My Most Important Task Each Week

Hey friends,

This week I’ve had a bit of an issue in that I haven’t gone to the gym as often as I’d have liked.

I aim to go to the gym three times a week for an hour, but I actually only went once for about 30 minutes because other things came up and my calendar ended up getting derailed.

One thing I’ve realised with myself is that whenever life gets busy, health is the first thing that disappears from the calendar. But this is false economy. Even if I was only concerned about productivity, me spending an extra hour on something work-related is probably not as productive as spending an extra hour on going to the gym, recharging my energy, and getting all those mental benefits of fitness beyond the purely physical benefits of keeping my body in shape.

So I need to actively combat this default mode of thinking. The default mode of ‘oh, my gym blocks aren’t sacred and I can squeeze into those gym blocks to get more work done or those gym blocks can be squeezed out of existence’. That’s how I currently think about gym time. Whereas almost every ‘successful person’ I know treats their health even more seriously than their business and won’t let anything invade that time because it’s so valuable.

I think I’m definitely getting better at this, but in my weekly review this week I really noticed my gym blocks had been squeezed.

So a couple of action points for me, which I hope might help other people as well, are:

1. Schedule gym blocks – I need to pre-schedule gym blocks into my calendar whenever I do my weekly review and look at the week ahead. The question to ask myself is ‘have I got at least 60 minutes for weight training at the gym blocked out in my calendar three times this week?’
2. Treat blocks as sacred – There needs to be a mental model shift for me to treat those blocks as sacred, rather than thinking they’re optional or a block of free time to schedule other stuff into.

The other way to think about this is in terms of percentages.

The idea is that going to the gym for an hour boosts my health for that day an infinite amount because it’s gone from 0 hours to 1 hour. So I have an infinite boost in the health component of my life. But doing an extra hour of work boosts my work percentage from 8 hours to 9 hours, which is a ~10% gain.

So, a 10% gain versus an infinite percentage gain is a bit of a no brainer to focus on the health thing and prioritise it over the work thing.

It’s an ongoing process, but I’ll report back and let you guys know how it goes. And hopefully this reminder can be helpful for others as well.

Have a great week!

Ali xx

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♥️ My Favourite Things

🎙️ Podcast – The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. This is a super interesting seven part podcast series, which has helped me to understand more about JK Rowling’s controversial trans views. I’ve listened to six and a half episodes so far and it’s been one of the best podcasts I’ve heard in terms of the production and the storytelling. 100% would recommend.

📚 Book – How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk. This is actually a parenting book, which we just so happened to have on our bookshelf because my brother bought it many years ago. I randomly decided to start reading it and was immediately hooked because the lessons in the book aren’t just applicable to parenting (I’m not a parent), but actually are really helpful for relationships in general. In particular, how to ‘deal with emotions’. There are just so many instances of parent-child dialogue in the book that I think work well for any type of relationship. So I’d recommend it to anyone who’s a parent, would like to be a parent, or has been a child at some point in their life.

💻 Course – FXF Course. My friend Nathaniel Drew has an editing course that everyone on my team is taking. The course teaches you how to become a world-class video editor and animator, and it’s absolutely insane. We don’t have any kickback from this at all and just want to offer an exclusive offer for Sunday Snippets subscribers as a little gift. So if you use this link and apply the discount code SUNDAYSNIPPETS at checkout you’ll get about 20% off the course. Make sure you check it out 🙂

⌨️ Keyboard – Nuphy Halo65. I bought this after seeing it on a YouTube desk setup video and thought that it looked like an interesting keyboard. Also, I’m in the process of developing my own mechanical keyboard, so I’ve been scouring the market for interesting keyboards that can help inform our own product choices based on what’s out there. I have to say this is one of the nicest keyboards I’ve ever used and it’s very reasonably priced – I got the matte white version with the brown 2.0 switches. My only slight beef with it is that the keys are slightly hard to press, so I can type marginally less fast on this compared to other keyboards that have lower profile keys or keys with less springiness. But it still makes typing an absolute joy. So shout out to Nuphy (no sponsor / affiliate relationship, unfortunately, just love the product). Although if anyone at Nuphy (or any other keyboard brand) is reading this, I’m always open to a chat 😉

🎬 YouTube Channel – Virtual Strategist. This is a really underrated YouTube channel and I’ve been binging all their videos on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) so we can refresh the way we define and track our OKRs as a company. What’s interesting is that the videos are quite old and the production value is quite janky, but they’re stil packed with value. I think there’s a real gap in the marked for someone who understand business to be a sort of business coach / CEO on YouTube if anyone fancies taking that idea, because there’s a lack of high quality content out there. (if you happen to be a business coach / CEO looking to take YouTube seriously, you might like to check out our Part-Time YouTuber Accelerator 😉).

🎬 My New Videos

📖 If I Was a Student Again, I’d Do This – Student life was hard, and it’s hard to get right first time. So if I had my time agian, I think I’d do things a little differently. So in this video I go through the 8 things I’d be thinking about if I could go back and do it all again.

✍️ Quote of the Week

“You have to ask the questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don’t understand, and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as you can.”