Here Are The 7 Habits That Changed My Life (Save 3 Hours a Day)
If you don’t work toward good habits, you will fall into bad ones.
Our human monkey brain often resorts to the pleasure principle, the instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain.
It doesn’t matter how logical you are.
It doesn’t matter how much willpower and discipline you have.
Humans are designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
And we have a lot of cheap pleasure in society today.
But what will always triumph over the pleasure seeking need we have as humans?
The habits you create.
Many good habits will change your life and save you time.
Time is our most valuable non-renewable resource.
We can always make more money but we can never make more time.
One thing I’ve learned as I’ve grown in fitness, business, and my personal life is that 90% of success is habits and mindset.
To truly become something, you have to adopt the mindset and habits of that person.
This is why people who win the lottery almost always go broke within a few years – they haven’t developed the mindset and habits of someone that is wealthy.
Someone who is quitting smoking has to think of themselves as nonsmoker.
A millionaire has to adopt the mindset and habits of a millionaire.
These are the 7 habits changed my life and help me save at least 3 hours a day so I can live more purposefully, productively, and become more successful in my health, wealth, and relationships.
Habit 1: Gamify Life
The first habit is more of a life philosophy rather than a time saving habit, but I think it will set the stage for the rest of the habits.
Think of life as a game.
This accomplishes two things.
It focuses my energy and time on the things that actually matter to me and it allows me to get through the frustrating, mundane, or scary parts of life.
So I’d estimate if I didn’t have this life philosophy I’d be wasting an extra 20 minutes a day.
I think of my youth when I would play Runescape.
If you didn’t play runescape, basically its a game where you have a medieval-type character living in this world with magic, monsters, quests and missions, and you can interact with other users.
You have different levels for your skills, like attacking, defense, woodchopping, farming, hunting, etc.
The game unlocks new quests and challenges as you improve these skills.
And I think of life as the same way.
You have different skills in life – I like to categorize them as health, wealth, relationships, and self.
Underneath these categories, I have different levels I can improve.
My bodyfat, strength, cardio, savings, income, bond with my wife, strength of particular friendships, reading, spirituality, attitude, patience, self-control, kindness, etc.
I think about this a lot.
When I’m doing something I don’t want to do, I think about how I’m leveling up my character and my virtues.
Stuck in a boring work seminar or presentation?
You’re building patience.
Gotta break bad news?
Building courage, compassion, and honesty.
Alex Hormozi said it well (and this is paraphrased):
If you had to create a human, what would you put them through to make them tough? You wouldn’t make it a chill life. You must pay the price tag of what you’re going through in order to become the person you want to be.
I think about my deathbed.
At the end of my life when I see the flash and I review everything I became and what I could’ve become.
I realize what is important.
And it is my levels in the things that matter to me.
I won’t care about how many funny memes I saw or tiktoks I saw.
So throughout the day I always think, is this progressing me toward the person I want to be and the life experience I want to have.
This ensures I don’t spend time on the things that don’t really matter, and allows me to endure those hard times.
Habit 2: Reminders and Lists
Second habit I’ve gotten into is a bit more lighthearted and simple.
It is to set reminders and have lists.
I’d say this one saves me about 10 minutes a day at least physically, but mental energy a whole lot more.
So this has two parts.
First, picture a busy day that is nonstop. You worked a long day, went to the gym, made meals for kids, picked them up from school, fed yourself, cleaned the house, spent time with your partner, worked on a side hustle.
Sometimes you don’t have a second to think.
As I’m going through my day and something pops in my head, I whip out my phone and voice note myself a note.
It could be a brilliant business idea, a task I need to remember to do, or a random thought I had that I want to review.
Your brain only has so much it can hold onto. Mental load is a real thing.
You want to avoid decision fatigue.
Oftentimes at the end of the day you’re tired not just physically, but most of it is mental.
Making decisions, choosing what to do.
All day long.
This is a big reason people usually fall off diets or fall into bad habits at night.
You’re tired and your willpower and mental capacity just isn’t the same as earlier in the day.
And besides that, if I don’t write something down, I will just forget it.
A lot of my best ideas come when I’m just going about my day.
The second part of this to save time is to have lists.
I use the notes app on my phone for video ideas, restaurants I want to try, books I want to read, date night ideas, and many more.
If you come across something, don’t part it in your head – you will forget.
