silence the dumb monkey in your head - part 1
The return from San Francisco has been kinda weird.
I’m back in France in my teenage room. In the past 10+ years, I only came here for holidays or weekends. So I had a “holiday” behavior, going to fast food, no gym, no proper routine, and no focus on work.
After a week back I noticed I could not continue that way I had to change something.
I read somewhere, probably on Twitter, someone talking about making the right decisions for yourself (ex. going to the gym when you don’t want to or not eating that extra slice of cake) and illustrated that with having to fight with a monkey in your head.
It’s a you vs you game
It’s not the first time I read something like this, and I usually suck at disciplining myself, but this one for some reason, hit me hard.
I realized that everything that happens, every decision I will take will just be me vs me. Not someone else that will influence them or something, just me.
It’s easy to say and start to go to the gym, but if at some point I stop, it’s because of me.
Postponing, procrastination? My decision.
Even with work, you have a plan, and you know what to do, but for some reason, you don’t do exactly what’s planned.
It’s mainly because you’re listening to this “dumb monkey” in your head who usually will make choices based on ease.
Incontionly you (at least me) fight to take a decision with that monkey. Sometimes you win, sometimes not.
The goal would be to win every time. Don’t know about you but I’m not a fan of being mostly driven by monkey decisions (which are mine at the end of the day, of course, no monkey shaming here.)
Beat that monkey @$$
I will talk about my own experience here (mainly because that’s my newsletter so…) but it will not necessarily work/apply to everyone.
Taking over your decisions and beating that monkey is easy to say, but if it was that easy, we would all be driven with the right decisions and be extremely successful. But it’s not that easy (at least for me).
So the first step I discover help is to make things easier for you.
To do that, you have to know your strengths and weaknesses and work with them.
Let’s stay in the physical activity theme (promise we gonna talk about work after).
After being back and having no physical activities for almost 10 days, I wanted to change that. But I know that usually, when I start to go to the gym, I go there 3 times a week and after 2-3 weeks I lose my motivation.
I then listed my strengths and weaknesses:
I like working out (strength), but I hate the trip to the gym + hate when it’s crowded there (weakness).
I hate cardio (weakness), but I love biking (strength).
I love working out in the morning (strength) but hate doing it later in the day (weakness)
Based on that, I’ll not force myself to do things that I know I’ll not like. It will be an easy win for the monkey when he convinces me to stay home because it’s rainy outside instead of going to the gym.
Instead, I’ll work around my weakness, so here’s what I’ve done:
I bought a bike, so I can go biking almost every day → Cardio that I like
I bought a bench and weights to do my workout at home → No trip to the gym, no meeting with random people
I do my workout right after biking as I’m already ready for it → Reduce the friction of starting.
I go biking straight out of bed, first thing I do in the morning → First thing done in the day, don’t have to think about it during the day
With these changes, today is the 12th day in a row that I bike 10km and follow this with my workout.
Before the end of the first week, it was natural and automatic for me that right after waking up, I would go biking, and even more natural to follow this up with my workout. I don’t even think about it.
I’ve made it so easy for me to do this that the monkey cannot even give me his opinion.
Create a routine
Ok working with your strength and weaknesses is a good start, what’s next?
Then the goal will be to create a routine that will, again, make things easy for you.
I already slowly introduced it when I say I go biking straight out of bed. This is a routine or a habit, you name it.
The goal is to have a lot of them or make them follow each other, so you have a set of new actions that you’re doing without thinking.
Let’s talk about general lifestyle now (and a little bit of work).
Again everything starts with strengths and weaknesses so let’s start with that again:
I noticed that it’s really hard for me to focus and do work between ~5/6 pm to 7/8 pm
I’m more focused during the evening/night.
I prefer doing light work (everything except coding/designing) during the day.
For some personal reasons, I go to sleep around 2/3 am.
Based on these I’ve made working for me easier. Instead of doing “like everyone” and waking up at something like 6, starting to work at 9 until 12, taking a break, and working from 2 to 6/7, I’ve completely adapted my schedule to what works for me + makes my life easier :
I go to bed around 2/3 am so wake up around 10 am. (~7 hours of sleep)
Morning is a no-work zone and only me time. I do my biking + workout, then shower + a meal, and usually go on socials and read, everything I want except work.
I start to work around 2 pm until I feel I can’t focus anymore (5/6 pm). During that time I do light work (emails, social, learning, etc…)
I take a big break between 5/6 pm to 9 pm where I usually go out, take a nap (add an extra 30min-1 hours to my sleep), read, go on social, have dinner, etc…
Start to work again around 9 pm, until 2/3 pm, with some breaks every hour.
Repeat.
