In Part 1, I gave you a one-page mental model for how your body works. Four levers control almost all of your health: weight, blood pressure, blood quality, and inflammation.

They connect in a simple cascade:

Keep your weight down → that keeps your blood pressure down → eat clean so your blood doesn’t have problem-causing stuff in it → exercise to move the bad stuff out and keep everything circulating → inflammation stays low.

That’s the mental model. But a mental model without numbers is just theory.

This is the owner’s manual. The specific biomarkers to track for each lever, what the numbers should actually be, and the highest-leverage fix when something’s off. Bookmark this one.

The Problem With “Normal”

You get blood work back and your doctor says “everything looks normal.” That should be reassuring. It’s not.

“Normal” is a reference range built from the general population. The general population is not healthy. Normal cholesterol in America would raise alarms in most of the world. Normal fasting insulin in a country where 40% of adults are pre-diabetic is not a number you want to aim for.

There’s a massive gap between “not currently diagnosed with a disease” and “actually healthy and performing well.” Your doctor is screening for disease. That’s their job. Optimizing for energy, clarity, and longevity? That’s on you, unfortunately.

We’re running 200,000-year-old hardware in a world of processed food, blue light, and desk chairs. Some of these numbers being off is almost the default. The good news is most of them respond to simple interventions once you know where to look.

Here’s where to look.

Lever 1: Weight

Why it matters: Everything works harder when you’re carrying too much. Heart, joints, kidneys, hormones, all of it. This is the lever that moves every other lever, which is why it’s first.

The numbers:

Body weight / BMI should be within 20 pounds of the BMI standard, ideally in the 19-25 range. Yes, people love to hate on BMI and it’s not accurate if you have a lot of muscle. But most people do not have a lot of muscle, and for those who don’t, anything over 30 is obesity and that’s bad across every health metric we can measure.

Fasting glucose should be under 99. Wake up, don’t eat or drink anything but water (at least 12 hours since your last meal), then test your blood sugar. Over 99 means you’re pre-diabetic and your metabolism is already struggling. You can test this at home with a $30 glucose monitor.

What to watch for: Constant fatigue, joint pain, sleep apnea (your partner may notice this before you do), and the frustrating inability to lose weight despite “eating well,” which is almost always a calorie tracking problem, not a willpower problem.

The fix: Track your food in Cronometer for 5 days. Just 5 days. You will be stunned at where the calorie bombs are hiding. One bite of some cakes or desserts takes 30 minutes of cardio to burn off. One bite. Ten bites and you need 5 hours of cardio. That math alone should convince you that diet matters more than exercise for weight loss.

Find your BMR, create a 200-300 calorie per day deficit, lose about a pound a week. That’s sustainable. If you’re obese with blood sugar issues, talk to your doctor about GLP-1 medications (especially Tirzepatide because it helps with blood sugar), they’ve been a game-changer for a lot of people.

Lever 2: Blood Pressure

Why it matters: Your blood vessels are like a garden hose. Too much pressure for too long damages the walls and everything downstream: heart, kidneys, brain, eyes. The kidneys are especially vulnerable because they filter your entire blood supply dozens of times per day, and high pressure slowly destroys the tiny vessels doing the filtering.

The numbers:

Blood pressure should be 120/80 or lower for both numbers. You know this one. A $40 home monitor is one of the best health investments you can make.

Resting heart rate should be 70 or less beats per minute. The less your heart needs to work while you’re at rest, the better your cardiovascular health. People in great shape are often in the 50s. Your blood pressure monitor will show this too.

Heart rate recovery should drop 20+ beats within 1 minute after vigorous exercise. Exercise hard for a few minutes, stop, check your heart rate, then check again after 60 seconds. The more it drops, the healthier your cardiovascular system. This is one of the strongest predictors of cardiac health and almost nobody tracks it.

HRV (Heart Rate Variability) should be 40 or higher (age dependent, higher is better). This measures the variation between heartbeats and is a great indicator of overall health, recovery, and stress load. You’ll need a wearable like the Whoop or similar to track it, but once you start watching it you’ll see exactly how bad sleep, alcohol, and stress show up in your body the next day.

What to watch for: Consistent readings above 130/85, headaches, vision changes, swelling in legs or ankles. If blood pressure is high, get your kidney function checked (that’s part of the CMP panel I’ll mention in Lever 4).

The fix: Lose weight. This fixes blood pressure more than anything else. Exercise regularly. If it’s still high after those two: magnesium, potassium, omega-3s, and CoQ10 are worth trying (with your doctor’s knowledge). Deep breathing exercises can make a surprising difference, this isn’t woo, the Resperate device is FDA-approved for lowering blood pressure through guided breathing. Gold standard medications if needed: telmisartan, amlodipine.

If you fix Lever 1, Lever 2 often fixes itself.

Lever 3: Blood Quality

Why it matters: This is about what’s actually circulating in your blood. Sugar, cholesterol, insulin, nutrients. Remember the mental model from Part 1: processed sugar acts like shards of glass in your blood vessels, cholesterol deploys to patch the damage, and when the patching never stops, it builds up until something blocks. This is also where the master system, energy metabolism, lives. If your blood quality is bad, the raw materials for every hormone, neurotransmitter, and repair process in your body are compromised.

The numbers:

Fasting glucose under 99 (yes, it shows up in Lever 1 too, that’s how foundational it is).

Fasting insulin under 25, ideally under 12 or even 10. This is huge and most doctors don’t test it. High insulin means your cells aren’t using fuel properly, and it can flag metabolic problems years before A1C catches diabetes. Ask for this test specifically.

A1C under 5.7%. This measures your average blood sugar over the past 2-3 months. Over 5.7 is diabetes territory. Unlike fasting glucose, which is a snapshot, this shows the trend.

Cholesterol: Triglycerides/HDL ratio under 2.0. Forget total cholesterol for a moment. If your triglycerides are 100 and your HDL is 50, that’s a 2.0 ratio, fine. Triglycerides at 150 with HDL at 50 is 3.0, that’s bad. This ratio tells you more than the total number.

ApoB under 110, optimally under 70 if other markers are also off. This is emerging as probably the single most important number for predicting heart disease. It measures the particles that actually cause arterial damage. Yet many doctors still don’t order it. Ask for it.

Lpa under 10. This one is mostly genetic. Test it once. If it’s high, you drew a bad hand on artery disease genetics and you need every other number on this list dialed in tight. If it’s low, one less thing to worry about.

Vitamin D at 30 ng/ml or higher, 40-60 is optimal. This is actually more of a hormone than a vitamin and has massive downstream effects on immune function, mood, bone health, and more. Many people are deficient, especially if you don’t get regular sunlight. A 20-year study found that people with the most sun exposure had the lowest risk of dying from any cause, full stop.

What to watch for: Fatigue, brain fog, slow wound healing, frequent infections, and gut issues. That last one is critical. If you have chronic digestive problems like GERD, IBS, or indigestion, your absorption is compromised. Every supplement and nutrient-dense meal you consume is partially wasted because your gut can’t process it properly. Fix the gut first or nothing else sticks. I learned this the hard way, it’s why Part 1 of my supplement series is entirely about gut health.

The fix: Clean up your diet first. Reduce processed sugar and processed foods. Get blood work done, it’s $100-200 for everything above and you can order it yourself online without a doctor’s order (Jason Health is one option, there are many).

For blood sugar issues: lower carb diet, exercise especially after meals, berberine as a supplement, metformin if your doctor recommends it.

For cholesterol issues: diet and exercise first, red yeast rice and plant sterols as supplements. Low-dose rosuvastatin and/or ezetimibe are the gold standard medications with the fewest side effects.

For gut issues: do a real elimination diet for 30 days. Not the “I kind of tried it for a week” version that 9 out of 10 people have actually done when they tell me they “already tried that.” A real 30 days. You will learn more about what your body can and can’t tolerate than years of random Googling.

Lever 4: Inflammation

Why it matters: Inflammation is the body’s alarm system. When you cut your finger, inflammation is what heals it. That’s good. But when the alarm is blaring 24/7 because of excess weight, high blood pressure, and bad diet, it stops being helpful and starts driving damage. Chronic inflammation is now linked to many cancers, autoimmune conditions, neurological decline, and basically every major disease category. The evidence keeps piling up.

The numbers:

CRP (C-Reactive Protein) under 1.0 is good. Between 1 and 3 is average, which really means “common but not great.” Over 3 and something needs attention. Don’t test when you’re sick or just had an illness, it will be elevated and not reflective of your baseline.

CBC/CMP (Complete Blood Count / Complete Metabolic Panel) is the broad screening panel. It checks blood cells, liver, kidneys, electrolytes. It’s cheap, usually done with a cholesterol test, and can catch issues ranging from anemia to early cancer signals. You’ve probably had this done before. Make sure your numbers are actually in range, not just “normal.”

VO2 Max of 41-49 or higher (age dependent). This measures your cardiovascular fitness and lung capacity. It’s one of the strongest predictors of longevity. You can get a rough estimate from some wearables, but a clinic test is more accurate. The more vigorous cardio you can handle, the better.

What to watch for: Chronic pain that won’t resolve, skin issues, autoimmune flares, brain fog that persists after fixing sleep and diet, frequent illness. If the first three levers are in range and CRP is still high, look deeper: gut health, food intolerances, and environmental factors. Get a CO2 monitor for your house and test each room, high CO2 is shockingly common and causes brain fog and fatigue on its own. Check for mold. Eliminate chemicals and allergens from your sleeping area.

The fix: Fix Levers 1-3. Inflammation is almost always downstream of the other three. Exercise is the single best anti-inflammatory activity you can do. If CRP is still elevated after that: omega-3s (high quality fish oil, krill, or algal oil), real elimination diet, environmental audit of your home. Address cortisol and stress directly since constant stress keeps inflammation elevated even when everything else looks fine.

When Everything Checks Out and You Still Don’t Feel Right

If all of the above is in range and you’re still struggling with energy, mood, or unexplained symptoms, the answer is usually in one of three places:

Thyroid. Undiagnosed thyroid issues are far more common than most people realize. You can be hypo or hyper, and both will wreck your energy, weight, and mood. Get the full thyroid panel, not just TSH. Read up on the recommended tests from “Stop the Thyroid Madness” for the most thorough approach.

Hormones. Past age 30, and especially past 40, this becomes critical. For men, testosterone. For women, the full hormone panel, especially approaching menopause. Getting hormones tested and balanced can be absolutely life-changing. I’m not exaggerating. People describe it as getting 10 years of their life back.

Nutrient levels. The final boss. You can eat well, supplement, and do everything right on paper, but very few tests measure what’s actually in your body versus what you’re consuming. A Nutreval or Metabolomix test ($400-800) eliminates the guesswork entirely. Expensive, but if nothing else has worked, it will show you exactly what’s missing. What’s your health worth?

The Cheat Code

Here’s something that would have saved me years: genetic testing combined with AI analysis.

Get your genetics done through 23andMe (Health & Ancestry package) or Ancestry.com. Download your raw genetic file. Run it through GeneticGenie (free) and Nutrahacker ($0-100). Then take those reports and feed them to an AI like ChatGPT with this prompt:

“You are a health and nutrition expert. Analyze the attached genetic or functional test report(s). First, give a plain English summary with the 3-5 most impactful diet, lifestyle, and supplement recommendations. Then provide a deeper dive with explanations of each finding, why it matters, and additional recommendations, clearly flagging high-priority issues separately from optional optimizations.”

This will generate a health plan personally customized to your genetics. Common defects like MTHFR and other mutations completely change how you absorb nutrients, and most people have no idea they have them. A few hundred dollars to potentially skip months of experimentation and guessing. I always ask people the same question: what is your health and energy worth?

Putting It All Together

You now have the mental model from Part 1 and the numbers from Part 2 and it’s enough to take control of your health instead of outsourcing it to a system that spends 10 minutes with you and hopes for the best.

The testing order matters: start at the top (weight, blood pressure, basic blood work) and work down. Most of the basic biomarkers can be measured at home or for $100-200 of blood work. Only go deeper into thyroid, hormones, and nutrient testing if the basics are in range and you still have issues.

One important reminder: add interventions one at a time so you know what’s actually working. The temptation is to change everything at once. Resist it. And give things time. It’s going to take a month or two to undo years of previous behavior. That’s probably modern society’s worst trait, expecting instant results.

The Health Optimizer in Zorga takes everything in this article and Part 1 and turns it into a step-by-step checklist with the testing order, interventions, and tools already organized. It took me years to build this system. Yours doesn’t have to take that long.

If you’re ready to go deeper on supplementation, Part 1 of my supplement series covers why you need to fix your gut before building a stack. Part 2 covers the actual stack across five categories. Start with the gut article if you haven’t read it yet, because supplements on a broken digestive system is pouring water into a bucket with no bottom.

As always, clear any changes to your diet, supplements, or medications with your doctor. I have to put that disclaimer, but I mean it.

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You can probably explain, in simple terms, how your car engine works: fuel goes in, combustion happens, wheels turn. You might even know how your business works, revenue in, expenses out, profit (hopefully) left over.

But ask most people how their own body works and you get a shrug. Maybe something about calories. Maybe a vague reference to cholesterol being bad.

This is a problem because you can’t optimize what you don’t understand. And most people are making health decisions, what to eat, what to supplement, whether to worry about a blood test result, with no mental model of how any of it actually works.

The health industry loves this. Confusion sells courses, supplements, and doctor visits. Every week there’s a new superfood, a new thing that’s going to kill you (are coffee or eggs good or bad this week? Who knows!), a new protocol from some shirtless guy on Instagram who is in his 20’s, has perfect genetics and zero chronic health issues. It’s overwhelming by design.

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of fixing my own health issues, losing weight, and getting every biomarker in range: your body and health is not that complicated. Not if you have the right mental model.

Why You Need a Mental Model

Without a framework, health is just a pile of disconnected facts. Cholesterol is bad. Inflammation is bad. Get more sleep. Take vitamin D. Eat less sugar. Exercise more.

All of that is sort of true. None of it is useful without understanding why it matters and how it connects.

A mental model gives you something most people never have: the ability to evaluate health information for yourself. When your doctor tells you something, you can actually understand what they’re talking about. When you see a headline about some new study, you can judge whether it’s relevant to you or clickbait. When something feels off in your body, you have a framework for figuring out where to look first.

That’s high-agency health. Not trusting blindly or ignoring everything. Understanding enough to make your own informed decisions and ask better questions.

The Master System

Before I give you the mental model, you need to understand one thing that ties everything together.

Your body’s master system is energy metabolism. This is the system that makes everything else work. Your hormones, your neurotransmitters, your immune function, your ability to think clearly, all of it runs on this engine.

You hear all the time that depression is a “chemical imbalance.” Anxiety is a chemical imbalance. Brain fog, low energy, mood swings, all chemical imbalances.

Fine. But where do you think those chemicals come from?

Your body builds them from nutrients. Some are endogenous, meaning your body produces them internally, but even those depend on exogenous inputs, the stuff you get from food and supplements. Your body cannot manufacture what it doesn’t have the raw materials for.

So the aha moment is simple: if you can get the right nutrients into your body in the right forms, you should be able to fix a huge number of those “chemical imbalances” at the source. Not mask them. Fix them.

This is why nutrition matters so much more than most people realize. It’s not about calories and weight loss. It’s about giving your body the raw materials to run every system properly. Energy metabolism is the master process, and everything downstream depends on it getting what it needs.

Keep that in your head as we go through the four levers.

The Four Levers

Your body is complex. Trillions of cells, dozens of systems, thousands of chemical reactions every second. But the things that actually go wrong? Those are surprisingly predictable.

