17 health and productivity tips from top performers — Aescle
To do your life’s work, you need extreme focus. Yes, you should be materially unbalanced. No, you should not neglect your health, and it’s actually counterproductive. Top performers focus on what they can control, and your mind and body are the definitional examples.<br>Here are 17 proven tips from folks like Sam Altman and PG to improve your health and productivity and achieve elite performance.<br>Master your physical baseline<br>Prioritize sleep . This is the highest ROI item and mentioned by every founder you can imagine, including Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Chesky, and more.
Make your bedroom a cave: dark, cool, quiet 1. Common tactics include blackout curtains, a window AC or mattress pad, a white noise machine or earplugs. I like this eyemask and custom fitted earplugs (Kaiser hearing in SF).
Clear your mind. Stop screen time before bed. Read a book, even just for a few minutes. If your brain can’t stop churning, try this: visualize your mind as a cluttered desk, sweep all the items into drawers, and lock them.
Maintain strict sleep/wake timing. Regularity trains your body.<br>Move as much as you can. Preferably outside on your two feet.
This is incredibly common across history’s greatest thinkers. It should come as no surprise since we’re bipedal. PG and Jack Dorsey walked to work. Alex Karp and James Dyson are elite endurance athletes.
Kill two birds with one stone.<br>Walk in the morning to get sunlight, kickstart alertness, and set up your body for sleep.<br>Walk after meals to reduce postprandial crashes and stabilize your blood sugar; also great to do with your cofounder/partner.<br>Walk during meetings or when you’re feeling stuck/tired/need to brainstorm; Steve Jobs was known for this.
Exercise. PG ran, Sam resistance trains. I do 180 minutes of zone 2 running, one Norwegian 4x4, and two 30 minute lifting sessions per week. Find what works for you.<br>Fuel well. Amount, quality, timing all matter.
Don’t eat too much, which is the default. If you work a lot, you’re likely eating out often. Go for the healthiest option possible; the defaults have too many calories and not enough nutrients. Cooking yourself can be more economical, much healthier, and pretty efficient if you do it right. The keys are Costco; meal prepping via sheet pan roasting or sous viding; or minimally processed ready-to-microwave vegetables and chicken.
Experiment with diets like intermittent fasting for focus. Sam Altman and others have said the same 1.<br>Create work opportunity, via negativa<br>Remove physical stimuli. 1
No coworking spaces, cafes, bars (for God’s sake), loud open offices. If you need to get work done, make it quiet. Get visual blinders. I have walls in front and on both sides of me, and I’ll wear a hat or hoodie when necessary. Make your work environment extremely plain and boring (though comfortable; get your ergonomics right).<br>Silence digital noise.
Personal phone in a separate room. I don’t touch or use my personal phone until well into the afternoon. When you’re in maker mode, no buzzes, dings, notifications of any kind, except for true emergencies. Do-not-disturb all the time. Christopher Nolan doesn’t even have a smartphone.<br>Kill your phone/social media addiction.
Pause when reaching for your phone or navigating to social media. Realize you’re a baby reaching for their pacifier. If you still need your pacifier, only use it during set times. Experiment with digital detox days. I find no feed days and digital Sabbaths very effective. Think Weekends a la Bill Gates when you really need to go deep.
Most of the time, whatever you want to check doesn’t matter or can wait. Be comfortable with quiet and boredom.<br>Guard your time and calendar.
PG’s classic “maker schedule”. You can’t get deep work done if your day is fragmented. 2 My maker days have completely empty calendars. Arrange your day (meals, exercise, family, etc) to optimize for uninterrupted blocks; John Carmack, Marc Andreesen, and Naval did this well. 3 4 5 Say “no” aggressively and by default. Be unreachable. Preserve your unstructured time.<br>Have an extremely boring personal life.
If you’re unhappy at home or work, fix it. This will bleed through and be the top idea in your mind rather than the work itself. Prune relationships, then invest in the ones you keep. Remove unproductive recurring sources of stress. Stop reading news.
Procrastinate aggressively, outside of The Main Thing. Messages, errands, chores, etc - most things can wait. PG: “Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.”
Outsource heavily and set a high personal hourly rate per Naval. You should not be cleaning, shopping in person, etc; your time is worth much more than that. Use DoorDash, Instacart, Uber courier, Amazon, ChatGPT Work, etc....