Reducing cognitive load

[ulrich]

Super off-topic question here.

As I become older, I have noticed that I become more and more ambitious and no matter how much I try, there is just not enough time in a day to meet all my goals (social, work, hobbies, fitness, etc…)

I can do everything but it feels like I am always lacking two or three hours a day and my mind is running at 100% capacity and that is tiring.

I feel one of my biggest obstacles is perfectionism… this tendency of looking every single thing from all possible angles and considering all scenarios. It is time and energy consuming.
It has been a great boon at work but I feel my life would be much more enjoyable if I could just turn it off sometimes.

Being that there’s many ambitious men here, I want to ask?

Have you ever felt like this?
How do you train your mind to look at the bigger picture at command?

 

[Kvothe]

Turn them into habits!

I read a good book called "Atomic Habits" which was quite useful at how to reduce cognitive load while improving your own habits to get more productivity on autopilot.

TRE + transcendental meditation to shut off the noise in my head at various points.

 

[Rakehell]

Shift your focus to what you can control, block out things that aren’t helpful or conducive to what it is you want to achieve.

Ask yourself how you would feel if everything you wanted in life was already yours, and act as if.

Above all remind yourself that everything you want will come in due time, regardless of what happens in the now.

 

[TomInHo]

I think it's hard to be into seduction and not be highly ambitious. But a mental model I use to help deal with the stress of trying to achieve everything at once is using Blast & Cruise cycles

During the Blast, I would pick 2 and only 2 parts of my life that I want to improve. Then proceed to go crazy with them to the point of near obsession. I don't stop blasting away at my goals until I hit quantifiable benchmarks I set at the start.

Then during the Cruise period, I would dial back on the obsession and focus on creating systems to at least maintain the gains I made from the previous blast. Because you can usually maintain your current level with way less work than it took to get there, especially if you have proper systems in place

Then after I have a baseline system to maintain gains, I would then pick another 2 parts of my life to blast and repeat the process again.

Rinse and Repeat till perfection

Doing it like this you'll be amazed how much you can accomplish in the long term, because life is very similar to the calendar in regards to it will always have multiple seasons, with each one feeling a little different

 

[ulrich]

Turn them into habits!

I read a good book called "Atomic Habits" which was quite useful at how to reduce cognitive load while improving your own habits to get more productivity on autopilot.

TRE + transcendental meditation to shut off the noise in my head at various points.

@Kvothe, my man.

Alright, that the third time or so that I read about that book. That’s definitely no coincidence so I will be looking for it.

Also, I have tried TRE and meditation before without a big result… but again, maybe now they will make the difference.
Thanks for reminding me of these ones!

Ask yourself how you would feel if everything you wanted in life was already yours, and act as if.

Above all remind yourself that everything you want will come in due time, regardless of what happens in the now.

Thanks @Rakehell!
I am definitely not doing these two things. I will try them.

You know I am the kind of man who does not like to feel accomplished until I have the results (crashed already many times)… but it’s worth trying. Perhaps is the missing piece.

I think it's hard to be into seduction and not be highly ambitious. But a mental model I use to help deal with the stress of trying to achieve everything at once is using Blast & Cruise cycles

During the Blast, I would pick 2 and only 2 parts of my life that I want to improve. Then proceed to go crazy with them to the point of near obsession. I don't stop blasting away at my goals until I hit quantifiable benchmarks I set at the start.

Then during the Cruise period, I would dial back on the obsession and focus on creating systems to at least maintain the gains I made from the previous blast. Because you can usually maintain your current level with way less work than it took to get there, especially if you have proper systems in place

Then after I have a baseline system to maintain gains, I would then pick another 2 parts of my life to blast and repeat the process again.

Rinse and Repeat till perfection

Doing it like this you'll be amazed how much you can accomplish in the long term, because life is very similar to the calendar in regards to it will always have multiple seasons, with each one feeling a little different

I loved this, man!! @TomInHo

Going to try it just next.

 

[Lover]

If there was any way to subscribe to this thread and get notified about new posts, I would do so. I will stick to bookmarking for now since this feels like a struggle to me too

 

[Chase]

This is pretty common for ambitious guys who work on lots of stuff, @uriel. Some things that have worked for me:


CUTTING PERIODS

I think it's helpful to go through 'cutting' periods. You need to be able to look at what you're involved in from a distance, look at what's taking up the most time, what you get back from it (doesn't have to be all material gain), and apply a little 80/20 to that... where are the biggest time sinks with the fewest returns? Those are the places you need to cut first.


