🦉 Tobias Scharikow 🚢 (2/100)

Welcome to Bring Your Ideas To Life!

In this ongoing series, in each essay, we explore one different method that helps you to bring your idea to life.

Bringing your ideas to life is a holistic and iterative process from ideating, strategizing, validating, implementing, launching and growing your (business) ideas.

🏴‍☠️ The Pirate Metrics

🗒️ What is it?

The Pirate Metrics are metrics developed by Dave McClure that can be measured to grow your startup and are based on an optimal meta user journey:

• Acquisition: How many users do find you?

• Activation: How many users get activated by having an "Aha-Moment"?

• Retention: How many users come back?

• Revenue: How many users buy something?

• Referral: How many users refer you to other people?

Now you might spot how they got their name :) AARRR!

✔️ How to use it?

• Define your pirate funnel!

  • Here you need to define what each stage means to you. What does Acquisition mean in your context? Is Activation a signup, a download, completing the onboarding? You can even subdivide each stage and split it into different metrics that are tracked (for example, you can track all of the mentioned actions for the Activation phase).

• Setup analytics & track the data!

  • Make sure that you can track all the metrics that you have set up. Defining metrics without tracking them will have no value.

• Find & battle your bottleneck!

  • When you have tracked your first numbers, find your bottleneck. Are you acquiring many users, but most of them don't activate? Dive deep here and find out the reasons and keep optimizing!

🤔 Why does it help to bring your ideas to life?

You can have the best idea, but if nobody knows about it no one will ever get to use it! That's why marketing is important.

That's why the Pirate Metrics shine especially for growing your startup because it implements the cycle from getting new customers until earning money from them.

👍 Pros & Cons

• ➕ Easy to use! If you track nothing else, you should track these!

• ➕ The metrics are comparable over time, so if you try a new acquisition campaign you can immediately see how this affects the metrics.

• ➕ You can even calculate how much each stage costs you.

• ➖ The phases are meta and need to be defined first for each context.

• ➖ Main focus on marketing / growing, but as a growing startup, you might need to use more important metrics along the way.

💡 Tips

• Keep in mind that this is like a funnel. You can't have any users referring other users if you don't know how to acquire them.

• Review these metrics regularly, e. g. weekly.

• Focus on one metric at a time. If you are an early startup, you might want to focus on acquiring users first. Once you have a base, you then might want to increase metrics in Activation, and so on.

• Combine it with other frameworks to measure other important KPIs.

• The stages can be defined very individually based on your context.

Today, I listened to a song on the radio which was about the meaning of life.

And a couple of hours later, I'm still thinking about this question:

Why do I live?

This question involves multiple perspectives. The biological perspective is maybe a bit simpler than the others: Because I was born.

What about other perspectives - the spiritual, the philosophical, the religious, the individual, ...?

So why am I still here? Why do I still live? Why do I still WANT to live?

Somehow this answer seems to be connected to the root cause of life. But it also seems to be connected to the end of life.

When I'm at the end of life, I would probably ask myself (and it would be so interesting to hear the answers of elderly people to these questions):

Was this the life that I hoped it would be? Do I regret certain things? What would I have done differently? Would I like to undo something? Was I happy with my life? Did I fulfil my purpose?

What is my purpose? And is my purpose the ultimate reason why I live?

I have values and beliefs. I have dreams. I have goals. I certainly want to be happy. But is that all? Is it my purpose to fulfil all my dreams and reach all my goals while living conforming to my values and beliefs? Living without regrets? That seems to be desirable! But is this all?

What would I do, if today was my last day? Probably spend the time with my beloved ones. I think my life had very little meaning if I had no one. Is this also the reason why I live? Or could I find a different meaning in life if I had no one?

When I asked people about their purpose they often told me common answers, including marrying, getting children, buying or building a house, seeing the world.

I wonder if this is everything?

I don't want to judge this. I think it's a great one. I'm thinking about similar things. It must be good if you are happy with it, right?

But somehow, it also feels to me as if this is something carved in stone. As if the book was already written. It sounds very harsh, but almost living like a lemming. Or like a pre-programmed sim.

Of course, we all have our typical days. We wake up, we do some kind of morning routine, we work, we eat, we spend time on hobbies, we sleep. Rinse and repeat. Maybe 5 days/week? 71% of our lifetime?

