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May 2020 Theme: Work

Written by Adam on May 1, 2020. Updated January 7, 2023.
7 min read. Personal, Blog. 12 Comments

For all of 2020, I’m trying something different. Every month I’m setting a theme. As part of that theme, I’m also setting goals and habits to help it along the way. These themes aren’t limited to the month either – each theme is for the year but in addition to everything else added before it.

For January my theme was Focus, for February it was Finish, for March, Routine, and for April Create. I picked these themes based on what I felt was the most important at the time to help stay emotionally grounded, productive, and happy.

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Does This Mean the End of the FIRE Movement? [Answer: No]

Written by Adam on April 13, 2020. Updated January 8, 2023.
12 min read. Minafi, Personal, Financial Independence, Investing, Taxes, Blog, Canonical. 23 Comments

March was one of the most eventful years of any lifetime, or at least it felt like it. For us, we flew back from Orlando in late February after a fun week catching up with family, attending a friend’s wedding and getting in some Disney time (Rise of the Resistance is an absolutely amazing ride by the way). Since then it seems like everything has changed:

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April 2020 Theme: Create

Written by Adam on April 1, 2020. Updated January 7, 2023.
8 min read. Blog, Personal. 9 Comments

For January my theme was Focus, for February it was Finish, for March, Routine. I picked these themes based on what I felt was the most important at the time to help stay emotionally grounded, productive and happy.

To my surprise, despite everything else going on in the news, the world cooperated to make these themes successful. Part of this is because these are themes, not goals. Themes help determine where my energy goes, but it doesn’t say what needs to be accomplished at the end of the month.

By itself, it doesn’t mean the month will be successful, but it’s an indication of what I’m spending my mental energy trying to improve.

My Themes So Far This Year

In January (Focus) I got picked for 5 weeks of jury duty (which went into February). That assured I was focused for 8 hours every single day. Combined with other personal guidelines for social media and other distractions and this theme was an effective shock to my system that helped eliminate distractions I’d been trying to avoid (yes, I’m talking about Twitter, Reddit and a few others that were sucking up my time).

In February (Finish) I had the flexibility to clean out my todo list. I ruthlessly uncluttered our apartment, giving away or selling things. I organized my digital life until I could find anything. A photo from a trip back in 2004? Yeah, it’s 3 clicks away. I went through my Minafi task list and completed a handful of programming projects that were already started. Some of them will be part of the Minafi Investor Bootcamp, others will be their own posts. The effect of this was that I felt lighter, with open loops closed. This wasn’t about starting anything new either – it was just about completing things I’d started.

In March (Routine), COVID-19 hit forcing us to stay home. Family canceled their trips out here to SLC and we canceled our 3-week trip to South Korea and Taiwan. There’s never been a better time to focus on creating a routine! I focused on a morning routine, a workout routine, a meal prep routine, a weekly task planning routine, and a few “don’t do this until that” style habits. By the end of the month, I had time blocked my week with tasks that I enjoy and know will be productive (or at least help me feel productive when I’m playing Final Fantasy VII for 16 hours a day later on).

My April Theme: Create

Let’s face it, most of us are going to be stuck at home for all of April. With COVID-19, social distancing, shelter-in-place, and 6-ft of personal space, I have even more time on my hands than usual.

Without some sort of goal or theme, I’d probably just stay glued to the news and freak myself out even more. That’s part of why I’m creating monthly themes – to push myself out of my comfort zone and do things that I know are good for me (even if I don’t always want to).

When stuck at home, it’s easy to get trapped in a consumption spiral. We consume news, check social media, TV shows, movies, games, music, audiobooks, podcasts, food and more. In times of stress, I tend to consume even more.

I’ve been doing more of these lately since being cooped up. I’m generally OK with this being an unusual time. I’m OK with tweaking my usual consumption habits to hear what’s going on in the news.

In actuality that’s mandatory. If we weren’t listening to the news we wouldn’t know of national, state and local rules regarding isolation.

It’s important to check in on yourself to make sure you’re not overwhelmed. This is an exceedingly stressful time right now. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not able to accomplish everything you want to. No one is, and I’m most certainly not. I planned to complete all of the content for the investing course I’m working on by April, but that’s not happening.

I’m not planning to turn my productivity up to 11 in a month. I’m thinking more about increasing the volume from a 3 to a 4. Nothing insane, but enough to have an impact on my mental health.

For April I’m aiming to adjust that habit and shift to a mindset of creation rather than consumption. That’s it. There’s no commitment to what I’ll create. No goal to complete what I start. This is just a mindset shift to create.

A former coworker of mine wrote an excellent article that still resonates with me that ties in with this: The Power of Creation Will Change Your Life. A quote from that article brings life down to two things:

Throughout our entire lives, we are doing one of only two things. Either we are consuming, or we are creating.
Ken Frei

In everything we do we’re either consuming or creating. The last month for me skewed heavily towards the consumption direction. I’ve felt out of balance because of it and want to shift the scale back to even.

To be honest, just writing that sounds exhausting. I’m very cozy in bed my dog right now, watching it snow outside. I have a feeling that to create I’ll have to get out of this warmth (eventually; I’m good now). I do know I feel better when I’m creating something and now just getting sucked into a constant news cycle.

There is a difference between good consumption and bad consumption too. Well, unless you’re playing Oregon Trail, then everything is bad consumption. Reading books, checking in on the world every once in a while, watching courses, learning something new and even watching videos that inspire me to take action is good consumption. I’m not planning on shifting these, other than being more mindful of good shifts to bad.

What Am I Hoping to Get Out of This?

By the end of the month, I want to shift my mindset to where I’m constantly looking for new things to create, I’m excited about their possibilities and I’m investing time to turn them into reality.

Simple right?

What I want to create varies. Lately, I’ve been focused so much on one thing (this blog) that it’s left me feeling underdeveloped in other areas. So here’s what I’m thinking it would be fun to spend time creating during this month:

Cooking new recipes. It’s the perfect time for this! So long as we can get groceries delivered, spending a little extra time learning how to make a new dish has an amazing return on time. We’ve focused a bunch on Southeast Asian, Korean and Japanese dishes – partially because we really love them, and also since they’re usually healthier than popular western cuisine.

Program something. I have an entire kanban board in Notion with programming ideas. Since I’ve been focused on finishing things lately, the board is shockingly empty. This is a chance to fill it up with some new ideas that I’m excited to work on. I’m thinking about adding a Q&A section to Minafi which would be a super-fun project.

Take a course. Learning something new creates a new way of seeing the world. When the right course comes along when I’m mentally prepared for it, it can be world-changing. Part of finishing things in February was getting me to the spot where I was ready to start something new. There are a few courses I’ve been eying – productivity with Notion, data visualization (maybe a Tableau course? or D3.js?), a photography one on Masterclass or something on Vue.js. There’s something attractive about taking a video course right now for that slight bit of additional human contact. (Does anyone have any amazing course recommendations?)

Spend time researching. Project management and research time is soooo underrated. Whether you call it planning, research or exploration, taking the time to develop how you’ll get from point A to B is needed. Take the “cooking new recipes” item above. If I just have that on my list but don’t do anything else except “cook”, then I’ll be limited by what I can make with the ingredients we have on hand. I need to find recipes that look mouth-watering, narrow it down to what looks best, buy missing ingredients and lastly cook. The same can be said for deciding what course to take, what trail to run or what workout programs to try.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
Abraham Lincoln

Research time can be so much fun too! It’s usually very low-stakes and low-energy. Rather than checking Reddit at night, spending a few minutes to decide on a course to take or sort through AllTrails and make a plan for our next hike is worlds more productive. As a bonus, it also makes me more excited about completing it too.

Write more. OK, you probably saw this coming. I did a word count on the Minafi Investor Bootcamp and it’s already up to about 70,000 words – that’s a book! And I’m only half-way done! Luckily the most technical parts of the content are complete, so now the focus is on the more soft-skills of investing (ex: ditching your advisor, retiring in style).

There are areas that I’m not focusing on creating. Mrs. Minafi got me a new camera lens for Christmas that I’m aching to try out (a Fujinon XF16mm F2.8 for those in the know). Once we can travel to some National Parks, that’ll be my main lens.

As much as I appreciate art, I like focusing on the basics (color theory, layout, typography) rather than illustrations and drawings. The Minafi logo is about the extent of my skills.

How Will I Do This?

This doesn’t mean that I’ll be consuming nothing. I plan to continue reading news in the morning, checking my favorite feeds, reading books and listening to audiobooks. The new Final Fantasy VII Remake also comes out this month, and Mrs. Minafi is already prepared for me to be MIA while I revisit the nostalgia from my teenage years.

During my career, I’d love to hear about new projects weeks or months before they were started. This helped me start brainstorming the problem in my head long before ever writing a line of code. I’m hoping to do the same this month – lining up a few things I want to focus on creating and jumping between them.

I don’t need to finish all of them either. This is more about shifting my mindset to creation over consumption. When I’m doing weekly task planning I’ll have that “creation” theme in my mind and I’ll help drive what I work on during the week.

Weekly Task Planning. During my weekly task planning, I’ll aim to highlight and even schedule things I intend to focus on creating. If I know what

Evening research. At the end of the day is when I tend to be the least productive. This is the absolute perfect time to do some research and line up the next things to work on. It has the added benefit of being a problem for “future-adam”. This part is essential to make progress too.

Block creation time on my calendar. One of the takeaways from March (Routine), was how helpful it’s been to time-block my calendar for future tasks. If I know what I need to do and have time blocked out for it, that raises the chance of getting there.

And lastly, don’t beat myself up about consumption. I’m going to miss tasks, I’ll miss times I blocked out and at times I won’t feel like creating. That’s OK! This monthly theme doesn’t mean I need to shift to being perfect.

One unexpected side effect of setting these monthly themes has been that I’ve been much more accepting of my progress in that area – whatever it ended up being. I’ve struggled to feel like I’ve been creating much lately, so I’m hoping this theme will help me celebrate those successes that I might not be seeing quite as much.

Do you have any goals or themes for April? How are you staying sane during social distancing? Are you struggling with over-consumption lately? Or have you found something that’s helped? Let me know in the comments!

21 Activities To Keep You Focused On Your Future [or to help during social distancing]

Written by Adam on March 23, 2020. Updated January 8, 2023.
16 min read. Mindfulness, Blog, Minafi, Canonical. 7 Comments

I have a confession to make: I absolutely love activities that get me thinking about myself, my environment, my goals, dreams or relationships in new ways.

I imagine that’s part of the reason why I loved the switch from Software Developer to Product Manager during my career (before I left my job) – it gave me more time to think about the future and to plan it. Even according to Strengthfinders, my #2 strength is Futuristic (#1 is Strategy, so yeah – future planning is kind of something I enjoy).

Over the years I’ve created or tried a bunch of different activities that help organize the thoughts about a topic, create a goal for the future and map out a course to get there.

As I’m writing this the world is currently on lockdown. Non-essential stores are closed, leaving only grocery stores, food stores, health care facilities and a few other places open.

For the first time, perhaps in my entire lifetime, there’s something happening that will impact every person on planet Earth. This ranges from extreme to mere inconveniences.

If you’re safe and are looking for something to get your mind off the news, then these activities are for you.

If you find an activity that you think will help you: give it a shot! If you find it useful then let me know.

1. Perform A Weekly Task Planning Session

There’s nothing that helps me feel more productive than checking off a few tasks for the day. Afterward, I can spend all the time in the world playing a game, reading Reddit or just relaxing knowing that I got at least something done.

Scheduling things to do is itself a task! One of the best activities that’s worked for me is to set aside an hour at the same time each week. During that hour I do one thing:

Update my todo list with 3 things to do for each day for the next week.

That’s it. I’ve decided to also block off Wednesdays and Saturdays as my “vacation” days during the week, so I don’t schedule anything on those days.

My friend and former colleague Drew takes this process a step farther and includes periodic reviews and also blocks out time on his calendar. I do like the time-blocking idea, as it helps mentally prepare me for doing the work.

Related Activities

2. Write Down 101 Things You’d Like to Know, Have, Do, or Be

This is probably my all-time favorite activity. Whether you call it a bucket list, a life list or a goals list, the idea is the same: write down 101 things you want to know, have, do or be. These are all things you haven’t done, and that you couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do today to just check them off.

I got the idea from a Ted Talk by Renee West. West was the first every woman COO of a major hotel on the Vegas Strip. Her story and her message is inspiring and worth a watch.

The “goals” range from skills you want to acquire (instruments, languages), things you’d like to own (house, car, place away in the woods), things you’d like to do (travel, skydive, swim with sharks) or personality traits you’d like you to call yourself (a good friend, a loving husband, an inspiring mother).

The hardest part is coming up with all 101 things. At about 30 it started to get difficult for me. If you find yourself just listing out countries you want to visit, try to batch them in a group (“take a tour of Southeast Asia”, “backpack around Europe for 3 months”).

To take it a step farther, I try to pick a few of these you want to focus on now. For me that’s these:

Goals to Try for This Year

Go on a week-long camping trip. (Planning for the Uinta Highline Trail).
Run a mile in under 6 minutes (fastest mile: 6:49).
Run a marathon (ran a half-marathon in 2:08 in 2019. Signed up for a marathon in July).
Read every science fiction and fantasy book on the NPR top 100 sci-fi list (57 down, 43 to go!).
Be able to walk on my hands (so much harder than it looks).

This list is based on what’s actually possible this year. Travel and experiences with other people are still on hold, but there’s still a lot I want to do that can be done largely on my own or with a few friends.

Goals to Work Towards This Year

Learn to speak Japanese fluently (up to 110 Kanji using Wanikani)
Be able to do every CrossFit workout RX (in a reasonable time)
Create a business that teaches people how to improve their lives (the Minafi Investor Bootcamp)
Learn how to create interactive visualizations that help teach others (reading lots of books on this and trying things out here on Minafi).
Create a website that generates more passive income than I spend with minimal work (with the current markets this may end up being important. We have 3 years of cash + investments we hope recover by then).

My CrossFit gym did close down this past week. Surprisingly it wasn’t because of the lockdown, but because Salt Lake City was hit with a 5.7 earthquake that knocked out their power! I can’t imagine how hard it is to be a small business right now.

Try your own list of 101 things and see what floats to the top.

Related Activities

3. Create a Personal Mission

If someone came up to you and asked “What is your personal mission in life?”, what would you say?

Probably “hmm, I don’t know, what’s yours?”.

It’s not a normal question people ask.

It’s not a question about what you do for work, or about your relationships – it’s a question that gets to the core of what you want to do.

In a way, it feels like asking a kid in middle school “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. They haven’t experienced enough life to know.

After much consideration in the activity below, I came up with this as my personal mission:

I help empower people to transform their ideas into reality by enlivening education.
My Personal Mission

How I came to this as my mission and how you can create yours is detailed in the following post.

Related Activities

What is Your Personal Mission?

4. Create Your Perfect Week

There’s something about looking at your schedule on a weekly basis that I find helpful. I think it’s because it’s when time “loops”. It’s hard to compare a Saturday and a Monday schedule-wise, but you can compare a Monday and another Monday.

This activity creates a sample routine using a Google Sheet (that you can copy). Creating a routine is helpful – both to feel important and to not get sucked into things you don’t want to be. I feel much more productive when I’m able to stick to parts of a routine.

Try creating your “perfect week”. What would it look like if you could schedule exactly what you wanted to do in a given week?

I’ve tried this activity a few times. Once when working, once when I was about to retire and then again after I actually retired and tried it.

Getting my schedule to a point where I felt productive but not overwhelmed and motivated but not stressed has been the struggle.

At the beginning of March, I decided to try making my focus for the month Routine. I wanted to create specific things that could be called “my routine”. This activity was helpful for ruling some of the ideas in and others out.

Related Activities

5. Start, Stop, Continue

Start, Stop Continue is one of my favorite activities to do with others professionally.

You choose a subject, say “things you want to do with your days now that you’re quarantined”. Set a timer for 5 minutes and write down as many things as you can that you want to start during that time.

Once you’re down, set a timer for 5 minutes and do the same for things you want to stop doing. Repeat this with 5 minutes of things you want to continue doing.

By the end, you should have a list of a bunch of things. You can prioritize them from most important to least, or circle 1-3 things in each column that are the most important.

If you’re really crazy like me you could give them weights and graph them too.

Check out the post for the interactive version

Related Activities

You Can’t do Everything: How I’m Prioritizing What to Start, Stop and Continue in Retirement

6. Design Your Lifestyle

Tanja Hester, from OurNextLife.com, created a very useful activity for designing your life in her book Work Optional.

The activity involves a handful of questions on the day-to-day level, the big-picture level, the legacy level, relationship level, and self-worth level. There are most questions than just those in this image, but here are a few:

After you’ve gone through and answered these, the next step is to try to pick out some themes. What stands out for you will be completely different mine.

The last step is to use these to create a personal mission. Mine from above ended up using this same format:

I help empower [grow] people to transform [grow] their ideas into reality [creation] by enlivening education [explore].
My annotated mission

Try it for yourself! I’m curious to see what other people’s themes are.

Related Activities

Work Optional Book Review: An Actionable Guide to Living Your Best Life

7. Design a Morning Ritual

The times in my life when I’ve been happiest have been when I’ve had a morning ritual. Sometimes that meant writing in the morning, sometimes it meant working out and at other times it meant having coffee in bed.

Whether you’re retired or quarantined, having a morning ritual helps to set a structure for your entire day.

When I first stopped working, I found that I was getting up, checking Twitter and Reddit and all of a sudden it was past noon. That was absolutely not how I wanted to spend my days.

Since my January emphasis on focus, my morning routine looks something like this:

Wake up naturally between 8am and 10am without an alarm (unless you count Lily as an alarm.
Have coffee in bed. Either with a protein bar or by making breakfast.
Mrs. Minafi and I alternate walking Lily around the block in the morning. Usually whoever went the sleep first the previous night walks her first.
I’m learning Japanese using spaced repetition. I’ll review anything terms Wanikani recommends and learn new characters if I have fewer than 50 characters in the “apprentice” category.
Check the news on my iPad from The New York Times and check on my favorite blogs via Feedly.
Check my todo list for the day and mentally prepare myself for it.
Hunker down to read a book until I feel like taking a break (usually either one checked out from the library or on my iPad).

This evolved over time and now it’s become my morning routine. I absolutely love it and miss it when I’m away from home. I start the day feeling productive, learning new things and relaxing – all aligned with one of my personal goals to “start every day relaxed and refreshed”.

Related Activities

The Bulletproof Strategy to Develop a Morning Ritual

8. Create a List of Your Personal Beliefs

What is it that you truly believe in? I don’t think about this as politics at all – this is your personal beliefs that inspire how you act in life. Doing this activity helped me understand what was most important to me.

You can have fun with it too! Pick your side (if you have one) on the true battles we’re facing today: Marvel vs DC (vs Image & others), Star Wars vs Star Trek, Backstreet Boys vs NSYNC, cats vs dogs – whatever you have a strong opinion about.

Related Activities

My 52 Beliefs

9. Design An Irresistible Staircase

I first heard the concept of an irresistible staircase in a talk Simon Allardice gave when I was working at Pluralsight. I immediately loved the concept.

The idea is simple: imagine a building where people aren’t taking the stairs. They’re windowless, dark, concrete and hidden away at the edges of the building. In an attempt to offset more people using the elevators, the building adds a beautiful, open-air stairwell in the middle of the lobby. It’s ornate and everyone sees it right when they walk into the building. Foot traffic immediately adjusts, with more people using the new stairs than ever before.

In this case, a staircase was a staircase. You can use this same approach to solve a problem that you’re facing. Is there something you absolutely want to want to do but haven’t yet been able to get the motivation to start? That’s where an irresistible staircase would help.

That could be getting that pair of running shoes, setting up your desk so you can focus on writing, or getting a good (but cheap) chefs knife so you cook at home. Find what you want to do and design something that’s so irresistible that you do it.

Note: this doesn’t mean you need to spend a fortune either. Try to find the “minimum viable irresistible staircase” – something that solves your problems and motivates with the least effort.

Related Activities

Find Your Irresistible Staircase to Early Retirement

10. Make a List of Your “Why’s” For Financial Independence

A financial one! This one is simple: make a list of all the reasons why you would want to be financially independent (or reasons why you are happy to be FI).

I looked back at this list as a reminder while I was working. It helped motivate me to focus my spending and keep the FI goal in mind. Looking at the whys just as important as looking at the hows.

There’s a common saying in the financial independence community:

Create the life you want then save for it.

Doing this activity helped me move some of these items from my “when I retire” list to my “let’s do that right now” list.

Related Activities

When Pursuing Early Retirement, You Must Be Armed With a Bag of Whys

11. Use Buffett’s 25/5 Technique to Prioritize Your Personal Goals

If you created a list of 101 goals, the next step is narrowing them down to a few you can focus on now. That’s where Buffett’s 25/5 technique comes in handy.

The process is simple: order your goals and pick the top 5. Work on those and actively avoid everything else. This is how I highlighted the 5 goals I’m working on this year.

Related Activities

Use Buffett’s 25/5 Technique to Prioritize Personal Goals

12. Create or Figure Out What Your Keystone Habits Are

Keystone habits are a topic that gets thrown around a lot. My definition of a keystone habit goes something like this:

Something you would do even if it’s not on a todo list or your calendar without needing to motivate yourself to do it.

At a basic level, habits include brushing your teeth in the morning, packing a lunch for work or journaling.

Most habits aren’t keystone habits though. These are the habits that kick-off additional work because other habits are inspired by them.

I don’t have very many keystone habits. My morning routine is a keystone habit. Exercising at 11:30 am every day is a keystone habit. Posting new articles on Minafi on Mondays is a keystone habit. Making a large meal on Mondays so I can leftovers for the week is another one.

Finding or creating keystone habits has been one of the ways I’ve tricked myself into feeling productive while staying at home since retirement. They’re a great way to focus on what matters.

Related Activities

Spotlight Your Potential with Keystone Habits

13. Find Your FIO Number – Financial Independence With Options

This is a fun financial activity. As we get older, it’s very common that our spending increases. We have more income coming in, allowing our lifestyle to become more expensive.

This could be the change from taking a road trip to international traveling, eating in to occasionally eating out, or buying a house rather than living in a cheap apartment.

There’s a term for this – lifestyle inflation. It’s an ongoing balance between improving the quality of life and spending on what you don’t need.

It also makes finding your financial independence number much more difficult. If you’re 22 years old and believe you’ll spend that much for the rest of your life, there’s a 99.5% chance you’re wrong (I’m looking at you Early Retirement Extreme).

So how do you calculate what your spending will be in 5, 10 or 25 years?

To be honest you can’t – but you can estimate it. This activity involves creating that estimate using a PERT review (Program Evaluation and Review Technique). It involves listing out a bunch of “potential” things that could raise your spending and then using the PERT formula to see how it impacts your actual yearly spending.

Check out this activity and the calculator at the bottom to calculate your own FIO number.

Related Activities

Why I’m Going for FIO – Financial Independence with Options

14. Create a Failure Resume

Almost everyone has written a resume. It highlights your greatest successes and puts you in the best light possible. It’s the dating profile of the workplace.

At my last job, I was talking with the other directors about being more transparent about sharing our failures with the rest of the team. One of the other directors said something that stuck with me:

I know of nothing Adam has ever done wrong.

I’ve fucked up a lot of things in my life. This comment made it clear I wasn’t sharing those failures as much though.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes – both at my job and at home. One bug in code actually cost the company $13,000 (!). I was cautioned against sharing that bug openly, saying it could reflect poorly on me in future jobs.

The opposite happened. The blog post I wrote hit the top of Reddit’s /r/ruby subreddit and the front page of hacker news. People clicked over to view the story and many signed up.

People on the team I managed thanked me for sharing a big failure on my part. It showed how the company responded when something went wrong – by learning from it not by punishing.

Cataract Gorge Falls — This photo looks beautiful, but I’d just fallen leaving my bruised for days. See how my hand is curled up? It’s because it was dripping blood.

Whether you’re sharing them publicly or just with those closest to you, sharing your failures is healthy. Do it.

Related Activities

My Failure Resume: A Story of 22 Failures Over 18 years

Related Posts

15. Write Your Rules for Traveling

There’s a saying in investing that the best time to plan out asset allocation is when things are going well. Don’t do it as a reaction, but as preparation.

The same could be said for traveling. Create your own rules for how you travel. This includes what you should spend money on, how you plan your days when you travel, how much downtime you have and what souvenirs you bring back.

Doing this now might even make you a little hopeful of that future trip.

Related Activities

Our 7 Rules for Travel Spending

16. Find An Opinion You Hold That Most People Disagree With

Perhaps my absolute favorite question to ask people in job interviews is lifted from the book Zero to One:

What Opinion do you Hold that Many People Would Disagree With?
Zero to One

This may seem like an easy question, but it’s actually incredibly tough. Chances are that your politics are shared by at least 30-40% of the US population. Whether you’re vegan, you voted for Trump or believe the world would be a better place with universal basic income – there are a LOT of people who agree with you.

Try coming up with your own answer to that question. If you can come up with an answer that 95% of the population would say “you’re wrong” to, you have a good answer. And not just “I disagree”, but a full out “you’re wrong”.

If you come up with a good one I’d love to hear it.

Related Activities

What Opinion do you Hold that Many People Would Disagree With?

Related Posts

My 52 Beliefs

17. Create Your Own Decluttering Manifesto

The first month after I left my job I focused heavily on creating a comfortable space here at home. With that came a bunch of decluttering, organizing and cleaning. I suddenly had time, and uncluttering is free, so why not?

I suspect a lot of people are going through the same thing right now.

One activity that helped me understand what I wanted to bring into my house was to create an uncluttering manifesto. This listed out what I should allow myself to bring into the house and how I would handle growing clutter.

Related Activities

How to Declutter: My Uncluttering Manifesto

18. Try A 3-Minute Mindfulness Exercise

I’ve always struggled with meditation. It’s not that I don’t think it’s useful – I do. I feel I get more out of journaling or writing through an issue than by clearing my mind.

Sometimes though when I realize I’m stressed out about something, I like to use this quick 3-minute mindfulness exercise to help relieve stress. It’s a visualization exercise you can use when you need to give yourself a little breathing room.

Related Activities

Newspaper Mindfulness Exercise

19. Start Your “Year In Review” Post

For the past 10 years, I’ve written a “year in review” post. These go over how the year went for me. They include the big events of the year, travel, entertainment, favorite books and movies, memorable dinners and anything else that stands out.

Backpacking to Lake Blanche was a highlight of 2019.

Even though we’re only 3 months into 2020 there’s already a lot to write about.

One thing that I love about writing this post early is that it helps me realize there are certain things I want to still do this year. I find myself adding things I haven’t done yet but want to do. Just realizing that helps me get there.

Try starting your own year in review!

Related Activities

Write Your ‘Year in Review’ Post Now

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20. Set A Monthly Theme

Setting monthly goals can be a double-edged sword. They feel a little too much like work. The time pressure makes them a little less fun.

Instead, try setting a monthly theme. I’ve started doing that this year, starting with focus, finish, and routine.

I set a few themes for the entire year as well:

Set an intention for every month
Have deeper, meaningful conversations with friends
Develop a deep DIY mindset
Tackle fitness challenges that motivate and inspire me

What I love about setting themes rather than goals is that they can impact me in unexpected ways. For example, in February I set a theme of Finish. My intention was that this would help me do things like complete the Minafi Investor Bootcamp (half done so far!).

Instead, it helped with prioritization in everything I do. When choosing what books to read, what TV shows to watch, what blog posts to write, what to program – everything. I focused on finishing what I started or giving up on (which is a type of finishing).

If I had set a goal of “complete the content for the Minafi Investor Bootcamp”, I might have been more productive in that one area – sure. What was more important was clearing my mind of incomplete projects. After those were addressed, everything had more time!

Try creating your own theme for April. One that will inspire you to spend your mental energy on what you feel is most important right now.

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Improve Your Focus By Setting Monthly Goals

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21. Write What You’re Doing Right Now

Speaking of right now, create a “now” list or page. All it needs to include is a list of a few things you’re working on right now (or this week/month).

The idea of this kind of page was created by Derek Sivers and spawned NowNowNow, an entire site showcasing links to other peoples’ Now pages.

Try creating your own!

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Bonus: Do These With Your Partner

Many of these activities are designed to be done alone, but a few would be tremendously helpful with a partner.

101 Goals, FIO Number and Start Stop Continue are all ones that are excellent when done with your partner.

Try Them Out!

I love pausing to take time out to dig into what I want to get out of life, or what would help me make a bigger impact today.

Whatever you’re currently facing, this quarantine will eventually pass. Do what you need to do to make it through while staying physically and emotionally healthy.

Bloggers & everyone else: if you try out any of these activities, let me know in the comments, or reach out and let me know. If you do one of these activities and post about it, I’ll link over next to that activity.

Stoicism In the Time of a Market Virus

Written by Adam on March 16, 2020. Updated January 8, 2023.
10 min read. Personal Finance, Mindfulness, Investing, Blog, Minafi, Canonical. 5 Comments

It’s been a crazy week. Actually, it’s been a crazy year.

Impeachment. The democratic primary. Brexit. The coronavirus. Massive stock market declines. Travel restrictions. Canceling of the NBA and NHL seasons. Conferences canceled. Quarantines. Parasite winning the Oscar for Best Picture (OK, that was a good kind of crazy, I loved Parasite!).

[Read more…]

March 2020 Theme: Routine

Written by Adam on March 1, 2020. Updated January 8, 2023.
10 min read. Goals, Blog, Personal. 6 Comments

For January my theme was Focus, for February it was Finish. Between just these two themes, I feel like I’ve gained a lot of momentum while also building back some of my ability to work on one thing for a long period of time (part of that was due to cutting out social media in January).

Here’s a recap of the themes for this year, including the new one for March.

January: Focus
February: Finish
March: Routine

For March 2020, my theme for the month is routine.

The word “routine” gets a bad rap. It’s associated with monotony, repetition, and boredom. Routines lack novelty. Routines get old and eventually stop working for what they are trying to accomplish.

But routines are also powerful! You can make amazing progress in areas you want to improve with a solid routine. Routines can even include built-in mechanisms for change and re-evaluation to ensure they stay relevant. Routines can increase or decrease in length as you learn more.

A Successful Routine Study: Todoist

There are very few apps – phone or computer – that I’ve continued to use for years in a row. One of those apps is Todoist, a super-basic todo app. Before settling on this one I tried just about every other task tracker out there (Things and Remember the Milk were my other favorites).

A year ago after I left my job, I got into a routine of using Todoist to schedule my days. My approach was simple: schedule 3 prioritized things I needed to do – then do them!

During the 82 days in a row that I did this (which ended around the time we went on a vacation to Yellowstone), I updated Minafi to the site you see today, started training for a half marathon and set myself up for an amazing hiking season by putting in the initial research.

All of those things didn’t happen because I was constantly pushing myself, but because part of my routine at the time was to schedule 3 things to do each day. One of those tasks could be as simple as “make a list of trails that look interesting” or “sketch some ideas for Minafi’s navigation”.