WRAP-UP POINTS

It's also helpful to give projects deadlines/wrap-up points. So e.g., if you have 10 things you're working on, maybe half those are continuous, like exercise or reading books, but the other half are projects you can wrap up at some point, like "achieve a promotion" or "finish writing my book" or "complete the new website." For each of those you set distinct wrap-up dates, then don't take on new things until those are wrapped. Anything new that tries to distract you you tell yourself, "I can start that after X and Y have wrapped." That way you are gradually clearing your plate, rather than allowing more and more things to accumulate.


GIVING IT ALL UP

One additional item if you feel stressed is reminding yourself that everything in life you have because you chose it, and if you wanted to you could give it all up and go live in the mountains.

So e.g., you've got a bunch of different things, 10 different deadlines, all these people dependent on you, a million people who want things from you, the stress is mounting, there's never enough time in the day... and then you remind yourself, "If I REALLY wanted to, I could just say 'Fuck all this' and give it all up and go live in a cabin in the mountains and survive on subsistence. The world would go on fine without me."

It'll calm you, and realize that nothing you're doing -- however important in the moment to you and all the other people you're tangled up with -- is absolutely necessary for the world to continue, and that everything you're doing is stuff you have taken on yourself, and you can remove if it ever becomes necessary to.


TIME TIED UP IN UNPRODUCTIVE PURSUITS

Finally, sometimes you may find yourself in situations where things are broadly not working, but your time is all tied up. That's happened to me a few times. When that happens, you need to swallow the hard pill and make big cuts. Just take big chunks of life where duties and obligations are piling up but nothing really all that good is coming of it, and totally cut those out. Yes, people will be disappointed, but you need to do it so you can refocus yourself on more useful/rewarding/productive endeavors.

Writing things down can be helpful here. Especially compiling a list of "where does my time go each day / how much of each activity gets my time?" You may quickly realize some things that aren't very rewarding are sucking up a lot more of your time than they're worth to you.

Chase

 

[ulrich]

This is pretty common for ambitious guys who work on lots of stuff, @uriel. Some things that have worked for me:

Thank you very much @Chase!

Just knowing that this is common for the ambitious ones, makes me feel calmer.

Killer advice as always!
Definitely need to implement the cutting periods and the giving it all up mentality more often.

TIME TIED UP IN UNPRODUCTIVE PURSUITS

Finally, sometimes you may find yourself in situations where things are broadly not working, but your time is all tied up. That's happened to me a few times. When that happens, you need to swallow the hard pill and make big cuts. Just take big chunks of life where duties and obligations are piling up but nothing really all that good is coming of it, and totally cut those out. Yes, people will be disappointed, but you need to do it so you can refocus yourself on more useful/rewarding/productive endeavors.

Writing things down can be helpful here. Especially compiling a list of "where does my time go each day / how much of each activity gets my time?" You may quickly realize some things that aren't very rewarding are sucking up a lot more of your time than they're worth to you.

Chase

About this one, what do you do with projects that have a ton of potential yet returns are currently meager?

Like, for example, a business idea with rave reviews and high profits but no matter what you do, you just can’t figure out marketing.

Is it OK to pause them or better give them the boot?

 

[Chase]

Don't mention it, @uriel

About this one, what do you do with projects that have a ton of potential yet returns are currently meager?

Like, for example, a business idea with rave reviews and high profits but no matter what you do, you just can’t figure out marketing.

Is it OK to pause them or better give them the boot?

That depends on where you're at with it.

e.g., a few scenarios:

1. You've experimented casually with a few things but nothing's worked. All right, you messed around and didn't succeed with the mess around strategy. Now it's time to get serious. Dive in, do a deep competitive analysis, write down everything other companies are doing, put together a complete marketing plan with a number of bullets of things you want to try and how you want to try them, break each one down into simple steps you can execute on, give them all start dates and deadlines, and start working through them one at a time. See if where "throw stuff at the wall" failed you can't make "careful execution" succeed.
   
   
2. You've done some methodical experimentation, it failed, but you have a few more ideas. Depending on how promising those are, it may make sense to continue driving hard, or it may make sense to keep working on them, but shift them down to a lower priority. e.g., you had six ideas to try that all seemed equally good. The first three flopped, despite your on-point execution. You are starting to get the feeling that this just isn't the right opportunity right now, and none of the other marketing ideas are THAT much better as to be a significant improvement over these flops. Well, in that case, you can still keep driving the other ideas forward to completion (always good to complete stuff if you can), but only when time allows for it and without breaking the bank or too much of a sweat to do it. At this point you think it may
   not work, but you're still going to give it the old college try and finish testing the things you wanted to test just to be sure.
   
