I'd rather be outside…
I hate the use of the word hack for everything under the sun, but I’m going to use it here anyway: an afternoon energy hack. I’ve worked this issue over many different ways in my life. For instance, I know enough not to go to a Chinese buffet for lunch on a day when I need to work inside in the afternoon. That is just a recipe for napping on my seat or on my feet. It just does no good. What I eat at lunch makes a big, big difference.
For a few days last week my phone was driving me crazy. It would be good most of the day and then every evening it froze up on me. I could reboot it and it would work for a couple minutes, then it would freeze. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and it was driving me bonkers.
Finally, I did what you’re really supposed to do and I started playing with apps and looking at which apps were on, trying to turn some on and some off. At one point I got a notification from the nightlight app that it was having an issue. That was the clue because it was the blue light filter that I had set to come on at nine o’clock in the evening, and I realized that’s when my phone was seizing up.
I made two decisions this morning right at the start of my day that are going to save me four hours a week, as a conservative average, for the rest of the year. To me that’s just amazing. When I figured out what those two decisions were going to do in my life, the decisions actually became a little bit easier.
Now, the first decision I made was about the YouTube video I’ve been producing once a week for our 12Church. It’s a foundational bit of teaching and leadership level stuff, which I think are important. We’ve got some good and very important videos out there talking about discipleship versus disciple making, and some of those basic disciple making principles. It takes me about about four hours a week to do that.
I’m not sure if it’s because it’s the beginning of a year or what the deal is, but I’ve been a little bit focused on tweaking my routine. The last podcast had to do with an evening routine adjustment I’ve made, and this one has to do with the morning routine.
Last time I talked to you about unplugging the internet or having an internet timer on. Our timer is currently set that our internet goes out at 9:30 at night, which leads to more reading, earlier to sleep, and it’s just good all around. I’m quite happy with that.
I want to highlight something today that I have probably mentioned in the past along the lines of productivity and energy management, but something that I’ve revisited here early in the new year. It was one of our better household habits over the last year or so and we’re actually enhancing it a little bit. What I’m talking about is having a timer on our modem for the internet.
Now in our household, we don’t have cable TV. Our TV is effectively the internet, and our primary location probably is YouTube both for instructional and entertainment. We also have Amazon Prime, so we catch some things there, but YouTube is where we spend a lot of our time.