Progress doesn’t happen all at once. Routine (and habits) are what help it happen.

I’ve struggled with building any kind of routine so far this year. Part of that was that I unexpectedly got assigned to a be on a jury for a trial that ended up taking 5 weeks (!). Add to that a week of volunteering at the Sundance Film Festival, enjoying the Sundance film festival, traveling to Orlando for a week, Valentine’s day and a 14-year anniversary with Mrs. Minafi.

This series of events has made me appreciate even more than I had before how nice is it to be able to have a routine! By having a changing schedule, I wasn’t able to plan out my days like I usually would. I couldn’t schedule a time to work out or write during the days. I also struggled to adapt and find times that worked best.

Because of that, I ended up exercising less, eating worse, making slow progress on projects and feeling more stressed than usual.

The problem wasn’t that I was busy, it was that I wasn’t able to create a routine around those busy times.

It brought me back to when I worked at a retail store (K-Mart!). Since I didn’t have control over my schedule, I didn’t do much productive around that time (unless you count playing a lot of Dance Dance Revolution).

It’s not that you can’t schedule time around it, it’s just that it’s a lot harder than when you know your hours ahead of time.

My hope this month is to get back to a point where I’m again enjoying the weeks and getting into a routine – although this time also with Mrs. Minafi here at home. She left her job in January. Actually, her first day off of work was my first day of jury duty. Sometimes things just align to make sure you don’t get too comfortable.

What Am I Hoping to Get Out of This?

If I had to put it into a sentence, my hope it to get here:

Sustained, enjoyable progress with well-earned relaxation and recooperation.

I’m not trying to put together a routine that maximizes productivity or focuses only on fun. The relaxation I love the most is when I’ve completed something and I’m able to sit back and enjoy the afterglow of a job well done.

Celebrating successes is something I did extremely poorly at during my career. I’d launch a course, release a new product or get a promotion and then the next day I’d be back to looking at what the next 3 months or 2-year plan would be. Sometimes just taking an hour to do something you really want to do can feel like a victory lap.

Another aim is that by creating this sustained effort, I’ll have more time to relax. That sounds counterintuitive, but it’s been my experience that once you get into a habit of doing something, it comes much easier than when you have to force yourself to do something.

Ryan Holiday mentioned this same idea in his book Stillness is the Key.

When the body is busy with the familiar, the mind can relax.
Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

Routines are familiar. My mind knows it can relax because it knows progress is happening. It doesn’t need to constantly ask questions like “am I improving” or “what should I be doing?”. Instead, it focuses on something else. What that something else is could be another problem or another opportunity.

Thinking back, some of my most successful routines didn’t start from a point of knowing they would succeed. They just kind of happened and I went with it:

Going to the gym every morning at 8 am with the same group of friends. We’d all go to the same CrossFit class 3-5x a week (3 for me). That little bit of social pressure and enjoyment made me stick with it for multiple years.
Writing from 5:45 am – 7 am every weekday morning. I can hardly believe I used to do this, but I did – for over a year. Most Minafi articles from 2017 to 2019 were written during these early morning hours. I focused on creating a morning routine that was an irresistible staircase and it worked! I wrote a bunch and didn’t break this habit until I left my job.
Last year I loved hiking once a week. This would usually be a 2-6 hour hike somewhere new. I have a huge Google Sheet with hikes I want to do, research on distance from my apartment and times of year to hike. It makes selecting a trail so much easier. I reward myself with audiobooks along the way, a protein bar (and perhaps beer) at the top, and a burger to celebrate when I got back to the city.
The 3-things todo list approach I mentioned above was a hugely successful habit. I didn’t have a reward for it back then, but nowadays I don’t let myself open social media or Reddit until those are done for the day (although this has the downside of make those feel like a reward).
Reading in the morning with coffee is something I’ve started doing and absolutely love. It started as checking Twitter and reading feeds, then changed to reading the New York Times and most recently has been reading graphic novels on my iPad (Monstress, Saga and now Watchmen if you’re wondering which). Sometimes I’ll eat a meal-prepped breakfast burrito or a bulk-bought protein bar for breakfast while there too. It’s hard to beat waking up, staying in bed with my dog & wife and just easing into the day like this.
Going a weekly date night with Mrs. Minafi – either to a restaurant, a movie or even just on a hike or to a museum is routine that’s its own reward!

What routines have you had that have felt effective? I’m always on the lookout for new ideas! Let me know in the comments.

How Will I Do This?

Creating up a routine is a lot like building a structure. You start with a solid foundation and add more onto it. If you build too fast, or shoddily, everything will collapse and you’ll need to start over.

I don’t have an architectural plan for what my entire routine will look like. Instead, I know what purpose the routine (building) should provide. If it looks like it’s not doing its job, it’s time to tear it down and rebuild.

My plan isn’t to schedule every day, or feel the need to have habits that I accomplish every single day. It’d be easy to pencil in an entire day of activities, or set times of the day when I should do certain things, but after so many failures trying similar things, I’m trying out something different this time around.

I don’t plan to track my habits (although it works well for some people!). My “home” for creating this routine will start with Todoist and one guideline: “schedule 3 things to do each day”. Ideally, these should be scheduled at least the day before, if not sooner, but in a pinch can be scheduled the morning of.

