your muscle fibers tear and produce adaptation. Without music so you are attentive to your neuro-muscular response.
- You must rest X hours daily, ideally with a small nap after training. So you trigger growth hormones and your body enters into recovery state.
- And have the right composition of nutrients in your blood to deliver to your muscles at the recovery times.
If you are even more saavy, you can take advantage of the metabolic window after training (which lasts up to 2 hours) where you should use simple fast carbohydrates (sugars) of fast digestion, and then 20 minutes later EAAs.
To have this you need to have a gym membership, organise your day to go to the gym and organise your life so your meals contain the right nutrients and are cooked just before eating.
And with that, to get to that goal, you basically have arranged “everything” [that needed arranging] to support you.
This extrapolates to everything else in your life… And so if you look at your goal(s), the big question to ask is - “have you arranged everything to support you?”
When I look at my other goals and areas of focus, I realise they are not arranged in the same manner.
The having a muscular body goal is easy for me, because I have done it to a professional level in the past for so long it became second nature.
But for other things not so much.
For whatever reason.
For things like building companies, there are a lot more distractions - that don’t support you.
A big part of building if you are in software is acquiring information, but what might seem a simple task is not so much so.
Online everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, competes for your attention. So not getting distracted is difficult.
A “quick search”, ends up on a spiral of watching youtube videos on “how did he do it”…and lying to yourself as this is helpful research that brings you closer to your goals.
It might be. But 99% of the times it’s not.
When you look at your phone to reply to something leading it to your goal, you get bombarded with tons of notifications of unrelated things.
And then there is the issue, all things knowdlege work, end up bundling together.
Investing, company building, etc. all have the same underlying value - increasing your money/net worth. And so accidentally, they are mixed and matched together despite being very different goals.
So looking at this from this perspective, one can re-arrange things so “everything supports me” instead of just going on with daily work that needs doing.
A practical example
Goal: Building a new software.
Building any company requires a deal of technical expertise, technical time, marketing efforts and sales efforts (in many cases) and then some admin and some research in technicalities and marketicalities.
Under the premise of arranging “everything to support me”, I arranged for all home things to be sorted, all food to be sorted (already done as part of another goal) and arranged for a clear calendar when I need to build technical parts.
I arranged for writing questions about how to solve parts of the software that I research first, even if I know the answers and used some vibecoding as the “first draft” or starting point.
I arranged for no social time while building; no interruptions of people coming see me, phone on airplane mode, no quick social media checks, etc.
I arranged and took the decision to not stop on a task until it is completed - because it is so easy to get distracted someting that should take 1 hour ends up taking 3 or 5.
I arranged working hours. And within working hours a % of those to be devoted to building and a % of those to be devoted to marketing.
When doing marketing you cant escape social media. And social media is distracting - so I time myself. I write down what I’m trying to do, give me 5 minutes, and check whether it’s done or I am any closer.
Big part of this is finding “what works now” in socials. And that requires research. But again, it’s so easy to get distracted I try to do that using other apps that are not social media.
Two other things when doing knowledge work are chains of thought and dissimilar thoughts. Dissimilar thoughts can be ideas, opportunities, interesting facts, things you remember spontaneously, etc. The way I deal with those is I write those down - for later. And review them at the end of the day.
For chains of thought the approach is a bit different as I want to capture what lead to it, what is it and what conclusions I got to; a final conclusion? a follow-on thread? something else?. Who knows. This is uncharted territory - and we all have this.
So, I capture these in voice notes. And explain well what and when, and who and which. And yes, review that at the end of the day.
So day reviews are a big part of it.
“What you don’t track you can’t improve” or so the saying goes.
Day reviews are a part of this. Categorising and organizing things for later is another. Loads of notes get generated in a day, post-its, voice notes, etc. Related or unrelated. It doesn’t matter.
All gets processed at night. Then the day gets reviewed based on the goals for the day.
This is not a perfect solution yet, but brings me closer to the idea of “everything to support me”.
Take away(s)
Reviews, goal settings, day goals, work times, timers,…all these are tools.
They are USEFUL.
But they need to be guided by something. Something that is the base you lay your work on.
And that base is the idea of “everything to support me”.
I hope you realize of this too - and can use it for your own adavantage.