I just wonder, if I live like this for most of my time (well, because this typical day represents the majority of my life), will I regret this when I'm old?

I feel like there must be peaks in my life. Things that I don't plan. Things I have no clue about before. Things that have a major impact.

Is it something internal or external?

Is the reason why I live something caused by external circumstances or coming from my inner self?

The past is full of so many far-reaching events.

People needed to fight for their rights, fight for freedom. They started revolutions to change the system.

And today? Well, we came a long way. But we are not at the end yet. There are so many problems in the world that must be solved. We have wars, religious conflicts, the global climate crisis, plastic waste, etc.

To me, there seems to be a difference between surviving and living. Even though I think that the meaning of surviving and living has changed a lot during the years.

It feels like the surviving mode in the rich countries of this world is living the typical day. But only by surviving, we wouldn't be where we are now, there would be no progress.

So what would be the living mode? Making a progress in the world? Saving the world? Making a real impact? Or is this the job of the politicians? Shouldn't we all care that humanity survives? The earth will not be there forever.

What happens after my life? Do I want to be remembered for something? Do I want to leave something to the world? Is the largest impact we can do raising our children so that they can keep living and saving the world?

Or shouldn't we care at all? Should we only take care of our own life? Because the end of the world is probably not within our span of life?

I create the meaning of my life.

What I know is, that I don't want to live like a lemming. I want to be happy and live without regrets. I want to pursue my goals, my dreams, my visions.

But I also want to make something of an impact. I want to give something back to the world. Contribute to making some kind of progress. Maybe trying to make the world at least just a little bit better. Maybe by helping people. Maybe by empowering people.

I want to explore my curiosity. I don't want to be standing still.

I want to create the meaning of my life. And a good step to do this is asking myself:

Why do I live? What is my purpose? What do I want to be remembered for? What is my impact on this world? How do I want to feel at the end of my life? How do I want to look back on my life?

It doesn't seem to be easy to find the answers to these questions. Maybe I'm overthinking it. But it feels good to think about them. Maybe the continuous search for the answers to these questions IS the answer itself.

Alright ... it's 08:43 pm. For almost 45 minutes I am starring on my screen and thinking about what I should write about.

The problem is not that I don't have any ideas. In fact, my idea backlog in Notion contains more than 60 different essay ideas.

However, right at this moment, I either don't feel very motivated to write about any of them or they need too much cognitive energy that I don't have at the moment.

Keeping up with writing daily for 30 days is hard. It was easier in the first 2 weeks, but I'm getting to a point, where I need a break and reflect.

I want to finish this challenge, especially since the destination is in view. So I am writing down my thoughts, word for word, and right now I am at 136 words.

In fact, I feel bad now for writing this down because it seems to me that this essay doesn't provide any value ... But the interesting thing I'm noticing is that I have something I want to write about. It's exactly these words. They are in my brain and they block me. Probably they're not very deep or interesting. Maybe they are not meant to be published.

But as I'm in this paragraph, I have already started feeling better. It's hard to describe. I am just writing down what comes into my mind.

It's 09:02 pm now. At 08:45 pm I named this essay "Untitled". Now I just changed it to "Write Yourself Clear". Because that's what I'm doing right now.

This is the message I want to tell with this essay.

Are you feeling stuck? Lost? Trapped? Is your brain full?

My advice: Grab a piece of paper or open a document. And then write. Just write down whatever comes into your mind. Go with the flow. It almost feels like a meditation exercise to me.

😵‍💫 My last week was really fragmented.

I had many appointments that made it difficult for me to get into a deep work mode. I wanted to accomplish some important goals for my app cocoona. But as you can imagine, I was unproductive.

On this Monday, the day started to become fragmented again.

I didn't want this to be yet another unproductive day. However, most of the common tips didn't work for me or I couldn't influence them (batch your meetings, make them shorter, ...).

I asked myself what I could do to stay productive even on such fragmented days. When I was procrastinating in a short time block before an appointment, I was thinking about sushi and an idea came into my mind.

🍣 How sushi rolls are made

Do you know how to make sushi rolls?

