#2 How Two Weeks of Freedom Highlighted My Need for Better Organization

From procrastination to productivity, it's all about mindset and organization

Hello there

This is Antoine - I’ve started writing publicly on May 1st 2024 and since then, there are 13 subscribers (gotta start somewhere :))

If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, this is your chance:

2 posts per month about:

• Personal thoughts: Lifestyle, hacks and personal developments

• Building a new venture: from bootstrapping to (hopefully) scaling it within 12 months

What you’ll read today

• Procrastination is ok - as long as you have a Bigger Better Offer

• How I organize myself to meet my goals

Let’s dive in !

Reading time = 3 minutes

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It’s been 2 weeks since I posted my first post and that brought me so many learnings - hopefully some of them will resonate with you.

The Procrastination Struggle

Back to my employment time, I thought that freedom is about having time. Now that I have time, I struggle to keep myself busy.

Grass is always greener on the other side, isn’t it?

When I was full time engaged as a contractor, I’d have a very tight schedule for personal and professional tasks, trying to balance out personal objectives with my client deliveries

A typical day would look like:

• Wake up, meditation, journaling, breakfast

• Work 3-4 hours for my client

• Have lunch (with my girlfriend or a friend)

• Read/take a nap

• Work again

• Exercise (tennis, workout..)

• Diner & sleep

That how I functioned so I don’t have to think about what I should do (I’ll get back to that in another post)

Looking back, I couldn’t say the past 2 weeks have been productive: I struggled to find some rhythm and focus on working on my next venture. Instead, I’ve been on the road and got back to Paris to celebrate a few things and went to Tarifa to kite surf.

Because of that, I skipped my routine

Because of that, I went back into partying and an unhealthy lifestyle

Because of that, I haven’t shipped any business idea

No reason to wake up → unintentional lifestyle (or the other way around?)

That’s when it hit me: now that I have (almost) all the time in the world, I postpone all my priorities. That’s called procrastination which I thought I knew how to deal with.

Procrastination is about emotions, not productivity (…) In the case of procrastination, we have to find a better reward than avoidance — one that can relieve our challenging feelings in the present moment without causing harm to our future selves

If you want to know more, have a read: Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control)

You Always Get What You Want

I realized that I didn’t have a better reward, and that’s ok - that’s what I thought I wanted at this time.

I shifted my priorities again and got into a new routine:

On the Sunday night/Monday morning, have a 30’ week review & planning session

These 30 minutes are by far the most important ones of my week.

If you’ve never seen my template, this is your chance:

Review Section

• I start with a short text to write about how my week was

• I pick 5 memorable wins (think about what you’re proud of, something you wanted to do for a long time, something you planned for etc..

• And 3 things I want to improve on

• Then I write about 1 thought that I kept thinking about and decide if it’s worth to pursue

All in all it takes me 15 minutes tops.

Planning Section

• Based on my objectives and what I did the past week, I write down 3 bullet points about what I want to live or try out (which are not necessarily my objectives)

• Set my top 3 priorities and WHY

• Mantra (I tend not to do it that much but could work for some of you)

• My MVD

• And how I want to remember this week specifically

Once this exercise is done, I go on my calendar and set-up some time blockers to meet my priorities: work on business ideas, get some client work done, kite surf and continue writing.

That’s the result:

Yes, I’m a google calendar type of guy

When I know what my day looks like, I’m way more productive - that’s called time blocking and proven to be efficient because it just helps me focus on one task at hand that I know is a priority without thinking about what I should do.

Maybe you have a different way of organising yourself. Some are more calendar based, some are the opposite: find what works for you !

Insider tip: journaling every morning helps me to remind myself about what I want to do and what my “minimum viable day” would look like. Sometimes my priorities would shift during the week, and journaling with a great capuccino is always nice ☕️

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That’s it for today !

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If you have any ideas on how to improve the format/writing or if you want to connect, drop me a message on Linkedin

👉 See you in two weeks !