That’s it.

Ok, that’s not everything. I want to develop routines for a number of things, even if I’m not sure yet what the routines will shape up to be. For each I want them to be sustainable, which means they may need to have some kind of reward mechanism depending on the subject.

Quiet morning routine. This one doesn’t take much effort to accomplish – wake up, have coffee, read some and enjoy the morning. For the most part, this means not scheduling other routines over this one. Occasionally going on a morning hike, or meeting up for brunch is another story.

Weekly date night with Mrs. Minafi. Another easy but important one. It’s nice for us to just get out of the house and do something together alone – not a group outing with friends or an evening at home. This is a good opportunity to explore new places too!

Exercise. This one I actually have a routine for, but it’s been on and off due to travel, volunteering, and jury duty. It’s pretty simple though: go to CrossFit MWF @ 12 pm, run (or hike) TR @ 11 am. It’s mostly at the same time each weekday, which feels very routine-y (in a good way). I signed up to run my first marathon in July, so I’m trying to get in shape for that. My hope is to increase the length of the runs from my current 10k average and add a weekend run as the marathon gets closer. Since I’ve been running up hills, a “reward” could mean running on a flat trail. ?

Minafi. There are three areas of Minafi that I’m working on right now. New blog posts every other week, developing content for The Minafi Investor Bootcamp and everything else. In an attempt to finish the Bootcamp, that’s where most of my effort is going to go. I’ve struggled to create focused time to sit down and do the work lately. I’ve been chipping away at things in one-off periods of time, but I’d like to get to the point this month where it feels like I have a solid routine for writing again – something I’ve been without for a while.

Focused learning. I’ve been loving learning Japanese with Wanikani. It’s made understanding kanji more fun than I ever thought. It’s amazing for what it is – spaced repetition with mnemonics to help remember. What it isn’t though is deep focused learning – the kind you get from putting your head down to study. For this, I’ll need to work some focused learning time into my routine to read through things like Genki or Learn Japanese the Manga Way. I have a feeling this will be splitting my mornings some do some deep learning then, but we’ll see.

Not everything in life needs a routine. I don’t need to add a “clean the apartment” routine, or a “relax after dinner” routine. Those are just things that happen when they happen.

I’m excited to see what impact putting the idea of “routine” at the forefront of mind for a few weeks will have. Check back in a month to see the results of this month’s theme!

What about you? Do you feel like your most impactful routines have been? Do you have any advice for others (including me) that might be having trouble getting into one? Let me know in the comments.

How Did It Go?

This is an update as of April 6, 2020 with my takeaways on the month.

March 2020 may well go down in history as one of the most eventful months of our lives. Stock market crashes, a pandemic, social distancing – it was a month of constant change and shifting schedules.

Mrs. Minafi, Lily (our pup) and I have been social distancing in our apartment since our last Costco run on March 16th. Here in Utah, there’s still no official stay-at-home rule, but our county finally issued one on April 1st. I’d like to think since we’ve been home for 3 weeks that we can confirm we didn’t have COVID-19 when we started our distancing. Now we’ll just continue to isolate, wash our hands and do our best not to chance coming into contact with anyone. We’ll do this by getting food & groceries delivered and limiting our outdoor time to dog walks, hikes far away from other people and the occasional run.

So far we’ve been ordering groceries, cooking most meals and having food delivered for dinner once a week. As a result of this, we did see our March spending go down by 28%! Our go-to dishes have been making carbonara (this recipe from Binging with Babish is easy) and Japanese curry using a box of Golden Curry mix and whatever we have in our fridge.

I tried to pile on as many “routines” (or habits) as I could that built on things I was already doing. Creating a routine from scratch is a recipe for disaster, but recognizing a routine and codifying it can help boost its importance.

I’ve been adding each of these routines to my Todoist list, which has helped keep them organized. Here are a few of the routines that I’ve successfully added this month:

Weekly Planning. On Saturday afternoons I do a “weekly planning session”. This is a chance to do some planning for the week ahead, fill in my calendar with some time blocks, add items to my todo list I want to get done or research throughout the week. This helps set the stage for a strong week – even if I don’t hit everything on it.

Monday Reset. Mondays are my reset day. I make sure our apartment is clean, everything is organized, and make a large meal with leftovers. Having this set means I don’t need to think about it throughout the week.

Weekend Morning Learning. I’ve been slowly chipping away at learning Japanese. Mostly one-off lessons with spaced repetition at varying times throughout the day. I added dedicated time on Saturday and Sunday mornings learning Japanese.

Workout 5x a Week. This used to be CrossFit and running before the quarantine. Now it’s running 3x a week and doing bodyweight exercises in our apartment 2-3x a week.

Rest on Saturdays and Wednesdays. I’m not scheduling anything for Saturdays or Wednesdays (other than a weekly scheduling session on Saturdays). I’ve loved having two days when I can do whatever I want and not feel like I’m behind. As a result, I’ve found new creative projects and other new things to do on these days.

There was one area I struggled with though: creating dedicated creative time. It’s been hard to set out time when I need to be 100% focused. Often those times will hit and I just don’t want to write or work on what I planned out. I could muscle through it and just do it anyway, or take the easy road and do something more fun.

This month I took the easy road quite a lot. With everything else going on in the world being productive wasn’t exactly a top priority for me. And that’s OK!