Of course, there are different types of sushi rolls and how they are made may vary. But put simply, you have a large Nori sheet, place the rice and other ingredients on it, and then roll it up tightly using a bamboo mat.

You probably know that usually, the sushi rolls you eat (e. g. Maki roll) are smaller. That's because the big rolls are cut into several smaller rolls using a knife.

🚀 What can we learn from making sushi rolls?

On Monday, I made very small sushi rolls.

The only difference was that I didn't really make sushi rolls. I created really small tasks. I mean really small! My blocks of time were too short for deep work or completing larger tasks.

But with these very, very tiny sushi rolls on my table (well, my tasks ...), I could complete several of them in my short blocks of time. My list of 4 tasks was divided into 30 subtasks. Even if I only had 15 minutes, I could grab at least one or two small tasks and complete them.

Now you will probably tell me: Alright Tobi, you divided your tasks into subtasks. This is no rocket science!

Well, yes! And I think that's why it's so simple and at the same time so effective. I wondered why I didn't do this earlier.

I felt so much more productive. Why? Because I could complete them in these short time blocks. The difference is, that you can now work on them, but also complete them.

"Interruption, even if short, delays the total time required to complete a task by a significant fraction." - Cal Newport

🗒️ TL;DR

• On fragmented days with many appointments/meetings, divide your tasks into very, very small tasks.

• Think your task is small? Try to divide it once more!

• This will allow you not only to work on them but also complete them within your short time blocks, even it's only 15 minutes.

• Consequently, you will feel and actually be much more productive since you don't need to pay the high price for the interruption and try to get mentally back to your large task again after a meeting.

• Therefore, it's also much easier to continue with the work. You will just grab the next small task instead of trying to remember where you stopped.

It's the 1st February of 2022! 🎉

This means that 1/12 or around 8% of this year is already over.

Sounds incredible, right? Are you also asking yourself where all the time has gone? 🤔

For me, a new month always means a new start. And that's why at the end or beginning of each month, I always do two things:

• Reflecting on the past month

• Adjusting directions for the new month

🔎 Reflecting on the past month

There are tons of questions you can ask yourself. To keep it simple, I would suggest at least reviewing the following questions:

• 🙂 What went well? List all the positive things from the past month that come into your mind.

• 😔 What went wrong? List all the negative things from the past month that come into your mind.

• 💡 Ideas & Thoughts? List down noteworthy ideas or thoughts you had in the past month.

• 🚧 Where do you stand today? Did you want to complete any goals or projects in the last month? How often have you completed your habits? Write down your current progress.

Of course, you can extend the review as much as you like.

🚀 Adjusting directions for the new month

Your reflection is a great base for adjusting your direction for the new month. We should try to think which conclusions we want to draw and if we want to implement any actions in the short, medium or long term.

• 🙂 How can you implement more of the positive things?

• 😔 How can you prevent the negative things to happen again or how can you react in future?

• 💡 Are there any ideas or thoughts you want to take action on?

• 🚧 Do you need to adjust anything (e. g. your goals) based on your current progress?

Here as well, you can extend this planning of course as you like.

Recently on the local radio, they talked about work-life balance and burnout.

They said, that the new generations mostly tend to prefer living to work rather than working to live.

First, I was grinning. "Yes, of course. Why choose the difficult way?"

But this thought immediately felt treacherous and I began to think deeper about the difference. What exactly is the difference? Do I work to live or live to work? And which one was better?

Working vs. Living

First of all, let's find out the difference between working and living. I don't want to get too philosophical and try to stay pragmatic.

We all have needs that we want and need to fulfil in our lives.

According to Maslow, the needs can be categorized into different categories and a bottom-up hierarchy from physiological needs, safety needs, belonging and love needs, esteem needs, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, self-actualization to transcendence.

In my opinion, the borders between life and work become blurry here.

On the one side, work can be a part of these needs (e. g. esteem needs) and therefore of life.

On the other side, work could also be viewed separately from these needs. In this case, work would be the sum of all activities you are doing which allow you to fulfil your needs. For example, we earn money with our work and then can exchange it to fulfil our needs (e. g. eating, drinking, ...). We could also grow food by ourselves or produce something different and then trade it.

