I signed up for newsletter just now.
It told to go to my inbox and click a link to confirm my subscription.
I felt a drive to go check my email as a result.
Except I have a new rule I am living by, where I only check my email between 12 noon and 2pm.
It’s 10:28am now.
Email is verboten.
So I opened up a notebook I’ve been keeping, where I’m tracking my email-checking urges. I write inside this notebook whenever I feel a drive to go check my email.
I wrote just now: “After signing up for some newsletter which is telling me to confirm my subscription in the email they just sent me.”
Who knows? I might one day realize something about when I feel the drive to pointlessly check email.
But that’s not why I’m writing these email-checking urges down. It turns out the simple act of writing them down is all I need to not check my email, either now or in five minutes from now, without any struggle or Thor-like willpower.
Since I’ve started this “write down when I feel an urge to check email” practice a few days ago, I’ve found it to be a useful hack.
But it’s probably only a hack. In other words, in the absence of other things, there’s a good chance it will work for a few more days, at which point my brain will adjust and the hack will stop working.
Which brings me to what I really wanna share with you in this email.
Because the newsletter I signed up for this morning was by a woman named Mandy Brown.
I signed up because I liked one single article she had written, which I came across a few weeks ago.
The article is titled, “Energy makes time.”
Brown is apparently a coach for “high performers.” These people, says Brown, typically have tried all the possible time-management hacks out there.
Many of these hacks work – until they don’t.
After the last hack has failed, the high performers come to Brown. And she suggests they try something different.
She suggests they realize that, much like money and pizza dough, time is actually a very stretchy substance.
A single day can shrink down to where you can barely get the dishes done before it’s time to go to bed, with nothing else fitting inside the 24-hour window… or a day can stretch so you can travel halfway around the world, meet a bunch of new people, have several great business or personal ideas along the way, and write the outline for a new book, and much of a first draft to boot.
The difference, says Brown, is that we’ve been conditioned to think that everything we do costs time.
And in the conveyor-belt optimization of human productivity, that means that certain things drop away — “There simply isn’t enough time, at least not now!”
That calculus ignores the fact that there are things that actually give you time back. That make more time for you. That stretch out the time you’ve got, so you can fit a boat and a house and maybe a book in there.
Which things give you time back?
Brown gives the example of doing art, if doing art is your thing.
But it really depends on you.
I’m guessing it can equally be going to the aquarium… or taking a day trip to see some place new… or spending a day with friends… or simply sitting down and writing out all the stuff that’s in your head, vague plans and fears included.
Anyways, it’s a kind of time management un-hack that’s been stuck in my mind ever since I read it in Brown’s article. (I read the article a few weeks ago. I re-read it now to write this email.)
Maybe “energy makes time” get stuck in your head as well. Maybe it give you some ideas to actually create time for yourself.
Now on to the topic of daily emails, which is my offer for you today.
Daily emails cost time. Much time.
But they can also create time. Much time. At least they do for me.
Writing daily emails gives me ideas. It gives me motivation. It gives me the satisfaction of accomplishing something every day, which makes it so I am more likely to accomplish something else, like attacking the dirty dishes that are waiting for me in the kitchen.
I don’t know if writing daily emails will make more time for you. Maybe it’s not your thing. Or maybe it is. There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to start, to stick with it for a while, and to see what happens.
And if you want my help starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails: