So I am writing this while stuck in quarantine, chances are, you are reading this while stuck in quarantine too. But the similarities between You and Me don’t just end there, what we both have in common these days, is a lot of time 1 on 1, with our own selves.

And for me at-least this alone time has been really weird. Because I have to convince myself everyday to do normal everyday things.

But there are some things that I have been doing automatically, because I really want to do them. It doesn’t seem to matter what day it is, or how I am feeling. I just keep doing those things. And it feels really great. You probably have those things too. Just a handful that you keep doing everyday.

And I wanted to figure out why is it so easy for me to complete these things, and why I need so much motivation to complete everything else.

And I found a couple of ways to, first, find that thing you love doing, and second, on taking it to the next level, so you get even more of that thing done everyday.

I am saying all of this because chances are, we are never going to have this much alone time, probably ever!. So before anything else let’s try to visualize this alone time.

Assuming you live alone, have a normal day job and have been under complete quarantine for 30 days [And assuming you’re reading this around mid April]. Since the start of 2020 this is(approximately) what you have been doing.

The first thing that is apparent is — Damn do we sleep a lot! But to give you something more to think about; the graph below is the alone time you had in the 31 days of January vs the 30 days of quarantine.

So before this quarantine ends and we get back to the chaos of everyday life — I want to take just around half an hour of your time, to show you two techniques I found, to find the thing you love doing, and finding out how to get more of that thing in your everyday life.

WHAT DO I REALLY REALLY REALLY LIKE DOING

We will start by looking at what you did yesterday. If you are like most other people you were awake for around 1000 minutes.

To make it better to see, we can think of these 1000 minutes as 100 10-minute blocks. Now I want you to think how you filled up each of these boxes. Maybe you were working from home that’s 48 blocks filled, maybe you tried cooking yesterday that’s another 5 blocks gone. If you see how fill up the blocks across multiple days, you will probably see a pattern emerging.

You will see some blocks that are uniquely yours. Repeated almost everyday. They can be things like you making music, working on that side hustle you have, it can be you talking to someone special.

There are blocks that you share with all other people, those that you share with some other people, and then there are those that are yours — shared with no other person.

This is where the 80/20 Principle comes in

The 80/20 principle says that 80% of your output, results and happiness comes from just 20% of your input, efforts and interactions.

It’s a principle used for decades by millionaires and world class performers, but I found it really useful when I looked at my daily life.

I found that any day where I would spend 3,4,5 blocks talking to this one specific person, that day I would be so much happier than any other day. Or, any day where I spent a handful of blocks teaching a friend about some cool new thing I came across or learned. That would give me this amazing feeling of satisfaction that I couldn’t get anywhere else.

What you will find when you look at your day is probably different. In some cases you may even be able to find those 20% of things that cause 80% of your unhappiness or dissatisfaction.

The main idea is to identify you happiness or achievement blocks and move the time spent on such high value activities from 20% to as high as they will go.

And to do this you will likely have to take risks.

Should I Jump ?

“ He who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary. ” — Seneca

It’s incredibly scary taking a risk, jumping into uncertainty. Most people would choose unhappiness over uncertainty. That’s life for most of us. But that doesn’t need to be the case.

Remember that person I liked to talking to, I decided I had to ask her(let’s call her Rey) out. And I had to write something to teach something useful to more people. Most of us have probably set goals like this, but the actual carrying out the goals part is probably the most difficult.

What helped me build up the courage was this exercise called Fear Setting by Tim Ferriss.

What is Fear Setting

Step 1

It’s an exercise where you start off by imagining the absolute worst thing that can happen if you take that risk.

So I decided to think about what could go horrifically wrong if I wrote something, I thought about how no one would like it, and I would never have the confidence to write again. I thought about how if I asked Rey out, and she said No, how I would never be able to talk to her, and I would lose all my friends because they would now think I have no game at all.

And the more I thought about the worst case scenarios, the more confident I kept getting. Because for everything bad that could happen, there was a very easy way to prevent it from happening or to repair the situation.

If no-one liked what I wrote, it just meant I had to find something else to cover, change the way I write. On how I would never be able to talk to Rey again, I just had to ask her in a decent enough way, so she didn’t cut all contact and run off to another country.

The options on how to not completely mess up were many, and most of them weren’t that hard to do.

So first you have to fill out this and analyse your worst nightmare. It’s probably not as bad as you think.

Step 2

I realised that on a scale of 1–10, 1 being it didn’t matter and 10 being permanently life changing. The worst case scenarios I had in mind would only score around a 3/4. And if instead the best case scenarios did happen I would be at an 8 easily.

In other words, I was risking an unlikely and temporary 3 or 4 for an easy 8 or 9. And I could easily recover to where I was at before I did anything, even if the worst case scenario did happen.

The Finale

So after all of that I really hope that you found something useful. I ended up taking those risks, this is the writing project that I have been too scared to start for months.

And I did end up asking Rey out, she said No.