"Working to live" vs. "Living to work"

In my opinion, the main difference is the following:

Working to live means that you view your work separately from your life. You spend time working to earn money (to keep it simple, we blind out self-sufficiency or trading here, because they boil down to the same point). This allows you to fulfil your needs. For the rest of the time you are not working, you are living and fulfilling your needs.

Living to work means that work is an essential and time-consuming part of the centre of your life. Work is a need itself that you are fulfilling. The borders between life and work become blurry and maybe don't even exist.

Which one is better?

"Choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life" - Confucius

Honestly, when I was reflecting on my past, I was living to work for many years.

Work was such an essential part of my life, that I even neglected many of my other needs for a long time. But still, work was feeling like work. I didn't pursue my own projects and ideas but was always working for other people and making their dreams come true.

After listening to the local radio show, I realized that I have a different opinion nowadays:

• Either, I want a great work-life balance, where the amount of time I can spend on the life part is substantially higher than on the work part (think of the 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferris).

• Or, I want to have almost no difference between work and life. This would be the case if I'm able to work completely on my own projects and ideas and these would generate enough income.

In any case, it's important to me that the "work" part can finance my preferred lifestyle.

Interestingly, I would define both options as "working to live". Because my main focus shifted from "work" to "live". Work is not an end in itself anymore for me.

In general, I think there is no real better option between living to work or working to live. It depends on your circumstances and needs.

I think a great way to find out what is better suited for you is to ask yourself:

When you are lying on your deathbed, how do you want to reflect on your life? How can you minimize the regrets?

You have superpowers!

Don't believe me? Well, have a look at these powerful quotes.

Read them, think about them, internalise them.

The more you do this, the more you will realize how powerful these concepts are. To me, they feel like a superpower.

The great thing?

We all have them deep within us!

1 - The Superpower of Believe

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right." - Henry Ford

2- The Superpower of Learning

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young." - Henry Ford

3 - The Superpower of Persistence

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas A. Edison

4 - The Superpower of Getting Started

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Chinese proverb

5 - The Superpower of Openness

"A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open." - Frank Zappa

6 - The Superpower of Saying No

"Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best." - John C. Maxwell

7 - The Superpower of Imagination

"Your mind must arrive at the destination before you do!"

8 - The Superpower of Positive Thinking

"Optimism is the one quality more associated with success and happiness than any other." - Brian Tracy

9 - The Superpower of Reading

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." - Marcus Tullius Cicero

10 - The Superpower of Love (and Humor)

"All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt." - Charles M. Schulz

Feeling grateful and showing gratitude has many benefits.

It strengthens your heart, calms you down, makes you happier, helps you to sleep better, reduces stress and has a healing effect.

Sometimes, we might have difficulties thinking about what we are grateful for because we are taking beautiful things for granted.

But there are so many things to be grateful for.

That's why I want to give you some inspiration and show you that oftentimes it should be even the "normal and small" things we should be grateful for.

“I am happy because I’m grateful. I choose to be grateful. That gratitude allows me to be happy.” - Will Arnett

Here's a list of things that you can be grateful for. Feel free to take it as an inspiration. 🙂

You can be grateful for ...

• your partner, your family, your friends

• a great conversation with someone

• walking in nature

• having a roof over your head

• seeing the faces of your beloved ones

• hearing your favourite music

• feeling the fur of your pet

• tasting your favourite food

• smelling freshly mowed lawn

• being able to walk and run

• reading a good book

• learning something new

• receiving a gift

• giving a gift

• a good night's rest

• buying something you like

• watching a great movie

• the ability to learn something new

• a productive day

• reaching your goals

• completing your habits

• laughing about something

• the ability to write and read

• the weather (whether sunshine, rain, snow or whatever you like)

• being alive

Do you notice that we can feel gratitude for the "small" things, that we often take for granted? Here are some categories for inspiration.

Categories to look for gratitude ...

• Relationships

• Health

• Productivity, Learning & Growth

• Environment

• Finance & Wealth

• Food

• Spiritual

• Work

• Experiences & Moments

• Random & Small Things

Welcome to Bring Your Ideas To Life!

In this ongoing series, in each essay, we explore one different method that helps you to bring your idea to life.

Bringing your ideas to life is a holistic and iterative process from ideating, strategizing, validating, implementing, launching and growing your (business) ideas.