Put it in a list and have things to review when a date night comes or you’re looking for a new book.
Reminders and lists truly change the game.
Habit 3: Plan Ahead
On to habit 3, which saves me about 60 minutes a day, is planning my day ahead.
This is especially important as a business owner where I can pretty much do whatever I want during the day, but its important for everyone.
It really can be simplified as just living more purposefully.
If I don’t plan, make a to do list, and schedule things at certain times, I guarantee I will procrastinate and get half as much done in twice the time.
Which brings me to Parkinsons Law.
Parkinsons Law is the old adage that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.
Deadlines can cause procrastination or even prompt people to fill their time with miscellaneous, trivial matters.
The classic example is a story of a woman whose only task in a day is to send a postcard – a task which would take a busy person approximately three minutes.
But the woman spends an hour finding the card, another half hour looking for her glasses, 90 minutes writing the card, 20 minutes deciding whether or not to take an umbrella along on her walk to the mailbox …and on and on until her day is filled.
A 3 minute task clearly took all day to do in this example.
So I also write down how long I think tasks will take.
I err on the side of shorter than longer just to force me to be efficient.
Another part to planning ahead is being able to be more in line with my goals.
If I have a bigger picture goal, lets say pay off a car in a year.
You can look at the bigger picture, pay $15,000 for the vehicle to be paid off.
Now you can pace yourself, how much do you have to pay a month or week.
How much extra do I have to make to comfortably pay it off?
Now I can schedule those tasks in my week, knowing they get me closer to the bigger picture goal.
And on the flip side, planning your day ahead like a puzzle maximizes work-life balance because you’re able to piece in time for yourself or your friends and family.
Its scheduled in already.
Works for me.
So plan ahead.
Habit 4: Phone Tactics
With habit 3, I explained how I plan ahead and this prevents me from procrastinating on something trivial.
Habit 4 is the habit to help with the most trivial thing we all use our time: our phones.
These phone tactics probably save me about 30 minute a day, mostly from procrastination.
Phones are great.
Literally revolutionized the way we live, in many good ways.
But bad ways too, for one, being a huge distraction and time sink.
You could say time is not wasted on your phone if you enjoy it, and while I do agree, a lot of the time its not purposeful.
Everyone is guilty of our phones distracting us from what we actually want to do.
I can’t tell you how many times I have a particular task, and I pick up my phone and then easily get side-tracked find myself scrolling or browsing or answering some notification that could wait.
So I’m pretty much always in some kind of do not disturb or focus mode.
The only notifications I allow are from my wife and my parents.
The wife one is a little iffy because I will get some random tiktok sent or a snap of my dogs being cute or some random house listing in a random city that I’ve never been to.
So an extra layer of that is phone always face down so it doesn’t light up and capture my attention.
I’ll always have my phone slightly out of reach for this reason too.
Phones seem less threatening and distracting if they are face down and not in eyesight.
When I am finding myself grabbing my phone, I installed the accessibility feature called grayscale, and you’ve probably heard this one.
I hit the home button 3 times.
This makes your phone pretty much black and white.
You’d be surprised how much you hate your phone when its black and white.
I like just don’t even wanna use it.
So turn that on when you’re finding yourself constantly reaching for it.
Or get a flip phone. But the nuclear level is an app called “one sec” which you can set up to make you pause and take a deep breath for a few seconds after you open a forbidden app.
Make that pleasure seeking monkey brain think rationally for a second.
Habit 5: The Spiritual Habit
Some habits are for saving time, some are for leveling up so you can better delegate and use your time.
And the habit that has helped me level up is a spirituality practice.
I think everyone should practice something like this.
And you don’t have to be religious or follow something woo woo, hear me out though.
I easily remove 20 minutes of stress with this habit, but long term savings are infinite.
And this comes from a mindset component.
I’m Greek Orthodox Christian, so I prefer to pray and do some meditation too.
But you can do a meditation practice or even something as simple as a visualization or a “structured daydream” practice.
I know so many people nowadays that can’t sit and do nothing, this is more common as you get in the younger and younger generations.
Think about the iPad kids.
They always need some stimulation.
But adults too.
Just to go about your day, you might need music playing, a video, a show, etc.
So when you aren’t comfortable with being alone with no outside stimulation, you could spiral into negative thoughts.
Prayer, meditation, and mindfulness first allow you to be comfortable with being with your thoughts.
