👋 Hey.
Welcome to issue #18 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter. Thanks for being here!
Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (3.5 min read):
(With a new years theme 🎉 – a few ideas to help set up our performance for 2023)...
🗓 Scheduling energy
Graphic by Visualize Value
Consistency beats intensity.
And consistency’s biggest enemy is burnout.
New York Times writer, Laura Vanderkam, offers a counter-intuitive way to avoid it:
“Adding energising activities to your schedule just might make life feel more doable”.
She argues that we don’t avoid burnout by taking our foot off the gas.
We avoid it through engagement – finding, scheduling and doing activities that we look forward to.
Could be sitting with a morning coffee. A short walk. Calling a mate on the drive home... Just something that requires a bt of effort that you can look forward to.
Her study found planning for and doing these things give us energy that spills over into other parts of our lives.
This isn’t to say overcommit and throw a hundred balls in the air...
But to figure out the small things we love to do. Schedule them. And protect those blocks of time aggressively.
You can read more here.
And speaking of scheduling energy. Here’s an idea…
🗞 Article: The single greatest habit you can build
This article by Sahil Bloom shares the research (+ his own experience) that supports the mental and physical benefits of walking:
- 💡 Creativity
- 🩸 Blood glucose health
- 🧠 Memory retention, and more...
One of those things that's so simple it sounds stupid.
For me, there isn’t much a 30-minute walk can’t fix.
Well worth the short read. An easy way to boost our performance in 2023.
Now here's how to figure out your other energising activities...
🎆 Year in review
So we know scheduling energising activities is gonna be helpful for our performance.
But how do we figure out what those activities are for us?
Enter: the Past Year Review
Tim Ferriss’ alternative to new years’ resolutions:
- 🗓 Go through your 2022 calendar
- 🔋 Identify the things that brought you energy (or peak emotion)
- 🪫 Then, identify the things that zapped your energy (or negative emotion)
(I don't really have a tight calendar. So just went through the months of the year mentally – where was I, what was I doing etc.)
We now have a list of things to schedule and book in advance for 2023. And a list of things to avoid.
✌️
That's it!
- If you've got a mate who'd enjoy this, please pass it on
- Is there a specific topic you want to see in future issues?
- Also, if you have anything interesting to share, I'd love to hear about it.
🎉 Happy new year. Thanks for your time and attention this year. Looking forward to next year. Lots to come :)
Matt
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