How to Live a Full Life: Integrating Productivity + Creativity + Self-Reflection | Tim Ferriss

i'm going to answer a question that i get in some form or another quite often this one is well worded and it's from chris p who is in a few of the private facebook groups where i do testing of various types here's the question how does tim integrate creating artistic flow in parentheses being productive getting done in parentheses self-reflection healing and transcendence and then in parentheses going beyond oneself be it spiritually contributing to others etc in his full life the crux of the question is what he's learned on living a full life and how he's learned to allow it all in given that we have the same 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year and each of these endeavors could be all-consuming of one's time and attention maybe it's balance maybe it's selective focus maybe it's something very different i'd appreciate his view so the question is how you incorporate these different facets or pieces of the pie chart into your life i do not have a perfect answer i don't think anyone has a perfect answer but i can tell you what i have changed in terms of how i think about this and how i implement it that has helped me to trend in the right direction where i feel better i feel more holistically integrated so to speak so let's look at this we have the creative let's call that artistic flow the productive getting things done then we have the self-reflection slash healing slash transcendence going beyond oneself whether spiritually contributing to others or otherwise my experience is that you will never find balance so let that sink in that might sound pessimistic the reason you won't find it is because you have to schedule it if you want any semblance of covering these bases in your day-to-day week-to-week month-to-month life in my personal experience it has to be calendared and scheduled in advance i'll give you a few examples of what this looks like for me let's talk about being productive getting done i block out mondays this is a monday when we're recording right now just to give you an example where i will batch certain types of activities that could be recording videos it could be phone calls with my team i do one-on-ones with my team members my employees administrative work is batched on mondays i do a lot of my say podcast recording and audio on fridays you'll notice that i'm not trying to cover the artistic the productive the transcendent that in one day i used to do that and the task switching cost the channel switching cost is extremely high for me personally it doesn't work very well there's a lot of grinding the gears trying to move between those things therefore i block out days of the week where i'm getting done there are also going to be certain check boxes that need to be checked off right now i have one blog post per week that must be published that then gets blocked out in the calendar for writing time typically before noon or before lunch on a given day that will be my focus for creating before managing right so create before you manage is a blog post that i recently put up on tim.log if you want to check it out that was reasonably popular and those are all pre-scheduled those are a few examples on a weekly basis being productive on a quarterly basis i also have a content creation week where i will answer various questions produce certain types of audio focus on writing etc get a lot done that can then be distributed over the next quarter the next three months that is a quarterly example of getting things done on the artistic side when i am home here in austin i will almost always try to have at least one day per week and it doesn't vary so this could be say a tuesday for a series of four to eight weeks or it could be on a wednesday doesn't really matter but the consistency is what matters i'll have a 90 minute drawing lesson first thing in the morning this is pre-input before any type of email or anything that might distract me i'll sit down with an art teacher and work on say whether it's charcoal pencil paint you name it for graphic expression right that is pre-scheduled pre-committed on the calendar then we have the transcendent the self-healing the reflective or introspective i will generally speaking at least once a quarter schedule one to two weeks semi to completely off grid this will be in nature and i'm allowed to write but i'm not allowed to read and this could coincide with fasting it often does but not always and this will be time that is blocked out once again in advance and preferably pre-paid for so whether there's travel involved lodging involved facilitators involved who could be say breath workers they could be experts in some type of therapeutic modality like ifs or otherwise having these things booked on the calendar so that there is a sunk cost fallacy that you can use to your advantage and you've already prepaid hopefully irreversibly for these things therefore there's a penalty for canceling and you can use the very exaggerated human tendency of loss aversion to work to your benefit in this type of example so this may seem like a very sterile answer to a comprehensive big question but for me it is a very practical answer and that is you have to put it in the calendar if it's not in the calendar it's not real you are not going to find balance you have to create it you have to fight every lesser tendency that you have in my case that will stymie and self-sabotage by putting into the calendar that is the only way that i have found to integrate these various pieces into my life and if i do not have them in my calendar it's not going to work things are going to break i'm going to neglect important areas and i'm going to pay the consequences as a result so that is a long way of saying get it in the calendar pay for stuff in advance commit to people so you have accountability and in my experience a lot of things take care of themselves after that you

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 296,721

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast, creativity, spirituality, productivity

Id: PorwgeWg8Ew

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020