I have long resisted making my life too structured and routine because I felt it would become too boring and monotonous, where each day is basically a repeat of the one before, and it feels like I’m trapped in the Groundhog Day universe. One solution I like is to use simple structural templates for how I flow through my days, and then I can just pick a template for each and follow it.

For instance, if I want to create a course lesson and a blog post in a day, I can do those in either order. I just want to have both published by the end of the day. Some days I’ll write and publish the blog post first. Some days I’ll design, record, and publish the lesson first. So all I have to decide on those days is which I’ll do first, and with that one decision, the rest of the structure falls into place. My preferred structure is to create a piece from start to finish and stick with it till it’s published. Then I move on to the next item. But the order of those items doesn’t particularly matter.

Some days I don’t record course lessons, so I can use different templates for those days. And of course weekend templates can be totally different as well.

The advantage of having a few templated structures to choose from is that I spend less time pondering what I should do next. I mainly just have to make one decision for how to begin my day, such as starting with a blog post, and then the rest of the day falls into place. Then I can spend the bulk of my day taking action by following the template I’ve chosen for that day.

A template is just a guide for when I have nothing else scheduled. I might need to modify it for any given day, like if I have an interview scheduled. But I can also create extra templates for known scenarios that happen often enough but not every day, such as doing coaching calls in Conscious Growth Club. On those days I know to limit myself to templates that include time for the coaching call.

A template is similar to a schedule, except that I don’t really schedule tasks by the hour. These templates are even simpler. They’re just lists of contexts to flow through in a given order.

For instance, one template for a workday could be as simple as:

• Breakfast
• Watch new lessons for the latest course I’m taking
• Write and publish new blog post
• Process communication
• Lunch
• Design, record, publish, and announce new Stature lesson

This might be a typical template for some weekdays. On other days I might have different items like planning work, administrative work, other creative projects, and so on.

Even with the simple list above, I can create different variations on it. What if I have an idea for a new course lesson right when I wake up, and I don’t want to wait till the afternoon to work on it? Then I can pick a different template that begins the workday with the course lesson. Since the other types of tasks are already laid out in a reasonable order within that template, I don’t have to refactor my task order. The other tasks all fall into place.

Using simple templates like this reduces the mental burden of deciding what to do and when. While it may seem like it’s not a big deal to decide fresh each day the order of every type of task, it actually is a big deal when you consider how much decision fatigue can accumulate by the end of a long day, and you multiply that across many weeks. Using templates saves a lot of unnecessary decision making, and that mental energy can be invested elsewhere. For me it may show up in having more enthusiasm for the afternoon work.

I can also have different templates for different parts of the day, like a few morning routine templates and a few different evening routines. So I could have morning templates, evening templates, weekday templates, and weekend templates. And there can be several variations of each.

I like spelling these out on index cards. Then I can grab one index card for each part of the day, and that gives me the template for the whole day.

I can also have templates for lighter days, half days, and heavier work days, depending on my energy and enthusiasm. There’s really no limit to how many templates I can create. I can even name them on the index cards, so I can quickly recognize each template at a glance.

Additionally, within each template, I can also have subtemplates. So there could be subtemplates for processing communication, and within those I could have different arrangements of tasks like checking email and the Conscious Growth forums. Or I can have subtemplates for creating course lessons because some steps can be done in different orders, like when I record the lesson and when I add the lesson summary and exercise to the course workbook.

Think of templates as recipes. You probably don’t want to eat the same meal over and over, so why would you flow through each day in the same sequence, especially if you have options? But you probably don’t want to plan every day from scratch either, so you can use templates to focus on your known favorites, just as you can use recipes to make your favorite meals repeatedly. This can provide a nice balance of stability and variety.

If you ever feel bored with your templates, you still have the option of breaking away from them and using a different approach when that appeals to you. And you might even learn something that could inspire new template ideas. Just as you may want to freshen up your habitual recipes now and then, you’ll probably want to freshen up your templates sometimes as well.

I think of a sprinkle goal as being a token goal that’s added to a goal list to try to create better balance. It adds the impression of balance, but it doesn’t really connect with deeper meaning or purpose.

Picture the sprinkles on top of a cupcake. They look nice, but they don’t really add much substance to the cupcake. And if you only have sprinkle goals, then you have no cupcake at all. You just have some colored sugar.

Here are some examples of sprinkle goals:

• Read 10 books
• Exercise more
• Spend time with my wife / husband / kids
• Connect with my friends each week
• Spend less time online
• Make a new social media post each day
• Spend X hours per week on decluttering
• Organize my finances

To really determine if a goal is a sprinkle goal, you have to view it in context. You’re the only one who can make that determination about your own goals.