Almost every common health problem traces back to one of four levers being pulled in the wrong direction. Fix these four and you eliminate the vast majority of what makes people sick, tired, and foggy.

Lever 1: Weight

Start here because everything else gets harder when you’re carrying too much.

If your weight is too high, your body is working overtime just to exist. Your heart rate is elevated even at rest. Your blood pressure rises because your cardiovascular system has to push harder to circulate blood through more tissue. Your joints take a beating. Your organs are stressed.

I watched elderly family members go through end-of-life health scares, and something clicked for me. When the weight came off, for whatever reason, entire cascades of health problems disappeared. High blood pressure, cholesterol issues, breathing problems, gone. Their doctors took them off all their medications. I also noticed there aren’t many obese people who live past their 70’s (or at the nursing home). You can draw your own conclusions from that.

What goes wrong when this lever is off: Heart disease, joint deterioration, type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, increased cancer risk, hormonal disruption, chronic fatigue.

The fix isn’t complicated. Find your BMR, create a modest calorie deficit of 200-300 calories per day, and you’ll lose about a pound a week. That’s sustainable. Track your food for a few days in something like Cronometer and you’ll be stunned at where the “calorie bombs” are hiding.

Lever 2: Blood Pressure

Think of your blood vessels like a garden hose. Blood pressure is the water pressure inside that hose. When it’s too high for too long, it starts damaging the walls.

This is why blood pressure is the first thing any doctor checks. It’s the canary in the coal mine. High pressure damages your blood vessel walls, which forces your body into constant repair mode. It stresses your kidneys (which are basically two very sophisticated blood filters). Over time, the damage compounds.

What goes wrong when this lever is off: Stroke, heart attack, kidney disease, vision loss, cognitive decline, peripheral artery disease. Your kidneys are particularly vulnerable because they filter your entire blood supply dozens of times per day, and high pressure slowly destroys the tiny vessels that do the filtering.

Weight is the biggest driver of blood pressure. Regular exercise and losing weight usually bring it down. If you fix Lever 1, Lever 2 often fixes itself.

Lever 3: Blood Quality

This is about what’s actually circulating in your blood. Specifically, sugar and cholesterol.

Here’s the mental model that changed how I think about this: imagine processed sugar and certain types of cholesterol as tiny shards of glass traveling through your blood vessels. They make small cuts in the vessel walls as they pass through. Your body detects the damage and deploys cholesterol to patch the cuts, which is exactly what cholesterol is supposed to do. But when the damage is constant, the patches build up. Layer after layer. Eventually they block the vessel entirely.

That’s a heart attack. Or a stroke. Or peripheral artery disease. Or poor circulation that makes everything worse.

What goes wrong when this lever is off: Heart attacks, strokes, peripheral artery disease, poor circulation to extremities, erectile dysfunction (yes, it’s a blood flow problem), increased dementia risk, diabetic complications.

This is why we measure glucose, fasting insulin, A1C, cholesterol ratios, ApoB, and Lpa. These are all indicators of what’s floating around in your blood and whether it’s helping or slowly killing you. ApoB in particular is emerging as probably the single most important number for predicting heart disease.

Lever 4: Inflammation

Inflammation is what happens when the first three levers are off. It’s the body’s alarm system, and when it’s blaring constantly, everything breaks down.

Overweight? Your body is inflamed from the extra stress on every system. High blood pressure? The constant pressure damages vessels and triggers an inflammatory response. Bad diet? The “shards of glass” are creating damage that requires constant inflammatory repair, which is why your cholesterol is high.

Put it all together and you get chronic inflammation, which many doctors now believe is the root driver behind most cancers, autoimmune conditions, and chronic disease.

What goes wrong when this lever is off: Cancer, autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, accelerated aging, gut disorders, Alzheimer’s and neurological decline, skin conditions. The research connecting chronic inflammation to nearly every major disease category gets stronger every year.

CRP (C-Reactive Protein) is the best single number to measure overall body inflammation. If it’s under 1.0, you’re in good shape. Between 1 and 3 is average (which means not great). Over 3 and something needs attention (but don’t measure it if you were recently sick as being sick causes inflammation and will boost that number for several days afterwards).

The Flow

Here’s how the four levers connect into one simple cascade:

Keep your weight down → that keeps your blood pressure down → eat clean so your blood doesn’t have problem-causing stuff in it → exercise to move the bad stuff out and keep everything circulating → inflammation stays low.

That’s the whole model. Everything else in health, every supplement, every biomarker, every intervention, is a detail within this framework. When someone tells you about a new health protocol or supplement, you now have a way to evaluate it: which of these four levers does it pull? If the answer is none, it’s probably noise.

The Foundation Underneath

Two things sit underneath all four levers. If these are broken, the levers won’t respond no matter what you do.

Sleep. This is always step one. Your body recharges, makes repairs, consolidates memories, and regulates hormones while you sleep. Mess with sleep and your blood pressure rises, your hunger hormones go haywire (making weight loss nearly impossible), your stress response gets amplified, and your immune system weakens. I’ve seen people fix “mysterious” health problems just by getting their sleep right. Most people need 6.5 to 9 hours per night, and a scary number of people have undiagnosed sleep apnea that’s silently destroying their health.

Stress. Constant stress generates cortisol, and too much cortisol wreaks havoc on every system in your body. It raises blood pressure, spikes blood sugar, makes it almost impossible to lose weight, disrupts sleep, and suppresses your immune system. Note that some stress is normal and even beneficial. It’s the constant stress that’s the killer. If you feel “wired” all the time, can’t lose weight despite eating well, or can’t seem to relax even when everything is fine, cortisol is probably part of the equation.

Sleep and stress aren’t a fifth and sixth lever. They’re the foundation. Fix them first, or nothing else will work properly.

What This Means For You

You now have a one-page mental model of how your body works. Weight, blood pressure, blood quality, inflammation, all sitting on a foundation of sleep and stress, all powered by the master system of energy metabolism.

This is enough to have an intelligent conversation with your doctor. Enough to evaluate whether a new supplement or protocol is worth trying. Enough to stop feeling overwhelmed by health information and start making decisions like someone who understands the machine they’re operating.

In Part 2, I’ll break down the major body systems one by one, what they do in plain English, the one or two numbers that tell you if each one is working, and the highest-leverage fix for each. That’s the owner’s manual.

But the mental model comes first. Because you can’t optimize what you don’t understand, and now you understand more about how your body works than most people ever will.

If you want to put this into action right now, The Health Optimizer in Zorga, my life operating system, takes this exact mental model and turns it into a step-by-step checklist. Biomarkers to track, what order to test them, and what to do when something’s off. It’s the tool I built for myself and it’s saved me years of guesswork.

If you got value from Part 1 of the supplement series, this is the foundation underneath it. You can’t build a smart supplement stack on a body you don’t understand.

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Last week I wrote about why most supplement stacks fail before they start. The short version: fix your gut, run your genetics, test before you guess.

This week I’ll detail exactly what I use and why.

Note that this is a great framework for you but not specific recommendations. This is my stack, built from years of experimentation, Nutrahacker genetic reports, and regular blood work. Yours will look different.

That’s the point: if you copy someone else’s stack without knowing your own genetics and deficiencies, you’re just doing the $60 billion guessing game I talked about last week with extra steps. As always, clear any changes you do with a health professional.

Why Categories Matter

Most people’s supplement setup is a graveyard of random bottles. They couldn’t tell you why they’re taking half of them. When something feels off, they have no way to troubleshoot because there’s no logic to the system.

I organize my stack into 5 categories. Each one solves a different problem:

1. Deficiency (filling what your diet can’t cover)

2. Longevity (protecting future you)

3. Energy (actual cellular fuel, not stimulants)

4. Nootropics (sharper thinking when you need it)

5. Relaxation and Sleep (winding down without drugs)

Physically, I organize by timing. Four small countertop drawers: AM, PM, Bedtime, Occasional. Each holds the bottles for that slot. I refill a pill organizer every Sunday morning in about 10 minutes.

One more thing before we get into it, timing matters more than most people realize. Some supplements compete for absorption if you take them together. Some are stimulating so they’re terrible before bed. Some are calming, which is pointless in the morning. The categories below include when I take each one and why.

Category 1: Deficiency (AM)

This is the foundation. If your basics aren’t covered, nothing else on this list matters. Remember from Part 1: your body’s master system is energy metabolism, and it’s nutrient-dependent. No raw materials, no output.

My deficiency stack is built directly from my Nutrahacker results, Cronometer diet tracking, and blood work. Here’s what I take every morning:

Electrolytes. Most people are chronically dehydrated in a way that plain water doesn’t fix. Modern filtered water strips out the minerals your body actually needs. I add an electrolyte mix to my first glass of water every day. I’m dead serious when I say that a lot of problems would go away if people were simply better hydrated.

There’s a hilarious guy on Twitter who swears this is why people in their 30’s four decades ago look like people in their 50’s now - nobody drank water back then and he shows the pictures to prove it. And importantly, water is just the delivery mechanism! It’s the salts and minerals that are in water that are what make the difference.

Vitamin D, 5000iu. Yes, the one that wrecked me for a year. Now taken correctly: with magnesium, off the PPI, and in a hypoallergenic form my body can handle. If there’s a single lesson from this entire series, it’s that the right supplement in the wrong context becomes the wrong supplement. I take it daily in the winter and every other day in the summer (assuming I’m getting sunlight which is the best source of Vitamin D).

Vitamin E as tocotrienols, 125mg. Not the standard form you see in most multivitamins. Tocotrienols are a specific type of Vitamin E with significantly better antioxidant and cardiovascular properties. Most Vitamin E supplements use tocopherols, which are cheaper but not as effective.

Phosphatidylcholine, 800mg. Supports cell membrane integrity and liver function. This one also pulls double duty in the energy category because healthy cell membranes are essential for nutrient transport. This also is a way for people that have the MTHFR mutation, like me, to get backdoor methylation support.

CoQ10, 200mg. Critical for mitochondrial energy production. Your mitochondria are the power plants in every cell. CoQ10 is the fuel they run on. Levels drop naturally with age, and statins actively deplete it, so if you’re on a statin and feeling fatigued, this might be why.

B1 as TTFD (aka thiamine), 100mg and B5, 100mg. TTFD is a fat-soluble form of B1 that crosses the blood-brain barrier much more effectively than standard thiamine. These support energy metabolism directly. If you have any sort of long-standing issue that you can’t seem to fix, I would definitely try 100mg of thiamine. The B5 is specific to my cortisol issues that I’ll mention below.

The B Vitamin Pulse. This one is specific to my MTHFR mutation, which means standard B-complex vitamins are basically expensive pee for me or an anxiety nightmare. Instead of daily B vitamins, I pulse once per week: hydroxy B12, B6 as P5P, and B2 as R5P. These are the active, methylated forms my body can actually use (except for B12, I cannot tolerate the methylated form).

If you have MTHFR (and roughly 40% of people have some variant), the generic B vitamins you’re taking might be doing nothing. This is exactly the kind of thing Nutrahacker flags for you. Note that some of us have to do a balancing act, this is why I pulse these and don’t take daily. If I have too little, I’m a zombie, if I have too much, it’s anxiety. Very hard to get this right for some of us but after experimentation I have the stack that works perfectly for me now.

Multivitamin. I generally advise against taking a multivitamin for the reasons I’ve already discussed: you don’t know what amounts, proper form of the vitamin you need and most importantly, which of the 20+ things in each pill are helping or hurting. That said, if you’re generally in bad health and don’t have time or finances to do the testing I recommend, you may want to trial a low dose of a very high quality multivitamin for a week or two to see if it makes you feel better. If it does, then you’ll realize that your issue is nutrients and you can start building your custom stack from there. I actually will take a multi once a week, especially if my diet has not been good or if I’ve been on vacation. This brand works for me and I only take 1 pill, not the 4 recommended. It’s high quality, has the forms that work for me and I tolerate it well. Think of it as a “patching” supplement to fill in the gaps if you need it.

Category 2: Longevity (PM)

These are the “future you will thank you” supplements. You won’t feel them tomorrow. You’ll feel them in 20 years when your cardiovascular system is still working properly and your peers are on their third prescription.

Vitamin K2 as MK-4, 500mcg. Directs calcium into your bones and teeth and away from your arteries, where it causes damage. Most multivitamins don’t include any or nearly enough K2. If you’re supplementing Vitamin D (and you probably should be), K2 is the essential partner most people skip.

Liposomal Vitamin C, 250mg. Liposomal means it’s wrapped in a fat layer that dramatically improves absorption compared to standard Vitamin C, most of which your body excretes immediately.

Lovaza. Prescription-grade Omega-3. Higher purity and concentration than over-the-counter fish oil because it has to meet pharmaceutical standards. Believe it or not, the generic version is actually cheaper than most of the high end brands you can get on Amazon so I’d ask your doctor for a prescription. If you can’t get a prescription, a high-quality fish oil or krill oil works, just check the actual EPA/DHA content, not just the total oil amount.

Bergamot. Supports healthy cholesterol ratios. Specifically targets LDL in a way that’s well-studied and complements other interventions. Worth discussing with your doctor before he puts you on a statin.

Low-dose aspirin, 83mg, every other day. Note the pulsing. Not daily. There’s increasing evidence that daily aspirin is too much for most people, but every other day still provides cardiovascular benefit with less GI risk. Aspirin has many other benefits if you can tolerate it and seems to be anti-cancer as well.

Situational: Berberine, 500mg. For LDL reduction and glucose control. I don’t take this daily. I use it when I destroy a pizza or blood work shows my numbers trending in the wrong direction. Berberine has research comparable to Metformin for blood sugar management, which is remarkable for a supplement.

NAC (N-Acetyl Cysteine). Supports glutathione production, your body’s master antioxidant. Also helps with histamine clearance, which matters for me specifically given my high histamine genetics.

Category 3: Energy (AM/Situational)

I want to be clear about what this category is and isn’t. This is not caffeine or pre-workout. These supplements support actual cellular energy production. They build capacity. Stimulants borrow energy from tomorrow. These create more of it at the source.

Creatine, 5g. One of the most studied supplements in existence and still wildly misunderstood. Most people think it’s a bodybuilding supplement. It is, but it’s also proven to support cognitive function, memory, and mental energy. Your brain uses creatine for fuel just like your muscles do. At 5g per day, this is one of the highest-ROI supplements you can take. Very important if you have MTHFR mutation because 45% of your methylation system is dedicated to making creatine naturally in your body. So supplementing creatine gives your methylation system a much-needed break!

Phosphatidylcholine (listed in deficiency too). Healthy cell membranes mean better nutrient transport means better energy at a cellular level.

CoQ10 (listed in deficiency too). Mitochondrial support. If your cells can’t produce energy efficiently, no amount of coffee fixes the underlying problem.

Category 4: Nootropics (Situational)

Here’s where I need to make an important point, and it connects back to something bigger. Most nootropic content online treats brain supplements like cheat codes. Pop a pill, think faster.

If your deficiencies aren’t covered, your nootropics won’t do much. If your gut is broken, you can’t absorb them. If you’re sleeping 5 hours a night and running on cortisol, no amount of Ginkgo is going to save you. Nootropics on a broken foundation is like putting racing tires on a car with no engine. You’re optimizing the wrong thing!

This is a pattern I see everywhere, not just with supplements. People want the advanced tactic before they’ve built the base. They want the morning routine before they’ve fixed their sleep. They want the productivity system before they’ve figured out what they’re actually working toward. The stack has layers. The layers have an order.

When the foundation is solid, nootropics are the sharpening stone. I use these situationally for deep work, important decisions, or days when I need sustained cognitive output:

Citicoline CDP. Supports acetylcholine production, which is the neurotransmitter most directly linked to learning, focus, and memory formation.

Ginkgo biloba. Increases blood flow to the brain. Simple mechanism, well-studied, noticeable effect on sustained attention.

ALCAR (Acetyl-L-Carnitine), 500mg. One of the few supplements that crosses the blood-brain barrier effectively. Supports mitochondrial function specifically in the brain. Think of it as CoQ10’s more targeted cousin. This one also gives a nice energy boost as well.

Rhodiola, 100mg, stacked with L-Theanine. This is my favorite combination. Rhodiola is an adaptogen that supports focus and stress resilience. L-Theanine smooths out any edge (especially from caffeine), promotes calm alertness and is derived from green tea so it’s basically harmless. Together they produce a focused, clear state without any jitteriness. If you try one nootropic stack from this entire list, try this one.

Category 5: Relaxation and Sleep (PM/Bedtime)

This category exists because of my genetics. Nutrahacker showed me I have naturally high cortisol and low GABA. In plain English: my body’s stress response runs hot and my natural calming system is weak. Relaxation doesn’t come naturally. For years I thought this was just my personality. Turns out it’s chemistry, and chemistry can be adjusted.

Bedtime stack (daily):

Magnesium Glycinate, 240mg. The glycinate form is specifically chosen for sleep and relaxation. Glycinate doesn’t cause the GI issues that citrate can, and it has a calming effect on the nervous system. This is probably the single most impactful supplement in my entire stack for sleep quality. You are also probably deficient in magnesium (most people are) so this plugs a deficiency as well. Consider adding 200mg magnesium citrate in the daytime if you want to fully plug a deficiency.

L-Theanine with Inositol, 200mg. L-Theanine promotes GABA production, directly addressing my genetic weak spot. Inositol supports serotonin signaling. Together they quiet the mental chatter that keeps high-cortisol people staring at the ceiling or wondering why there are no words that rhyme with “orange” or “purple”.

Phosphatidylserine, 100mg. Specifically helps lower cortisol levels. For someone with naturally high cortisol like me, this is targeted intervention. If you suspect you have high cortisol, this is the one to try right away.

Situational bedtime (rough days): Taurine (1g), Glycine (1-3g), or extra L-Theanine (100-200mg). I rotate these based on what kind of stress I’m carrying. Physical stress responds better to Glycine. Mental stress responds better to extra Theanine. Taurine covers both.

PM support for histamine:

Zinc carnosine and histamine-specific probiotics are part of my nightly PM stack. These support gut lining repair and help manage histamine levels at the source.

DAO or Histaguard I take situationally before high-histamine meals (aged cheese, wine, fermented foods). DAO is the enzyme that breaks down histamine in the gut. If you get flushed, stuffy, or headachy after certain foods and can’t figure out why, high histamine might be your issue. This was invisible to me until Nutrahacker flagged it.

Bonus: The Detox Protocol

Twice a week I take an activated charcoal capsule 30 minutes before a sauna session.

The logic: sauna mobilizes stored toxins that get released into the digestive tract. Charcoal binds to them and carries them out before they recirculate. It’s simple, cheap, and adds nothing to your schedule if you’re already doing regular sauna sessions. I consider sauna itself one of the most underrated health interventions available, with a massive body of research behind it, and the charcoal just makes it more effective.

The Stack Is the System

Everything I’ve described here is a system. It was tested against data (genetics, blood work, diet tracking). It’s organized for execution (drawers, pill organizer, 10 minutes on Sunday). It has clear categories so I can troubleshoot when something isn’t working. And it compounds over time.

This is how I think about everything, not just supplements. Health, business, daily routines, decision making. Test, organize, iterate. Make the right action automatic and the wrong action difficult. That’s the core of what I teach in Zorga, my integrated life and business operating system at organize.io. Supplements just happen to be one of the clearest examples of the principle in action.

Your body is the platform everything else runs on. You wouldn’t run your business on a pile of random tools with no idea what each one does. Don’t do that with your body either.

If you haven’t read Part 1, start there. Fix the gut. Run the genetics. Then come back and build your own version of this.

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I lost an entire year of health progress because of a single vitamin.

Vitamin D. The thing every wellness influencer on earth recommends. It gave me anxiety for months. Not because the vitamin was wrong. Because my gut wasn’t absorbing it properly, I wasn’t pairing it with enough magnesium, and I was on a PPI for acid reflux that was silently blocking absorption of half my supplements.

Nobody told me any of this. I had to figure it out the hard way.

That experience completely rewired how I think about supplementation. And it’s why I cringe every time I see someone post their “$500/month longevity stack” with zero context about whether their body can even use it or if it will cause a much worse problem.

The $60 Billion Guessing Game

I swear the supplement industry runs on vibes, it’s infuriating. Someone hears a podcast, orders what Joe Rogan mentioned last week, and starts slamming pills. No blood work. No genetic testing. No idea what their body actually needs.

Two things are true at the same time: most people should be supplementing something, and most people are supplementing wrong.

Some are taking things they don’t need. Some are taking forms their body can’t process. Some, like me with the Vitamin D, are actively making things worse and blaming everything else.

Here’s what makes this more frustrating. Even if you eat clean, you’re probably still deficient. Over-farming has depleted minerals in our soil so badly that the average American is short on magnesium, potassium, Vitamin D, Omega 3, B6, B12, and E. Data on mineral depletion in both meat and vegetables goes back to at least 1991, and it’s almost certainly worse now (scroll to the “Vitamin Deficiencies” section on this page to see the several studies/data on this). Many researchers think the recommended daily allowances are too low on top of that.

Here’s what most people don’t connect. Your body’s master system is energy metabolism. This is the system that makes everything else work, your hormones, your neurotransmitters, all of it. You hear all the time that depression is a “chemical imbalance.” Anxiety is a chemical imbalance. Brain fog, low energy, mood swings, all chemical imbalances.

Fine. But where do you think those chemicals come from? Your body builds them from nutrients. Some are endogenous, meaning your body produces them internally, but even those depend on exogenous inputs, the stuff you get from food and supplements. Your body cannot manufacture what it doesn’t have the raw materials for. So the aha moment is simple: if you can get the right nutrients into your body in the right forms, you should be able to fix a huge number of those “chemical imbalances” at the source. Not mask them. Fix them.

So you probably need supplements. But you can’t just throw them at a broken system and expect results.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Your gut is the bottleneck.

If you have GERD, IBS, chronic bloating, or any digestive issues, you are probably flushing money and pills down the toilet. Your body literally cannot absorb what you’re giving it. This is not a small problem. PPIs, one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in America, actively block the production of stomach acid, which actually blocks absorption of magnesium, B12, calcium, and more. Millions of people are taking supplements on top of a medication that prevents those supplements from working.

I was one of those people. I was supplementing aggressively while on a PPI and wondering why nothing was improving.

This is why every supplement article that starts with “here’s what to take” has it backwards. The first question isn’t what to take. It’s whether your body can use what you take.

The Genetic Shortcut Most People Skip

After the Vitamin D disaster, I started looking for a way to take the guesswork out. I found Nutrahacker. You upload your raw genetic data from 23andMe or Ancestry.com (the file you can download for free if you’ve already done the test, Nutrahacker shows you how), and for about $40 you get a report showing your genetic mutations, what you likely can’t process, what you’re probably deficient in, and what supplement forms your body actually needs.

That one report changed everything.

I found out I have an MTHFR mutation, which means standard B vitamins don’t process correctly in my body. I have naturally high histamine, which explains a bunch of symptoms I’d been chasing for years. I have naturally high cortisol and low GABA, which means relaxation doesn’t come easy and never will without targeted support.

None of this was obvious (besides the allergies and consistently high stress which I just thought were “normal” for me). None of it would have shown up on a standard blood panel. And without it, I would still be guessing, still be experimenting blind, and probably still be anxious from the wrong form of Vitamin D.

Genetic testing won’t tell you everything. But combined with blood work and a few days of diet tracking on something like the Cronometer app (which shows you the actual nutrients you’re intaking), it cuts months or even years off the experimentation cycle. For those who want to go deeper, the Nutreval test (around $500) actually measures what nutrients are in your body. That’s the gold standard. But even just the Nutrahacker report alone is worth 10x what you pay for it.

You can also upload all of these results to ChatGPT or another AI and get a personalized supplement plan in minutes. A good prompt:

Analyze the attached genetic and/or nutrition reports. Give me a plain English summary with the 3 to 5 most impactful diet, lifestyle, and supplement recommendations. Then provide a deeper dive with explanations of each finding and why it matters.

This is genuinely better analysis than most people get from their doctor, and I say that as someone who respects doctors but has sat through too many appointments where they glance at results for 30 seconds and send you on your way with a new pill.

Five Principles Before You Take Anything

1. Fix the gut first.

If your digestion is broken, nothing downstream works. Do a real elimination diet. Not the 3-day thing you tried once. A full 30 days of eating only foods you know don’t cause issues, then slowly reintroducing things one at a time with 72 hours between each. I know maybe 1 in 10 people who say they’ve done an elimination diet have actually done one.

If you have digestive issues and need nutrients now, use alternate absorption pathways. Sublingual (under the tongue) and liquid vitamins bypass the gut. Epsom salt baths deliver magnesium through your skin. These aren’t permanent solutions, but they keep you from falling further behind while you fix the root cause.

If you’re on PPI’s like Nexium, try to wean off and manage your GERD with something less strong like Pepcid Complete. Try half pills or even skipping days so your stomach has enough acid to actually digest food and supplements. Many find that a long term fix is actually to add more acid via Betaine HCL, which you can get on Amazon. The theory being that low acid is preventing your stomach from fully sealing up, so it “leaks” back up your esophagus. Do your research on this and definitely ask your doctor because it takes some finesse, but I’ve seen it change lives.

2. Test before you supplement.

Nutrahacker for genetics. Blood work for current levels (you can order blood work online without a doctor, see sites like JasonHealth.com). Cronometer for dietary gaps. Pick at least one. Ideally all three. Now, you can guess at things which you might be deficient in based on your overall diet, but it’s better to test in my opinion.

3. Add one thing at a time.

Wait at least 3 to 5 days between adding a new supplement. This is the only way to know what’s working and what’s causing problems. If I had done this with Vitamin D, I would have caught the anxiety in a week instead of losing a year. Too much of certain vitamins is worse than not enough, and combinations can create unexpected reactions. I learned the expensive way, you don’t have to.

4. Forms matter more than doses.

Generic B6 and P5P (the active form) are not the same thing. Generic B1 and TTFD are not the same. If you have an MTHFR mutation or other genetic variants, the standard forms of many vitamins simply do not work in your body. This is why Step 2 matters so much. Without genetic data, you have no idea whether the form you’re taking is doing anything at all.

5. Organize or you’ll quit.

I use four small plastic countertop drawers labeled AM, PM, Bedtime, and Occasional. Each one holds the actual bottles for that time slot. Then I fill a pill organizer with AM/PM/Bedtime compartments once a week. Takes about 10 minutes on Sunday. Without this system, compliance drops to zero within a month. You will not remember to dig through a cabinet of 20 bottles twice a day. Make the right action easy and it becomes automatic.

The Bottom Line

Your body is the operating system that everything else runs on. Your business, your relationships, your energy, your ability to think clearly. A founder running on bad fuel makes bad decisions, burns out faster, and caps their own potential without knowing it.

But optimizing that operating system doesn’t start with a stack of pills. It starts with a gut that works, data about what your body actually needs, and a system that makes compliance automatic.

Next week in Part 2, I’ll share my actual supplement stack across five categories: deficiency, longevity, energy, nootropics, and relaxation/sleep. But that stack means nothing without this foundation.

Fix the gut. Run the genetics. Then build.

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You sit down to work. Within 20 minutes you’ve hunted for a file, replied to three texts, fixed a billing issue, answered a question that could have been an email, and completely lost what you were even working on.

This isn’t about being lazy or disorganized. Your day simply has too much “sand in the gears”.

This is what workflow is actually about. Not the best project management software. Not color-coded calendars. It’s about removing the low-grade friction that hijacks your attention before you ever get to the work that matters.

The Real Problem Most People Have

Most people think they have a time problem. Or a motivation problem. Or a discipline problem.

They don’t. They have a friction problem.

Friction is everything that gets between you and forward motion: too many inboxes, scattered tasks, vague communication, constant context-switching. Each one is minor on its own. Together, they make your day feel like running in wet concrete. You’re expending energy constantly but not going anywhere.

Here’s what friction actually costs you: research shows that once you’re interrupted, it takes 5 to 15 minutes to get back into full focus. If that happens 10 times in a day, which is conservative, you’ve spent hours on nothing. Not on hard problems. Not on creative work. You’ve lost it simply trying to get back on track.

And here’s something worth noticing: There’s a Silicon Valley observation that the busiest, most successful people tend to respond fastest. The most effective people tend to move through their day with less visible chaos. They respond quickly, make decisions fast, and seem to have more time. It’s not that they’re smarter or work longer hours. They’ve simplified. Fewer inputs. Cleaner systems. Less sand in the gears. The simplicity looks like confidence from the outside, but it’s really just a better-designed, more fluid day.

It’s important to remember the most important thing in communication: That’s where opportunities are. If someone is reaching out and it could be a huge business or personal opportunity, who do you think is getting it? The person who responds in minutes or the person who takes 5 days (or simply misses it in the chaos of their inboxes)?

What is Workflow?

Workflow is not a complex system. It’s just how you handle the routine stuff so you can protect the time and energy needed for the important stuff.

Think about everything that comes at you daily. It really breaks down into three things:

• Inputs (emails, tasks, messages, notifications)

• Outputs (what you send to others)

• Communication (the back and forth).

That’s it. Your entire daily chaos is just those three categories out of control.

The goal is to reduce all three so you can stop fighting your day and start directing it.

How to Fix It: The Workflow Basics

None of this is complicated. But most people have never deliberately set any of it up, so their day runs them instead of the other way around.

Minimize your inboxes. Every place you receive inputs is another tax on your attention. One email address. One task app. One notes app. One physical inbox. I’ve seen people with multiple inboxes, task apps, notes apps and it’s madness. If people are reaching you across five different platforms, pick one and let people know where to reach you and let the others go quiet. Every additional inbox is another source of stress you didn’t consciously choose.

Capture everything in one place. Tasks go in your task app. Notes and information go in your notes app (or notebook). This sounds obvious but almost nobody does it. The reason it matters is trust. If you don’t trust that everything is captured somewhere, your brain runs background processes trying to remember things. That low-grade hum of “don’t forget, don’t forget” kills focus and creates stress even when you’re not consciously thinking about it. One place for tasks, one place for notes.

If you’re on the go, text yourself or use voice capture. The habit of capturing instantly is critical, there are simply too many distractions these days and you will forget if you don’t have a system. Pro tip: Keep a note called “@Inbox” that is sorted to the top of your notes app for quick things like phone numbers, room numbers, quick notes.

Stop communicating haphazardly. This one is underrated. Have you ever sent a quick half-thought-out email or text and watched it spiral into a 50-message thread that ate half your day? Every careless or confusing message creates a cycle of replies. It stirs up dirt at the bottom of the fountain. One well-crafted email, text or a single short call can replace a dozen scattered messages. Less is more. Communicate carefully, strategically, and as infrequently as the situation actually requires.

On a related note, stop communicating like this in text or chat:

- Hey
- Quick question
- If you have a moment
- Wanted to pick your brain on XYZ
- I think it’s up your alley
- I’m available this week for a call
- Thanks!

That’s 7 notifications you just bombarded someone with (not to mention these are not easily marked unread, copied into a note or task for them to follow up) and trust me a busy person hates it. Put it all in one message, short as possible (5 sentences is generally considered a good limit on short communications), with an easy yes or no answer:

- Hey, can you have a quick call about XYZ? I think it’s up your alley. I can be available pretty much any afternoon this week. Thanks!

Use filters aggressively. Set up email filters so newsletters, updates, and non-urgent reports go straight to a “Read” folder instead of your inbox. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb during focus time, with exceptions only for the people who genuinely need to reach you. These two changes alone can eliminate the majority of daily interruptions.

Batch similar work. Email two or three times a day, not constantly. Stack calls and meetings back to back on one or two days rather than scattering them throughout the week. Every time you switch between different types of tasks, your brain has to reorient. Five calls in a row are dramatically more efficient than five calls spread across a day. If 5 people are in a meeting for 1 hour, that’s 5 hours spent, not one. Batching prevents context switching, which is the silent killer of real productivity.

Apply the “do it now” rule selectively. If a task takes less than a few minutes and it’s actually worth doing, do it now. Call the dentist. Pay the bill. Send the quick reply. But be careful: if you spend all day on two-minute tasks you’ll make zero forward progress on anything that actually matters. The rule only applies to things worth doing right now which means they are either important or urgent. Everything else goes on a list for batch work later.

Close your open loops. The texts and emails sitting unanswered in the back of your mind are draining mental energy even when you’re not actively thinking about them. These open loops create low-grade stress that compounds over the course of a day. Reply quickly, even if just to say “I’ll get back to you Thursday.” Closing loops cleans up the mental background noise more than most people expect.

Work by energy, not by clock. Not every hour of your day is equal and pretending otherwise wastes both. When you’re sharp, do hard things. When you’re not, do admin, organizing, or routine tasks. You’re still making progress, and often the act of doing something generates the energy to shift into higher-value work. Stop forcing creative work into hours when you have nothing left to give. Remember, you can also generate energy if necessary.

Use a focus ritual. Remember focus is a habit. Use a focus ritual for when you need to do deep work. Remember to prioritize your tasks properly and fix procrastination if you’re having a hard time getting started.

The One Thing to Remember

Your goal is not a more complex system. It’s a simpler day.

Tame the small stuff so you have time and energy for the big stuff. Get off the treadmill of low-level tasks you never consciously chose to be on. That’s all workflow is. And once you set it up deliberately, your day stops feeling like something you’re fighting and starts feeling like something you’re actually in charge of.

If you want a complete system for building this kind of structure into your daily life, this is one of the core frameworks inside Zorga, my personal operating system for getting out of the chaos and into the work that moves your life forward. You can learn more at zorga.io.

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Your doctor spends about 10 minutes with you, can’t remember your name without looking at the chart, and is part of a system that accidentally kills up to 250,000 Americans per year.

Seriously, look it up, hundreds of thousands dead each year. The systems kills so many there’s an entire category of death called “iatrogenic” which is basically doctor/hospital caused deaths. This makes it possibly the 3rd leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.

I don’t bring this up to scare you or to dunk on doctors. Doctors aren’t evil but many are trapped in a broken system. Malpractice fear has driven “defensive medicine” (over-testing, over-prescribing), the HMO’s only let them get 10-15 minutes per patient and they’re incentivized to treat, not prevent.

Frankly, patients demand a lot of this. Nobody wants to hear “you need to lose weight and exercise more” or “you have a virus and there’s nothing you can do but wait it out.” They want a pill or other quick fix to make it go away.

I should know. At one point I was near 240 pounds and on 5 medications. That’s when I decided that the current system isn’t working at all. You get prescribed a drug, sent on your way, and nobody connects the dots between your 3 different specialists. Your cardiologist doesn’t talk to your endocrinologist. Your PCP doesn’t know what supplements you take. Nobody is looking at your full picture.

You’re the only person with the incentive and the ability to see your complete health picture. But most people don’t, because they were taught “trust the doctor.” The problem is there are now multiple doctors, many more tests and data, more complexity and the various systems don’t really communicate with each other.

The solution is you have to become the CEO of your own health. The good news: this is simpler than you think. You don’t need a medical degree. You need a document, a few tools, and about an hour of setup.

Here’s the system.

Keep a Health Tracker

There are only a handful of metrics that are very important to know and you should have one note (or ideally a spreadsheet) and it should be accessible from your phone. In this document you will have:

• Your numbers (see next section)

• Current medications and dosage

• Supplements

• Allergies

• Family history

• Test results (or a folder with them all kept in one place)

Bring this to every appointment (or print it out). This alone will prevent duplicate tests, conflicting prescriptions, and the “start from scratch” problem every time you see a new provider or have to go to some random ER or urgent care (where they won’t have your records). Make sure to show it to any doctor who wants to put you on a new medication.

Know Your Numbers

In Zorga (the life operating system I created), I have a tool called The Health Optimizer, I provide a list of exactly what things you should track:

Note that you can measure many of these at home or order bloodwork online (without a doctor - search “blood work online”) at places like:

• Superpower.com

• JasonHealth.com

• FunctionHealth

I know those metrics above have weird names but what’s interesting is almost all of them are related to either body weight, sugar or inflammation. Extra weight puts stress on your system (especially heart and arteries, leading to high blood pressure). High blood pressure and inflammation damages the pipes, cholesterol patches the damage and you get blockages (in the heart, legs, brain, etc.).

Sugar and processed food further damages the pipes, which is why Type 2 diabetes is so deadly. This is an oversimplification but the model is accurate. The main thing is to keep your body weight down, don’t consume junk (especially excess sugar or inflammatory foods) and exercise.

Get a Wearable Device

I know these devices can get out of hand (Whoop, Fitbit, Oura Ring, Garmin, etc.) and even make some of us neurotic, constantly analyzing every little thing. But I think they’re valuable for at least a few months so you can get a baseline on your stats and make sure you’re sleeping well. Sleep, as I’ve discussed, is critical to almost everything and most people don’t sleep as well as they think or have a hidden issues like sleep apnea which causes a lot of health problems.

These devices can give you your HRV (Heart Rate Variability) which is one of the better indicators of overall health and recovery. Over time, HRV and other basic metrics from these wearables like resting heart rate will tell you a lot more than a single doctor visit. There are some cheap ones on Amazon if you just want to try out the basics.

Track Your Nutrition with Cronometer

Cronometer.com is a free website/app where you can enter what you eat and it will give you calories, macronutrients and the vitamin/mineral content. I know what you’re thinking: here we go, I’m going to spend hours logging everything I eat. No, just log a few typical days of eating (they have all the major types and brands of food, restaurants, etc.). Most of us eat the same 5-10 meals so this isn’t as hard as you think. I think you’ll probably be shocked at what you’re deficient in, I certainly was.

Most Americans are deficient in magnesium, Vitamin D, potassium, Omega-3s and several other vitamins and minerals. I want to convey how your life can change if you simply supplement a few deficiencies. Magnesium alone was such a game changer to me that I will never stop bringing it up to people who have blood pressure, sleep, anxiety or migraine issues. A dramatic life improvement. Same with potassium and Vitamin D.

The point is that Cronometer takes the guesswork out of eating properly or supplementing. A lot of people just randomly take vitamins and that can actually backfire, which I’ll go over below. Spend a few minutes messing around with the free app on your phone and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Unlock Your Genetics

The #1 thing I’ve done for my health (and some friends and family) in the past year is running my genetics through a service, then having artificial intelligence interpret those results and make recommendations. Remember, modern AI is trained on the most advanced medical knowledge and is making diagnoses on par with real doctors at this point.

To do this, you need to first have your genetics analyzed. 23andMe or Ancestry.com are the 2 most popular. Then download your “raw data file” from them. Then go to Nutrahacker.com, upload the data file and you can get a “basic” report for free or an advanced one for like $40. I recommend the advanced one.

This report will detail various mutations that are probably causing you issues. I found out I couldn’t process folate properly (MTHFR), my cortisol never shuts off (NR3C1), I can’t clear dopamine or adrenaline fast enough (slow COMT; meaning I’m constantly wired) and the stuff that calms all of that down (GABA) is also underpowered.

Needless to say, some simple interventions based on that report have had a dramatic improvement on my life. And doctors, for the most part, have no idea or don’t test for a lot of this stuff.

Let AI Connect the Dots

Next we leverage AI. I recommend ChatGPT, Claude or Google Gemini. This will be more powerful if you can attach a copy of your Health Tracker, the Nutrahacker report and any blood work you may have. Don’t worry, the AI can sort it all out and make sense of it.

Then you can simply enter one of the prompts below:

Prompt 1 (if you have test results/genetic reports):

You are a health and nutrition expert. Analyze the attached genetic or functional test report(s). First, give a plain English summary with the 3-5 most impactful diet, lifestyle, and supplement recommendations. Then provide a deeper dive with explanations of each finding, why it matters, and additional recommendations, clearly flagging high-priority issues separately from optional optimizations.

Prompt 2 (if you have nothing yet and just want to start):

You are a health and nutrition expert. Ask me targeted questions, one at a time, to find the best lifestyle, exercise, supplements and diet for me. Cover my health issues, profile, goals, current routine, lifestyle, and constraints. Then give evidence-based recommendations, prioritizing the top actions with the biggest impact.

NOTE: Make sure to list any medications you’re on in these discussions. The AI may recommend lots of interventions and a laundry list of supplements. Start with your biggest issues first, one at a time and work on those.

Supplement Wisely, Not Randomly

As I mentioned above, you almost certainly have some kind of deficiency and should be supplementing (or adjusting diet). However, most people are simply supplementing wrong or in a haphazard way and that can cause problems.

For example, I mentioned Vitamin D. I knew I was deficient from blood work so I simply started taking it. It took me a while to understand this, but my background level of anxiety kept creeping up higher and higher. Ultimately I figured out that the type and brand of D I was taking was causing this. I lost a year of anxiety to this so I want you to understand that supplementing can backfire.

So, the lesson is: test first or at least verify through Cronometer you’re not getting enough of something. Try to add only one thing at a time and make sure you’ve researched the correct dose. This is why I typically don’t recommend multivitamins unless they’re very low dose (many are huge megadoses) and very high quality (many multis use cheap ingredients). So add one at a time and track how you feel.

Work Around the System When Needed

You can probably sense my frustration with the medical field. This is due to not only my own experience but the experiences of many loved ones. All I will say about this is that there are very stubborn doctors who do not keep up with modern treatments and technology.

If this is the case, my recommendation is to change doctors. I highly recommend a “direct primary care” doctor (or “concierge doctor” if you can afford it) that you can do tele-visits with and text for questions, refills, etc. - none of this “wait 4 weeks for an appointment” nonsense. You want to work with a doctor who actually talks with you and listens.

Worst case, there are many services online where you can get a doctor on demand and they can help you with the issue you’re having. Do online searches for any condition and you’re likely to find one of these newer services. Certainly blood and other tests can now easily be ordered online without a prescription.

While you’re at it, make sure you have a healthcare directive and will or trust in place. Nobody likes thinking about it, but it takes an afternoon and it’s one of the most important things you can do for the people you care about.

Summary

I lost 30+ pounds, got off medications and am probably now in the best shape of my life. There’s zero chance this would have happened if I simply let the healthcare system be in charge of my health. You have to take ownership of your health and be your own doctor in many cases, the system above is how.

Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor. Emergencies and serious diseases obviously require medical attention and that’s what our system is the best at. But for baseline health? You’re the best person for the job.

If you want the complete system with the biomarker tracker, optimization checklist, and AI prompts built in, check out The Health Optimizer inside Zorga.

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Note: I’ve renamed this newsletter to “Clarity” as I realized that one typically needs clarity before they even think of systems. Which transitions nicely into the topic of this post.

Most people forget their goals within days of setting them.

Not because they don’t care or lack discipline, they simply just forget them. Life floods in with its notifications, demands and other people’s priorities. The goal you set on Sunday is gone by Wednesday.

This is why most productivity systems fail, they assume the problem is motivation or willpower. Actually, the real problem is drift and overwhelm. We’re constantly pulled off course by the whirlwind of daily life and we don’t even notice until we look up months later wondering where the time went.

I’ve spent nearly two decades refining a personal operating system, and if I had to strip it down to one non-negotiable habit, it would be this: the Weekly Review.

It can be as little as 10 minutes and it will keep you on track forever. Yes, forever.

I attribute much of my personal success (and more importantly, my mental health) to this habit.

What the Weekly Review Actually Is

The Weekly Review is your “get clear and reminding system.” It’s a short, recurring appointment with reality where you close open loops, see how you’re progressing and force yourself to prioritize.

It’s not long-term planning, that’s vision work. It’s not daily task management, that’s your to-do list. The Weekly Review sits between thinking and doing. It’s the bridge that keeps them connected.

Here’s what it does:

• Closes loops. All that mental clutter about what you’re forgetting, what’s hanging over you, what you said you’d do? The review captures it, processes it, and gets it out of your head.

• Creates feedback. What worked last week? What didn’t? Where’s the friction coming from? You can’t improve what you don’t examine.

• Forces prioritization. You pick 1-3 things that actually matter for the coming week. Everything else is secondary or noise.

It’s very important to understand this is real work. Done properly, it saves you hours of unfocused, reactive time during the week. It replaces anxiety with clarity.

The Process: 6 Steps

Take this checklist, copy/paste it into a recurring task or recurring calendar item. Do it weekly. Sunday evening or Monday morning works well. Turn off your phone. Close the tabs. Give yourself 10-15 minutes of uninterrupted focus.

Step 1: Clear your inboxes. Email, notes, physical inbox, desktop. Move anything that doesn’t need immediate action to a “Later” folder. Star or flag what needs attention this week. Here’s a secret: most things you think are important aren’t. If something is truly urgent, it will come back.

Step 2: Review your goals. Look at your top 1-3 goals. Make sure each has at least one task assigned for this week to move it forward, even if it’s small. This is how you stay on track forever: constant, gentle reminders of what you already decided matters. Also, check if you still want these goals. Your goal list should represent the current you, not the past you. Don’t feel bad about removing something that no longer resonates.

Step 3: Review your calendar. Look two weeks back for loose ends you forgot to follow up on (meetings, etc.). Look two weeks forward to prepare for what’s coming. This reduces background anxiety and prevents surprises.

Step 4: Set the week. Review and organize your task list. Set priorities and due dates for this week only. Choose 1-3 meaningful priorities. There’s no prize for completing everything. Just make sure the important things get done.

Step 5: Review your direction (optional). If clarity feels low, quickly review your vision, values, or whatever document captures where you’re headed. This isn’t a deep dive. It’s a nudge back toward your north star.

Step 6: Ask three clarity questions. Pick one or two of these and actually answer them:

1. What went well last week, and what didn’t?

2. What can I simplify, eliminate, automate, or outsource?

3. Is there something I’m doing out of habit that doesn’t make sense anymore?

That’s it. This may feel cumbersome the first time or two because you’ve never done it. But it gets faster, and the payoff is enormous.

Why It Works Forever

Life constantly drifts. Systems drift. People drift. The Weekly Review counters entropy.

• Motivation fades. The review doesn’t rely on motivation.

• Willpower fails. The review relies on reminders.

• Systems break. The review reboots them.

• Overwhelm happens. The review simplifies and organizes.

This is why it’s the one habit I’d never give up. Everything else in my personal system could fall apart, and as long as I did my Weekly Review, I’d rebuild. It’s the control system that lets everything else run in the background.

If your organizational system ever breaks down, just do the Weekly Review. That’s the reset button.

Do It Badly

The first few Weekly Reviews will feel clunky. That’s fine. Speed matters more than elegance. A bad review beats a skipped review.

When you’re overwhelmed, strip it down. Just clear your inbox, pick your top priority for the week, and call it done. Five minutes. That’s still infinitely better than drifting for another week.

Over time, the review will speed up. You’ll internalize what matters. You’ll develop a feel for what needs attention and what can wait. The process will become second nature, and the clarity it provides will compound week after week. I can do a proper Weekly Review in about 10 minutes now.

Start This Week

Put a recurring event on your calendar right now. Sunday evening or Monday morning. Call it “Weekly Review.” Give yourself 15 minutes to start.

If you want to go deeper, the Weekly Review is one part of what I call the Zorga Trinity: a Codex (your vision, values, purpose, goals) that captures where you’re headed, a Daily Action Plan that drives what you do each day, and the Weekly Review that keeps it all aligned.

Together, they form a complete system for getting what you want out of life. But even on its own, the Weekly Review will change how you operate.

That’s what clarity is. And that’s what the Weekly Review delivers.

Genetics gave me a nervous system wired to be stressed out. Top 1% according to genetic testing. I had to figure this out or it was going to kill me, especially as a founder.

A lot of people misunderstand stress. There’s a concept called “Zebras Don’t Get Heart Attacks” and what that means is that even though they’re under stress from possibly being eaten by a lion or other predator, they’re not dying from heart attacks because that kind of stress is acute - it happens only occasionally. Most of the time, zebras just chill, eat grass, run around. They’re fully relaxed.

The point is that acute stress is fine and even valuable. It gets the blood pumping and can even be exciting. The problem with modern life is that many of us have constant stress without fully relaxing. This is what slowly kills you over time.

Chronic stress isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s destructive. It pumps cortisol into your system, which can wreak havoc: weight gain, high blood pressure, brain fog, weakened immune system.

Note that cortisol is meant to be a good thing: it wakes you up and gets you energized for the day. However, if it’s “on” all day your body thinks you’re in some kind of emergency.

For example, cortisol is not going to let you lose weight because it thinks you’re in a bad situation and is holding on to calories in case you need them for “fight or flight.” So some people are stuck in high stress 24/7 and their nervous system never turns off.

If you’re stressed out you can’t think clearly, solutions seem impossible, you make bad decisions. Stress compounds as well: poor sleep leads to poor diet leads to less exercise leads to more stress.

For me personally, my genetics means my cortisol really never shuts off on it’s own (the receptors never “hear” the cortisol so it keeps flowing - called an NR3C1 mutation). I had difficulty losing weight and sleeping properly, even with exercise and calorie counting.

The point is, some people’s entire day is ruined by a flat tire. Others wouldn’t even mention it. The difference isn’t circumstances, it’s nervous system regulation. Also, if you’re easily triggered, you’re easily manipulated! Trust me, someone could be taking advantage of that right now, especially in business and relationships. You want to fix the problem at the root.

The Solutions

The main insight is that stress tolerance is a skill and can be trained. The goal is learning to calm down on demand.

Eliminate the Stressor

Probably the most obvious, but in some cases, the most difficult thing to do, is simply eliminate the stressor. So before you learn to manage stress, ask yourself: can I just eliminate it? You know who or what I’m talking about: the boss, the “friend”, the neighbor, the social media platform, etc.

Set some rules. What are you no longer going to tolerate? This isn’t about being a jerk. It’s about having boundaries. Nobody respects people without them, and you’ll get steamrolled until you establish some.

• Toxic people: Get rid of them. I don’t care if they’re your boss, your in-laws or your best performer in your business. They still need to go. Make a plan to get rid of them or dramatically reduce interactions with them.

• News/social media/politics: These are designed to stress you out. Cut way back or eliminate.

• Situations you keep tolerating: What would the audience be screaming at you to stop doing if your life was a movie?

• Business stress: If your business or staff is stressing you out, you need to get control of your business before it wrecks your life.

Again, very obvious. But many people I talk to about stress are literally still doing the stressful thing, a thing that can usually be stopped pretty easily. Watching the news or doom scrolling on social media, for example.

Control Your Breathing

Almost all stress issues trace back to breathing so this is where you should start. Breath is the only part of your autonomic nervous system you can consciously control. Here’s some simple things you can do right now:

• Box breathing: Get control of your breathing with a 4 second in, 4 second hold and 4-8 second exhale (purse your lips on the exhale). Breathe more with your stomach than your chest, near the belly button. Imagine your body as a deflating balloon.

• Another method is to breathe in deeply, then do another breath in, and then another breath in until you’re fully “inhaled,” then slowly exhale (pursed lips).

• Do these breaths as many times as necessary to calm down mentally (it may be as little as 3-4 breaths or may take several minutes). Experiment with shorter or longer times on the exhale/inhale/hold cycles to whatever makes you feel most relaxed but longer exhales than inhales tend to be more physiologically relaxing.

• Any mental or physical tension you notice, simply “breathe the tension in” and exhale it away. Imagine the tension literally leaving your body out of your feet.

• Try “humming” on the exhale to calm the vagus nerve, this can be very relaxing.

Relax Your Body

The body and mind are connected. Relax one and the other follows.

• If you are sitting or standing, note your posture may be slouched so stretch out, “straighten up” to a more powerful and relaxed state. Your posture tends to reflect your mood and vice versa.

• Relax your shoulders and downward towards your lower back.

• Relax/unclench your jaw and face (many people are astonished to find they’ve never really relaxed their face!)

• Relax your body with a scan starting from your feet and scan slowly upwards through your entire body to your head. Notice how much tension you may carry in your body, especially your shoulders, neck and face. It’s sometimes helpful to tighten the muscles in a tense area and then relax them a few times to get them fully relaxed.

Sometimes, especially in a panic, it’s helpful to distract or shock your system a bit to “snap” it out of a bad place:

• Cold water on your face (this activates the parasympathetic or calming part of your nervous system)

• Contrast (hot then cold then hot) shower

• Long hot shower or bath (add epsom salt to baths)

• Brush your teeth, shave or chew some gum

• Listen to relaxing music

• Watch a movie that relaxes or distracts you

• Tetris and similar games have been proven to help distract, even for people with PTSD

Move Your Body

An easy way to “get out of your head” is to simply start moving, even walking:

• Long walks are well-known for improving mindset

• Cardio is particularly good for mindset and relaxation

• Cleaning a room or even a desk is relaxing to many

• Try somatic therapy (see this video or search for “TRE” on YouTube)

Clear Your Mind

I spend a lot of time emphasizing mindset, reframing and clearing the mind in my work. It’s very hard to silence the mind, but you can stop believing or simply ignore every thought it generates, which are many times just crazy!

These tactics can take a few weeks to develop but after you learn them, you can call on them anytime which is the real secret. You can go into what President Truman calls the “foxhole in my mind” - the stress free place in your head you can go to on demand. Very powerful!

Here’s some things you can do to clear the mind:

• Turn off or silence all devices or other sources of stimulation.

• Clear your mind of any thoughts. Just focus on your breathing (the literal sensation in your nose or mouth), dismiss each thought you have and go back to focusing on your breathing.

• Keep scanning your body for sources of tension or pain and “release” it.

• Don’t judge your inability to stop thinking or ruminating, just gently refocus on your breath when your mind inevitably wanders. It takes a few weeks of regular practice to get better at this.

• Scheduled Worry: If you’re having a hard time not thinking about something, schedule a time (or email yourself a reminder) later to allow yourself to worry about it then. This not only gives you permission to stop thinking about it now, but lets your nervous system calm down. When the time comes to process it, many people find the issue is actually much more manageable or many times simply goes away!

• Consider reducing or eliminating caffeine. Caffeine intake is massively higher in recent years and many anxiety/stress issues are related to simply too much caffeine (and about 25% of people are slow caffeine metabolizers like myself, so even 1 cup of coffee is in their system for 24+ hours). It spikes cortisol as well.

• Listen to “binaural beats,” “bilateral stimulation” (search on Youtube) or other relaxing music.

Reframe Stress

Emotions are automatic. Your interpretation determines how you feel. A reframe is how you analyze negative thoughts and feelings, put them in their proper place and either “reframe” them to something not nearly as bad as you thought (or even learned something from) and/or simply “dismiss” them as something you no longer allow to torment you.

Do these steps in order, each builds on the last:

• Brain Dump: Create a note and write down the negative thought as well as anything else you want to say about the situation. Let it all out, do a full brain dump, including any worst case scenarios. Many find just doing this relaxing. This is so you can separate it from “you” and examine it intelligently. Then analyze:

• Is this my business? Many issues are actually not your direct responsibility and you shouldn’t burden yourself with them. News, politics, work drama, family/friend drama and “acts of God” typically fall in this category. Remember, you don’t have to have an opinion or even respond to anything. You are not obligated to be involved in other people’s business (especially from people you don’t love or who don’t love you). If you are certain this is your business, go to the next step.

• Do I even need to think about this? If this is your business, for example, some trauma or hurt feelings, and you’ve already processed them and learned the lesson (and most of us have), then you can safely dismiss this thought (tell the mind “dismissed!”). If you haven’t learned the lesson or it’s unclear, go to the next step.

• Is this true and can I absolutely 100% prove that? Many times, the mind has simply gone haywire again and is putting things in your head. “I’m a terrible person” or “X doesn’t care about me” and similar thoughts are in this category. Think clearly to see if the issue is really true or just your mind making things up without proof. If it’s just your mind, then you can dismiss the issue as your “annoying roommate” (your brain). If not, go to the next step.

• Can something good come of this? A lot of success stories came from the seed of a so-called disaster. Usually because it forced you to take action, get out of your comfort zone or re-evaluate your life. For example, if you had a major falling out with someone, are you now free to live a dramatically different, perhaps better life? Did someone anger you? You can use that anger to fuel taking action. Sometimes there is divine intervention, but also divine protection (you not getting what you wanted).

There are more steps to this process but that’s the basic process and it’s super effective if you’re willing to spend 10-15 minutes to solve stress at its root.

Support Your System

One of my biggest a-ha moments is when I realized that yes, many health and nervous system issues like anxiety and depression are a chemical imbalance. That’s true. But then I thought: where do those chemicals come from? It turns out some are made by the body (endogenous) and some are made from things you intake (exogenous). In fact, you sometimes need the exogenous ones to help make the endogenous ones.

So how can we fix the balance? We simply intake enough nutrients and we let the body do its thing by giving it enough sleep, exercise, etc. and the body can fix the rest.

NOTE: Always clear changes with your doctor or health professional.

• Sleep: non-negotiable. This is where many of the repairs and energy gets made. If you’re not getting enough sleep then it’s going to be incredibly difficult to fix your nervous system. Do whatever it takes to normalize your sleep.

• Exercise: at the bare minimum, get a walk in each day. A walk outside checks off so many boxes: cardio, sunlight, movement, stress reduction, lymph flow, contemplation, etc.

• Clean diet: eat real food. Simple as that.

• Check your nutrients and supplement: Over-farming and soil depletion have reduced many nutrients from our food so many of us our walking around deficient in many things. Use Cronometer.com to identify your baseline nutrition then create a meal plan that you enjoy and meets most of your daily nutritional needs (then use supplements to fill in the rest).

  • These are the most common deficiencies many of us have:

    • Magnesium - take 100-200mg of magnesium citrate in the morning and 200-400mg of magnesium glycinate at bedtime.

    • Vitamin D - either get 10+ minutes of sunlight on 30% or more of your body per day (or buy a Vitamin D lamp) or supplement starting at 1,000iu/day and working up to 3,000iu/day (but test!). Many have found the supplements don’t work unless you also add sunlight or a lamp

    • Potassium, Sodium - try an electrolyte drink, added salt and eat more foods high in potassium

    • Omega 3 - try 250mg-1000mg of high quality fish oil (or Krill or Algal oil if you don’t like fish oil)

    • Vitamin A, Choline, Vitamin E, Vitamin C and all the B vitamins can be supplemented individually OR try a lower dose multivitamin that contains them all (be cautious - consider taking 1 or ½ a pill instead of 2 of those capsules or skipping a day occasionally)

    • Vitamin K - try a “Multi K” as most multivitamins do not have enough

• Try relaxation supplements: If you’re getting enough nutrients and still having issues, you may want to try some of these well-known relaxation supplements. Start on smaller doses, add one at a time:

  • Magnesium glycinate (200-400mg)

  • L-theanine (100-250mg)

  • Glycine (1-5 grams)

  • Inositol (100-500mg, some go up to 5g)

  • PharmaGaba (100-200mg)

• Try cortisol lowering supplements: the supplements above help with cortisol but these help lower it directly:

  • Rhodiola - (100mg) - a personal favorite, helps with energy as well

  • Ashwagandha (300-500mg) - very effective for high cortisol

  • Phosphatidylserine (150-300mg) - most effective for high cortisol

Fix your nutrient deficiencies, give it a few weeks for your body to “turn back on” and then layer in the relaxation and cortisol-lowering supplements as required. These were game-changers for me personally, especially magnesium, l-theanine and rhodiola, which is by far my favorite supplement and I still use it regularly.

Summary

Possibly the #1 skill you can develop is increasing your stress threshold. If you can handle anything, you just keep moving toward your goals regardless of what life throws at you.

This isn’t about becoming emotionless or a zombie, it’s about not letting stress run your life. High performers aren’t less stressed, in fact many times they deal with a lot more stress than the average person. They’ve just trained their nervous system to recover faster and be more resilient. That’s how you become unstoppable.

I was dealt a bad hand genetically for stress but using the tactics above has dramatically improved my life. I built Zorga to systemize everything above and much more.

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. - Goethe

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: probably 90% of people in the world focus on emergencies or whatever else they feel like. The exceptional focus on priorities. Just learning to prioritize will get you far ahead of most.

Being able to identify what’s important and focus on that is a critical life skill. This is basically what good leaders and CEOs get paid to do: identify the priority and get everyone to work on it.

A lot of people can be “busy” all day and get nothing important accomplished. Some people are “productivity experts” at doing completely irrelevant or unimportant things. Their computer desktop or email folders will be completely organized, but they’re not working on anything close to their priority.

Prioritizing can be tricky (everything seems like a priority some days!), but here’s the real issue: when everything is a priority, nothing is. You probably have 10 big things you want to do or build. I guarantee if you try to do all of them you won’t get them all done and most will be done poorly.

And here’s a warning: working on the real priority often feels wrong. You want to do those other simple, less important things, usually because they’re easier or a habit. That’s the trap.

The Curse of the Hard Worker

Many of us are “hard workers, damnit!” and we’re not afraid to “get our hands dirty getting the job done!”

Well, that’s great and admirable, and many times required when you’re broke or starting out, but it’s totally unscalable and you’ll be doing the dirty work forever unless you move on to higher value tasks.

Think about it: if you spend 5 hours doing bookkeeping for your business, you just did $10/hour work because it didn’t give you any extra income and can easily be done by vendors on various online marketplaces.

Now, say you spent 5 hours improving your resume and end up making $5,000 more a year. You actually made $1,000/hour off that work, just in the first year.

Or 5 hours making an ad or sales page that makes $25,000 in sales? That’s $5,000/hour.

A lot of people do low value work because it keeps them busy. It’s another form of procrastination.

And if you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will. No better way to say that. Are you living a life of your priorities? Or your boss’s? Or someone else’s?

The Frameworks

The good news is we have some great models and frameworks to figure out what the priority is.

The Eisenhower Matrix

First we have the famous Eisenhower Matrix. If you’re not familiar, it has important and unimportant tasks, it has urgent and not urgent tasks in a matrix. Simple but powerful for seeing where your time actually goes.

The Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)

80 percent of your results come from 20% of your effort. 80% of a typical company’s income comes from 20% of their customers. 20% of criminals cause 80% of crime. It’s a pattern seen all throughout life.

Here’s what matters: if you were able to focus 100% of your day on 80/20 tasks you would get 500% more results. Or, if you like to take it easy, you can spend half a day getting 250% more done. You just need to learn to focus on the right things.

$1,000/Hour Tasks

High level CEOs make one phone call to close a deal that will make or save them millions. I know people who make $10,000 or more per hour from high leverage work all the time.

The question to ask yourself: what’s the actual dollar value of the task I’m about to do?

These frameworks are all useful, but they’re also all very similar. Here's what none of these frameworks tell you.

The Counterintuitive Truth: Start Before You Prioritize

I know what you’re thinking. Shouldn’t I prioritize first, then start working? No. You need to learn the habit of starting first.

Why? Because action forces prioritization. Once you’re going you have to figure things out. Prioritizing before starting often becomes just another excuse for procrastination. Overthinking is the enemy.

Prioritizing actually becomes easier once you’re in motion. You get clarity. So it makes sense to start first anyway.

The Key Question

Once you’re moving, a great question to ask yourself is: “What’s the highest value task I can work on right now?”

Many times, just realizing what’s a waste of time at this moment is helpful.

The Simple System

Looking at our frameworks above, here’s the best practice from each:

• Eliminate low value tasks that are not important. Gossip, useless busywork, doomscrolling on social media or TV. Most people find hours a day by eliminating the silly stuff in their life.

• Delegate or automate the urgent things that come up that are not important. These are daily chaos things like email, bills, calls. Put bills on autopay, use filters on email, batch phone calls all at once, hire an assistant for that $10/hour work.

• Focus on high value tasks, especially those that are not urgent. That’s where basically all high value, $1,000/hour+ tasks live: projects tied to your goals, building systems or strategies, learning, exercising (gives you more energy, better sleep). Many of the most high performance people on Earth focus almost exclusively on these types of tasks.

As you get more control of your time and day, you’ll notice the urgent important issues start coming up less. Fewer fires. Why? Because you’re being proactive and focusing on higher value things like systems.

Maybe you’ll make some checklists or systemize your business to prevent these issues from coming up, these fires from happening in the first place. Then you’ll have more energy to prevent them because you’re being strategic or not wasting time on low value or unimportant work.

Saying No

Ruthless prioritization, as I like to call it, because it is ruthless. Sometimes you don’t get to do what you want and many times others don’t get access to your time either.

This involves saying “no.”

A lot of people have problems with saying no, but like anything, it gets easier with practice. And there are ways to do it that sound so nice the other person doesn’t even know they got rejected:

“Oh man, I’m working on a project, can I hit you up when I’m done for a raincheck?” Bam. See how easy that was?

Derek Sivers recommends the principle of “Hell yeah! or no.” Unless it’s something you would say “hell yeah” to, pass and maintain focus on your existing priorities. Naval Ravikant takes it further: “If you can’t decide, the answer is no.”

Summary

Honestly, working on the priority can be messy sometimes. An ultra-clean desktop or workspace is not always the indication of productivity. Some things may not get done. Lower priority things will slip. That’s life. Life has tradeoffs.

Remember Goethe: “Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” We want to get to the point where we focus almost exclusively on things that are in the realm of important but not urgent. Like I mentioned above, things tied to goals, systems, strategy, learning, etc.

The more time you spend working on higher value tasks, the faster you will accomplish your goals. It really is that simple.

So here’s your action rule: Work on the highest value task first. Ask yourself: “What’s the highest value task I can work on right now?”

Break the curse.

If you want a simple system to identify your highest-value tasks and actually work on them daily, that’s exactly what Zorga is built for.

[Focus] is the one habit I find over and over again that is present in every single successful self-made millionaire I study. - Lewis Schiff

In previous posts, I’ve shown you how to beat procrastination and how to generate energy on demand. But what if you’re still not getting things done?

If that’s the case then your issue is almost certainly focus. Procrastination is also often a focus problem in disguise.

It’s not because you’re lazy, it’s probably because you’re overstimulated. Think about it, if you can scroll or watch TV for hours on end, you can focus on something.

So the issue isn’t attention span, it’s stimulus addiction. Your focus is being hijacked by modern life which is hostile to effective focus: infinite scrolling, notifications, dopamine on demand, zero steps to distraction.

Some people are wasting 4-8 hours a day on this stuff - an entire workday, wasted - it’s insanity. Imagine your life if you doubled your effectiveness!

The issue is being able to know what matters, start the task and remain focused on it for 30 minutes up to several hours (most people can only truly focus for about 4 hours per day).

The people that can do this simple routine regularly will have dramatically better outcomes than people that cannot do focused work. They’ll work more intelligently, think deeper, bring more to a project and ultimately accomplish their goals faster and easier.

Why Working Harder Won’t Work

Willpower ultimately depletes and focus fails the moment you’re tired, stressed or even bored. If your focus depends on motivation, then you’ve already lost. This is why most people’s “focus” lasts until that first notification, then they’re off to Distractionville.

This creates a terrible loop: tasks then feel heavier the longer they’re avoided, creating a mental load. Then guilt kicks in and ultimately you end up overwhelmed.

Every scroll reinforces shallow attention. Every interruption resets your focus to zero. Every open loop drains your mental energy. Focus is a muscle and you’re training the opposite one: distraction.

Even worse, the attention economy wants you distracted! Algorithms are learning exactly what turns you into an addicted consumer (“for engagement”) and they’re only getting better at it. So, in this way, becoming focused is almost an act of rebellion. You’re basically saying ”I’m awake, I’m paying attention, you can’t distract me and turn me into a mindless ConsumerBot2000.”

The good news is that focus is a skill, not a superpower. Any experienced meditator will tell you this. Focus can be trained and it’s easier than you think. More importantly, I’ve found that most overwhelm can be cured by about 3 hours of deep, focused work.

I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded in life because I have a long attention span. - Charlie Munger

Here’s how to install a Focus System.

Step 1: Remove the Focus Killers

Before adding habits, it’s easier to remove obstacles, then focus will have room to emerge.

• Greyscale everything. This little hack is amazing, you’ll find that color is actually a dopamine weapon - you’re attracted to it (Mother Nature did this so you see fruit, food, blood, etc.). Go into your device settings and turn the color to greyscale (or play around with “white point” and True Tone settings) and you’ll be amazed how it’s simply not that appealing anymore. There are ways where you can make this a shortcut to easily turn this setting on and off (but if you still struggle, don’t make it too easy). Some find that doing this allows you to use an older, smaller phone without all the whiz-bang new features which usually are just focus-killers.

• Notification Zero. Notifications are absolutely out of control. I see some people’s phones and they have hundreds of them! Many app makers are using them for sales and promotions (which is frankly unethical). Turn off everything except truly critical notifications: phone calls from important contacts, calendar, tasks, etc. Everything else is probably just noise pretending to be urgent. If you have some “I need the notification but not urgently” apps set the notifications to deliver “silently” then you can review them at your leisure.

• Turn off “rise to wake” and “tap to wake.” Sounds silly, but making it harder to turn on the actual device means less reaching for it.

• Delete or block the problematic apps. You know the ones I’m talking about: TikTok, Instagram, games, etc. Remember, you can install them again on the weekend or vacation or visit them on a desktop computer but the problem I see is hours and hours of mindless scrolling on the devices. Imagine your life with an extra 2-8 hours per day, forever! If you can’t delete them, look into blocking apps or the blocking function on your device to limit them to X minutes per day or password protect them and have the password only known by a friend or family member.

Step 2: Adopt a Focus Ritual

Just removing the focus killers will help a lot, but the next level is installing a focus ritual. The greats understood this. Most of their body of work came from a simple routine: sitting down, unbothered, completely focused is responsible for most of their entire body of work: famous writers, scientists, philosophers, business titans, etc. The basics are simple, it’s amazing more people don’t do this.

1. Schedule it. Put a 1-4 hour focus time on your calendar (or as a reminder or alarm on your phone), like a recurring daily meeting. Even 1 hour of real focus is powerful, 2 is great, 4 is elite.

2. Pick 1 task. Select just 1 thing you need to get done first. Ideally it should be the most important task to move you or your business forward. Even better if you select this the night before so you know exactly what you’re going to work on when your scheduled focus time hits.

3. Create a starting trigger. For most this is usually just sitting down at your desk and it signals “work mode” to your brain. Clearing your desk, tidying the workspace, organizing your computer desktop, etc. I recommend OneTab for storing all your open tabs for a nice clean workspace. Don’t spend more than 1 minute on this.

4. Eliminate the attention monsters. Unless it’s absolutely critical to have, silence your phone and put it in another room. This will feel weird at first, then you will realize that it’s actually liberating to not be at the beck and call of that thing all the time. If you feel the urge to reach for it, it’s still too close. Also make sure to silence your computer desktop notifications, especially the email notifications which are the worst offender among notifications.

5. Communicate boundaries. This is hard at first because many people think they can just interrupt you at will. You need to actually train people that focus time is important. Easy things to do are close the door, put on headphones or if you have an email or text heavy job, use an autoresponder to let them know you’re in focus mode and will get to them later. If you have a boss who demands availability all the time, consider proposing the focus time (even 1 hour) to allow you to do better, deeper work.

6. Use sound strategically. One thing I’ve found for many is that music with lyrics is actually distracting and competes with the same brain real estate as your work. I recommend either white noise or music without lyrics. I personally use Brain.fm but there are things like binaural beats, background music and focus playlists on YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify.

7. Force it with a timer. If you have a hard time at first, you can set a timer for 30 minute work sessions, also known as “Pomodoros”. Set a timer for 25 minutes, work until it goes off and take a 5 minute break. You can get a simple timer at Amazon or there are Pomodoro websites that have these built in) You can do multiple sessions like this: 60, 90, 120 minutes, etc. This is like training wheels (you won’t have to do it forever once it becomes habit) for your focus sessions and is very effective.

8. Make Returning to Focus Simple. The secret to sustained focus isn’t starting. It’s restarting. A lot of people don’t start because they think the task is too big. They think they’ll be stuck on it forever. Or they think they’ll never be able to return to the work because it will take too long to figure out where they were, so they either work on it for too long (neglecting other things) or never start! This has a few easy fixes.

   1. Leave breadcrumbs. Before you stop the task for the day, write down where you are in the task, what you were about to do and anything else you want to remember. This eliminates “where was I?” moments. Put it on a post-it note and put it right on your computer or wherever you’ll see it - now you have an easy way to get back.

   2. The Hemingway Trick. Stop mid-sentence, not at the end of a paragraph (apply this same concept to whatever you’re working on: a painting, code, cleaning the garage). This leaves you an obvious on-ramp back to where you were and can also be motivating because you naturally want to “finish” what you were working on. Hemingway did this deliberately as a way to keep him writing and also to find his way back to where he was.

Note this focus ritual may feel weird at first. Don’t worry, just get into one of your tasks and do the first absolute step: open the document, compose the email, open the garage, etc. and you will find your way into focus in a matter of minutes.

Simple Focus Rules

The ritual is simple, here are some simple rules to get even more out of your Focus System.

• Focus is a habit and environmental, not moral. Don’t blame yourself for a lack of discipline, start designing your environment and daily routine to allow you to easily get into focus. Focus will begin to emerge naturally once it becomes a habit.

• Focus is a byproduct of clarity. Try to have one task, one clear next action. Everything else on hold. When you know exactly what you need to do first, focus follows easily. Some people like to write the name of that task on a post-it note and place it on their phone, computer, etc. Finish that task, then move on to the next.

• 3 Focused hours beat 10 distracted ones. Deep work compounds over time. Scattered work just creates exhaustion. You’ll get more work done and feel less drained using a Focus System.

Ideally you should be able to wake up, do your basics (bathroom, breakfast, etc.) and immediately sit down knowing your one task you need to work on. Knock that out and the rest of the day is yours to do whatever you’d like.

Step 3: Nuclear Options

If you’ve implemented everything above and still struggle, your nervous system may need a hard reset. Don’t panic, these are actually very clarifying and I recommend them to everyone, not just those who struggle with focus. There’s simply too much “stuff” going on and some of us need a good reset. Here are 2 you can do right away.

• Silent walks. Do 30-60 minute long walks with zero inputs: no playlists, no podcasts, no device. The first 15 minutes may seem boring but then you start to realize that you’ve forgotten how to think on your own! You’re too busy reacting to others or listening and reading other people’s thoughts. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a walk, it’s just easier to start that way. In fact, I recommend everyone just simply take 30-60 minutes each day with no inputs to just think. Walking just makes it easier and less tempting to grab a device or be distracted.

• 48 hour dopamine detox. No electronics, no music, only books, writing (on paper) or movement. For some of you, this will be very hard for the first 6-12 hours but after that you should have incredibly clarity. By day 2 you’ll probably start to wonder what the hell everyone is doing, looking at them like they’re zombies. That’s the power of resetting your dopamine baseline.

Modern stimulation has raised your threshold so high that normal work feels unbearable. These 2 things recalibrate you.

Summary

Focus is not a personality trait, discipline or motivation. It’s a system you install once and maintain lightly.

When you solve focus, tasks that felt impossible become inevitable. Overwhelm dissolves into progress. You reclaim your mind from the attention economy.

Combine this with energy and anti-procrastination skills and you become genuinely unstoppable.

Install the system: remove the focus killers, adopt a focus ritual, some simple focus rules and try a digital detox for even more clarity.

If you want the complete system that ties all of this together, including Vision, Purpose, Apps and Workflow, I share it all at Zorga.io

Having energy is critical to almost everything in life. Life is so much easier and, frankly, so much more exciting when you have energy.

Most people think they need motivation before they can take action. They’re waiting to “feel energized” before starting. Meanwhile, successful people seem to have unlimited energy. So what’s the secret?

That General Patton quote above is one of my favorites because it is so true: fatigue does indeed make cowards of us all. A task that’s simple when you have energy seems impossible without it. You think smaller, avoid big projects, live a smaller life.

Then you get stuck in the cycle: no energy -> no action -> no results -> no energy.

I think we’ve been lied to about how energy works. Your energy isn’t a battery that depletes and you can tap into a few simple mindset changes and tactics that can dramatically improve your energy.

Mindset Hacks

Energy Rule #1: Energy comes from action, not the reverse

There’s a cultural myth that “motivation comes before action.” I’m not sure where it comes from but it’s destructive.

Now, are there people that bounce out of bed, totally energized, ready to take on the world? Sure, there are the top 1% in all kinds of areas of human existence. These people likely have amazing genetics, a great upbringing (no traumas or mental health issues), a passion they’ve found, a purpose to drive them and more.

Don’t get me wrong, as we’ll see, we can install passion, purpose and a better mindset too, but for us mere mortals, to get started towards that, we need to take action first.

The reality for most of us is that if we start first, then the body and mind will be activated, then the energy comes.

Action unlocks energy. Simply installing this mindset in yourself will dramatically improve your life so take this seriously, especially if you suffer from procrastination.

This applies to productivity as well: high energy people rarely have productivity problems. They may not have focus, priority and other things that can be trained but having energy just gives you more to work with each day.

Energy Rule #2: Your energy isn’t a battery or gas tank

Most people’s mental models on this are flawed, they think there’s a tank or battery that gets depleted as you use it. Now, this is somewhat true for physical energy, but mental energy is definitely different.

Mental energy is renewable. You can excite yourself with things you consider important or interesting. Don’t believe me? Remember staying up all night with the person you were interested in dating, totally energized? Or being up all night with friends? Or with a good book or video game? How about if someone calls you up and says your loved one needs help and it’s an emergency, bam - instant energy boost.

Physical energy is boostable. It’s a bit tougher than mental energy, and you don’t want to be boosting it all the time (that will just burn your body out), but things like cold water, quick bouts of exercise, caffeine, etc. The main point is don’t just throw in the towel if you’re “tired” - you have more energy than you think, especially if it’s important.

Are you starting to see the shortcut to why so many successful people seemingly have unlimited energy?

Instant Energy Hacks

Don’t think, just start

First you need to get going, this is where the “don’t think, just start” hack works. If you give yourself more than 5 seconds to start thinking about a task the brain is going to come up with all kinds of excuses, overthinking, planning, distractions, etc. so the best hack is to just identify what you need to do and get started immediately before your brain even gets a chance to interrupt.

Take the literal smallest first step you can do: put on your shoes, open up the document, search for the phone number you need to call, start composing the email. Remember, move first and then energy will follow.

Sunlight and walking

10-30 minute walks (at lunch or breaks if necessary). Let me quickly explain why sunlight and a walk are so good, especially first thing in the morning. First, the sun triggers your circadian rhythm which controls so many things. So many of us are vitamin D deficient that sun each morning is going to do a lot of great things. Next, walking is easy, it burns calories, it gets your blood and lymph flowing, it lowers stress, it improves cardio, and you can do simple tasks like phone calls (use earphones), quick emails/texts, you can listen to audiobooks or podcasts or you can simply do your deep thinking and strategizing for the day.

The list of geniuses who credit walking with their best ideas is ridiculous: from Aristotle to Einstein, from Steve Jobs to Nikola Tesla. I’m telling you right now if you’re not walking you may be missing out on a lot of extra energy and insights.

And finally, even if the rest of your day goes to hell, you get that bit of exercise in and don’t have to feel guilty about missing a workout. Done properly, exercise should give you more energy and improve your sleep, in addition to optimizing mood.

Food strategies

Anyone who’s had a Thanksgiving meal knows that too much food will knock you out. This isn’t just anecdotal, in Tim Ferriss’ book Tools of Titans it was remarkable how many high performers ate very small meals or skipped breakfast altogether. I believe that’s due to the energy-draining effects of too much food.

Everyone is different of course, if you function fine on a big breakfast and lunch, more power to you. Personally, I’ve noticed I have much more energy and clarity if I have a small meal (protein shake or fruit) or even skip meals. Even if you do eat, you may want to focus on whole foods and protein to see if that boosts your energy levels.

Boosters

Caffeine is the best known stimulant that many of us use. But it has drawbacks (tolerance, anxiety, sleep disruptions, etc.). There are however some clean alternatives. Cold water is a well known one, just splash on your face or take a quick cold or “contrast” (hot then cold) shower.

There are also some well known energy supplements like Rhodiola, Cordyceps, ALCAR, Tyrosine and Dynamine (all available on Amazon, etc.) but make sure to clear with your doctor and obviously start small and one at a time.

Rhodiola is my personal favorite, I use this brand.

Sleep Optimization

I harp on sleep a lot, I think I’ve mentioned it in each of my last 3 articles. The truth is that it is easily the number 1 way to improve your life: energy, clarity, mood, and a million other things. 99% of people need between 6.5 and 9 hours so if you’re not feeling great, even with the recommendations above, then sleep is likely your main issue. Either get more sleep or make sure to get tested for sleep apnea (which tricks you into thinking you’re sleeping but you’re actually choking or not breathing properly).

Make sure you’ve optimized your light environment as well. 10 years ago I would have said this is crazy to worry about, now I think it’s a top 5 societal health problem. With all this artificial light (especially from devices beaming straight into your eyes), your brain thinks you’re looking at the sun, so it won’t give you the calming melatonin to actually sleep well.

So you need to:

• Minimize blue light (from devices and TV) after sunset

• Dim lights at night, especially overhead (again, the brain thinks that’s the sun at noon)

• Consider blue blocker glasses or red mode on devices at night

• Get real sun within 30 minutes of waking (you need to activate your circadian rhythm as well to give you energy, sun in the morning does that)

Practicing good “sleep hygiene” is essential too. Make sure your room is totally dark, cool and silent. Don’t eat 3 hours before bed (digestion interferes with sleep) and try to sleep and wake at the same time everyday (even weekends - your body doesn’t understand “weekends,” it wants consistency). There are all kinds of trackers, apps and more but doing these basic things first should resolve most of the issues.

The Inner Game

The things mentioned above are great but if you want the foundational “pop out of bed ready for world domination” energy then you’ll want to start working on your inner game. People with a solid inner game will develop intrinsic motivation and energy in nearly limitless supplies. After you learn the tactics above, this is life on the next level.

This includes:

• Purging negative energy from your life: Remove negative people, negative self-talk, cut out negative media and don’t abuse alcohol or drugs.

• Emotional self-control: Work on your emotional resilience with a “not my circus, not my monkeys” mindset (also known as becoming “highly undisturbable” or developing a “thick skin”).

• Visualization: Visualize outcomes and goals. See yourself as energized and successful. Tying the outcome you want (your vision) to your daily actions (no matter how mundane they are) is a huge source of motivation and energy.

• Becoming purpose driven: Clarify your values and find your purpose. Once you have a motivating purpose then your energy is basically limitless. These are the people that truly cannot wait to get started each day because they’re fully internally motivated. Purpose-driven work doesn’t feel like work.

• Sense of humor: Being able to laugh at the absurdity of life is a superpower. Laughter is a powerful cure. It helps you maintain perspective and you learn to not take everything so seriously. Energizing and relaxing!

• Relaxation exercises: Whether it’s meditation, somatic therapy or HeartMath, there are so many known ways to calm your nervous system. I think it’s mandatory for the modern person to have at least one of these tools available in their arsenal.

Troubleshooting

If nothing else seems to work, then you’ll want to look into:

• Underlying health conditions: chronic fatigue, underlying depression, undiagnosed illness like Lyme disease.

• Elimination diet: almost all mysterious conditions have a dietary issue at the root (unknown allergies, gluten intolerance, etc.). Start by eliminating everything then adding things back in one by one (waiting 3 days - the full digestion cycle - between each new addition). Nobody likes doing it but this process has solved many intractable issues.

• Professional coaching or a functional medicine practitioner: Sometimes you simply need a pro to go over everything and while they’re not cheap, what is your quality of life worth? Is it worth a few thousand dollars to totally change your life? This should be a no-brainer. Seek out a coach or functional doctor who can work with you (many will do this virtually).

SUMMARY

Energy isn’t something you wait around for. It’s something you generate through action, optimize through habits, and multiply through purpose.

The two foundational rules: energy comes from action (not the reverse), and your body isn’t a battery that depletes. Master these mindset shifts and you’ve already won half the battle.

Start with the instant hacks: move first, get sunlight, eat lighter, use strategic boosters. Build the foundation with sleep optimization (this alone will transform your life). Then work on your inner game: purpose, visualization, emotional control, and removing negativity.

The entrepreneurs and high performers who seem to have unlimited energy? They’re not genetic freaks. They’ve just figured out that energy is a skill you can develop, not a resource you’re born with.

Related Articles:

• Fix Procrastination in Seconds

• How to Take Control of Your Life

Want to systemize your entire life? Zorga is my complete personal operating system that includes tools, templates, and frameworks to master energy, focus, and productivity.

I want you to look at that image above. This is from a course outline (sorry to call them out) that will supposedly teach you how to beat procrastination. Now, we all know that procrastination is a big problem, perhaps the biggest problem among entrepreneurs and other high performers because 1) they are usually intelligent and 2) intelligent people tend to overthink and over-plan.

Anyway, the ironic thing about that course above is that it is itself a great, perhaps even the perfect example, of over-thinking and over-planning. I mean, “identity protection mechanisms” and “threat detection analysis” and I think this course goes on for 6 weeks. It’s a procrastination course that is itself procrastination! This is madness.

The Problem

I used to suffer from this badly (literally hundreds of plans, notes and tasks!) and I see this all the time. The problem with procrastination is:

• Every delay drains energy

• It becomes an “open loop” that can drive you crazy over time

• It increases avoidance of other tasks (you give up on the whole day because you don’t “feel ready” or can’t “get started”)

• It increases frustration because you’re waiting for clarity, energy, motivation or the perfect plan and those simply never come

• You begin to mistake “planning” and “research” for getting things done (yes, planning and research are important as we’ll see below)

• In short, it causes stress and things don’t get done, so you fall behind on your work and life in general

Most productivity advice, like that course above, is way off base. They’re trying to solve for something using the logical brain (“threat detection analysis!”) and I’m here to tell you, it is the logical brain itself that is the problem. It’s not a motivation problem at all. The real enemy is those critical 5 seconds before your brain hijacks you. After 5 seconds or so you then can get into the “thinking trap:”

• Do I feel like doing this?

• This may take a long time, should I wait until I have more time?

• Is this the best thing I should be doing?

• I think I need to do more research.

• I better make a plan.

• I wonder what’s happening on Facebook or on my phone?

That last one is for those of us that have ADHD and one of the things I want you to stop letting ADHD be an excuse for not doing things. Like a wild animal, your mind can be trained, it may be harder for us, but it’s not impossible. The majority of ADHD meds just boost chemicals in your brain that you can generate naturally by taking the advice in this article.

The Solution: The Starting Habit

Don’t laugh, the solution is ridiculously simple: “Don’t think, just start”

I’ve been preaching and teaching a variation of this for years and it works. Why? Because it doesn’t give the thinking brain time to come up with all the excuses above. It won’t have time to start doing the energy calculation of the task. Like I said, you have about 5 seconds before the thinking brain kicks in so it’s important at first to just get started and that means literally anything: open the document you need to work on, go into the room you need to clean and pick up one thing, pick up the phone and call the person you need to talk to, etc.

Can I Just Do It Now?

The second part to that rule is: “Can I just do it now?”

There’s a viral video on TikTok about the daughter who is astonished about her mom’s ability to “just do things.” In this example, her mom needed to make a dentist appointment and didn’t understand why her mom didn’t write it down in her task app, add “find dentist phone number” “call to make appointment” and the other subtasks to that and let it sit there all week. Her mom just googled the dentist, clicked on the phone number to call and made the appointment in seconds. This is exactly the type of mindset switch that will smash procrastination forever. Don’t think, just start.

The science behind this: once you begin the habit of starting, you’ll train the mind. The mind prefers default behaviors and patterns. Doing will feel better than hesitation because hesitation activates all those bad feelings and stress I listed above. Action literally interrupts the loop.

The Planning Trap

I know what some of you are thinking: my work is complex! I need to be strategic! I can’t just jump in without a plan!

I understand that. But the point of beating procrastination is to install the starting habit first, solve that problem forever. Learn to start first, then you can be more strategic about prioritizing and planning and focusing. I think if Napoleon (pictured above) can conquer most of Europe without overthinking it, you can try it too.

One thing I’ve noticed is that people who do great or interesting things tend to just dive in. One person will spend weeks planning the trip to Europe, overthink it, paralyze themselves with picking an airline, itinerary, etc. whereas a person with the starting habit checks their calendar real quick, searches up the flights on a comparison site and books it. Then sort of fills in the blanks with hotels, car rentals, etc. as the date gets closer. Will they miss out on some better deals, better options or the “perfect experience?” Maybe. But they’re going while you’re planning and they’ll probably have more fun because they’re not overthinking it and probably will do more interesting things by not planning.

We have to crawl before we walk. So even if starting means getting started on research or planning, that’s fine, just make sure it’s real work and not an excuse to avoid the real work. Even literal researchers and planners have to submit their work eventually so if you’ve spent more than say, a few hours on a plan (short of rocket and skyscraper design), then be careful that you may be in fact, massively over-planning.

Besides, one of the best things on earth is feedback. Feedback is how you correct course when something doesn’t work and honestly, most things in life don’t work on the first try. So take the action, don’t think, just start and then that will give you feedback and then you’ll try something else until it eventually works. Whoever gets the most feedback the fastest tends to win at whatever endeavor they are pursuing. Feedback is a big topic itself but that’s the most important aspect: acting, listening to feedback, changing strategy until you win. This is very important for entrepreneurs and other high performers to understand.

How to Start Today

Very simple: add “Don’t think, just start. Can I just do it now?” as a post-it note on your computer/phone/whatever or on the top of your task list. Or email it to yourself and keep it in your inbox. Anytime you feel internal resistance: count 1–2 and move. Make it automatic.

Still feeling a bit of resistance from this? Change it to: “Don’t think, just start, it doesn’t have to be perfect - just do 5 minutes.” Anyone can do something for 5 minutes even if you’re just getting the stuff ready to work. Some examples of things you can do to start right now:

• Open the doc

• Put on your shoes

• Fill the water bottle

• Start the timer

• Pull up the spreadsheet

• Draft the first sentence

When you catch yourself hesitating, take a physical action within 5 seconds. Not the whole task. Not the perfect start. Just a small physical movement that moves the task forward, again, like opening the document. This bypasses the mind’s negotiation loop and shifts the body into motion. If you’re still getting distracted away then consider placing your phone in another room and putting some focus software on your computer or working device (it limits what sites and apps you can use).

Why It Works

This works because almost instantly, starting becomes addictive. You’ll realize that motivation comes after starting, not before. You’ll realize that all those terrible feelings from procrastinating simply never happen anymore. You’re starting to become a high agency person, an “I do what I say” person and others will notice this too. You’ll realize why so many high performers say “amateurs need motivation, professionals just do the work.” You may even start to get into “flow” and that’s where the magic really happens, where people who can work deeply for hours on end live.

Most importantly, you’ll start to get over your perfectionism or fear. See the maze above? That’s probably the best example I’ve ever seen of the “don’t think, just start” mentality and why it works. 1 hour of doing results in more than 10 hours (or 1000 hours!) of thinking about it.

The Next Level

Now, I hesitate to even mention this because we just want to be able to start without thinking about it, so I’ll write more about these concepts later, but once you’ve adopted the starting habit, you can then start doing things like:

• Doing a focus ritual: devices silenced, email closed, maybe a time-blocked part of your day

• Prioritizing: ideally the night before you will identify the ONE task that is most important to work on (not most urgent, most important!)

• “Finding your way back” - adding what you were working on and how to get back to that to your tasks (helps overcome the “where was I?” aspect of bigger tasks)

• 5 minute planning and how to use AI to help plan your next step or priority

But for now, let’s just focus on adopting the starting habit and so many great things will follow from that.

Summary

“Well begun is half done.” - Aristotle

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.” - Plato

I lost literally years to procrastination, even though I was insanely busy. I’d do busy work all day and keep rolling over the big projects that would have made a difference. This affected my employees, my health, relationships - everything. Don’t make the same mistake I did and let your own brain terrorize you. Building this habit was the first step in the system I eventually built to take back control of my time and energy. I share the full framework at Zorga.io.

Adopt the habit now:

• “Don’t think, just start. Can I just do it now?” or

• “Don’t think, just start, it doesn’t have to be perfect - just do 5 minutes.”

I challenge you to do this for one week. Add the phrase above to your task list, post-it on your phone or wherever you will see it and resolve to start taking immediate action.

Now, pick one task you’re avoiding and don’t think, just start!

After I wrote the How to Take Control of Your Life article, I realized that a lot of people who like “systems” are small business owners, consultants, creators, knowledge workers or even manage a household and probably could use similar principles to take control of their business. Note: If energy or “open loops” are an issue in your life, read that article, because they certainly apply to business as well.

Now for business, we have a different set of things we can do to take control.

Have a Plan

It’s hard to overstate how important having a simple plan is, not only for your clarity of mind, but to get your team to understand where the company is supposed to go.

Most small businesses have no clear strategy or goals besides the whim of the founder at that time. The founder may have a vision with no clear goals, which will get you nowhere fast. Some founders have plenty of goals with no vision to guide them, which can actually be counterproductive (“chasing squirrels”).

You don’t need a formal 30 page business plan, but you want to have at least some kind of direction mapped out. This can be as simple as one page and just writing it down can give you lots of clarity that you may be missing from day to day.

It should include:

• Vision. A clear vision that is well communicated puts the same picture in everyone’s head and can be extremely motivational and clarifying. This lets everyone know the future they’re working towards every day. This doesn’t have to be more than a few paragraphs.

• Purpose. Answer this question: Why do you wake up every day and work toward your vision? Who are you serving? Knowing your “why” is incredibly motivational if it inspires you to action.

• Core values. What does your company value and what do you stand for? Knowing this will help you differentiate between good and bad decisions.

• Goals. Vision and purpose are great, but you need to have concrete, measurable goals, that you work toward. Definitely, you want goals for the year and many great companies have 3, 5 or even 10-year goals for things like product, revenue, profit, etc.

• Scoreboard. Can I glance at the plan and know how we’re doing? A well-designed scoreboard (sometimes an electronic dashboard or even manually collected stats) will measure a handful of metrics (revenue, profit, number of leads, etc.) and let you know the status of your goals (usually green, yellow, or red).

Take the time to create your first plan, get it in front of your whole team then refer to it and keep improving it forever. You’ll be amazed how this simple one-page document can radically clarify what needs to get done and simplify how you operate your business.

Centralize Everything

Knowledge

Something like 25% of the average worker’s day is wasted just looking for things or information. How many times a day is your team asking how to do things, “where do we keep ABC”, “who’s our vendor for XYZ”, etc. This is insanity. You need to have a central source of truth where all those things live.

Then, use something like Notion or Coda to make this information accessible to your team in an intranet (private to your company). Things like:

• Notices to employees (keeping them out of email)

• Team Calendar, Payroll, Time Sheets, PTO requests, Training and Onboarding tools

• The Scoreboard so everyone can see how the company is doing

• Store your written procedures (see below for more on these) and instructions for updating and writing new ones

• Keep marketing and sales information about your products and services

• Store handbooks and other policy documents

• Maintain contacts, phone and account numbers for vendors and other important contacts

• Keep tracking documents like inventory and office supply lists

I can’t tell you how many problems will go away once you centralize all your business information, even if you’re a solopreneur. Then just tell your team “check the intranet” after that to build the habit and stop the constant interruptions. This is especially important if you ever want to step away from or sell your business.

Customer Data, Projects and Tasks

Some businesses are managed chaos. Cindy uses Google tasks, Dave uses Apple Notes, Joe uses a text file, Joanna keeps things in her head. This is not ideal because 1) things can slip through the cracks when someone is off, quits or is fired 2) you have no visibility on what’s being done or worked on in your business.

At the bare minimum, use some kind of shared spreadsheet to track customers, projects and tasks. I’ve seen businesses that still use faxes! There are literally dozens and maybe hundreds of great software solutions. Ideally you have a project management software and a CRM software to manage customers and perhaps a shared email inbox for sales and support. Spend some time researching them for features and price and make sure your team uses them.

Document Your Process and Procedures

I know: we all hate writing SOPs (“standard operating procedures”) but I’m here to tell you 1) writing down just your top procedures (or ones that give you the most hassle) will dramatically improve your business (and make your employees lives easier) and 2) having documented process and procedures is how you add value to your company and make it sellable (or able to be handed off to family, for example).

Written procedures are how you fix a process so it’s done right each time and, more importantly, it’s how you delegate that procedure to someone else so you don’t have to do it anymore. That’s the key here. Imagine having a cleanly written procedure for whatever big process you do, hiring someone and simply sharing that document with them (with a quick walkthrough training or maybe a video).

For more complex businesses you’ll want to document the whole customer journey from awareness (marketing) to sales, ordering, fulfillment and service. This is so you can “hold the whole thing in your head” but also so you can identify bottlenecks, simplifications and opportunities. Use a whiteboard or flowchart software and spend some time doing this to get a much better handle on how your company works.

Get Your Team Straight

Look at what we did above: made a plan, centralized information, centralized tasks, projects, customer data and documented our processes and procedures. Simply doing that is going to do wonders for your team. They’ll know why they work there are where they’re going (plan). They’ll have access to everything without having hunt for it all day or bother anyone (intranet), they’ll have a system that everyone knows and uses to do their work and they’ll have clear procedures so they can be trained right from day one and take over if someone is gone without it being a five alarm emergency.

This is going to make your business a much better, calmer and more predictable place to work at. You and your team are less stressed when things are predictable. Nobody likes working for someone who is scattered and all over the place. Establish a rhythm of regular check-ins, company retreats or events to further tighten this up and make your business a great place to work.

Speaking of that, here are 7 simple things you can do as a business owner to dramatically improve employee retention and happiness (and thus, your happiness):

1. Remember their birthday (and offer to give it to them off).

2. Listen to their feedback and ideas (see below).

3. Offer more time off in general.

4. Free meals: donuts, lunches, etc.

5. Minimize meetings and busy work.

6. Give them some flexibility and perks (if they’ve proven reliable and loyal).

7. Send a weekly email to everyone letting them know how things are going (put a copy of the scoreboard as a screenshot), what the priority is for the coming week or weeks and thanking individuals (“shout outs”) for great performance.

#6 mostly means if you’ve had a dedicated employee, you should show them the respect of additional benefits and flexibility like leaving early, being able to slip out to take the kids to get a haircut, not rejecting PTO unless absolutely necessary, deferring to them for advice and decisions, making them feel valued and important.

For point #2, you’ll want to maintain a list (on your intranet ideally or it could be an email or form) for employees to submit their ideas, fixes and issues. I’m telling you your business has problems and your employees know what they are. They’re simply not telling you due to fear or no way to do it easily. Let them know the “Issue List” exists and encourage them to use it. Importantly, visibly work on and fix the things they bring up and thank them for bringing them up. You want more ideas and feedback? Reward, don’t punish that feedback! Ask for issues at every team meeting.

On point #5, minimize meetings and busy work, you’ll want to think about your meetings and if they’re truly necessary or could they simply be an email or a post on your intranet home page? Some companies have zero meetings and I think that’s a mistake - you need occasional face time and collaboration, at the least to check in. But many companies have too many meetings and it drives employees crazy. At least make sure each meeting has a written purpose (agenda) and actual results and tasks that come from it at the end. Eliminating busy work should be obvious and you’ll discover that when you write your procedures and analyze them for efficiency. Many times there are complete steps that are unnecessary or were being done for a reason nobody can remember!

Get Rid of Toxic Employees

Finally, having a good team means getting rid of the toxic and underpeformers ASAP. Or sometimes just the people that nobody likes. I’m telling you right now that keeping those bad apples is ruining the rest. It demoralizes the good employees to see that you tolerate the bad ones. Oftentimes some are so toxic they’re holding the whole company back or literally terrorizing and “poisoning” the whole culture.

You probably are already thinking of someone on your team as I write this. Some of the best decisions I’ve ever made were to let someone go, even if I had to scramble for a few weeks to replace them. You can do this nicely and in a very professional manner but get it done soon. Nobody likes doing it but sometimes you have to suck it up, take 1 hour and meet with them, get it over with and then you’re free. Of all the things above, this may have the most dramatic effect on how you perceive your control of your business.

Summary

Taking control of your business isn’t about working longer or hustling. It’s about building systems. Systems allow you to have a more calm business which you and your employees will like much better. The steps are simple:

• Have a Plan

• Centralize Your Information

• Document Your Process and Procedures

• Get Your Team Straight

The business owners who do this are calmer yet more effective. If you are a business owner and would like to implement this in your business, visit SmallBizOS where we can do this for you.

Start With Energy

“Fatigue makes a coward of us all.” - General George S. Patton

Energy is the foundation of control. Have you ever noticed that doing something on 4 hours of sleep seems like an impossible slog but get 7+ and suddenly it’s a piece of cake?

Now multiply that times dozens or hundreds of days each year and suddenly the best you can do is get through the day and plop on the couch. You’re gassing out and unable to think strategically. When your body is depleted, your mind defaults to comfort and avoidance. When you’re rested, clarity and action come naturally.

So the first step is obvious, you need to protect and prioritize your sleep. The rules are simple but I would estimate 80% do not follow them and if you did for a week you would notice a dramatic improvement in sleep and energy:

1. Pick a hard bedtime and wake time. Your body will adjust to this but you need to enforce it and it may take a week or two. Get in your bed at least 8.5 hours before your wake time. This gives you time to wind-down and go to sleep and gives you plenty of runway to get what you need. 98% of humans need at least 7 hours of sleep to be fully functional.

2. Stop eating and drinking 3-4 hours before bedtime. The body spends a lot of energy digesting and things like heartburn, etc. creep up if you eat too close to bedtime. Stopping liquids prevents you from getting up to use the bathroom.

3. Stop caffeine at least 8 hours before bedtime and ideally 12 hours. Some of us are “slow caffeine metabolizers” so it’s even more important to have a caffeine cut-off.

4. Light and Devices. Turn off your devices 30 minutes before bedtime. If you have problems falling asleep extend that to 60-90 minutes. All lights in the house should be dimmed or off. Think about it from a caveman perspective: if you are staring at a device or there is a light above you, it assumes you are staring at the sun or it’s noon. So it’s not going to kick in your circadian rhythm, produce natural melatonin, etc. At the least wear blue-blocking glasses (search them on Amazon) at night.

5. No mental stimulation before bedtime: social media, news, politics, etc. - you need your nervous system to calm down.

6. Wind-down. Some of us need even more relaxation to shut down the brain. Deep breathing or meditation is helpful here or simply listing everything you need to do tomorrow to get it “off your brain” so you can relax.

7. Environment: At bedtime your bedroom should be completely dark (try a sleep mask if not possible) and silent if possible (try earplugs if not possible). Many prefer a colder temperature so experiment on fans or dialing down the thermostat.

The next step is obvious: you need to make sure your diet and exercise are dialed in. Fix sleep first, but then make sure you get at least some walking in daily (7k steps seems to be the sweet spot for health, despite what you heard about “10,000 steps”) and try to cut out processed food as much as possible. A lot of people don’t sleep well because they don’t actually move enough for their body to want to shutdown!

Finally, you need to start noticing things that give you energy and things that take it away. Then start adding things that give you energy and eliminating, managing or reducing things that take your energy away. You want to start paying attention to these things.

Close Open Loops

Control begins when you face what you’ve been avoiding. “Open loops” are those things that gnaw on your conscience, bleed attention and energy. These are things like unanswered emails/texts, tasks you have to do but aren’t written down (they live in your mind), that stack of things on your desk or inbox, decisions you need to make, phone calls or conversations that need to happen, birthdays, anniversaries, appointments you need to remember.

That voice reminding you to ‘email that person’ or ‘fix that drawer’ is an open loop trying to close itself. These things build up and suddenly you’re overwhelmed and scrolling social media to take your mind off them. Closing your open loops is a totally underrated way to lower stress levels.

The solution is first of all to start writing things down to get them off your mind. Calendar all your recurring events: birthdays, anniversaries, important dates. Set recurring tasks for things that need to be done regularly like shopping, bills, maintenance tasks. Write down everything that needs to get done. Keep things in one place: one notebook or one app you can access from your phone.

Then take action and do them one by one starting with the things bugging you the most - just pick up the phone and have the conversion. Just send the text or email. Just clear out the mess in your garage. Don’t think, just start. Again, these are basic concepts that “everyone knows” but when I see people in action it is rarely done.

Finally, you want to manage all your “inputs” better when you get more time and energy: emails, texts, voicemails, physical mail, etc. - try to clear them out regularly. Don’t be the flaky person that doesn’t know how to manage their communication. Every loop you close frees up mental bandwidth for what actually matters.

Simplify Your Systems and Create a Daily Rhythm

Okay so we’re getting more energy and we’re closing our open loops, which should give us even more energy and less to keep “top of mind” all day. We’re starting to get control of our day. Now let’s simplify and optimize our day and our environment.

First, create a simply Daily and Weekly Routine. This doesn’t have to be the silly 3 hour thing you see on social media. Just apply some simple structure to your day and week so you don’t have to think about things on the fly all day. This is incredibly relaxing when you know exactly what your day will look like. I see people and families that just sort of “wing it” all day: “do we need to go to the store,” “should I clean the bathroom,” “oh I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning,” “does Joey have soccer practice” etc. This is crazy because the solution is so simple.

Automate the Basics:

• Daily tasks can be turned into automatic habits: exercise, grooming, working (tasks, projects etc.), wind-down routine. These can be made to be automatic so you get things done automatically.

• Set regular days for things: shopping, cleaning, errands, calls/meetings (I set one day a week for all meetings and calls), bills, etc.

• Calendar everything: as mentioned before, get all the stuff on the calendar so it’s off your mind. Don’t be the person that doesn’t remember birthdays and anniversaries.

• Put things on autopilot if you can: automatic bill-pay (go paperless to get it out of your mailbox), regular grocery delivery, landscaping, maintenance, etc.

• Keep lists: shopping lists, household lists (how to winterize the house, where the will or valuables are, etc.). Again, getting important things written down frees up mental space.

Eliminate the Noise:

You want to eliminate the unnecessary. Are you getting too many emails, texts, notifications. Delete the apps or turn off notifications (there are various ways to filter important things from your family, etc.). Unsubscribe from texts and emails you don’t want or read. Cut off the inputs as mentioned earlier. A clean desk and quiet phone will give you more control than any productivity hack.

Clarify Your Direction in Life

Ultimately, what truly gets your life under control is having a plan. A vision, goals - a direction in life you are moving towards. Once you have that, then you know where you’re going and know what gets in the way of that or is a distraction. Get clear on that, then you know when you’re going in the right direction or not.

Ask yourself:

• What would my ideal day look like if I had full control?

• What am I doing right now that doesn’t align with that vision?”

It’s so powerful to have a direction in life because you start to notice that all these things, the notifications, the endless scrolling, are simply distractions from where you want to go in life. You’ll start to see things like that as silly and in the way and will naturally want to reduce or eliminate them. You become mission-driven and the noise from other things starts to dial down.

The final level of direction is getting clarity on your values and purpose. Once you get clarity on that, you’ll have yet another way to prioritize your day, filter out the stuff that gets in the way and do things that align with your values and purpose. This is life on the next level and is ultimately how the most effective, relaxed and accomplished people I know live. When you know your direction, you no longer need motivation. Your purpose does the work for you.

Build a Weekly Review Habit

The best way to manage chaos is to do a quick weekly review of how things are going. This can be as little as 10 minutes and is a game changer. Note that doing a weekly review keeps you on track forever because you’re reviewing how things went and making adjustments.

Here’s a simple weekly review format:

1. Clear all your inboxes and collection points (mailboxes, piles on your desk, etc.).

2. Review your goals.

3. Review your calendar and set tasks/reminders (2 weeks forward and back).

4. Clear your task and email inboxes.

5. Clarity and feedback questions.

   1. What gave me energy this week? What drained my energy this week?

   2. What can I simplify, eliminate, automate or outsource to buy me more free time?

   3. What went well this last week? Did I move toward my goals - why or why not?

   4. What did not go well this last week and what do I need to change or stop doing?

   5. Is there something I’m doing out of habit that doesn’t make sense anymore?

   6. Who or what do I need to start paying more attention to?

This ten-minute ritual keeps you from drifting. It turns control into a repeatable habit.

Summary

Taking control of your day isn’t about motivation or willpower. It’s about building systems that support your energy and direction in life. People and families that have done the above things are happier. They’re more accomplished yet somehow more relaxed. The steps are simple:

• Prioritize energy

• Close your open loops

• Simplify and create a daily/weekly routine

• Clarify your direction in life

• Review things weekly.

The people who do this are calmer and more effective. If you’d like a deeper framework, I share one at Zorga.io.