10 Tiny Ways to Make Your Life Easier (Today)

Something that I love doing are little favors for my future self. Little things that'll make future me's life much easier. And in this video we are going to walk through nine tiny really easy things that you can do immediately, today, that will make your future self's life easier. This video is sponsored by Copilot which I'll talk more on later. Number one, write letters from your best self to your future self. So to craft these letters, first find your mistrunchable areas. The areas where you go full mistrunchable on yourself when you really should be going full miss honey on yourself. And you might find that your mistrunchable only comes out in some areas of your life. Maybe you go full miss honey on yourself when you mess up in a social situation but as soon as you miss a deadline, mistrunchable comes out. Maybe you are all miss honey when you have a low week and you struggle to get the basics done but you are full mistrunchable as soon as the client gives you bad feedback. Find those areas of your life where when you have a setback, you react in a way that is more aligned with mistrunchable than miss honey. And write a letter from your internal miss honey when you have difficult times in that area. So your miss honey letter might be from the perspective of miss honey. It also could be from the perspective of your older, much wiser self. It could be from a spiritual leader depending on your beliefs. It really doesn't matter, just fill these letters with compassion, with kindness and maybe even with some guidance. Store these letters somewhere where you can get to them easily. So even in your phone is fine. Number two, find a tv show, audiobook or podcast for restricted temptation bundling. So as a favor for your future self, find yourself a restricted to cooking, cleaning, working out tv show, podcast, audiobook. So you've probably heard of temptation bundling before. This is when you do something that maybe you don't enjoy doing so much. Could be cleaning, could be cooking. And while you do that, you pair it alongside something that fills your brain with dopamine. So you chuck on a tv show, watch a little tiktok, do something that is delightful to your brain while also doing something that isn't as delightful. But what makes a much bigger difference is restricted temptation bundling. So the first time that I noticed this was when I realized that I was being really consistent with my meal prepping habit. I was like, wow, I'm so impressed with myself. Then I realized that me being consistent with my meal prepping habit also happened to correlate with Euphoria being released week by week. While I meal prepped, I would watch the latest episode of Euphoria. I restricted myself to only watching Euphoria when I cooked. And that wasn't difficult because it was coming out week by week. And this is an idea that's promoted by Katie Milkman, who is an economist. So in a study, a bunch of students, imagine, they offered $100 to spend some time in a gym, which is a great deal. For some of these students, they were given iPods that were preloaded with audiobooks like The Hunger Games, enjoyable audiobooks, things you'd want to listen to. The students were told, work out, listen to your audiobooks. When you finish your workout, your iPod is going to be put in a locked box that you can only access going to the gym. So if they wanted to listen to more of The Hunger Games, they'd have to go back to the gym. The students who were given the iPod exercised 55% more in the week after the study, and they saw benefits for up to seven weeks after the study, up until the Thanksgiving break. And I think that there is something to this. Temptation bundling on its own is great. Restricted temptation bundling, it's different. So as a favor for your future self, go ahead and find your restricted temptation bundling show, podcast, audiobook. And you literally want to start calling it your cooking show, your cleaning audiobook, your workout podcast. And if you can't find something that's literally coming out week by week, try finding something on a platform that you maybe wouldn't normally visit, so that it doesn't feel so accessible. So if you normally use Audible to access your audiobooks, try getting an audiobook on Libby, the library app. If you normally watch Netflix and you have some disposable income, try buying episode by episode each week on Apple TV. Number three, make working out easier with Copilot. Copilot's tagline is literally, fitness coaching that makes you nine times more consistent. So before I signed up to Copilot, I was actually doing one personal training session per week. And that personal training session was $60 for just one session. Copilot, on the other hand, works out to be a lot cheaper. So my journey on Copilot started out with finding the right coach. I used the find my coach button on their website to get really specific about what I wanted. And these coaches are all experts. I had my onboarding session with my coach. I told her about my lower back problems that I have been finding that I really wanted to work on. I told her that I wanted to develop some upper body strength because I'm quite weak. And all of my other preferences. And using those preferences, she created me custom, beautiful workouts that I can do whenever I want. So I'm in my third week of Copilot now. This is what you're going to see when you open up the app. You'll see the workouts that have been assigned to you by your trainer. And these are all custom made. They're frequently changing. And they're designed specifically for you and for your needs. So I'm in touch with my coach, Kayleen. She's just checking in, asking me what I enjoyed about the workouts, asking me what I'd like to change about the workouts. And something about that constant contact keeps me motivated. The good thing about Copilot is I have my coach, Kayleen, who does all the thinking for me. Do you use Copilot yourself? Yeah, I'm very much so into having a little circle filled at the end of the day. With Copilot, you're able to really branch out there. And you're just getting that personal one-on-one coach with the convenience of online training. So I just finished my workout. And one of the exercises that I was doing, the dumbbell wide bent over row, kind of hurt my lower back. So I'm gonna message my trainer. I feel like, what am I doing wrong? She'll come back to me and be like, okay, engage this part of your body. Maybe do it like this and give me a little demo. Don't forget to check out Copilot using my link in the description. Go.mycopilot.com slash michelleb for 14 days, free with your own expert fitness and health coach. Set up six-week meal menus. So I'm about to introduce you to the meal planning technique that has made meal planning a whole lot easier for me. Six-week meal menus. I've always done some kind of meal prepping. But the biggest thing that I have struggled with