Structure As An Antidote For Chaos

Nowadays there are a bunch of shitty videos out there overhyping routines.

• “Trying Andrew Huberman’s Morning Routine”

• “My 2-hour Morning Routine”

• “Andrew Tate’s Morning Routine: Become a Top G”

Go to YouTube and type: “routine.”

You’ll find some interesting stuff, but mostly it is crap.

Routines became a meme. Nobody takes routines seriously anymore.

Keep in mind this is not me shitting on routines. 

Everybody has a routine whether they are aware of it or not.

In fact, 99% of people (pulled this number from my arse) do the same things every day in the same order unconsciously. 

We all have one. Whether we choose it or if it was assigned to us by society.

Routines are not bad per se, the reasons for having a routine are what are corrupted nowadays.

A lot of people have routines so they can:

1) Upload it to the internet to show people how perfect their lives are.

or

2) Mentally masturbate themselves into thinking they are making progress.

Emphasis on the second point, because it is one of the most common things I’ve seen online.

Dudes waking up at 5 am to do a cold plunge at 1°, then doing red-light therapy, followed by a 1-hour edging session while listening to Andrew Tate affirmations, followed by 5 more habits.

Then by 10 am, they haven’t done shit. All they did was think themselves into working without doing any actual work.

Having that much complexity in your routine will only make you miserable and won’t make you money.

Most of the dudes doing those routines already have money.

They already did what you’re supposed to be doing.

They didn’t get rich because of weird routines. They got rich because of actual work (or a trust fund kid, you never know online nowadays.)

But then you have the “don’t have a routine” gang.

They swear that not having structure will give you freedom. Which is obviously BS.

I’ve found that a routine can give you the freedom that nothing else can.

Now, you don’t have to tie yourself to any of those sides. You can have a short routine that complements your goals.

That’s what I’m teaching you today.

Structure As An Antidote For Chaos

A lot of people have chaos in their lives.

They don’t know what to do.

All they do every day is fuck around.

• No structure.

• No purpose.

• No goals.

Then they wonder why they have anxiety or depression. 

It’s hard to have an ordered mind when everything about your life is chaos.

That’s why despite people believing that routines will limit them, they accomplish the exact opposite effect.

A routine gives your head the order it so badly needs.

You remove the bandwidth use from planning and not knowing what to do and allocate it to important stuff.

Our brain has limited focus, and if that finite resource is used for planning and not thinking, we are not using it to its full capacity.

The first thing someone who wants to change their lives should do is setting a daily regime.

Knowing what to do and when to do it is imperative.

No wonder you try to be productive, but out of nowhere you start beating your meat.

You haven’t given your time the importance it deserves and you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing at every minute of your day.

Imagine school without schedules.

Everyone just doing whatever they want to do.

You don’t know where you’re supposed to be.

Sounds awful, yet that’s exactly what you’re doing to yourself.

If you want to achieve something worthy, give your time the importance it truly has.

Every minute of your day needs to be used towards your goals.

And what better way than setting the exact list of what you’re gonna do and when you’ll do it.

So here’s what you’re gonna do:

1) Change your perspective on time.

Most significant changes come from doing a paradigm switch, from changing your perspective about something.

As I already said, a lot of people don’t value their time. They spend their days doing nothing.

But you have to realize the clock is ticking.

If you averaged your life span between 76 and 79 years (which is how much people live on average) you’d live for about four thousand weeks.

Four. Thousand. Weeks.

When you talk about life in years, it seems like a lot. But in weeks, you realize how short life actually is. 

(I beg you to read the following article. Completely transformed my perspective on time. Just go read it bro.)

Don’t let this discourage you tho, use this as motivation to make the best out of your life.

No matter how much time you’ve wasted, you still have time to change the trajectory of it.

Whether you do or don’t do the work, time is going to pass. That’s why you need to start valuing your time.

Create an hourly rate for your time.

Say for example you want to value yourself at $20 per hour.

Now, every hour you lose, you’re throwing away $20 bucks.

Use this exercise as a way to change how you see and value time.

Try it out and see if it works for you.

You may think this is dumb, but until you try it yourself, it’s pure speculation.