One person’s sprinkle goals may actually be meaningful for another person. For one person a goal like reading 10 new books may feel very purposeful, while for someone else it’s just something tossed onto the pile to pay lip service to learning, creating the illusion of more balance.

Sprinkle goals don’t generate much commitment, and they’re often phrased noncommittally. A common sign of a sprinkle goal is when a goal contains words like more or less. It doesn’t connect with real behavioral changes or specific outcomes.

Sprinkle goals are lazy goals. When someone sets a sprinkle goal, they haven’t thought through much to the implementation side. They usually stop at the formation of the goal and leave it at that, so it just perpetually hangs there in space. It isn’t turned into something specific. There isn’t a sense of wanting to follow through into action when the goal is set.

A sprinkle goal normally lacks a connection to deeper meaning and purpose. It may take a stab in that direction, but it somehow misses.

Which 10 books are you book are you going to read? Why do you want to read them? What will be missing from your life if you skip this? What’s the point?

Why do you want to spend more time with your wife? Doing what specifically? Does watching TV together count? What are you trying to change or improve about your relationship?

One way to spot a sprinkle goal is to ask: If this were my only goal, how much would it matter?

What if your only goal was to read 10 books? What if your only goal was to spend more time with your kids? Those could matter enough if they’re connected with a deeper meaning and purpose, but most of the time when people ask this question, the hollowness of their sprinkle goals becomes apparent.

Is it so terrible to have sprinkle goals? No, you could have a few. They may still add some value to your life. But you’ll probably get more value if you redefine them into more meaningful and specific ones.

A sprinkle goal is really an excuse not to think deeply about setting true and meaningful goals in some area of life. Setting a goal like “read 10 books” hides the fact that you haven’t really figured out what role self-education will play in your life or what new skills and knowledge you want to gain and why.

Setting a goal like “spend more time with my husband” means you haven’t really thought through where your relationship is going and how you’d actually like to see it grow and improve.

A sprinkle goal is a replacement for the hard work of real goal setting. They’re often added on top after you’ve gotten tired of thinking deeply about your other goals, and you don’t want to invest the same depth of thought into other areas of life. So you just toss in some placeholders to create the illusion of balance.

Because they don’t matter much, you probably won’t achieve your sprinkle goals either, and it may be best that you don’t since they’d otherwise distract you from working on more meaningful goals. But even adding sprinkle goals to your goals list is generally a mistake because it creates clutter and makes you feel less accomplished. You’ll be tempted to treat them like other goals, but they’re really too malformed to be truly actionable in a meaningful way. Whether you do them or don’t do them is of little consequence.

Cautiously watch for sprinkle goals infecting your goals list, and prune them when you notice them. It’s okay to feel the void of not having a goal to cover some aspect of life such as your relationship or your self-development. Don’t race to fill that void with sprinkles. Hold out till you do the work of baking the whole cupcake.

Tomorrow in Conscious Growth Club, we’re having our quarterly planning review call. This is a group video call where I review the quarterly goals that some members have shared in our forums, and I look for potential issues as well as noteworthy items to share with them.

It’s similar to a code review, where one or more programmers look over another programmer’s code, looking for bugs or security flaws, calling out good practices, and noting areas for improvement.

We all have blind spots, but our blind spots aren’t the same. Having a second pair of eyes to review your goals or plans can help spot potential issues that you may have overlooked. Another person may also spot hidden opportunities that you could be missing.

Having gone through this process multiple times with the same people, I’m becoming more familiar with the patterns. The bright side is that many people do achieve their goals, usually not all of them, but they do make meaningful progress. It’s great to see people chipping away at their goals quarter after quarter.

I’d say the number one challenge that people have is being able to focus on their goals consistently enough with action, day after day, week after week, till the end of the quarter. Setting a goal isn’t enough of course. We also have to set ourself up for consistent action, and that part tends to be more difficult than many people expect.

The hardest part is usually getting the right habits in place to support our goals. This includes answering questions like:

• What will I do to move this goal forward each week?
• Which days will I work on this?
• How will I work on this?
• How will I track my progress?
• How will I bring my focus back if I start getting distracted?

Perhaps the most important question is actually this:

How will I prevent myself from falling off track?

Goals need rails. They need scaffolding to support them. They need structure to back them up. There has to be something in place so that when the initial motivation fades – and it almost always fades – we’ll keep going and going and going until the goal is achieved.