🔁 The Lean Startup

🗒️ What is it?

Many startups fail for various reasons.

These could include no market need, a flawed business model, pricing issues, lack of product-market-fit, etc. But the real question is: How can we increase our chance to succeed with our business model? How can we decrease the risk of failure?

That's where the Lean Startup steps in!

It was developed by Eric Ries based on the preliminary work by Steve Blank. The goal of this iterative method is to develop companies and products while at the same time reducing risk, eliminating waste and increasing innovation, speed, learning and the chance of success.

✔️ How to use it?

• Internalise the 5 principles of Lean Startup

  • Entrepreneurs are everywhere: Lean Startup can be used for any kind of organization, whether you are a solopreneur or a huge enterprise.

  • Entrepreneurship is management: Your startup is not only a product but also an organization and therefore requires some kind of management.

  • Validated learning: To create a sustainable business model, the underlying assumptions need to be tested by continuous validated learning processes.

  • Innovation accounting: Select and measure continuously actionable and appropriate metrics to measure your progress.

  • Build-Measure-Learn: This is the core process of the Lean Startup which is about building MVPs (see below) for your ideas, measuring the feedback of your customers and learning whether the path is correct or needs adjustments.

• Focus on Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)

  • An MVP is a minimal iteration of your idea or product that creates some kind of value and thus allows you to test your hypotheses and collect feedback as fast as possible.

  • It could be a paper prototype, a mockup, a design prototype, a coding prototype, a landing page, an explainer video, etc.

• Use the Build-Measure-Learn cycle

  • Build a minimum viable product to test your identified hypothesis.

  • Measure the feedback and results when testing your MVPs.

  • Learn and analyze the measured feedback and decide, whether your hypothesis is validated or not and if you need to make adjustments or pivot.

  • Repeat this cycle to continuously improve and validate your product.

🤔 Why does it help to bring your ideas to life?

Basic principles (such as using MVPs or focusing on validated learning) can be applied to many stages of the process, such as validating, implementing or growing.

However, the main stage where the Lean Startup shines is the validation phase. The underlying principles, the MVP ideas and the Build-Measure-Learn cycle make a strong foundation to validate your ideas.

👍 Pros & Cons

• ➕ Helps us to escape the "build trap" and instead focus on progress.

• ➕ Enforces customer-centric development and therefore helps to prevent some of the biggest risks of failure.

• ➕ Focus on short, fast and iterative cycles with continuous progress.

• ➖ It's valuable at many stages, but especially at later stages, you will get to the point where you need to decide whether to build or not. Lean Startup can sometimes promote procrastination when taken too "religiously".

• ➖ It offers a great base but practically it needs to be combined with other meta-methods (e. g. Design Thinking) to holistically build a company.

• ➖ In certain scenarios it might not be appropriate (Validation takes longer than actually building the product? Disruptive scenarios? Very special markets?)

💡 Tips

• Start treating everything as an assumption and hypothesis and make them explicit - your price, your customer group, your value propositions, etc.

• Include your users and customers into your cycles and put them in the centre of your processes.

• Metrics are very important, especially when creating experiments for your MVP. Take enough time to pick the right metrics and measure them correctly.

• Remember that MVP has two dimensions for the product: "Minimum" and "Viable".

• Focus on learning and going as fast as possible through the Build-Measure-Learn cycles.

This essay has two parts. This part is about explaining why it's so important HOW we give feedback. The next part is about how we can actually give better feedback.

Feedback can make or break a person.

We all know, that giving and receiving feedback is significant in life. Feedback can help us to grow, improve ourselves, get to know other perspectives and broaden our horizons.

But giving feedback is more than just telling your opinion or facts.

The success of your feedback often depends much more on the How than on the What. How we deliver the feedback often makes the real impact.

If we do it wrong, the feedback maybe will never reach the receiver. It might even break the person. But if we chose the right way of giving feedback, it can help the person to flourish and grow.

A story about learning how to drive and giving feedback

When I was 19 years old, I started to take driving lessons.

My driving instructor was a very direct and harsh kind of person. He would become loud very fast, and giving positive feedback was not his strength either.

I'm an introvert and a pretty sensitive person, so you can imagine that these lessons were pure torture for me.

