The environment you’re in strongly dictates how productive you are.

You must control for:

• Morning routine
  • what do you do when you wake up? building habits of doing things as simple as taking a shower and making breakfast could change your whole day due to its kick-start
  • do you have a thing you’re waking up for? you need to know what you’re doing in the morning before you wake up! (tip: commit to a meeting/workout with someone)
  • do you know what you’re wearing? this is less important for some, but in any case you should at least have clean and ready laundry. Running around preparing could -again- influence your whole day based on its kick-start
• Work place
  • where do you work? your work spot has to be defined and comfortable. It must have everything you need (e.g. water, coffee, papers, outlet, etc…)
  • do you have your work station ready? if not, you should at least have your bag ready to go or to be ready in seconds
• Work itself
  • what the heck are you working on? you should have a list of goals for the day, week, or month that you address. Or a to-do list as a breakdown of those goals if that works better for you
  • a very interesting habit to instill is to write the day’s goals as part of your morning routine, or by a certain hour
  • check the Rawi model for getting shit done that uses weekly checklists
• Recreational activities
  • are you doing things other than work? Doing such activities (esp. sports) would motivate you to work more because you’d value time more, let alone feel refreshed and energized
  • do you have those planned in advance? even if a day before. You don’t have to fill your schedule, but put it in there
• Meeting people
  • very strong tool to reflect through people & either feed off their energy, or use what you find negative to motivate yourself to work on bettering yourself
  • not to mention the benefit of seeing and catching up with your loved ones. It’s rejuvenating
  • tip: stay tf away from those who suck your energy and leave you drained
• Evening routine
  • what you do before hitting the bed? it could strongly influence your kick-start for the next day. Did you do your errands? prepared your schedule and goals for the next day? Don’t sleep until that’s done
  • are you getting enough sleep? nobody in this day and age can dictate exactly when they go to bed and wake up with ruthless discipline unless they’re fine killing their social life (and occasionally some of their business prospects as well) BUT you should do your best to get in bed early enough to get 6-8 hours of sleep depending on what works best for you

I find my most productive days to be those which include every ingredient of this recipe. I wrote it here as a reference, mainly for myself, as well as others to revisit whenever one feels a lack of productivity. Not all of your days shall be productive, but if you can make most of them so, why the heck not?

Farewell.

A year ago, I stumbled upon a thought provoking question that has had quite an impact on how I think:

What are your 10 year goals? How can you achieve them in 6 months?

The point here is not necessarily to end up achieving your 10 year goals in 6 months, but the exercise of thinking of an answer itself will be eye-opening.

Some of your long term goals can actually be achieved in a much shorter period of time. And if you realize you can do that, then why the hell not? Living one’s life with a sense of urgency to achieve will require more effort, but it certainly is more rewarding.

Granted, some things come with time (coupled with work), but perhaps the majority of our goals are just pending our disciplined action.

[this is work in progress]

I stumble upon numerous pieces of wisdom or philosophy every now and then that I end up applying on my everyday life. With time, however, I tend to forget some of them and feel like I’m re-learning some lessons when I find them again. Hence, inspired by my friend Fahad, I decided to jot down all the rules, principals, and pieces of wisdom that I wish to follow here so I can revisit them every few weeks. I’ll jot them down scattered down here, and perhaps organize them with time. This is mainly for my own reference, but I figured it might be helpful for others as well.

On Knowledge

• No matter how much you know, you know little.
• Knowledge is a great thing, only if put in a phenomenal application. You’ll need to learn a lot however before you’re able to apply some of that knowledge.
• You are incredibly lucky to be alive in this day & age. Access to information has NEVER been easier. Utilize it. Learn in every means you can and from every channel possible. Learn about what you’re interested in and what matters to you. Learn about what we learned from the past and what’s important for the future.
• We tend to place things into boxes, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. We’re animals of pattern. Patterns and boxes help us understand things better by making them more predictable, and that’s how we can build on them. Every while though, these boxes become outdated, and you must be open enough to take things out of that box, figure them out, and put them in a new updated one.
• Documentation of knowledge and wisdom has been extremely beneficial for the human race.

On Wisdom

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I’ve visited some of the most expensive cities in the world recently, and the food was almost as expensive, if not cheaper than the GCC (proper meals, not cafeteria food). In this post, I try to breakdown the reason(s):

To start with, restaurants have 3 main cost elements:

1. food ingredients
2. real estate and
3. labor.

Gulf countries have SIGNIFICANTLY lower costs on all 3 elements!