Even modest goals can take incredibly tenacity to achieve. It’s just so easy for a goal to go off course when the habits to support it aren’t strong enough.

Progress logging helps. Social support helps too. But character-wise it all comes down to self-discipline to keep moving a goal forward to completion. Reconnecting with the purpose and meaning behind a goal can rekindle some motivation, but it takes discipline to do even that.

It’s nice to think that goals are achieved with thoughts and feelings, but the reality is that goals are achieved by behaviors. It’s the habitual actions that move a goal forward. Even if a goal requires a series of unique and varied actions each day, it still takes a behavioral habit to get yourself to engage with those actions consistently.

Turning a goal into a collection of habits is a bit of an art form. For me this is one of the most challenging yet creative aspects of personal growth. I never get it quite perfectly, but it’s so rewarding when I’ve finally locked in the right behaviors, and I can see that a goal will be achieved by keeping those behaviors going.

New goals mandate new behaviors. And that’s the part we tend to resist. It’s where we drop the ball most often. A goal could be well-formed. It could be clear and achievable. It may be deeply purposeful. But it won’t become a reality unless we reconfigure our behaviors to transport us there.

Recognize that each goal represents a significant behavioral change. Getting the right behaviors in place is difficult, and it’s so easy to underestimate just how difficult it is. Most commonly we set too many goals. This is easy to do by making estimates for what we can achieve based on assuming that we’ll instantly change our behaviors to align perfectly with our goals. But of course that doesn’t happen. Developing the right behaviors is a major goal unto itself, perhaps the biggest one of all.

Instead of setting a dozen goals for a quarter that all require significant behavioral changes, it may be better to just set 3-5 goals or even 1 or 2 sometimes. Then put a lot more effort into the behavioral changes needed. Once you’re doing a good job with those behaviors, then consider adding more goals to the list.

Alternatively, you can set several goals for a quarter, but then just focus on creating the behavioral shifts for one or two of those goals during the first month. Then work on behavioral changes for a few more goals once those new habits feel stable.

Self-discipline is a limited resource, so you’re likely to burn out if you try to use it for too many changes at once. It’s wise to use it sparingly, first to design a new habit and then to practice the habit sufficiently till you can continue mostly on autopilot, and less discipline is needed to maintain your momentum. Then you’ll have the capacity to tackle more changes.

You can also frame some (or all) of your goals as behavioral changes, which can make you more aware of the work involved. Then you may discover ways to accomplish multiple goals with similar behavioral changes, such as training yourself to follow a morning routine that could help you achieve a few different goals.

If you’ve noticed the same goals coming up for you repeatedly and you find your rate of progress unsatisfying, consider looking at your goals from a behavioral angle or even framing them primarily from that direction. This will help you become more away of the real changes needed as well as the self-discipline demands that you’re placing on your character.

Normally when I want to write a new blog post, I take a few minutes to tune into an idea, and then it begins to flow into writing. Getting an idea involves listening with my inner senses, as if I’m scanning some electromagnetic field for signal matches. When I discover a match, I can lock onto it, and then it’s rather easy to let the idea flow through into words.

The idea comes through as energy that I perceive as oscillations in my thoughts, and it combines with memories and other knowledge as I write. So first I get an initial sense of the idea in my mind, but it’s really through the process of writing that I grow into a full understanding of what’s being expressed.

So I don’t really know what article I’m writing till it’s written. Sometimes I can only see the beginning third of it or so, and the rest comes into view after I’ve written part of it.

I also get ideas from other sources, like people making suggestions. But the best articles that people appreciate most are usually writing with the process of scanning for inspiration and inviting it to flow through. I’ve shared more about this process in the article How I Write.

An interesting thing that happened today was that when I tried to summon an article idea, nothing actually came through. I sensed that the field of energy that I normally gather ideas from had gone silent. This happens now and then, and usually what I do is just assume that I don’t need to write anything at that particular time. I figure there’s no message to deliver. So I don’t write anything on those days, or I try again later in the day.

Usually when nothing comes through, it’s because there’s some inspiration to be followed in a different direction that doesn’t involve writing. I have to broaden my idea scanning to include more frequencies, not just the ones in the writing ideas spectrum. Then I usually notice that I’m pulled towards an idea for what to do next. It could be a business idea or a personal idea. When I sense the energy signature of an aligned idea, I like to flow into it with action right away.

Today, however, when I did the broader scanning and invitation process, still nothing came through in any direction. That seemed odd, but it does happen now and then too. So I decided to just sit with that for a while. I sat and did nothing and waited. If the inspiration field is silent, perhaps doing nothing for a while is the right course of action.

