All right, Jesse, what do we got next? - Okay, next question's from Jacob, a 20 year old from Colorado. "I seem to have contracted a case of what I call seasonal discipline, where I'll be very actively disciplined on following my habits and systems for a few months at a time, and then fall off really hard for a few months in an endless agonizing loop.

I'm wondering if you have any tips for cultivating a more consistent commitment to discipline?" - You got a lot of young people today, Jesse. - I know, I was thinking the same thing. - Makes us feel old. - You know, when you were doing the Henson Reed, I was thinking, you know, you haven't shaved in two days, and I was like, "Mine, I go back and forth a lot, but mine's white now." - Oh, mine is too.

- Yeah, yeah. - I don't mind it. - I don't mind it, but my beard is, well, it's salt and pepper, but it's definitely white. And I can see it at my sideburns as well, yeah. My hair is still mainly brown, but... Oh, that's coming, that's coming. We need to balance these 20 year old questions, I'm telling you, Jesse.

People get, I don't know, a 41 year old question is gonna be like a combination of wanting to know about tax filing. You know, I'm doing my Schedule C deductions and wondering if this is the right line item to put that deduction. Some mixture of talking about, yeah, tax filings, and then also, I don't know, what else does?

- Potential hair surgery. - And like, yeah, hair surgery. I am, I'm thinking like, this hair surgery for this hair surgery, and I have a kind of a tax question. And also I'm tired all the time. And I need to, should I get like testosterone treatment? Yeah. Meanwhile, these young kids are, yeah.

I was up 12 hours, 20 hours straight working on my screenplay. And we're like, I only get two hours of working in the morning before I fall asleep and take a nap. All right, Jacob, I'm sorry, let's get back to your question. So, I'm gonna have, again, two solutions here.

Where this is gonna overlap with what I talked about with Fahad is just the mindset training piece. So the very same thing I recommended Fahad that I recommended at the beginning of the show, I'm gonna recommend as a starting point for you as well. That discipline layer, that very first layer of the deep life stack.

Two to three, non-trivial and tractable, non-trivial but tractable daily discipline and then the last one, the mindset training piece. So, I'm gonna have, again, two solutions here. Non-trivial but tractable daily disciplines covering multiple areas of your life that you track every single day and put most of your productivity, intentionality, focus, all that willpower on just doing those every day, not breaking the chain.

You wanna mark it every day on a calendar. It's a good tune up just to get your mind back in shape as I don't need external power to do things. I don't need to be in a season where I'm excited or things are going well to make progress on important things.

I can also make progress in the hard seasons, in the proverbial winters when other things are going on or the work itself is not going so well. So, there's a mindset tune up and I think that returning to that discipline layer can help with that. And then just like with Fahad, but with slight differences in specifics here, I would say let's also think about what this, what you're calling here habits and systems, what these habits and systems are.

So, even if you have the right internal conception of yourself, it is still the case that if the particular habits or systems you've put in place, if those particular habits and systems aren't sustainable or if they have a lot of friction, they work but they have overhead that don't need to be there and your mind senses that, you are going to accumulate stress fractures, right?

You're gonna accumulate over time this friction and grinding of the system's not quite right. It's too big, it's too hard. It has steps we don't need to do. It's like the system's gonna start building up these stretch fractures until the whole thing eventually breaks apart. And that's maybe why you can only make a few months.

This is very common in the world of productivity systems that if the system is not compatible with your life and streamlined and believable, you can last with it for a while. But after, it gets this clunky. I'm typing these notes and it goes into this note system that then automatically populates these types of systems.

And every day I have a generative AI bot take these and generate a schedule and then I use that schedule to sort of schedule my hours. These type of high overhead, high friction systems, they begin to just accumulate too much wear and tear until all of the gears get jammed.

And then you just say enough with this and you fall back to doing nothing until doing nothing after a while gets you so stressed out or overwhelmed by being disorganized that you go and build a new system and that starts generating friction until it's gears mesh. And then that could also be the source of what you're seeing here.

One season up, one season down, one season up, one season down. So you also wanna really check out your systems here. Streamline them. The simplest possible thing that actually helps you get your work done sometimes is the right thing to do. Get rid of unnecessary things. Have a core document where you keep track of, here's what I do and how I do it.

So you're not just trying to keep track of things in your mind and you can see where there's overlap or redundancies or your systems are sort of out of control. You want something that fits very naturally into your life. So if you're starting from scratch here, I would say something like multi-scale planning.

You have a strategic plan, a weekly plan and do some sort of daily time block plan during work days but not the weekends. Have some sort of good system for capture of your tasks so that you don't have to keep track of those things in your head. Put those two things together, maybe mixed in with some sort of fixed schedule productivity mindset of this is my work hours and everything else has to fit into it.

That's a good start for organizing all the professional things in your life. Use very simple tech tools for implementing this. I'm talking, you have a paper time block planner and then a couple of Google Docs to keep track of strategic plans and weekly plans. You could use Trello to keep track of tasks or even just a long text file where you're typing things.

Simple technologies that are easy to get in and easy to get out that you can access from multiple platforms, that makes a big difference. As you add in other structures or goals around your personal life, keep it simple. So again, let's go for simplicity, accessibility. Let's try to minimize friction.

Let's just make the general rhythm of your life something that's very sustainable. That'll help too. So I don't know in your case, Jacob, which is the bigger problem. So I don't know if it's a mindset issue, that your systems are fine, but your mindset just needs right now, external fuel for you to work on hard things, or if it's a systems problem, your mindset's fine, but your systems have too much friction.

So look at both. But between those two things, I think you're gonna find the seasonality of following systems is going to go away. One epilogue I will add to this as well is don't reject seasonality outright as an issue. I think it's an issue if your systems are seasonal.

I stop being organized during some months versus others. I think it's completely fine if your workload is seasonal. In fact, in my new book, "Slow Productivity," which is coming out in March, there's a whole principle is about working at a natural pace, and it really gets into seasonality and how natural and well-suited humans are for that.

So I do wanna throw that in there. You might just be getting exhausted, right? Like a professor, by the time a professor gets to the end of spring, traditionally, they're exhausted because they've gone through a full school year. So to actually pull back some in the summer makes sense because you need to recharge.

If you try to go all out in the summer after a hard spring and after a hard fall before that, you might just run out of steam altogether. So I think seasonal workload could be fine as well. So let's throw that in here, not just as an epilogue, but I'm gonna throw this in, Jacob, as my third part of my answer.

Make your workload seasonal, but keep the systems the same. You're still multi-scale planning, but when you get to some months of the year, the amount of stuff you're putting into your week and the complexity of your daily time block schedules are much easier, and you get that relief of, man, this feels great.

I can really control my time. I'm taking Thursdays completely off because why not? I'm using planning so I can move pieces around. This is great. I can actually extract a lot more relaxation and recharging because I have some structure. So I think a seasonal workload could be excellent, but you don't want your systems to come and go seasonally.

And you wanna make sure that your mindset is one that doesn't require external power. So there we go. I upgraded this from two parts to three parts, Jacob, and hopefully you will find that useful. All right, let's keep going here, Jesse. - Yeah, and then the time management video on our YouTube channel is definitely something you should check out.

- Yeah, so look under the, what's it, core ideas is the playlist? - Right, so youtube.com/calendarportmedia. Look at the playlist. There's a playlist called core ideas. There's one titled, a video titled time management, where I talk about that multi-scale planning. Yeah, shows up right in there. It's a good place to start.

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