How to Live a Full Life; Integrating Productivity + Creativity + Self-Reflection ¦ Tim Ferriss

I'm going to answer a question that I get in some form or another quite often. This one is well-worded, and it's from Chris P., who is in a few of the private Facebook groups where I do testing of various types. Here's the question. How does Tim integrate creating, artistic flow, in parentheses, being productive, getting shit done, in parentheses, self-reflection slash healing and transcendence, and then in parentheses, going beyond oneself, be it spiritually, contributing to others, etc., in his full life? The crux of the question is what he's learned on living a full life and how he's learned to allow it all in, given that we have the same 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year, and each of these endeavors could be all-consuming of one's time and attention. Maybe it's balance. Maybe it's selective focus. Maybe it's something very different. I'd appreciate his view. The question is how you incorporate these different facets or pieces of the pie chart into your life. I do not have a perfect answer. I don't think anyone has a perfect answer, but I can tell you what I have changed in terms of how I think about this and how I implement it that has helped me to trend in the right direction, where I feel better. I feel more holistically integrated, so to speak. Let's look at this. We have the creative, let's call that artistic flow, the productive, getting things done, and then we have the self-reflection slash healing slash transcendence, going beyond one's self, whether spiritually, contributing to others, or otherwise. My experience is that you will never find balance, so let that sink in. That might sound pessimistic. The reason you won't find it is because you have to schedule it. If you want any semblance of covering these bases in your day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month life, in my personal experience, it has to be calendared and scheduled in advance. I'll give you a few examples of what this looks like for me. Let's talk about being productive, getting shit done. I block out Mondays. This is a Monday when we're recording right now, just to give you an example, where I will batch certain types of activities. That could be recording videos, it could be phone calls with my team, I do one-on-ones with my team members, my employees. Administrative work is batched on Mondays. I do a lot of my, say, podcast recording and audio on Fridays. You'll notice that I'm not trying to cover the artistic, the productive, the transcendent, in one day. I used to do that, and the task-switching cost, the channel-switching cost, is extremely high. For me personally, it doesn't work very well. There's a lot of grinding the gears, trying to move between those things. Therefore, I block out days of the week where I'm getting shit done. There are also going to be certain checkboxes that need to be checked off. Right now, I have one blog post per week that must be published. That then gets blocked out in the calendar for writing time. Typically, before noon or before lunch on a given day, that will be my focus for creating before managing. Create Before You Manage is a blog post that I recently put up on TimDotBlog, if you want to check it out. That was reasonably popular. Those are all pre-scheduled. Those are a few examples on a weekly basis, being productive. On a quarterly basis, I also have a content creation week, where I will answer various questions, produce certain types of audio, focus on writing, etc., get a lot done that can then be distributed over the next quarter, the next three months. That is a quarterly example of getting things done. On the artistic side, when I am home here in Austin, I will almost always try to have at least one day per week. It doesn't vary. This could be, say, a Tuesday for a series of 48 weeks, or it could be on a Wednesday. It doesn't really matter, but the consistency is what matters. I will have a 90-minute drawing lesson first thing in the morning. This is pre-input before any type of email or anything that might distract me. I'll sit down with an art teacher and work on, say, whether it's charcoal, pencil, paint, you name it, for graphic expression. That is pre-scheduled, pre-committed on the calendar. Then we have the transcendent, the self-healing, the reflective or introspective. I will, generally speaking, at least once a quarter schedule one to two weeks, semi to completely off-grid. This will be in nature. I'm allowed to write, but I'm not allowed to read. This could coincide with fasting. It often does, but not always. This will be time that is blocked out, once again, in advance and preferably pre-paid for. Whether there's travel involved, lodging involved, facilitators involved who could be, say, breath workers, they could be experts in some type of therapeutic modality like IFS or otherwise. Having these things booked on the calendar so that there is a sunk cost fallacy that you can use to your advantage. You've already pre-paid, hopefully irreversibly, for these things. Therefore, there's a penalty for canceling. You can use the very exaggerated human tendency of loss aversion to work to your benefit in this type of example. This may seem like a very sterile answer to a comprehensive big question, but for me, it is a very practical answer, and that is you have to put it in the calendar. If it's not in the calendar, it's not real. You are not going to find balance. You have to create it. You have to fight every lesser tendency that you have, in my case, that will stymie and self-sabotage by putting it into the calendar. That is the only way that I have found to integrate these various pieces into my life. And if I do not have them in my calendar, it's not going to work. Things are going to break. I'm going to neglect important areas, and I'm going to pay the consequences as a result. So that is a long way of saying, get it in the calendar. Pay for stuff in advance. Commit to people so you have accountability. And in my experience, a lot of things take care of themselves after that.