Templating your life

Once your heart is committed to something it’s easier to do it. Here is a tool to help you commit to practices you want to incorporate into your life: Put it in your schedule and then just never argue with your schedule. A study showed that you only have x number of willpower points per day. It’s why it’s easy to follow your diet first thing in the morning, but then after work you’ve expended them all, so at that point, it feels like pizza or beer is a really good idea. We only have a few points per day, so we expend them throughout the day, and then we run out of them towards the end of the day. So, the end of the day is not a good time to make a decision or make efforts. Some of the guys who are into hacking life say they decide ahead of time what they are going to eat all day long so they don't waste any willpower points on deciding what to eat. They say - I go to work at the same time, I wake up at the same time, I use the same toothbrush, etc. They save their willpower points for later in the day. They eliminate all these decisions so that they save their willpower points for things that are significant. This is kind of like that. If you want to do yoga, put yoga in your calendar, and just do what your schedule says. Surrender to your schedule so it doesn’t take any willpower to go to yoga because it is in there the same as if you had scheduled a client. And you treat it like it is the same. I call it templating your life. Template your year. Template your life. Template a month. Template a week. Even template a day. You are pre-creating it so that you can just flow into it. You don’t have to be in negotiation around things because you’ve created a structure. And it’s fine to change it, but change the structure, don't just say “I'm not doing that thing today”. Meaning, if you don't want to do yoga today, you either have to change the structure and quit saying that you go to yoga every day, or you go to yoga.  This makes it a container you can flow into and find your rhythm. You don’t question your decision. You create a container and then you stick to it.