Why You Should Sweat the Small Stuff this Week

As we’re almost into the final month of this awful year, attention is turning to 2021, and for me that means the launch of my book with nutritionist Colette Heneghan. It’s called How to Have the Energy. The backstory is that I approached Colette to help me increase my energy, both for productivity and mental health reasons and the changes I experienced through our her coaching were so remarkable, that we decided to put it all together in a book.

The idea was it would be a practical book about food and nutrition, for people who didn’t have the time or headspace to make huge sweeping changes. It was released a year ago, with what in hindsight turned out to be a terrible title “Work Fuel”. Needless to say, it didn’t sell very well, mainly because book-sellers weren’t sure what shelf to put it on. But the people who did read it loved it and called it things like “a hidden gem” (which is nice, but y’know, not really the dream of anyone who invests a year of their life into writing a book — we wanted it to reach a huge audience and make a bigger difference), so we figured it was worth a second shot.

You can buy How to Have The Energy from independent book shops here, or get it 50p cheaper from Uncle Jeff here, but you should know that means you’re condoning the fact that he doesn’t pay his taxes.

I guess what was most interesting to me about my journey through nutrition with Colette was that I didn’t need to make massive changes or start intricately weighing proteins to have a huge impact on my energy. In fact, after coaching with Colette, I probably now spend less time actually preparing food than I did before, but more time enjoying food and certainly more time enjoying the energy that food gives me (I no longer get that 4pm energy slump, which I used to ‘treat’ but grabbing a Wispa bar and pouring a stronger coffee- which it turns out, wasn’t an ideal fix).

The parallels with productivity and anything else where you want to change a habit are pretty clear to me. There is no magical app or secret sauce when it comes to doing great work, or Ninja-level productivity. If there was a magic formula though, it would simply be this:

“Do the simple things consistently and well.”

It’s amazing how we often tell ourselves to make things more complicated than this, when in reality changing habits is easier when we’re not overhauling our entire lives. It’s much easier to focus on making one meal a day better than it was before than going on some high-effort fad diet. In the same way, it’s much easier to see the benefits of learning a few new skills in the things or places you operate most often, than learning a whole new skillset. Tiny things lead to big change:

Your team feel stuck or lacking creativity and inspiration? Plan a regular ten minute brainstorm as part of your team meeting, or watch a Ted Talk together.

Drowning in email? Spend a few minutes on YouTube learning a couple of new keyboard shortcuts and start using them consistently, or have a ten minute conversation with your team about email etiquette and when not to bother sending them to you.

You feel overwhelmed or overworked? Spend just a few minutes getting all the stressful thoughts out of your head and onto paper.

The point is that these small things aren’t the end-game. But each of them sparks a bigger set of changes. And why? Because you have momentum. Momentum is the mental energy that tells you that you’re capable, that things are moving in the right direction — and often momentum becomes so addictive that you want more. The opposite of stress, I often say, is “playful, productive momentum”.

It’s hard to make huge changes in your habits stick, because you have to concentrate on them so hard, and use up so much willpower doing so, that eventually you just get bored and try some other huge masterplan that’s equally unsustainable (this is why New Years Resolutions usually suck, too).

But once a habit becomes habitual, then you’re onto something. It’s the fact that you can eat well, or work well, or live well without having to think about it any more, that makes the difference. In fact, that’s really at the heart of everything I try and do with people — it’s not about knowing what to do, or even starting out the process of doing it, it’s about doing it long enough that you don’t think about it anymore.

And when you focus on making tiny changes all the time, they amount to big changes over time — without you even noticing.

So here’s a question for the week ahead:

What small changes can I make, without too much disruption, to make stuff 1% better this week?

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