⚒️ Toolbox #4: Managing Burnout, Authentic Vulnerability & De-Screen Your Vision

🛠️ Welcome to the Weekly Toolbox. Our most practical resources, tools and strategies so you can level up each week in minutes.

1. Managing Nerves, Anxiety and Burnout with Jonny Miller & Lenny Rachitsky

Jonny Millar is the founder of Nervous System Mastery, and has helped hundreds of professionals cultivate calm, reduce nervousness, enhance resilience and elevate their sense of aliveness. Our favourite tool from this interview is his A.P.E (Awareness, Posture and Emotion) framework for recognising body signals, but there are at least 10 other gems he gives in this episode.

Listen on your favourite podcast platform here.

2. How To Write Usefully by Paul Graham

A big driver for writing this newsletter is to become more useful writers. The understatement of the century, however, is that writing is hard. This essay by prolific writer and investor Paul Graham gets to the heart of good writing: it should be important, novel, correct and have strength. He elaborates on his useful writing formula in this essay.

Read it here.

3. Four Tools To Build Team Trust | BrainTools #46

Trust is the cornerstone of any high performing team. And it takes time to build, and can be lost in an instant. We give you 4 evidence-based tools to build trust from the ground up, and become a more compassionate, radically candid and effective leader.

• Tool 1: Build An Excellence Inventory

• Tool 2: Give Trust A Face

• Tool 3: Information Rituals

• Tool 4: Authentic Vulnerability

Listen on Apple or Spotify.

🤔 Brain Riddle

What English word has three consecutive double letters?

Find the answer at the bottom of the newsletter!

💻👁️ De-Screen Your Vision

Most of us stare at our screens for too long when we work. This short distance visual focal point can elevate our cortisol, stress and anxiety.

Simply put, our brains aren't evolved to deal with a high volume of short range visual attention.

That's why you need de-screening.

Implementation Guide

1. Look away from the screen at a focal point far into the horizon.

2. Try to expand your field of vision into a panoramic lens.

3. Allow your gaze to soften and don't concentrate too deeply on any one point. The goal is to soak in a wide vision view of your surrounding.

4. For every 30 mins staring at your screen during your work day, spend ~5 minutes de-screening.

Doing this effectively resets your optical system which is directly attached to our nervous system. It helps you reduce stress, reset focus and help recenter your concentration.

Research & Further Reading

• How Panoramic Vision Can Reduce Your Stress and Anxiety | Andrew Huberman

🎯 The 80/20 Rule

The author Richard Koch says: “80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.”

He’s right.

Working on the right thing - the most important thing - is much more important than working fast. After all, there’s no point going fast if you’re going in the wrong direction.

You should use the 80/20 rule to allocate your time - your most precious resource - on the things that matter most.

Implementation

1. Define what success looks like to you for any goal, project, business you’re working on.

2. List all the actions you could take to get you closer to that goal.

3. Then ask yourself: “If I could only do one of these actions, which one would I do that would get me the closest to my goal?”

4. Be ruthless with that one thing. It’s the only thing that matters. Schedule it as your first task you do every morning (or in your Zone of Effectiveness) and execute. Ignore everything else.

The examples are endless:

• 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients;

• 80% of your procrastination comes from 20% of your temptations;

• 80% of your problems come from 20% of your vices; and

• 80% of your success comes from 20% of the actions.

Your job is to find the smallest set of activities, that you can control, to create the biggest impact on getting from where you are, to where you want to be. Do less, achieve more.

Research & Further Reading

• How to 80/20 Your Life | James Clear

• The Pareto Principles | The Plymouth Student Scientist

• 100 Examples of the 80/20 Rule