I don't want to say that his feedback was not justified (the What), but I couldn't work with the way how he gave me this feedback (the How). And at that age, I was not mature enough to stand out against him. The way he delivered his feedback would not let me grow. It raised self-doubt in me. I started to hate driving lessons and finally hated driving cars.

For one week, he was on holiday, so there was another instructor for this time.

He was very calm and settled. In his driving lessons, I received my very first positive feedback. I still made mistakes, but he didn't shout at me. He calmly explained to me what happened, how I can do it better and what was positive about this situation. These 5 driving lessons were the best ones I had, and I felt like I learned a thousand times more than in the ones from my original instructor.

Unfortunately, it was too late. I already felt broken.

In the end, I passed my theoretical and practical exams on the first try. The examiner told me that I was driving very good.

But I couldn't feel proud. I felt like I didn't grow. I didn't have developed any confidence and felt like I didn't deserve this. I didn't enjoy driving at all. The way how my instructor gave me feedback was always present as a dark cloud.

For almost 10 years, I hated driving cars and I only did it a couple of times.

Fortunately, today I'm able to enjoy driving cars and I even have a car. But this is another story.

I hope this example illustrates that it's important that we care about how we give feedback. We never know what this will do with the person.

In the next part, I will illustrate a manifesto to give better feedback.

Welcome to Design Your Life x5!

In this ongoing series, in each essay, we explore one different idea that helps you to design your life (e. g. productivity, goal setting, time management, mindfulness, tools, frameworks, etc.) in 5 main points.

Designing your life means holistically reflecting on and understanding your past, organizing and focussing on your present and shaping your future.

📈 The Eisenhower Method

🗒️ #1 What is it?

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."

The Eisenhower Method is based on this statement and allows you to prioritize and categorize your tasks into a matrix based on the two dimensions importance (important / not important) and urgency (urgent / not urgent).

Therefore, the matrix overall has 4 quadrants:

• 1. Important & Urgent

• 2. Important & Not urgent

• 3. Not important & Urgent

• 4. Not important & Not urgent

Importance is about how large the impact of this task is (e. g. for yourself, for another person, for your goal, ...).

Urgency is about by when we need this task to be completed (e. g. if it has a concrete deadline).

✔️ #2 How to use it?

• Prepare the matrix (e. g. on a paper, whiteboard or digital in any app). You should be able to categorize your tasks.

• List down the tasks you want to prioritize.

• For each task, think about how important and how urgent it is. If it helps you, you can use a scale to evaluate these dimensions (e. g. 1-5).

• Assign the corresponding priority to each task and fill it in the corresponding quadrant.

• Work on the tasks based on these rules:

  • 1. Important & Urgent: These tasks have the highest priority, you should do them as soon as possible.

  • 2. Important & Not urgent: Because these tasks are important but not urgent yet, you should terminate to make sure that they are done before "it's too late".

  • 3. Not important & Urgent: In a business context, these tasks should be delegated. If it's only you, of course, you can't delegate them. If the urgency is crushing, you should do them right after the tasks put in 1.

  • 4. Not important & Not urgent: "Officially" according to the method it's recommended to delete these tasks. However, you can still keep them in a backlog if you like. But they should definitely not be your focus for now.

🤔 #3 Why does it help to design your life?

Organize your present: It helps you to work and put your focus on the right things because you have prioritized your tasks accordingly.

Shape your future: It helps you become clearer in finding out what is really making an impact for your future.

👍 #4 Pros & Cons

• ➕ It's a very easy method, you don't need any special knowledge or tools.

• ➕ It allows us to work on the right tasks.

• ➕ The visualization in a matrix can be helpful make the prioritization even clearer.

• ➖ The "delegate" recommendation doesn't work if these tasks depend upon yourself.

• ➖ The strict order contradicts following the personal flow of energy and creativity.

• ➖ Visualization can become messy when there are too many tasks.

💡 #5 Tips

• To better evaluate the importance and urgency of a task, you can use a scale (e. g. 1-5).

• Remember that this method is purely about finding out to work on the right tasks (effectivity), not to work on the tasks right (efficiency).

• Use this as a guide, but don't neglect your personal motivation, the flow of energy and creativity.

