24 Ways to Change Your Life

An important reminder: Your entire life can change in one year.

Not ten, not five, not three. One.

One year of focused daily effort.

You can change your entire life in ONE YEAR.

2024 is officially upon us. Will it be the year that you change your life?

To get you started, here are 24 tiny actions to help you make 2024 your best year yet…

Reader’s Note: Simply pick ONE action from each category (life, work, health, money) and get started this week. Small things become big things.

Life Actions

To identify what to prioritize in your days, use my Energy Calendar Technique.

For one week, at the end of each day, color-code the activities from your day:

• Green for Energy Creating
• Yellow for Neutral
• Red for Energy Draining

At the end of the week, look at your calendar and assess the trends: What are the common energy creating, neutral, and energy draining activities? Energy creating should be prioritized, while energy neutral and energy draining should be delegated or deleted over time.

To improve your focus, turn on Grayscale Mode.

Grayscale Mode removes the colors to make your phone immediately less appealing and addicting.

If you have an iPhone, follow these steps: Settings, Accessibility, Display & Text Size, Color Filters -> On, Grayscale. Note: Instructions for non-iPhone users in the link above.

Since starting to use Grayscale Mode in January, I’ve seen my screen time drop and my focus rise.

To remove complexity in your life, conduct a Simplicity Audit.

A tidy, simple environment unlocks the mind. The Simplicity Audit examines the four key environments of your life: Physical, Digital, Mental, Social.

For each item in each environment, you ask: (1) Is this necessary? (2) Is this Energy Creating?

If “No” to both, remove the item immediately. If “Yes” to both, keep the item. If “Yes” to one, think about the item’s role more deliberately before deciding.

To improve the quality of your outcomes, spend more time around the big thinkers in your circle.

Thinking big is contagious. When you get a group of ambitious big thinkers in a room, incredible things happen.

Just sitting in the room, the energy gets injected into your veins. When you’re around others who are battling in the arena, you can’t help but follow suit.

Big thinkers will encourage you to be more ambitious, bold, and courageous. They will never tell you to be realistic. Get around more of them.

To nail your different roles, use Character Invention for specific times of day.

Determine the different roles and identities you need to embody at different times of day.

Here are three characters I might try to turn on in a typical day:

• The Morning Monster: This character is built of cold, emotionless discipline. This character is built to hit the cold plunge and get in my weight training and cardio.
• The Deep Work Machine: This character is focused on a single task with the highest priority. This character is built for creative work.
• The Dad of the Year: This character is present, emotionally and physically. This character is built to be the Dad and Husband I admire.

Give yourself a reminder to “turn on” those characters when those times hit.

To unlock new asymmetric upside in your life, schedule a Think Day.

Pick one day each month to step back from all of your day-to-day professional demands. Seclude yourself (mentally or physically), shut off all of your notifications on your devices, and put up an out-of-office response.

The goal is to spend the entire day reading, learning, journaling, and thinking.

Depending on your professional and life constraints, you can scale the Think Day up or down. The point is to force this air and space into your life and experience the unlock it provides.

To make dramatic progress in 30 days, try my 30-for-30 approach.

With whatever you want to improve at, do it for 30 minutes per day for 30 straight days.

30 days is a real commitment, but 30 minutes is small enough to take on.

900 minutes of accumulated effort will yield surprisingly significant results.

To make daily progress in any arena, set ABC Goals.

For any daily goal, set three levels:

• A: Most ambitious, perfect case.
• B: Middle ground, base case.
• C: Minimum viable level, downside case.

On days when you feel great, you hit your A Goal. On days when you feel ok (most days!), you hit your B Goal. On days when you feel bad, you hit your C Goal.

Remember: Small things become big things. Anything above zero compounds.

Work Actions

To separate work and personal life, develop a Power Down Ritual for each evening.

A Power Down Ritual is a fixed set of actions and behaviors that mentally and physically mark the end of your professional day.

An example of my fixed sequence might look something like this:

• Check email for any final requests requiring action.
• Check calendar and task lists for the following day.
• Complete 15 minutes of prep work for initial priority tasks of the following morning.
• Close down all applications and technology for the night.

Create a Power Down Ritual and stick to it.

To improve your focus and get more done, get a focus app and set your phone on Do Not Disturb mode.

Build a deep work practice with 60-minute windows during which you have zero distractions. These are sacred windows to make progress on your most important long-term tasks.

To reduce the impact of attention residue, take short breaks between meetings.