Eventually I got the idea to try an experiment, which was to write in a different way. Instead of waiting for some signal to come through, I popped open my journal and decided to write from within the space of nothingness. No special inspiration. No ideas coming through. Just write from the void. You’re reading that journal entry now.

I began thinking about how many writers write every day whether they feel inspired or not. I almost always wait for inspiration. But what happens when my timing and the timing of the inspiration don’t coincide? That’s a concern for this year because of my one-year daily blogging commitment. Can I expect that I’ll always be able to write from inspiration as I have in years past if I’m doing this more frequently than ever?

I’ve gone to the well of ideas so many times before, and the ideas feel like they already exist in some form, like they’re grapes growing on a vine, and I’m plucking a grape off the vine. Then my assignment is to consume and digest that grape and turn it into a new article. The vine still feels like it has an abundance of grapes, but I also feel that perhaps it’s time to explore some other idea space and leave the grapes to others sometimes.

These signals often feel like they’re coming from other people. It feels like I’m tuning into what someone out there wants helps with, and then I write an article for that person. I often feel like I’m tuned into the energy of an individual or perhaps a small group of people with similar desires when I write new articles.

Something I value about this daily blogging challenge, however, is the opportunity to explore other aspects of writing and self-expression that I may not have considered as much. I’ve leaned on a certain mode for getting ideas for so long that it’s second nature to me. And so it feels a little too easy to keep leaning on that skill.

Today is my 100th day in a row of blogging (I started on December 24th). So I don’t have any doubt that I can keep this up for a full year. But writing every day with the same approach I’ve been using feels like hanging out on a plateau. I think what I’ve been sensing lately, especially with respect to having my own wake-up call, is a desire to move beyond this familiar and comfortable mode of writing. It’s easy. It’s abundant. I can write that way all day and produce an infinite stream of content. But I’m not seeing much inner growth in repeating the same approach day after day.

I can also switch media like doing video and audio, but I’ve done that as well, and I still summon ideas using the same approach, so it doesn’t really feel new. It only felt new up to the point where I grew just as comfortable creating through other media, but then it’s pretty much the same.

I look around and see a world full of self-expression. Every day people are cranking out more and more content and consuming the content of others. While initially I found that fascinating and fun to participate in, now it feels a bit too boring and predictable if I keep using the same approach. It’s an infinite game, but it feels overly bounded to me.

I’m going to continue the daily blogging challenge, but I want to explore other ways of doing this going forward, especially in terms of how I generate ideas. It’s appealing to seek ideas in frequency ranges where I’m not used to scanning. I’m really not sure what form that will take or what it will look like. And I really don’t even know where to begin. I just sense that it’s time to mix things up.

This isn’t an April Fools’ joke by the way. I thought about doing one, but that also feels a bit cliché, and if you can believe this, I’m actually still getting emails every month from people falling for the one from 2011. It’s been eye-opening to discover just how many people would like to be enslaved. So I have to consider how a playful joke may affect my email inbox for the next decade or so.

Our series on reducing mental effort continues. This is the final piece in the series.

Reduce decision fatigue

Consider how many times you may ask yourself questions like these during a typical week:

• What should I do now?
• What should I eat?
• What should I wear?
• Do I feel like exercising today?
• What should I watch now?
• Should I go out or stay in?

Even if you don’t ask that question consciously, your subconscious mind still has to address it.

Or do you ever have thoughts like these come up?

• I should go shopping soon.
• I really ought to do laundry.
• I should catch up on emails.
• I need to remember to pay my bills this week.
• When am I going to find time to _____?

Are you really facing unique and different options each time you ponder these questions and thoughts? Or are you actually making very similar decisions each time?

Your work and your typical days probably involve a lot of patterns. You can leverage the predictability and stability of your known patterns to make many decisions less often. And you can also replace some chaotic decisions with patterns to systematize your daily and weekly flow even more.

A common objection here is that if your life becomes too predictable, it will become boring because you’ll be removing so much of the surprise aspect. And that is a valid objection in general, but it’s easier to get past it by asking this question:

If you didn’t have to spend much mental energy repeatedly making daily decisions like what to eat, what to wear, or what type of activity to do each hour of your week, what else could you do with the extra decision-making capacity?

Mental energy is a limited resource. If you spend this resource making lots of small decisions, you’ll have less of this resource available for making bigger and more interesting decisions.

