Digital Minimalism

April 20, 2024

I used to float through my life and business without any self-awareness.

Making mistakes but not learning from them, not optimizing my time correctly, and doing tasks that wasted too much of it.

That was until I started to spend 1 hour every Sunday reflecting on my week.

Now I’m making progress much faster because I’m reviewing how things went and iterating instead of not learning from the things I'm doing wrong or inadequately.

In your case, you may be:

• Trying to study harder for those exams but you keep failing every time.
• Posting video after video on YouTube but you just arent growing.
• Going to the gym every week but you aren't getting closer to your goals.
• Wasting time doing things that don't serve you or your goals and feeling bad about it.

You keep going through this cycle of failure but you keep going because you know that you shouldn't stop. You'll make it eventually, right?

Wrong.

Productive time is important, but you also need time for maintenance and planning as well if you want to stay productive.

There's no point in being productive if you don't know where you're going or you're going in the wrong direction.

If you float through your life without any self-awareness, you will find yourself in a bad place and not know how you got there.

Most people are going through life doing the same things over and over that aren’t getting them good results and then they wonder what’s wrong.

Everyone should have dedicated time in the week to sit down, take a breather, reset, and realign their focus.

This letter will teach you how to do that with just 1 hour or less once every week.

Keep reading if you want to change your life with just this one simple habit.

Consistency is A Double-Edged Sword

Most people would agree that as long as you are consistently putting effort towards something, eventually, you will achieve your goal.

This idea has been further perpetuated by the systems over goals advice that everyone takes from Atomic Habits.

(I explain in more detail why this is bad advice in this letter called 'This is Why You Can't Change')

But this is not the whole story.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."-Einstein

You could be consistently doing something in the completely wrong way, or not well enough to achieve the desired result.

Do this for long enough and you’ll quit.

People give up on things when they fail to see that effort put in, doesn’t necessarily equate to results put out.

Most people are so focused on making progress, that they forget to self-assess along the way and make sure that they are going in the right direction.

If you don’t give yourself time to recuperate and organize your life, you'll end up putting off these little maintenance tasks that do matter in the long run.

Don’t make yourself go insane.

Instead, you should be consistently putting in effort towards something while analyzing and iterating along the way.

Reflections are vital for managing your work and ensuring you're on the right path. It's best to dedicate time each week, ideally on Saturday or Sunday, for a weekly review to prevent going off course.

This allows you to evaluate the previous week, identify what went wrong, determine how to improve, and recognize what you might have overlooked.

If and when something goes wrong, your effort won’t be wasted if you learn something.

Dickie Bush says: “It’s not how many days in a row you do something. It’s about how reliably you get back on track when you inevitably fall off.”

Everyone needs to declutter their mind and life just like the way we declutter our rooms at home. It should be routine and mandatory.

Weekly Reflection

Dedicate 1 hour, 1 day a week, to declutter your mind

-if you have more time, you can dedicate some to decluttering your life too.

I’ll go over some extra things you can do to declutter your life later.

I find it very refreshing to go to a coffee shop or bookstore and do this. After spending all week in my room, I like the novelty of going somewhere outside to work that’s more social.

Then, pull out a journal or laptop from your inventory and open a blank page to do your reflection.

The following questions are from the reflection that I teach inside of the Purpose Planner Course.

The planner has a page that you can copy each week to do this which makes it convenient. But you can do this without.

Before you reflect, review last week’s plan (if you had one) to see what you did and didn’t accomplish. This will help you to prepare better for the week ahead.

Even if last week didn’t go as planned, it’s okay because it’s a learning opportunity.

It’s only a failure if you don't learn from it.

There are 5 questions that you should ask yourself every Sunday:

1) What challenges did I face last week? How did I handle them, and how can I handle them better moving forward?

This is to help you identify and analyze the challenges you face.

When you have a problem in your life, a lot of the time, you will either solve it, or it will pass over.

But the real question is:

How did you handle the problem?

Did it cause you a lot of stress?

Did you make the right call?

The goal is to help you handle things better moving forward. In case you come across the same problem.

Think of it like studying history. The point is so we don't make the same mistakes of the past.

But you can't study the past if you don't even acknowledge it.

2) How effectively did I manage my time? What activities wasted my time? How can I improve for this week?

Time is our most valuable asset. And it’s nonrenewable.

So you should be making sure that you are using it in the most efficient way possible.

For example, you may note that you spent way too much time on Instagram this week. And it spilled over into your sleep.

Since this causes you to feel tired the next day, that is a problem, and you should aim to improve that.

Or maybe you scheduled 1 hour of time to do your homework or study each day, but you weren’t able to finish in that time.

You then would re-assess how long you need to get your work done each day and make the intention to give yourself more.

3) What lessons or insights did I gain this week? How can I apply this knowledge going forward?

If you really are self-improving, you should be able to think of at least one thing that you learned during the week.

Whether it was from a conversation, a situation, a book, or a piece of content like this newsletter.

Try to think of something that you learned that would help you if you applied it to your life. Then make the intention to use it.

Knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.

Knowledge turns into wisdom through self-experimentation.

You need to experiment with the things you're learning if you want to gain understanding.

Otherwise, you're just consuming for entertainment. I go into much more detail about this in the letter: How To Learn Any Skill 10X Faster

4) Assess your physical and mental well-being. Did I practice enough self-care, and maintain a healthy work/life balance?

You do not want to burn out. It’s not fun. (Speaking from experience)

Not practicing enough self-care will eventually catch up to you if you are not careful.

Only you know how much rest you really need to stay healthy, so it’s up to you to reflect and see if you truly are getting that perfect amount.

5) What are 1-3 things I am grateful happened last week?

“The whole process of mental adjustment and atonement can be summed up in one word, gratitude”-Wallace Wattles

The way to change the way you think about things is through gratitude.

The way to change what you gain from a given situation, good or bad, is through gratitude.

Gratitude is the easiest way to go from being in a negative state or vibration to a positive one.

Sometimes, we can be very unappreciative of what we have. It’s easy to get caught up in the not-so-good things in life. But so rewarding to appreciate the little things that we take for granted.

Take some time every week to really think about what you have to be grateful for and why you are grateful for it.

After You Reflect

Once you are done with your reflection, you will plan out the week ahead - from a state of clarity and confidence.

You may have gotten insight into what you need to change; things like your routines, habits, or goals. So make sure to keep those updated too.

While you're at it, you might as well take some time to declutter your life. Some things I do on Sundays:

• Track finances
• Clear emails
• Do "shallow work"
• Grocery shopping
• Laundry
• Long walks
• Cleaning
• Catch up on messages

If you would like a place to do your weekly reflection along with planning your upcoming week and much much more, I highly recommend you check out my productivity notion template, the Purpose Planner.

The questions I went through here were part of the weekly reflection section of the template.

If you aren’t quite ready to invest in the planner, I have a free journaling course called 14 Days To Purpose that over 6000 people have taken already.

I’m confident that it will help you on your self-improvement journey no matter where you are.

Remember-

Purpose is your priority

Inaction is your enemy

-Abraham