You can become more resilient to them or you can learn to leave them to a higher power and trust that everything is okay and you are right where you need to be.
So this is to highlight the power of mindset and creating a positive attitude.
And let me tell you the power of thoughts and words.
Dr. Emoto, a Japanese scientist devoted his life to studying water.
He did experiments where he said either positive words like “beauty”, “love”, and “happiness” to a certain plants, and he said negative words like “evil” “hatred” or “disgust” to another set of plants. The water that experienced positive words formed beautiful, symmetrical crystals under a microscope, while the negative word water formed chaotic, fragmented crystals.
There’s another experiment with plants and negative and positive thoughts.
Similar set up here.
Plants that received positive thoughts from the examiner grew into beautiful plants.
Plants that received negative thoughts did not grow, wilted, and many died.
Your thoughts and energy are powerful.
With a prayer or spirituality practice, you will hardwire yourself to think these positive thoughts, leading to similar positive outcomes in your environment and more purpose.
Habit 6: Efficient, Not Perfect
This next habit literally forms the basis of a lot of my personality.
Its called efficient, not perfect.
It saves me about 20 minutes a day.
The premise is that perfectionism is an enemy of productivity.
Trying to do something perfectly takes extra time and energy.
There are probably a lot of things you have to do that you are avoiding doing because you think they must be done perfectly.
So decide which activities in your life deserve your best effort and then make it a habit to avoid the time suck of perfectionism for less mission-critical tasks.
For example, it makes sense to put extra effort in when you’re painting a room you’ll be living in for years but it makes less sense to meticulously fold clothing that is going to be hidden in a drawer.
Another example, you may think the dishwasher or laundry machine can’t be used unless they’re maximum capacity.
A common misconception is thinking, “I can’t run the washer yet; it’s not full. I’ll wait until tomorrow when it fills up.”
The result is unwashed dishes, leading to a pileup or a need for items currently inside the dishwasher.
The solution is to run the dishwasher each evening, unload it in the morning, and fill it up throughout the day.
It’s not crucial to wait for the perfect, full load.
By establishing a regular routine, you can avoid dishes piling up on the counter or in the sink.
Just find a convenient time to run the dishwasher consistently to prevent accumulation.
Efficient, not perfect.
Another example from my past – let’s go back to medical school.
One nice thing about med school is that many schools preclinical curriculums are pass/fail.
The percentage of some exams to pass is just 70%.
So why spend 40 hours studying for a 90%, when you can spend 20 for a 75%.
It’ll essentially take double the time for an extra 15%, and your time is just best used somewhere else.
Give yourself permission to do things efficiently and not perfectly, and I guarantee you will be able to free yourself from so much “build-up” of tasks.
Habit 7: The 3 Minutes Rule
And lastly a logical segue from efficient, not perfect is the “just 3 minutes rule”.
This saves me 20 minutes a day and that is quite a liberal estimate.
This rule has a few different components.
The first one is if I’m struggling to do something, I can just get started for 3 minutes.
For example, cleaning my house.
I set a timer and I just get started for 3 minutes, and then I can stop if i want to.
You’d be surprised how much you can get done in just 3 minutes, and then you may just keep going.
A great example is for people trying to get into an exercise routine.
Go to the gym or wherever you work out, and just give it 3 minutes.
Once the 3 minutes are up, you can leave, but I doubt you will want to.
The theory behind this is getting started is always the hardest part of something.
It beats procrastination because I am only committing to a small portion of it.
This habit really helps with discipline and actually getting things done.
The second aspect is if something takes less than 3 minutes, I just do it immediately.
All these microtasks of replying to an email, messaging back a friend, picking up my clothes just take up mental load in your head.
A lot of fatigue really is mental fatigue, not physical.
So just doing those 3 minute tasks frees up a lot of headspace and pushes your life forward in the direction you want it to.
This is how I was a UNIT in medical school balancing a business, school, life, etc. I was a task machine just getting things done.
So just give it 3 minutes.
Overall these 7 habits save me at least three hours every single day and add purpose and value to my life.
I hope you found at least some of them helpful and let me know what you might try and incorporate into your life.
If you’re interested in more tips related to becoming a top tier human, fill out my 1 on 1 coaching application from the button below to become fitter and healthier – guaranteed in 90 days. Thanks for reading.
To your continued health and success
Dr.CP