The Secret to Staying Consistent
Sharpen and Templatize; Pencil Sharpening Sessions
Consistency is the key to achieving your goals. If you are an NBA All Star, it’s consistency in putting in training sessions. If you want a banger body, it’s consistency in the right kinesthetic program. If you want to build a YouTube channel, it’s consistency in making content.
The secret to staying consistent is something I call Sharpen and Systematize.
As humans, we have two modes. Deep Energy vs Shallow Energy.
The problem is, the majority of out time is spent operating under Shallow Energy. So the key is not only a combination of improving how you perform under your deep energy sessions, but also your output under your shallow energy sessions.
Part I: Sharpen
One Line Takeaway: Make it a habit of scheduling “Pencil Sharpening Sessions” during your deep energy states.
Explanation:
“It’s not about how hard you row, it’s about what boat you are in.” — Warren Buffett
It’s important to regularly invest some time when you are in a deep energy state in order to make the goals you want to achieve as easy and seamless as possible. If you are rowing hard with a stick, good luck getting to your destination. If you use a jet propelled engine, you honestly won’t need to work that hard.
“But Matt, where in life can I find the jet engines!” I used to think that jet engines are rare, but especially with a creative mind, they are way more abundant than you think. You would be surprised if you are mindfully and consciously looking for jet engines, and are setting aside time in your regular work day to find them (and even buy them), there’s a lot out there.
People work hard every day to give value in any industry and field designed to make you more productive. Or if one solution doesn’t work, the beauty is we can combine other people’s solutions to engineer our own path to getting a jet engine. It’s the engineering mindset. More often than not, it will already exist. But if it doesn’t exist, we can build it.
These things will be different for everyone, but in general I believe these are the different parts of your pencil you should focus on sharpening:
Part 1: Environmental and Physiological Sharpening
- Cleaning my room and surrounding environment (clear mental headspace)
- Having a purposeful desk setup
- Health, sleep, nutrition, exercise, diet — these all also increase the levels of deep energy sessions you have in a day. My mind is part of the boat too. It’s simple: more deep energy means more output.
- A 3L water bottle that makes it so that I only take water once a day and my water intake is solved for the rest of the day
Part 2: Relationship Sharpening
- Building and growing relationships where you have each other’s backs
- Delegating via freelancing, friends, and family (my favorite way to spend money is to have somebody teach me a something 1 on 1 or trade their time for my money)
Part 3: Template Sharpening
- Notion Templates
- Personal Project Management Journal and System (I can go deeper into how I do this in a separate article or video)
- Making a platform (for me an Instagram account is very effective, especially since you are incentivized to do a good job at every session) to easily and consistently document my progress (made one each for my chess, table tennis lessons, entrepreneurship insights, and music journey)
- Having a dedicated and frictionless piano setup for my recording sessions so that I can more consistently record my music.
More specifics can be found at Part II of this article.
Part 4: Tool Sharpening
- Finding tools with the mindset of “Will this make me work incrementally faster?” Over time, if you stack these things, they will add up. In chess endgames, a Grandmaster way of thinking stale endgames are: “If I can improve my position by 3–5% at a time, and the opponent improves by 0%, patience will eventually make my position a clearly winning one.”
- Leveraging the power of software
- Investing in productive assets (I view myself as a business) for whatever your business is.
Part 5: Reflective Sharpening
This is a sharpening area that is often overlooked, but is very important. Me writing this article distills the concept out of my head into a simple form that is digestible to other people. This very term of “Pencil Sharpening” is something that I only coined after going through the process of writing this article. But it is something that will simplify the decision making process in my head and is definitely not time wasted. Before I wrote this concept out, I do waste mental headspace trying to figure this out. But now that I wrote it out, it’s something I have ownership over and this more developed concept will be something that I will make very actionable for my life.
It also increases self awareness by a lot. The words you choose to tell yourself and the internal conversations you have with yourself is often not monitored enough. But in fact, these words and conversations are an immensely large contributor to your future success.
I don’t know about you, but I truly hate the feeling of not being able to truly understand something. Writing and building something around it vastly deepens my understanding of it and is very good for not only my growth, but also my well being.
Part 6: Goal Oriented Sharpening
This is basically Template Sharpening, but it’s worth it’s own section.
This is where you apply Systems Sharpening to your highest priority goal you need to achieve.
For me right now, I need to get going with my video production process for my YouTube channel and it’s hard for me, so I am doing the hard work upfront to make my video creation process as enjoyable as possible.
For me, I have to make a system for recording where I lay out template or a very clear set of steps for whenever I record. This template will help me tick off all the boxes and things I need to keep in mind for whenever I do a recording session. I usually have to reinvent the wheel and think of these things, but if I have it on hand with me with the template for every time I want to record, I will actually record more often!
Here’s the theme. You practically dedicate time blocks which I call “Pencil Sharpening Sessions” within your deep work sessions to make your autonomous and easy work sessions more productive. It helps to choose one section at a time for each of your pencil sharpening sessions.
This way, you are putting in less combined effort, but are achieving more than people around you — simply by virtue of having a better boat.
Part II: Templatize (Systematize)
Templatize is not really a word, but it’s the word I am making to describe the action of turning something into a systematic template. Templates are powerful, and can be applied to way more areas than you think. It’s so powerful because as you try to snowball your skills through habits, this is like a way to steepen the slope of the hill to help you snowball even faster.
Templates will not only save a lot of effort, it ensures you do the right thing consistently every time you do it. Consistency is built upon habits and routines.
You have to make sure each time you do a session of your routine (like listening to the news, writing an article, chess lesson, piano lesson, etc.) you are improving by at least 1% every time (as much as you can). Making a system will help you do this. Empty Sessions are toxic and should be the enemy to your productivity — these are the sessions where you simply go through the motions.
For example, I used to listen to news, but the next day I would forget or I would listen with only 10 percent of my mental capacity because I have a habit of multitasking — I used to have tons of these Empty Sessions and this actually snowballed into a ton of wasted time in hindsight. I don’t get much out of this system. Now, I make a Notion Template for every time (as often as possible) I have a news scouring session. Here are the sections I am reminded to or can fill out in my template:
- What Happened? (Simply listing the events and what their potential impacts might be).
- Concepts
- Price Action and Portfolio: where I evaluate and make comments regarding what has happened to my portfolio and price action going on in the market. Here I also list important metrics I should keep track of.
- Company Analysis
- Other People
- My Actionable Strategy
These don’t have to be complicated. In fact, it should be made as simple as humanely possible. Simple scales, fancy fails.
You should think of the things you do regularly as systems that help you move closer and closer towards your end goal at the end of every session.
The other benefit of templatizing is when you find out new things that are very good to routinely implement in your life, simply putting it in your system that you see every time you do the activity will make it so that you actually do it.
A good systematic template makes your routine as actionable and enjoyable as possible. It is also regularly optimized for the metrics you want to optimize. For example, if I want to always have some sort of action every time, I would make a section where I force myself to list out the actions I take on my portfolio based on the financial research that I did that day. Or if I deem reflection important for the particular routine, I add a section that encourages that.
People often spend time making the food, but less time reevaluating ways to improve their recipe. Templates inherently encourage a consistent self evaluation and consistent improvement of your recipes.
I like to keep things simple and actionable. So the takeaway phrase from this article is to: schedule pencil sharpening sessions (pick one of the 6 sections I discussed earlier in this article for each session) into your day. The rest of the article is just to explain and go deeper into what that means.