• In the beginning, as soon as you have evaluated one task as a base, you can then evaluate the following tasks in comparison to this base task. It will simplify the evaluation a lot.

• You can also use this method to evaluate other concepts, such as projects or goals.

• Be clear about the context and keep it consistent. What does important mean (e. g. progress on your personal goals, or the impact in general, etc.)? What does urgent mean (e. g. today, this week, this month, etc.)?

• We often spend our time on urgent tasks. But very often, the real tasks for your personal are important, but not urgent. To reach your goals, you often need to do the important things today, that are not urgent yet.

I love going for a walk.

By now, I try to do it every day. I'm not talking about running or going to a supermarket. I mean a real dedicated walk in nature.

It increases my productivity, makes me physically and mentally healthy and helps me to become a more mindful person.

Wonder how? In this list, I have compiled my top benefits of going for a walk. For most of these benefits, several studies prove that they are true. However, primarily they mirror my own experiences.

🚶‍♂️ General

• 🤝 You can do it with whom you like - either alone or together with your beloved friends, partner or family members.

• ⏲️ You can do it anytime - e. g. to get awake in the morning, to overcome afternoon sleepiness or to finish the day in the evening.

• 🔁 You can do it as long and as often as you want - e. g. 3 times/day á 15 minutes? 1 time/day á 45 minutes? You decide!

• 🗺️ You can do it anywhere - of course, going for a walk in nature or at least a park or something similar has the best effects. You can even change the routes and explore new places.

• 💭 You can do it for any reason - whether it is to relax, calm down, recharge your energy, think about a problem, maintain a healthy lifestyle, search for inspiration or spend time with your beloved ones. The reason is totally up to you, and you can always find a reason to go for a walk.

✨ Productivity

• 💡 You can find solutions to problems that you couldn't figure out before. As Henry David Thoreau said: "Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow."

• 🔋 You can recharge your energy and become productive again after finishing your walk.

• 🌃 You can stimulate your creativity, find inspiration and get new ideas.

• 🔥 Your ability to concentrate will be renewed after the walk.

• 🤔 You can deeply think about anything without procrastination.

🙏 Health & Mindfulness

• 👀 You can relax your eyes by doing a screen detox and regularly viewing things that are far away.

• 💊 You can protect yourself from many diseases and problems as tons of studies show, including diabetes, depression, sleep problems, being overweight and many more.

• 🌞 You can eliminate your Vitamin D deficiency which is crucial because Vitamin D is important for metabolism, the immune system and much more.

• 🧘 You can relax and reduce your stress because a walk in nature is one of the best ways to calm down.

• 🙏 You can become a more mindful person because going for a walk is one of the best ways to live in the here and now.

What is the difference between a sprint and a marathon? And what can it teach you about designing your life?

Sprints are short and intense

A sprint is very intensive. It's a short distance and you run as fast as possible to reach the goal. You spend all the energy you have because a sprint lasts only for a short duration. It's important to make as much progress as possible in this short time.

Marathons are long and persevering

A marathon is a long haul. On this long distance, you need to distribute your energy evenly throughout the whole marathon. You need to prepare yourself to keep pace for a very long time and can't spend all your energy in the first minutes. Otherwise, you will fail to complete the marathon. It's important to keep going and make consistent small steps.

Are you a sprinter or marathon runner?

Well, it actually depends on the situation.

When shaping your future, it's useful to think like a marathon runner. Life is indeed more like a marathon than a sprint. How can you make small, but consistent progress towards your goals? Consistency is the key to this mentality. Thinking about life as a marathon, it doesn't really matter how fast you achieve your goals. It's more important to keep making progress on a consistent level. Long-term, focus on consistency.

When focussing on your present, it's useful to think like a sprinter. While making consistent progress in your marathon, now and then you can plan a sprint. It could be on a daily basis (e. g. 2 hours of deep work) or on a weekly basis (e. g. similar to agile 1- or 2-week sprints), where you focus on certain sub-goals. Short-term, focus on intensity.

"Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years." - Bill Gates

So, you can be both a sprinter and a marathon runner in life. And combining these two mentalities is great for designing your life.

For one decade, I was driving at full throttle.

I didn't allow myself to slow down. I pushed my car and myself very hard over the limit. Always straight ahead. No breaks. Everything around me didn't matter. Outpace. Accelerate. Repeat.

