Newsletter Week 44 | 2021

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Hey there.I hope you've had a great week.

What I've made for you

Book Notes: The Personal MBA by Josh KaufmanThis book is a large collection of briefly described models. As it is with such books, every reader will love some parts, like others, and not care about the rest. While that describes my experience with the book, I think it had a good love/uninterested ratio. 

What I've been pondering

Environment design. A few weeks ago, I started to think more and more about it.

Changing your environment is one of the best and easiest ways to change your behavior.Make it such that you don't have to expend willpower to do what you want to do (remove friction). And reverse for what you don't want to do (add friction).

A few ways I've implemented environment design:

• Put gym clothes out the evening before, so it's much easier to get dressed when going in the morning. I go to the gym pretty early in the morning. As you can imagine, there's a lot of friction from going from my warm bed to outside in the cold and driving 10 minutes to my gym. I'm doing everything I can to make that process easier and more enjoyable, and putting out my clothes the night before is a great start.

• Deleting apps that prompted mindless browsing from my phone. I tried to introduce a time-restriction, but found that I just pressed “Don't show me again” every time the warning showed. Yeah. That didn't work. So instead, I'm now deleting the apps every Sunday — and I can re-install them again the next Friday.

• Blocking entertainment sites when being productive. The harder it is to unblock, the better. YouTube is especially a killer for me.

Both Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits contain a lot of quality information on environment design. 

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To your success. Regards,

Christian Bager Bach Houmann