1. Crops, meats, and dairy are cheaper (whether local or imported).*
2. Real estate is 2-3 times cheaper.*
3. Labor is 3-4 times cheaper.**

So why the heck is food in restaurants so expensive here? It makes no sense. Some might think that it’s greed, which may be a factor, but certainly not the prevalent one.
After a lot of thinking & analysis, I reached to the conclusion that high food prices track back mainly to poor demand generation, which results in poor unit economics management.

There’s very little traffic to restaurants here compared to international urban cities. But why??

Well, multiple reasons. Here are some:

• For one, urban planning is poor in most GCC cities, or  at least not designed for transportation efficiency
  • meaning there are no areas of condensed traffic
  • low foot traffic due to the weather
  • less orders for restaurants per neighborhood
• Most people live & work in different places, resulting in areas full of offices, and others full of homes. This means that:
  • Restaurants in homey areas have orders only during evenings in weekdays, & sometimes on weekends. Otherwise, they’re dead.
  • Restaurants in office areas have orders only during weekdays day-time. Otherwise, they’re dead.
• There’s too many restaurants for the consumers with purchasing power (there’s 1 restaurant for every 300 people in New York. But there’s 1 restaurant for every 150 in Bahrain for example, meaning more restaurants are making less money).

That means in order for a restaurant to survive (break-even on recurring operational costs) they have to charge higher margins to make up for the low traffic!

Food delivery startups have helped solve that problem slightly, but added another massacre of 20-30% cuts, not really benefiting the users or restaurants by much in the long run.

Cloud kitchens promise to resolve this, but on-demand food production is still time consuming, delivery times are still high, and cost is on the rise regardless of current cheap labor availability.

Wonder what the solution may be.

* New York vs. Riyadh in terms of cost of living (produce + real estate)
** minimum wage in  NYC, SF, AMS, etc… ranges between $12-15 compared to $2-4 in the GCC.

Maybe the secret to living a happy life is in not taking things too seriously. Maybe it’s also the secret to succeeding at whatever goal you desire, as it makes you less uptight and more likable. Maybe it’s ok to accept mediocrity every now and then, because life is like that. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, and has mediocrity all over it. Maybe it’s ok to admit that life is shit sometimes and not live with so many made up rules that make you uptight and pretentious. Maybe start truly accepting that shit happens and that people’s well-being is more important than any other arguably meaningless goal. Technically, all human goals should contribute to elevating the state of humans, and if whatever goal you pursue is built on the acceptance of hurting someone’s well-being then that defies the whole purpose. Maybe being “type A” gets you somewhere fast, but also kills you -and your relationships with people- fast. Maybe.. Just maybe.

Funny enough I think this was triggered by this Cafe I’m sitting at in Amsterdam that had so many imperfections which somehow made it so fucking beautiful.

Old man on a ladder fixing a light in the middle of the Cafe at noon because it needed to be fixed for him to go home and see his family later. Waitress takes a long time to respond to you because she’s busy serving others. Chef leaves the kitchen every now and then to take a walk because he’s bored. Waiter grabs a fry and munches on it as he delivers the tray to the right table because he’s hungry. Why the fuck not.

Maybe.. Just maybe.

If you like weed, you’d love acid.

It feels like being high for long hours. It makes it feel normal. Like life could actually be like this.

When I was in the woods, I walked in for 45 minutes or so until I got high. And once I got high, I started seeing everything better, in a sense.

I reached to this little bridge and on one side there was a lake and on the other side it looked like an ocean. It was open ended. Only the clear waters and the sky for you to look at. The other side had all the good stuff for me. It had all the leaves, in different shapes and sizes, in different places. It had lots of swamps and corners where there was something happening. And I could look at one thing and forget the world.

I would focus on one element: say the shivers in the water as the wind blows, or a leaf being moved an inch back and forth by the water.

I was stunned here for no less than 20 minutes, 0 words spoken.

You start noticing patterns. Especially patterns in movements. It’s like you feel more aware of your surroundings, and whenever something moves you detect it. It probably feels so compelling to look at it because it might feel like you’re part of it, and it’s part of you.

It’s beautiful, I don’t know how to describe it. But that’s when I tried to put it in words to our friend who didn’t go on acid to stay sober with us, she never tried it before. It took me a few minutes of starting at things to be able to come up with the words.

“It’s like you see details in anything. I just stared at this broken concrete I’m sitting on for the past couple of minutes observing it. How was it broken like this? Looking at the patterns on it, the difference in colors. I look at one thing and pause the scene, and end up feeling every fucking detail in it.

There you go. I can’t say it any better.

