Transcript:

Welcome back to The smashed system podcast. I’m your host, Nino Prodan. This week, we spoke a lot about the impact of the corona virus on our daily lives and the uncertainty that it has created. And I’ve given you a couple tools to deal with it. And what all that really comes down to is creating systems. And what those systems are is ways to take advantage of the way your brain normally reacts, things that you can repeat to get a predictable result. See, as a kid, I used to forget my keys all the time. I used to forget things all the time. When I was leaving the house, someone would remind me my mom, my dad, my sister would say hey, don’t forget this. And I would say okay, and then I will go do one thing. And guess what? I would forget thing that they told me about. So what I did was create a system. So I wouldn’t forget things. I was leaving the house. I will put things by my shoes, because my shoes were the last thing to go on. If something was by my shoes, there was about a 99% chance that I would remember it. And then I went to create other ones that were similar, like checking for my keys as I was about to close the door, because I was notorious for locking myself out. And then along the same lines is I got tired of looking for my keys all the time, I kept losing them. And I thought about it and it eight hours out of my life, looking for keys. And so what I did is I started putting my keys into a basket along with my wallet, and anything else that I carried on me every time I left the house. So when I went to leave the house, everything was in the same location. Now everything isn’t foolproof because sometimes you get distracted, you’re carrying things into the house and then you forget to put stuff in the basket but The most part, these systems work, because they’re based on triggers. And triggers can be good or bad. Psychological triggers are used to manipulate people, but you can also use it to manipulate yourself. You can use it, to create habits within yourself, to act a certain way to think a certain way to feel a certain way to remember things. If you forget things all the time, you can do like I did, and start creating triggers to jolt your memory to think about what it needs to do before leaving the house. Or when you’re getting home from doing something and you want to feel a certain way. You want to put the day behind you because it’s stressful. You want to put your focus on your family. Create a trigger as soon as you walk through the door, going through the doorway could be your trigger, and you can see yourself shedding the skin of the day off as you walk. through the door and becoming a new person, you can imagine the stress swing on your shoulders and as soon as soon as you walk through the door, you could see a fall off and repeat it every single time you walk through the door, put a sticky on the door to remind you. That way, your brain starts to do it automatically as you continue doing it. You could also use this right now, if you’re working from home, say you’re having trouble concentrating. So set aside an area for yourself that’s only dedicated to time for work, and do your work there. That way. Every time you sit in that seat in that spot, it activates your brain to know that it’s time to work. Don’t do anything else while you’re sitting there. And also get help from everybody. Let them know if they see you sitting there. It’s not acceptable to bother you. And one way to do this too is to limit The time that way, when you’re focused, you’re not being bothered. But then you give it a break, so that you can relax and pull away and also not interrupt work time while you’re sitting in the chair or sitting in that spot. And soon enough, your brain will recognize that spot as the place to get work done. And then when you sit there, you’ll actually become more prod