is the mental work behind meal prepping. So picking the meals that I want to make for the week. So I decided to set up six-week meal menus. I did the mental work once. It saved me so much effort and time. So apparently this is also what kindergartens do. It makes it easier for the chefs, but it also makes sure there's enough variety for the children, which I love. So to create this, set up a six-week plan. Then for each week, allocate two or three meals, depending on how much you tend to prep. I let go of worrying about, am I gonna have exactly the right number of meals? Because it always just pans out. And if for some reason one week you don't have enough, you can make more the next time. When you populate this meal plan, use recipes that you already know that you like, recipes that are easy for you to cook, and recipes that can be cooked in batch. Some weeks I'll also have on-the-spot meals that I'll pop in there. So this week I have burgers as my on-the-spot meals. I can make those in like 10, 15 minutes. And then you just rotate through your weeks. When you get to week six, you go back to week one. Setting this up once will save future you so much time, effort, mental work. Categorize your money. So one huge favor that you can do for your future self immediately is set up a category of savings called short-term savings. So hearing about the idea of short-term savings made me feel really dumb because I was really unsure why I hadn't done it before. So one part of short-term savings is saving for predictable spikes in spending. Wedding season, vacations, big furniture purchases, big clothing purchases. For example, I know that I, at least once a quarter, I'm gonna do a bit of a shop for new clothes for the new season. I almost always go over budget for this shop. It is pretty predictable. And I'm like, eh, I deserve it. But then for the next few weeks, I find myself hibernating and trying to recoup that money that I've spent on clothing. So now I set aside money for that predictable spike in spending so that I'm not struggling when that time comes around. I'm like, yes, I have the money set aside for that. I'm not gonna be struggling for the next few weeks. So maybe you know that you will reliably drop a little too much money on skincare every season or books or games. Instead of doing that, scrambling, getting frustrated with yourself, blowing your budget, create an account for your predictable spikes in spending. The author of Worry-Free Money, which is where I read about this idea from, actually said this in the book. I have seen it so many times. Clients who have solid short-term savings consistently stick to their financial plan and worry way less about money than those without short-term savings. Create a style Pinterest board. Style boards save you so much mental work when it comes to buying new clothing. So if you wanna buy something new, look at your style board. Does it fit in? If no, don't buy it unless you are obsessed with it. When you go to buy clothes because it's a new season, have a look at your board. What are the people in your board wearing? What kind of colors are they leaning towards? What kind of cuts are they leaning towards? Buy those items that appear a few times. So for example, for spring, if you have a look at my style board, there are a lot of cropped racer tops. So I know that's something that I wanna stock up on for the spring. As a really nice flow and effect for this, once you start to build up your wardrobe in line with a distinct personal style, it's a lot easier to throw together clothes on a day-to-day basis because everything tends to go together. Use resonance testing to revisit your goals. Usually when you set your goals, your motivation is at an all-time high and it is really easy to overshoot. You get into this mindset of like, yes, from next week, I will be able to work out 40 minutes a day because I have all this motivation right now. Therefore, future me will also have that motivation. Right now in this moment, there is no buzz unless you've just had a birthday. There are no false messages about your motivation levels. Use that to your advantage. Instead of beating yourself up about goals that maybe you didn't stick to as well as you wanted to or you didn't stick to at all, revisit your goals using resonance testing. I talked about this in my video on five mindset shifts that are improving my life. So meditation teacher John Croft said, discover what non-zero amount of the activity you are willing to do. If your aim was to meditate for 20 minutes, ask if you'd be willing to do 19. Wait for the answer. No? Okay. What about 18, 17, and so on? It seems like it would be too simple to work, but I can report that it really does. You can apply this to any goal when it comes to quantity or how long you do something or even the style of how you approach the goal. So ask yourself, am I willing to write one blog post a week? No, am I willing to write one Instagram caption a week? And so on and so forth. You can test different goals and see how your body and mind respond. Almost always when you start with a lower level goal, you are more likely to be successful. Spend an hour optimizing your environment for your habits. So bouncing off of the very last point, take an hour to set up your environment and cater it to you achieving those goals. For example, your goal. Build a website. You might have a habit behind that goal of working on your website for half an hour every morning. To optimize your environment for that habit, you might put your laptop right beside your couch where you sit in the morning. Create an automation that runs every time you open up your laptop so that your brainstorming space for your website appears. And so on and so forth. Set up a delivery service for the things that you often run out of and you don't make time to get. So I used to be really terrible at renewing my contraception purely because I didn't want to go into the doctors, have that whole conversation, have to get a script, go to the chemist. It's a whole long process. It's something that seems really simple. So I signed up to Kind Fertility which is a contraception service. It hasn't been a problem since. Maybe you always find yourself running out of toilet paper, skincare, razors, and you just forget to check for those things when you do your weekly grocery shop. Try signing up for some kind of delivery service so that future you doesn't have to do that worrying anymore. Don't forget to check out Copilot using my link in the description for 14 days, free with your own expert fitness and health coach. If you liked this video and you're looking to do more things that create more ease in your life, try watching my other video which has similar advice. You can bash it all in one day, do all of these things to make your life a little bit easier for future you. That video is on the screen and down below. I appreciate you so very much and I'll see you soon.