Microsoft researchers found that taking short breaks between meetings reduces stress and improves performance.

The simplest way to action this is to default to 25-minute calls/meetings (instead of 30 minutes) and take a simple walking or breathing break during the 5 minutes. Most calls/meetings have 5 minutes of wasted time on pleasantries, so just cut that and get straight to the point.

To improve your balance of professional time, assess your current mix and make small changes to it.

There are four types of professional time:

1. Management: Meetings, calls, emails.
2. Creation: Writing, coding, building.
3. Consumption: Reading, listening, studying.
4. Ideation: Thinking.

Three tips: Batch management time, increase creation time, and create space for consumption and ideation time.

To do less, but better, default to No.

The best way to improve your life is to say “No” more often.

Never say yes to things under the assumption that you’ll have more time for them in the future (you won’t). If you wouldn’t want to do the thing today, don’t say yes to doing it a month from now.

To prioritize more effectively, use an Eisenhower Matrix.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a visualization tool that forces you to differentiate between the urgent and the important in order to prioritize and manage your time more effectively.

Organize and prioritize your tasks and time according to the matrix.

The Goal: Spend more time on the important tasks that contribute to your long-term values and goals.

To improve your work efficiency, batch email and message processing into 1-3 condensed windows.

Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Force a time constraint on low-value, high energy draining tasks (like email!) to get them done efficiently.

Health Actions

To improve your mental and physical health, go for more walks.

Take a 15-minute tech free walk every single morning. You don’t need a fancy morning routine—just go for a walk. The sunlight, movement, and fresh air have a direct positive impact on your mood, circadian rhythm, metabolism, digestion, and more. Leave your phone at home (or put it on airplane mode). Let your creativity flow.

To fight the afternoon lull, follow the 80% rule at lunch.

The Okinawans of Japan are famous for their incredible longevity. One of the principles of that longevity was an ancient Japanese principle called Hara hachi bun me, which translates to “Eat until you are eight parts full.”

Eating causes the body to move blood and energy towards the digestive system. By eating a big lunch while sitting down at my desk (a staple of my old routine), I was basically triggering my body to go into digestive recovery mode.

To fight back, eat a lighter lunch and go for a walk right after it to promote digestion and mental clarity.

To improve your health and grit, get cold more often.

11 minutes of weekly cold water immersion (showers or full immersion) has been shown to have a whole host of benefits.

If you need daily inspiration, I share some “Cold Wisdom” every single morning from my cold plunge (at 4:45am!) on Instagram stories.

To fall asleep faster, try the 4-7-8 method.

Breathe in through your nose for a 4-second count, hold your breath for a 7-second count, and exhale for an 8-second count. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which triggers your body to turn to rest mode.

To eat healthier, do all your shopping on the outer perimeter of the store.

The outer perimeter typically has all of the fresh produce, meats, fish, and dairy, while the middle aisles have all of the processed stuff. If you’re trying to eat clean, stay on the outside. Do this for a month and you’ll notice the results.

To start your day with energy, try my 5-5-5-30 method.

When you wake up, do 5 push-ups, 5 squats, 5 lunges, and a 30-second plank. You can do it while you are brewing coffee or right when you get out of bed. It will jumpstart your metabolism and give you a boost of energy to start the day.

Money Actions

To set your wealth on autopilot, create an automated direct deposit into an investment account every month.

Never look at the account. Don’t pay any attention to it. A $100 monthly investment into the S&P 500 for the last 10 years would be worth ~$20,000 today. Let it compound.

To improve the quality of your spending, never think twice about investments in yourself, but wait 48 hours on material purchases.

Investments in yourself include books, sleep, fitness, network, quality food, mental health, and personal development. Never think twice on these.

On material purchases, once you put something in your shopping cart, walk away from the computer and come back 48 hours later. If you still want it, buy it. Most of the time, you’ll realize you don’t need it. Invest that money instead and watch it compound.

To clear your mind, automate all basic financial tasks such as paying bills, credit cards, and investing.

When you have to think about these tasks every month, there is a small cognitive burden that reduces your capacity to focus on more important projects and opportunities. They are all easily automated (most of the services offer automated flows) and the digital systems tend to be accurate. Do quick accuracy checks once a quarter but avoid looking otherwise.

2024 is YOUR Year

Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.

Take one tiny action today that will start your compounding machine.

Then do it again tomorrow.

Then again the next day.

2024 is YOUR year. Never underestimate what you can accomplish with one year of focused daily effort.

I look forward to seeing the results!