2) Create a daily regime.

Now that you know how valuable time really is, is time to create your daily regime.

See that I didn’t call it “routine.” They mean the same but can be seen differently.

“Routine” can sound weak and volatile, but a regime, sounds like you’re going to the army, it sounds extreme.

When you talk about a regime it sounds military-like, which is what we are aiming for.

The first thing you have to do is pick the habits you want to stick to, your daily non-negotiables. I wouldn’t go further than 5 habits in the beginning.

If you’re just starting, more than 5 can do more harm than good because you’ll have too many expectations and probably end up doing nothing.

You have to be realistic here since we are not aiming for perfection but for progress. You can add the other habits later.

I would start with the following habits:

• Meditation. 

• Physical activity. 

• Journaling.

• Working on a personal project (eating the frog).

• Reading.

You will be improving all areas of your life.

These 5 alone will change you completely.

Make sure you start slow and then ramp up.

Also, make sure you do them daily, no matter how you feel.

If you only feel like meditating for 1 minute, then just do it for one minute.

If you only feel like reading for 2 pages, then just read 2 pages.

If you only feel like doing 10 pushups, then just do 10 pushups.

When you lower your standards, you allow yourself to progress.

The idea is not to be Mr. Perfect.

The idea is to never miss.

And if you do miss, make sure to never miss twice.

One of the things that helps the most with this is using a habit tracker. 

Here you can get the Notion template I use daily to track my habits.

Now…

Once you’ve picked the habits you want to do consistently, it’s time to organize your day.

You can do it on a piece of paper, you can do it in a notes table, you can do it in Excel, you can do it on a Notion page, you can do it in Google Sheets, you can do it in Google Calendar. 

I personally have a Notion page where I just have it listed in order from top to bottom and then in Google Calendar I have a specific calendar called “Regime” where I have all of my week organized.

Doesn’t matter where you do it, just do it.

You need to have your regime somewhere so not only you can look at it every day, but also so you have a place to iterate and modify it as much as you need to.

Start by blocking things you know you have to do.

Things like work, sleep, and eating are the first things you have to log because these will be the skeletons of your daily regime.

They will determine where you allocate the rest of your activities.

Let’s say you work a 9-5 and you want to become an online writer to quit your 9-5 (just like me).

You eat breakfast at 7 am and dinner at 7 pm.

And you go to sleep at 10 pm and wake up at 6 am

Here’s how your daily regime skeleton would look like:

(sorry if the image looks weird, I had to zoom out a lot so everything was visible lol)

Look at those empty spaces.

That’s where you’ll be doing the habits you have to do.

If you wanted to incorporate all the 5 habits I gave you, you could go about it like this: 

As you can see you’re doing the frog task (the thing that will move the needle) first thing of the day.

This is huge as you could be writing before going to work.

Then you could meditate, get ready, and commute.

Go to work and after work, hit the gym.

Eat dinner, then finish your day by clearing your mind and writing your thoughts.

Then lastly, reading before sleeping (which in my opinion is the best time to read since you will fall asleep easier and can take advantage of a block of time that would be otherwise wasted scrolling on TikTok.)

Now, obviously, I don’t know you or your situation. 

You may be able to do more, or you may be able to do less.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to this.

I’m just giving you the main idea.

It is up to you to do the rest.

You have to look at your life, iterate, and see what works for you.

But trust me when I tell you that the simple action of creating a regime will change your life.

Also remember that the aim is progress, not perfection.

Sometimes I don’t follow my regime.

Sometimes I go to sleep at 1 am.

Sometimes I scroll on IG instead of working.

It is normal to fail.

What can’t be normal is making failure a habit.

So I hope you take anything you’ve learned from this letter and apply it to your life.

If it doesn’t work, then blame me and shit on me, I won’t be mad.

But if it does work, make sure you tell me, so I can know someone learned something valuable from me.

If you liked this letter, please let me know so I can keep making content like this.

If you didn’t, also let me know what you didn’t like so I can improve my content for you.

In both cases, thank you for reading this letter. You’re a G.

PS - If you liked this, you’ll probably like the rest of my stuff, go check it out here.

That is all from me.

Tu amigo,
- Manuel