Life is too hard to not autopilot ease
Notice and do, but for your own life.
Leadership is about patterns. You look at customer behaviors to inform product strategy. You notice the points in the process where the team tends to get stuck. You keep tabs on what’s working and strategize on how you can invest more resources in that area.
Noticing these patterns, usually with the help from data, instructs where to go next and how to spend your time. But what if we applied the same principle to our own lives?
If you had asked me a few years ago about my preferred morning routine, I would have said that I want to sleep as long as possible. But that’s not true. What I really want is to not have to get out of bed the minute I wake up. I like laying there for a few minutes to get myself together. Noticing this mini joy—or really the lack there of when I’m rushed in the morning—led me to adjust my alarm to ensure I have those few minutes.
Another example: My body tends to feel stiff on Mondays after spending my weekend with a toddler. In those instances, I like to do yoga and stretch. Instead of treating these as one offs, wondering why I’m feeling not myself, I noticed the pattern of Mondays and worked yoga into my schedule, even on the busiest days.
I’m a big believer in setting up systems so as much of life as possible can be on auto pilot. It’s a waste of brain energy to think about how to solve my uncomfortable joints and muscles every Monday when I could just put yoga into my calendar ahead of time.
Yes, this feeds into the culture of life optimization. But in these cases, I’m not optimizing in order to be a better version of myself. I’m implementing strategies to be a happier version of myself.
What I’m reading
The Guardian: Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican
Simon Willison: Introducing Datasette for Newsrooms
The Objective: The Case for Movement Journalism
Nieman Lab: Blue checks (Bluesky’s version): What journalists need to know
Wall Street Journal: The Locker-Room Playbook for Managing Gen Z Employees
One more thing
I finished “Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed,” and it is one of the best books I’ve read in awhile. The cliffhangers! And people say nonfiction is boring.
See you next week,
Rachel
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