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For those of you who have been following me for a while you know I’ve done a lot of experiments about productivity to see how I can basically become a better version of myself.
I want to accomplish more and just feel like I’m achieving something everyday and making the most of my time. Here on the blog, I’ve shared my experiments with different productivity hacks like polyphasic sleep as well as how I engineer my environment for peak productivity.
One year when I wrote five or six e-books I did all of my writing on the Bangkok SkyTrain because for whatever reason I was in the zone, and without internet I had very little distractions. I just got my laptop out and started typing.
What I want to share this time around are some of my revelations that I’ve uncovered within the last year or so.
Since the Covid era began, I’ve spent the time here in Vietnam which is a beautiful country and has a great cost of living so it’s a very nice place to wait out a pandemic.
However, last year Saigon began to go into a lockdown and I got out just before it was too late. I packed all my things and got on my motorcycle and drove up the coast, eventually ending up in a mountain city called Da Lat.
The lockdown in Saigon lasted about 4 months and it was extremely severe. But where I was up in the mountains, I was prospering. The cost of living was very low, my expenses were only around 13 USD today, including my room and all of my meals (and I eat a lot). I spent the time focusing on healing what needed to be healed, growing where I needed growth, listening to guided meditations every morning and taking courses from masterclass and mindvalley.
Because life in the mountains was relatively simple and peaceful it gave me the space I needed to grow and to heal. Oftentimes I would rest early after sunset, sometimes in bed about 8:00 p.m. and waking up around 4 or 5:00 in the morning.
This was a great exercise in simplifying my life, simplifying my routines, and also simplifying my diet. Basically I got into a routine where I didn’t eat anything in the mornings and usually had my first meal in the early afternoon around 2:00 p.m., and ate everything within a 5 to 6 hour window.
It was incredibly convenient because in Da Lat, you could eat at an all you can eat vegetarian buffet for only 25,000 vnd (which is about $1 USD).
And what I have found, is that during that stretch from 5:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., I have no issues at all with energy and productivity. If you have ever studied my work before, then you know that I’m all about managing energy, rather than managing time.
And fasting seems to be, bar none, the best way that I can have my mind and body on board with what I want to do for the day, and operate at full steam without any sort of resistance or a fatigue.
Conversely, I always find myself very tired after I eat a meal and I don’t want to do any work anymore. It’s like my willpower is sapped. And all I want to do is rest. So on certain days when I want to take a nap, I will try and plan my naps after eating a big meal.
People often ask me, since I wrote the book “Hack Sleep” and created a video course called The Sleep Hacking Masterclass whether I am sleeping better nowadays. But I think it’s actually the wrong question. The issues that I have never really disappeared, but my capacity to manage my day in a way that suits me best has become greatly enhanced since I studied the content needed to write the book. It’s about managing my energy and my body so that it does what I need it to get done.
And this is really, really important for me particularly because I don’t like to leave anything half finished. When I start something, it is very important for me to complete it.
I’m not interested in earning a participation medal for a good effort. If I say I want to do something, whether to myself or to someone else, it is absolutely essential that I do what I say.
In any case, there’s all kinds of literature about the benefits on the fasting online, from burning fat to extending lifespan. I don’t need to get into all of the details on here, I just want it to share my own experiences and related in a way that’s easy for the layman to understand, implement and benefit from in their own life.