Since I’ve made these changes (in addition to the physical activities of course) I feel overall happier, more energetic, and more productive, and especially, I’m not thinking about how I’m going to organize my day. Of course, this is open to changes if I’ve some unexpected stuff to do.
Again, this is not something that I recommend to everyone, but just to show you how to adapt your daily routine to make things easier for you.
Reflections & Realizations
Ok cool, let’s talk about work, are you successful now?
Not at all and it’s funny (not really).
I can say I’ve fixed my routine and on the personal physical plan, that’s a huge progress. On the professional one, that’s another story.
Since I’m back home, I’m also back to my old bad habits, one in particular which is: overthinking.
I overthink a lot, for everything and it definitely blocks me. It’s kind of a next-level monkey on my head who will argue with me every time I’ve something to do.
For the quick (promise it’ll be quick) overview, I’m working full-time on Auro. I realized a few things:
Apple pays you out with a 2-month delay. So for all the revenue I’ll get in the month M the money will arrive in my bank account beginning of M+3. Yes, it sucks.
I overthought what was next for Auro, I wanted to revamp the design, add a REALLY useful feature to it but also do some marketing to get some users. End of the day didn’t know where to start.
For some reason (only God knows), I was focused on making money fast. (fun fact: it’s never good.) And things were not going fast enough with Auro.
With all of this, I decided to focus on something that could make me money faster. (fun fact: still a bad idea)
That’s when I finally started to work on my small online courses called Comet Courses.
Ok good, what’s the problem?
I spent almost a week overthinking how I’ll architecture the courses. Finally one day I decided to just do it one way and see. I created 6 courses that day.
Time wasted: 1 week.
I spent another week working on the landing page because people should have a place to be able to look for the information. I overthought how to make it, which template, started from scratch, paid someone, it was awful, starting to do it myself again, finally used a template, and paid WAY too much attention to useless details on the website. The real-time it could have taken: 1 day.
Time wasted: 1 week.
Also, I spent 2 days working on my personal website because I found a cool template and it’s been 1+ year since my website was down because I forgot to pay for the hosting (RIP my old wrodpress).
Time wasted: 2 days.
Add this to the fact that I wasn’t even sharing anything on social, which means for 2 weeks straight, I’ve worked in a tunnel, without any feedback, without shipping anything. Not talking about the fact that Auro, my main app is still on standby, I clearly lost the momentum.
Yes, that’s a mess.
The good part in there is that I realized that I was lost in the sauce. So I asked for help.
Goals
A big thanks to Principal Amit who helped me clear my mind and realize a few things:
I’ve to stop focusing on short-term money. If I want fast money I go get a job (no). I should focus on what I really want/love to do, money will come after. → Focusing on long-term goals.
Not trying to work on two projects at the same time (especially when none of them is successful yet)
Picking ONE (and only one) task a day and just doing it. Make it so simple that I don’t even have room to overthink this (remind me of something…).
I’m too smart (He said it, not me) so I think too much. I should be more dumb.
Having a routine to share what I’ve done in a newsletter every week to keep myself accountable. (Now you know why you’re reading this.)
Ok so now what?
It took me 4 days to write this newsletter.
Yes, 4.
3.5 to overthink how I will write it.
1 hour so far to write until this exact line.
Wasted time (again): 3.5 days.
As you probably understand I still have to work on my overthinking behavior.
Something that helped me to start today (that could maybe help you): I decided to just write this in the shittiest way possible, put a 20 min timer, some white noise, and the goal to finish this in the 20 min frame.
Well, I relaunched the timer twice, but at least I’m productive.
What’s next fr?
This was quite long, and I realized I like writing actually. I was used to doing it years ago if you’re interested.
I’ll try this exercise, every week (on Wednesday I guess?)
On the working side, I still have to beat that overthinking monkey, hence part 1 in the title, part 2 will be more focused on this.
Also, my focus for the next week is the following:
Focusing on what I love: Making apps, and so working on it + sharing updates more often.
Learning about app marketing and especially ASO. This is by far one of the best ways to increase acquisition and thus, revenue for an app. This strategy is more long-term tho.
Share more on social about what I’m doing. Twitter and TikTok especially. This newsletter will be a weekly summary and a brain dump, I guess.
That’s it for today, it was quite long, but I think I did pretty okay at condensing all of this considering how messy it was in my head.
I encourage you to take some time to think about your own routines, strengths & weaknesses and how you can improve the different areas of your life based on that.
Hope my experience was at least a little bit helpful for you.
See you (hopefully) next week.
I like the imagery of the monkey. I’m going to think of that the next time I don’t want to run. Hope your morning bike ride at home doesn’t have as many hills as SF!