Yes, indeed I travelled a very long distance during this time. Everything seemed to work out. My destination was getting closer and closer.

But after almost ten years, something strange happened.

All of a sudden, I was getting really tired. I could barely keep my eyes open anymore. When I looked at the fuel gauge, I frighteningly noticed that my tank was almost empty. Additionally, my car started to make some weird noises.

What the hell was going on?

I had no clue. But when I started to think about this, I quickly realized that at least one of two things would happen if I wouldn't react:

• I would crash into a wall if I kept driving at this speed while being so tired.

• My journey would end right here and now if my gas tank became empty.

Feeling very vulnerable, I didn't know what to do. I can't stop! I need to get to my destination as fast as possible!

But deep inside me, something spoke to me. Strangely, it seemed like both my heart and my brain wanted to tell me the absolute same thing.

Driven by this feeling, I followed their advice. And I made a decision.

For the first time in 10 years, I started to slow down.

Maybe I slowed down a bit too fast, but I slowed down. And finally, I stopped the car. I took my hands off the wheel and my foot off the pedal. I even put on the brake.

While sitting in my car, a strange feeling came over me. I started to look around and was surprised where I was stranded.

😴 Do you have difficulties falling asleep because your thoughts won't leave you alone?

This problem haunted me for a long time. It didn't matter if I was sleepy or not. Often it took me more than 1 hour to fall asleep. Consequently, I would be really tired in the morning and unproductive during the day. Mostly, this repeated 3-4 nights and then I would be so tired that I just fell asleep on the couch at around 6:00 pm.

👊 One day I made the decision I want to fight this battle!

Sleep is necessary for survival. It's necessary for so many things. So I tried out a bunch of methods.

Reading on the phone was not helpful because the blue light would keep me awake. Also, the articles would give me even new input for my thoughts. Listening to music didn't help me because I could easily continue thinking. Just laying down and waiting to fall asleep wasn't the solution either.

A couple of methods weren't bad at all (preventing blue light, meditating before going to bed, taking a hot bath, reading books, etc.). They made me sleepy. But as soon as I laid down on my bed, it seemed like a magical force would activate my brain again.

✨ The one thing that helped me

One evening, I tried Audiobooks. I even remembered the first audiobook I listened to (Monster 1983 on Audible - absolutely recommended!). I set the timer to 30 minutes, and guess what? I fell asleep at this time! And ever since then, this method doesn't disappoint me and worked in 95% of all cases. In the rest of the cases, I start a second timer again with 30 minutes and then I would fall asleep in this one.

Let me tell you the primary reasons why I love this method and why I think it worked for me:

👉 It prevents you from (over)thinking. You literally can't think because you are listening to the audiobook.

👉 If you are not falling asleep in your interval, no worries. Start a second interval and you will fall asleep very likely.

👉 What is the worst thing that can happen? Well, you listened 30 minutes to an audiobook. In a year that would be around 180 hours, and with an average audiobook duration of 10 hours that's an additional 18 books per year.

👉 You exactly know when you fell asleep. Note down the time you went to bed (e. g. at 10:30 pm) and start the timer (e. g. for 30 minutes). On the next day, check the last minute you can remember - it's when you fell asleep (e. g. after 18 minutes). This means you fell asleep at 10:48 pm.

👉 You don't need light and your body will learn about your personal sleep routine. So it will very likely keep working if your body understands this (going to bed & turning on the audiobook = sleep mode).

👉 There are so many great audiobooks. I personally pick historical or fantasy novels because they do a great job of pulling me out of this real-world with my thoughts into another epic world. I also tried nonfiction, where ironically I would fall asleep very quickly, but not remember anything the next morning. For fiction, it mostly takes me up to 30 minutes to fall asleep, but I remember what happened. I wonder why. 🤔

✅ What you should take away

If you only take one thing away from this essay, I want it to be the following:

Please, don't sacrifice your sleep. 🙏

If you're an overthinker, maybe listening to audiobooks can help you. Try it out, experiment with the timer and find your perfect category of audiobooks. Ideally, go to bed 30 minutes earlier.

If it doesn't work for you, try other methods. You will find a method that will work for you. I did, and so can you do it. 🙌