   
3. You've really tested a bunch of well-thought out ideas, and none of it worked. At a certain point, if you can't make something catch on even with a variety of good ideas, it is probably not going to catch on with a few other good ideas. If something's catchy, it's catchy, if you get it in front of enough of the right people; if it isn't, it isn't, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to keep trying to push it in front of people forever. So this is probably a project to back-burner and not worry too much about it.

Also, if you do have something with rave reviews and high profits but little traffic, why not set that up to catch anything it can catch on its own, then otherwise leave alone?

e.g., you have a design training company where the students pay $10,000 for courses and all come out much more skilled and promptly land lucrative careers. But you're having trouble marketing it and there's just really not a lot of demand for it.

Instead do this:

1. Spend a day revising your landing page to make sure it's crystal clear, the copy is golden (benefits & features), graphics are clear, testimonials are all there, and it's SEO optimized
   
   
2. Make those changes to the landing page
   
   
3. Make sure the page has a contact form that forwards to the email you use regularly
   
   
4. Spend a week building organic backlinks to it so it's not an orphan page with no backlinks pointing in
   
   
5. Now, forget about it

When people stumble on the page every now and again, if they're interested, they can message you, and you'll see it in your inbox.

Otherwise, there's no need for you to keep checking up on it -- you are now free to move on.

Chase

 

[ulrich]

Thank you @Chase.
This is golden and you have given me some very good ideas on how to manage next projects. I’m really grateful for it.

 

[DarkKnight]

Super off-topic question here.

Not that off-topic, it really affects game. I too live a very chaotic and intense life where I become increasingly more ambitious. Obviously this affects our vibe and game. I always feel hurried in some way. Understanding how scarce time is, has made this a bit worse. Can't enjoy a movie like I used to.

can do everything but it feels like I am always lacking two or three hours a day and my mind is running at 100% capacity and that is tiring.

Same.. Wouldnt say 100% capacity in my case.. but I do go very intense and yes it is tiring. Seems I just have accepted this and try to find my way through it, in other words, I do not want to back down. This creates some burnout moments for me unfortunately.... which I seem to recover faster from than ever.

How do you train your mind to look at the bigger picture at command?

Doesn't happen at command.. Thing is I have higher goals which I try to achieve, goes pretty well too (ups and downs..) but when you have serious things on your mind you automatically start to screen out small and petty shit. I am sure you have encountered this with very busy people, they always feel more fleeting and scarce, because they are scarce. It is because these people cannot afford to lose time, so they automatically screen out the small stuff. Problem is sometimes we can also omit dealing with "small problems".. which can become a bit bigger because it was not dealt with early on... had such an occurence this week.

Also use good supplements.. they really give an extra boost. When you have a decent stack.

 

[Glow]

i would advice on mental training - a more applicable approach to mindfulness type thinking.
The act itself reduces the cognitive load significantly.

in 8 weeks you can reorganise your brains plasticity towards better brain usage that decreases the automated load running. Basically through more breaks where you focus on your breath. This will enable increased prefrontal cortex activation for all decision making in your life vs being emotionally driven(most people are even if they dont think so). It enables you to make better decisions, more rationally driven. Youll get stronger on uptake of things and clear in many areas of your life eg writing. Things will sorta organise better inside you to driver more from your core values.

but its about seriously getting meditation and continued daily pauses into your habitual way of being. Not easy.

It also involves a slow process of uncovering the drivers in you, various motivations that enslave you(stoic thinking) to whatever 1000 things u run w. Stoics consider you a slave if youre driven by it vs selectively inclined towards it with less clinging. You can then assess these drivers better and potentially adjust them, strategies or situations.

its only manageable through a slow down of your speed or full stop where you senses can system hits a place where you start seeing more and is not in continued drive mode or worse.

I have continued slower periods where i orient myself around my inner drivers and evaluate their health. And how rational and sharp i am in my strategies. mixing thinking, journalling, sensing and meditating along nature walks and the likes.

less is more, insulabased decisionmaking and concentration of your forces is far more powerfull than hamsterwheeling it uncounsciously.

process is not simple easy though. Demands that you awake another capacity in your physical being. it needs to arise gently more than being driven forward.