Hey friends
This week has been all about reflection for me and making sure that I’m staying on track with my monthly, quarterly + 12 month goals.
With that in mind, here are some of the best bits that I’ve contemplated, tried and tested this week...
Business
A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to the theory called Opportunity Management. In short, Opportunity Management is a process to help you maintain focus on your business goals and enables you to say “No” as and when new opportunities come up.
We’ve all heard of shinny penny syndrome in business, when we get caught chasing a shiny new opportunity instead of focusing on our core business that helps to take the business forward.
Opportunity Management helps you achieve your business goals in the most direct way possible by determining what you’ll be spending your time on.
Opportunity Management is that what and why, Time Management is the how. It allows you to retain control of what you focus on in your business and allows you to say no to opportunities that aren’t the best use of your time.
I’ve started to incorporate Opportunity Management in my monthly reviews and will be interested to see impact it has on my core business. What opportunities can you start saying “No” to today, to stay focus on your core business goals?
Fitness
I’ve set myself a goal of completing 4 fitness + endurance challenges or competitions this year - The Murph challenge, a 15km Tough Mudder, a 20km Spartan Race and I’m currently deciding between some form of endurance race (marathon or 50km race).
As a result, I’ve started to get a lot more focused on the type of training and workouts I’m completing in the week as I work towards my first challenge, which is completing The Murph in under 35 minutes (my current time is around 42mins) in May.
The lesson? Make sure you set yourself a fitness goal to work towards as you exercise, whether it’s losing the last couple of pounds from Christmas or training for your first 5km race. Having a goal will impact what training you do on a weekly and monthly basis keep you pointing in one direction, towards achieving your goal!
If you’re stuck and need some help reaching your goal, SelfMade Fitness can help, just drop them an email.
Life
This week I’ve been focusing a lot on tweaking my morning routine. My aim is to get up to 9 things completed after I wake up at 5am and before I open my laptop for work at around 8.30am.
These are:
- Using my Lumen to track my metabolism and updating my Whoop journal
- At least 1 round of Wim Hof breathing
- Mobility exercises to get my back warmed up
- Working out
- Medating
- Journalling
- Reading and/or Learning something
- Updating my Commonplace book
- Cold Shower
At the moment I’m stuck on completing 7 things. Reading and updating my Commonplace book are suffering. I place value on all of these things, which is why I want to get them done first thing before the day starts.
I’m trying to habit stack (i.e. listening to a podcast or a course while exercising) and to cut down the time for certain things but the solution has eluded me for now.
What I am doing consistently though is tracking my progress through the morning and reviewing how and where I can make changes on a regular basis to improve.
Think about adopting the same approach as you navigate through your day.
Favourites of the Week
Podcast Episode: I enjoy listening to the Knowledge Project podcast, hosted by Shane Parrish at Farnam Street. In this episode he is interviewing Marc Andreessen, founder of Silicon Valley investing Firm Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and Pintrest. The episode explores investing, decision making and the art of solving unsolvable problems, and my favourite section of the episode was the discussion around having a mental model of Elon Musk on your shoulder.
Quote: Marc Andreessen on approaching ideas - “What’s my mental model for how Elon (Musk) would think about this? The most simple form of Elon that’s useful in this way is what he calls first principles thinking. And it’s basically like, okay, script things all the way down to the basics again and basically start the logical thought process over again.”
Source: The Knowledge Project Podcast
Tech: I’ve been using an app called Shift on my Mac for a couple of years now, which is “The workstation for productive people”. This desktop app allows you to streamline all of your accounts, apps and workflows in one easily manageable space. I’ve got my Gmail accounts, Asana dashboard, Notion dashboard and a bunch of others on in my Shift workspace, which I’ve found super useful and saves time switching between tabs and accounts.
Funny: Wow, look how many friends I have! Can’t you hear how busy I am? Or maybe I’m just using this “Busy Simulator” site.