Have you heard of the concept of decision fatigue? When you must make many decisions throughout your day, your decision-making circuits eventually become fatigued. When decision fatigue builds up, you may notice that at the end of the day, it can feel challenging just to decide what to watch on Netflix. That shouldn’t be such a difficult decision, but it can feel like a form of real work when your mind is mush from making so many other decisions throughout the day.

Decision fatigue can be cumulative over many days as well, so after several days of making lots of little decisions, you may feel inclined to have a “veg out” day where you barely have to decide anything. This isn’t such a bad idea, as it allows your decision-making circuits to rest and repair.

When you pile up decision fatigue, your self-discipline goes down as well. As fatigue increases, you’re more likely to make poor choices. One part of your mind may wish to make wise and intelligent, health-affirming choices, but the part that does the actual deciding just wants to rest and has basically checked out from the process. When you experience this state, it feels like your self-discipline has gone offline for a while, which is pretty close to what’s actually happening.

The way to alleviate decision fatigue is to make fewer decisions. Use this resource wisely. Instead of squandering its capabilities on recurring decisions, try to make each type of decision less frequently.

Systematize your days and weeks

As a direct application of the above, a good way to make fewer decisions is by structuring your days and weeks in advance. Map out what types of activities you want to fit into each week, and decide once what general purpose type of week works for you.

You can always adapt your general plan to incorporate unique changes for each week. And even if your weeks look very different from each other, you can still pre-decide how you’ll spend various blocks of time.

You can do this mapping with any decent calendar software. I recommend using the weekly view, so you can see the overview of your whole week.

Alternatively you can use a spreadsheet, setting it up much like you would with a calendar.

You could do this mapping very loosely by breaking your days into several blocks, such as: early morning, late morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, and evening. The decide what type of activity you’ll assign to each block of time. With this approach you’d have 5 blocks per day, so that gives you 35 blocks to allocate for each week.

Alternatively you could structure your day in more granular segments like by hours. Using 30-minute blocks currently works well for me. Of course some activities may require multiple blocks.

The types of activities you might use to populate your recurring weekly calendar could include:

• Hygiene (shower, shave, dress, brush teeth, etc)
• Exercise, meditation, and other health-related activities
• Creative work (writing, designing, etc)
• Project work (marketing, launches, etc)
• General business or admin work
• Communication (emails, phone calls, video chats)
• Personal development (journaling, reading, courses, etc)
• Skills practice (speaking, filming, guitar, etc)
• Weekly review and planning
• Housework (cleaning, laundry, repairs, maintenance)
• Naps and other breaks
• Meals
• Errands and shopping
• Entertainment or leisure
• Social time (date nights, time with friends, meetups, etc)
• Sleep
• Free time

Note the last item on this list. I think it’s wise to have some pre-scheduled free time that you can use at your discretion. You’ll be able to make better use of this time if you aren’t so overloaded with micro-decisions all throughout your day. Then it’s actually nice to look forward to some free time where you have the option to choose your activities. This free time will feel ever freer when you’ve adequately pre-decided when to handle all your must-dos and should-dos, and you can use your free time to enjoy some of your nice-to-dos.

When you get used to flowing with a weekly structure, it tends to feel freeing and less stressful. When you’ve intelligently pre-decided how to fit in the important stuff each week, you can relax and trust that you’ll get to everything that matters over the course of the week.

Even attempting to create a weekly structure can show you when you’re overloaded, and you need to scale back some commitments. When I first started using this approach, I caught myself designing 12-hour workdays to squeeze in everything I thought was important, and I soon realized that wasn’t very sustainable for me. So I re-thought what’s really important, and I scaled that back. I also learned to work with different quarterly priorities, so I can create a different type of balance across the quarter and across the whole year, which frees me from feeling that I need to address every type of activity each week.

Remember that the structure is meant to empower you, not handcuff you. You can always consciously break from it when you choose to. It’s there for you to slide back into it as your default approach when you’d rather get into the flow of doing and spend less time deciding.

One of the most empowering benefits of following some kind of pre-decided weekly flow is that you have more mental processing power for thinking bigger. You can take on those kinds of projects that you’ve always wanted to do but never had time for. It feels really good to be finally completing some of those major projects that I’ve had on my creative bucket list for years, such as publishing a major deep dive course on Subjective Reality, or leading people through a transformational deep dive course on character sculpting.

Even blogging this series was an exercise in reducing mental effort since I pre-decided the theme for a week’s worth of blog posts, so that was one less decision to make each day for a while.

This concludes our series on reducing mental effort. I hope you enjoyed it!