What I’ve Learned In One Minute…

Hi Friends,

There was a stretch last year where I convinced myself I was being too rigid. I had my schedule mapped out, knew exactly what I was doing and when, but it started to feel a bit controlling, like I was squeezing all the spontaneity out of my life. So I loosened up and started going with the flow more, doing things in moderation and being flexible.

And for a few weeks, it felt good, like I was breathing again. Then I looked around and my sink was piling up with dishes and I hadn't done laundry in two weeks and my favourite jeans were starting to feel tight. I had projects due that I'd been putting off, telling myself I'd get to them when I had time, but I never had time. Or I did, but I didn't know where it went.

I thought letting go of structure would give me more freedom. Instead, I just felt like I was losing the game.

That's when I came across this idea in Steven Bartlett's book, Diary of a CEO. He called it "Time Betting." The idea that we're all gamblers sitting at a roulette table, betting our time in the form of hourly chips on the things we do in our lives. With each day, you get 24 chips. It's completely up to you how you use them.

When I read that, something clicked. I wasn't losing because I had structure. I was losing because I didn't understand the game I was playing. I was throwing my chips around without thinking about what they were actually worth or where they were going. I thought moderation meant freedom, but really I was just drifting. And drifting costs more than you think.

It's taken me close to 3 years now to understand how to actually play this game well enough for myself, and I'm still figuring parts of it out. But what I've learned is that structure isn't controlling. It's freeing. It's the only way I've found to actually have time for the things I care about without feeling like I'm constantly behind or sacrificing everything else to get one thing done.

So if you're feeling like you're spending more time than you should on tasks, or like you have no time in your day to get the stuff you actually want to get done, this is for you. Because I've been there. And I'm going to show you how I think about my time now.

24 CHIPS

If you want to use your time well, you need to know how you're going to use it, and I don't mean just looking at a task and seeing whether it fits your schedule. I mean understanding the chips you get to play with every day. With each day, you get 24 chips and it's completely up to you how you use them.

This completely changed the way I look at one of the challenges I faced from late adolescence to my early twenties, getting good sleep. I used to think I only needed six and a half hours of sleep to get where I wanted to be so that I'd have more chips in my day to play with. But the problem with that? I didn't understand what cost that played on how I could use my chips in the day. Now, I know that if I have a bad night's sleep, the quality of my chips the next day halves because I can't do as much. Even though I'd have the same chips back as everyone else, what I'd be able to do with them is significantly less. Knowing that, I started prioritising my sleep, allowing me to do more with my chips.

Another thing I've learnt is that your chips don't reset with each day and what you do the day before will have an effect on how you can use your chips the next day. The benefit of this is that when you place your chips in a healthy bet for yourself, the results will have compounding effects, allowing you to be able to do a lot more with your days to come.

If you don't use these chips wisely, you end up sleeping late and borrowing from tomorrow's stack. I've done this more times than I'd like to admit. Trust me, it's never worth it.

On every Sunday, I look at my chips and see how I can play my game for the week to the best of my abilities, and I'll be showing you how to do this with the rest of this newsletter. At the end of this, I'll show you a screenshot of how I've understood my chips and how you too could take inspiration to plan out your week. I started doing this on Sundays and it's helped me feel less like I'm just reacting to everything.

TIME BLOCKING

To get the most out of your time, you need to see it in blocks, chunks of hours that repeat, shift, and stack up across your week.

Understanding what blocks of time you have is a powerful tool. Now these blocks won't look the same every day, however I am confident that if you look at the time you have over a long enough horizon, you can see a consistency behind the activities you act on. Seeing your days by blocks of time is essential because it allows you to see the flow of your energy throughout the day and how you can use it to define a system which helps you manage the block, minimising stress and mental load.

Take the time to understand the blocks of time you have for yourself on a weekly basis. For example, your sleep block, exercise block, travel/commuting block and "me time" blocks. Next take these blocks and fill them out in your calendar or use the time blocking template I've linked at the end of this newsletter to see where they normally fall in your day. After this, I would want you to order these blocks by importance, numbering them from the most rigid to most flexible. First start with the appointments you have in your week that you cannot control, lecture times, work hours and meetings. Next, look at the blocks you have more agency over. A sleep block would be very high as it needs to be the most rigid to allow you to perform at your best and maybe your social outing or meal prep blocks could be flexible depending on who's available when and how long the dish you make takes to make.

LIFE BLOCK EXAMPLES

Here's what this looks like in practice. These are my actual life blocks:

Sleep block - 9 hours x 7

Gym block - 2 hours x sessions

Meal Prep block - 2.5 hours

Commuting block - 1 hour each way

Work/study block - 6 hours x 5

Now also identify blocks you'll occasionally have but not know when they could happen:

Social outing block - 3-6 hrs

Hair Appointment - 2-4 hours

After this you should have a firm understanding of how you use your weekly chips and a greater understanding of how much you're actually spending on the things you're doing and whether you're spending your chips in the right places and if you have the capacity to spend more chips on the things you enjoy.

If you see yourself having more chips you might spend than what you're allowed then you my good friend are on the burnout train on a path straight to overwhelmed station. It's time for you to cut back on your chips, limiting yourself to what you can and can't handle for longevity.

Further, if you feel like someone who has no idea what activities to cut or you see yourself as having too many commitments, I will be making a dedicated newsletter on that. So, be on the lookout. If you do feel that you are in a more pressing or urgent need of getting back your self confidence and time, do not hesitate to message and we can work together and sort something out.

TIME BLOCK SEQUENCING

Now that you know where your time is going, the next thing is to figure out how to actually order your time so that you can get the best out of what you do, to make time for yourself to be as productive as possible but also aligning yourself to enjoy life as well as possible.

The truth is the most important block is actually the one you notice the least, your sleep block. This is definitely a block that I took for granted mainly because I thought that I only needed to sleep to feel at least OK and I didn't realise that I actually benefited incredibly well from having a good night's sleep.

Actually, I could undoubtedly say that if it wasn't for having at least 8 to 9 hours of sleep every day I wouldn't be here making newsletters, working on YouTube videos and Instagram content.

If I wasn't getting good sleep, I think I'd probably be waking up at 10 am or later, maybe even 12 pm trying to get the day started with a slight hazy hangover feeling in my head.

I've started protecting my sleep block by giving myself at least 45 minutes before bed where I'm not doing anything but winding down. No work. No decisions. Just quiet. On the other side, when I wake up, I try to keep things calm, no screens, no caffeine if I can help it. Just being.

Me personally, I have a lamp that dims over time before I go to sleep. That's when I do my night reading, prayer, and journaling. In the morning, I spend time doing light exercise, could be a walk, a jog, or just some stationary movements, then praying, journaling, and preparing for the day. When I protect my sleep like this, I can actually focus on getting things done without feeling like I'm dragging through the day.

I've noticed it helps to split your day into three active blocks. Your first four to six hours, your middle four to six hours, and the last four hours of your day.

I call my first four to six hours the deep work block. This is where I either write, learn or read, and I also put tasks which I know would require the most amount of discipline to do at this time. Sometimes I wouldn't want to be doing the work, but I know that while I'm fresh and have the most willpower in the morning, it won't feel as frustrating or draining to push through.

That said, I'm still figuring out how to make this work when I have lectures in the morning. I know I can learn best early in the day, but when I have a lecture scheduled at 9 am, I lose that window. My body clock is set to sleep early and wake up early, so it feels like I'm wasting my best hours sitting in a lecture hall when I could be trying to understand a concept on my own terms. I haven't fully solved this yet, but I'm sitting with it.

Next I have my middle block and depending on what I did in the first block this could either be a continuation of what I did before in the first block but with less intensity. So maybe instead of me trying to learn a concept in uni I'd spend the time writing or reorganising my notes or maybe just going over flashcards. This would mainly be for revising flashcards and not deep learning or trying to understand new concept flashcards.

This is also during the window in which I have meals so I know that usually after either breakfast or lunch, I won't be as switched on in my head. I've noticed it helps to make the transition between the first block and the second block as smooth as possible without stimulating yourself. I know that some of you guys including me at one point used to have the transition between the first and second block be a workout block, and that is perfectly fine as long as when you go back to your place of work you have a transitioning time into doing the work, otherwise your brain feels very stimulated from the block and this could be 15 to 30 minutes of just quiet meditation and reading and just being in your head.

For those of you who like to listen to music before doing work, I've found it helps to skip it for the first two blocks of your day. Your brain works at 100% when it's focused on one thing. If you stimulate it with music, a workout, or anything that gets your energy up right before switching into deep work, you'll feel the difference, it's harder to settle in. You need that quiet transition, even if it's just 15 to 30 minutes of sitting still, reading, or being in your head.

For your meals, I've also noticed that having lighter meals as I wrote about in last week's newsletter helps. The lighter your meals are while still holding down your hunger, the better because they allow your brain to focus more on doing the task and less on trying to digest heavy loads of food.

And lastly, after my first two blocks, I will then go into my workout or wind down block. This usually consists of having a gym workout or a gym class that I go to then having dinner as early as I can, having a shower and then getting ready for the next day. I find that having the last four hours in my routine, having nothing that challenges me mentally like anything academic is really good for me and as well as that it gives me the time to spend my evenings on my personal things that I enjoy doing.

In short, know how your brain works in the day and see what blocks of time you have throughout the day to allow yourself to work the best, to give certain blocks to the tasks which would require high mental load as early as you can in the day and the ones which are more enjoyable and require less of a mental load later on in the day.

TIME BOUNDARIES

Now let's say you have a project coming up and you have about 3 weeks to do it or 18 study blocks to get it done. The most important thing for you to do at the beginning is setting a boundary either in blocks or hours of how much time you are willing to give this project. What I've seen for myself is either one of two things happen. I procrastinate the assignment until I have about 2 blocks left and hope for the best. Or I spend every block I can on the assignment neglecting every other priority. From looking at both of these camps, neither are enjoyable because the opportunity cost is high as you are missing out on either being relaxed and having a well thought out project or you end up sacrificing your other assignments and hoping to catch up on them later down the road.

I went through having this issue for a long time, especially the procrastination one because I didn't define how much time I was actually going to give the job and I didn't want to feel like I had to make the task take up my whole life for me to do well in it, even though I'd end up going on that path for the last days before each assignment was due.

Whilst trying to make Youtube videos, I discovered I was going through the same problem. I was putting off starting them because I felt like I would need to spend the whole day on a video. I then realised that for me to actually do what I wanted to do while still enjoying the life I have, I had to set boundaries with my time, then coining the concept of time boundaries. Usually we'd set boundaries with people, but why not with time?

This ties into that thing where work expands to fill whatever time you give it, so if you don't set a limit, the task will eat your whole week. Time boundaries stop that from happening.

An example of a time boundary for me is "I will not spend more than eight hours on the production of this Youtube video". Now because of this boundary I set for myself, I've now given myself that peace of mind of knowing that regardless of what happens, the task will be completed in eight hours and that I will work on the project with the best that I can in the time I spend on it. Nothing more. This took away a large component of my procrastination because now I know how much time I've set for the project and it's up to me when I'll want to spend that time. I could either do two blocks of four hours or four blocks of two hours, whatever blocks I can do towards doing the task.

Now back to the problem of having an assignment for university. You have three weeks, 18 six hour blocks. Knowing this now I'd set my time boundary of 15 hours on the project, even though this is close to three six hour blocks. Because I've given myself that boundary, I now have clarity on how long I will commit to the project, and because of that, I'll be able to have more consistent deadlines or markers I'll be able to set for myself in smaller blocks. Fifteen hours now becomes 5 blocks of 3 hours, with each three hour session being equally spaced throughout the three week period, and with each three hour period, I set a clear objective for that block allowing me to stay on track for the deadline I have set. Now, you will not always meet this deadline, but part of that is also the point, learning how to gauge how long tasks actually take for you and learning from the amount of work you can actually do. More positively, this gives you the freedom to have more time spending on other stuff you would want to do, go on walks, socialise and enjoy life knowing you have set boundaries with your time and are confident in yourself on when you'll spend the time and how you'll get it done.

TL;DR

I used to think structure was controlling, so I loosened up and tried to go with the flow. Ended up feeling more lost than ever. Then I realised structure isn't the problem—it's what gives you freedom. I started thinking about my time like chips in a game (24 per day), mapping out my week in blocks, and setting boundaries on how long I'd give tasks. It's helped me actually have time for the things I care about without constantly feeling behind. Still figuring out parts of it, like how to protect my deep work time when I have morning lectures, but I'm getting there.

QUICK HACKS (FROM THE MAIN STORY)

1. Set a time boundary before you start any project. Decide how many hours you'll give it upfront. Example: "I won't spend more than 12 hours on this assignment." Stops the work from eating your whole week.
2. Protect your sleep with buffer zones. Give yourself 45 minutes before bed where you're just winding down. No work, no decisions, just quiet. Same for mornings—no screens, no caffeine right away if you can help it.
3. Skip the stimulation between deep work blocks. Don't pump yourself up with music or a workout in between focused sessions. Your brain needs a quiet transition—15 to 30 minutes of just sitting still or reading.
4. Do a Sunday planning session. Look at your 24 chips for each day of the week and map out where they're going. Removes the feeling of just reacting to everything.

WINS & LESSONS

Win: I did barbell squats on Thursday and didn't feel any major pain in my joints. For those of you who know about my journey with my injuries, this was a big win for me.

Lessons: I've learnt to be more open and honest about myself at work and that people are a lot more accommodating and understanding than you think. It really makes me appreciate the people I work with.

QUESTION FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

When you think about how you spend your time, does it feel like you're choosing where it goes, or like it's just slipping away from you?

Alright that's it from me.

In a bit,

Motheo