On the way back, out of the woods, I saw a world in every bit of corner I spotted. I stared at the ground for minutes and it seemed like I could do it for hours, if we didn’t have to move. I honestly think I would’ve been stuck there if it wasn’t for the group moving us in the right direction out of the woods. I was so compelled by the details. The sensations. The touch. The feel. I pushed a stone into the ground and felt the grains of sand being carved to make way for the pushed stone.

I barely collected the courage to look up cuz I’ve been walking for minutes faced down and I immediately notice how beautiful the leaves are and I see the patterns in them. I see the holes in these leaves that are 4 meters above me and I see how light is passing through these holes. It is fucking surreal. Everything becomes clearer, and everything becomes more beautiful.

I can just look anywhere and immediately see something that’s incredibly beautiful and unique that stands out or make one up (i.e. find beauty in anything)

I was so much better at seeing beauty in things.

Sensations are also amplified. Some are numbed, completely fucking numbed. You don’t feel your body. You’re literally drugged. It’s similar to being on weed I guess in that regards, but also amplified.

But more than anything. Sensations are fucking amplified. I taste the water I drink. I literally tasted 2 different waters and knew which one was from the tap of my friend’s place in Brooklyn, and the other was from the tap in Jersey (and if you’re wondering, the tap from Brooklyn tasted a whole lot better). It tasted more earthy in a sense, more natural. And the water from Jersey tasted a bit metallic, like the tap metal which the water came through

I smell much better too. Smell of weed or tobacco makes its way. And it smells different. It’s like I get a better sense of the smell.

Sounds are amplified. Sometimes you can listen to a very subtle crack of a log you’ve stepped on. Something you would’ve always ended up ignoring otherwise.

The conversations I’ve had are fucking insane. I don’t even feel a thing while talking. I continue talking with 0 fucking restrictions. Which is scary. We spoke about so many insane things, I’m so glad I’ve recorded most of the conversations, which I’m yet to listen to sober.

I’m sure I would’ve never reached to some of these realizations or thoughts had it not been for acid. For that I am thankful.

At some times you don’t feel like talking, you just listen or watch

Which was quite odd for me because I’m a very talkative person. Especially when I was staring at nature, I had 0 intention or will of talking. I just couldn’t put in the energy. My energy was all poured into observing visually. It’s like I was stunned.

Over the past few years, I’ve developed a decision making process that helped me navigate through the toughest and biggest decisions of my life so far, and it has never failed me as it runs on objectivity. Give it a try if you’re stuck with a decision. Here it goes:

If you’re unsure of a decision, don’t ask people for advice right away. Grab a piece of paper, write down the problem, mention the options, and run a quick SWOT analysis on each (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) be very objective. Make it into a table like this one:Read More

Over the past few years, I have tested many task management tools, read about plenty of methodologies, and experimented with different approaches and routines in the pursuit of productivity. Let’s just say that I didn’t stick to any one of them for a good reason: they didn’t work well. The main reasons for their failure, I believe, are the following:

• Triggers: I tend to forget about my task management tool (where I wrote down what I need to do basically). My tasks need to be top of mind so I would actually do them.
• Distractions: We get interrupted a dozen times a minute in this day and age, especially in a fast paced work environment. That does you no favor to focus on the task at hand to finish it with quality in a timely manner.
• Prioritization: Which tasks are more important?
• Rewards: There’s usually little motivation/incentive for me to get all the things on my list done

The reason why I’m calling this the Rawi model is because, well, it’s my last name. Deal with it.

So, here’s how it goes in a nutshell. I’ll explain the steps in the process, then I’ll dive deeper into each step.

1. Write down the tasks
2. Estimate the time that each task will take
3. Assign the priority for each task
4. Record the time you actually spend on each
5. Update your list

Sounds simple enough, huh? Here’s what makes this different than everything you’ve been doing.

Step 1: Write

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The beauty in any piano piece mainly lies in 3 variables. It lies in having each note that plays to be slightly different from the one before it; not too similar, not too different (variance). It lies in having the piece shift between the fast and the slow pace to form the perceived harmony right in the middle (speed). It lies in having the pitch of these notes interchange between the happy and the sad (balance).

Without variance between people, life would be dull. We need people who are different from us just as much as we need people who are similar to us, and the best people for us are those in the middle; not too similar, not too different.

Without speed changes in life pace, life would be boring. We will have fast-paced days where we can barely catch up, and we will have days where we’re taking a step back, slowing down, reflecting and relaxing; both are necessary for each other.

Without balance between good and bad, life would be meaningless. We must have bad days to have good ones. If there was nothing wrong, then there’d be nothing right; both have to coexist.