Mark Luckey hit overwhelm in 2018 juggling a business merger, family caregiving, and renovations. In 2020 he started waking at 5am and journaling, then added decluttering, the Eisenhower Matrix, and Pomodoro timers to cut mental noise and boost focus.
Around 2018.
Around April–May 2020.
Foreign. My first awareness that life could possibly be simpler probably started around 2018. My company that I owned, the Australian part of Rooms xml, merged with a UK company to form Stuba, and I was appointed a cio. And that happened right at the time that I was also delivering one of the biggest offshore software developments in my life to the Australian grains industry. At the same time, we were doing minor renovations at home and major renovations in our office, which meant everyone from the office was working in our home at the same time that I was relocating my aging father from interstate. And it was just that feeling of overwhelm, that there was too much going on, that it was really hard to prioritize what was needing to be done on any given day because it felt like there was just so much to do. The first realization that I had a lot going on in my mind was around April and May of 2020, when the pandemic kicked in and all of the hard work was beginning to unravel. I was finding it really hard to focus. There was a ton of uncertainty in the world. And for the first time, I got up at 5am and did the whole 5am Club and started journaling. And as I journaled and I started getting all of these random thoughts out of my mind, it allowed me to resolve them, which in turn began to really clear my thought processes a bit and give me some clarity on what exactly it was I really needed to do. So for me, the start was journaling. And then once I had my thoughts in front of me, I had a much better chance of organizing them and starting to get things done. So I never really felt the pressure to do more. I always just had lots to do. And so I would just work harder and try and innovate in my processes and procedures, you know, hire more people, use different software packages to try and improve our efficiency. What I realized was that at times I was the bottleneck. Part of that was thinking, well, do I hire more people, put in more systems that. That if I can remove some of that clutter, that I can be more focused on understanding what needs to be done. And these days, I've still got plenty of projects on, new businesses launching and new ventures underway. And I look at mostly what the hardest jobs are for the day, and I try and do them first. Of course, looking at deadlines, when things need to be done by, are there other people depending upon me to deliver something so that I can liberate them to get their job done when I'm really stuck, something like the Eisenhower Matrix is awesome. They're really important, desperately urgent through to the it's been on my to do list for five weeks. It's probably never going to get done. Simplifying happened at a time when I really started to understand the best way to be productive at what I was doing. I think there was moments in different days where it was just astounding that I'd been making a really big deal out of something and I just needed to get on with it and get stuff done. But I think in a more general sense, what I found that once I combined that removing of the clutter with better processes and pomodoro methods and sampling all the different ways to organize my workday, I got staggered by just how much I was getting done in a day. That by getting up early and being really focused and having nothing else on the desk apart from that one thing that I needed to do, it was just incredible how much focus I gained by removing the clutter and just how productive I became. A cleanup decluttering exercise and the drill is simply take a photograph of a messy area that you spend a lot of time in, tidy it up, and send a photograph after you've tidied it. And then the week after we have a discussion of, well, what happened after you tidied it. And I think for three or four of us in the group, we tidied our desks. And not only does tidying the desk make you feel good because you finish a job and it's obviously done, but it was also that whole, wow, how much more work was I able to get done in that period of time? Second part of that is, you know, only have open on your screen the things you absolutely need to get your work done. Turn off all your notifications, leave your phone in another room, just have the Word document open that you're writing on, or the spreadsheet or the code base or whatever it is you need, because even those other visual distractions are opportunities to take us away from the job that we're doing. So as always, start simple, see how it feels, build some momentum, and keep going.
Tim Ferriss: How to Learn Better & Create Your Best Future | Huberman Lab Podcast
