The productivity hack nobody is talking about

There's a chance that you're trying way too hard to change your life. You're expending all of your willpower on things that don't require it. Let me give you an example: I've been playing hockey for about 20 years. I'm going to be 27 this year and I've been playing since I was like two feet tall.

So, after 20 years of conditioning, what do you think happens to me when I step inside a hockey rink? I immediately want to play hockey. I start thinking about scoring goals. The environment, the smells—everything about being inside a hockey rink creates a downhill slope that makes me just want to play hockey. But little do we realize everything in our life is like this, especially the spaces that we most commonly occupy.

Even the smallest things, like the layout of our furniture, what foods are on display in our kitchen—every room in your house is telling you to live your life in a certain way. A lot of the time, those ways are ways you want nothing to do with. And then when we try to live our life differently, or we want to improve ourselves and improve our habits, it just feels like we're swimming upstream all the time. We can't figure out why nothing ever sticks; we feel like some other force is working against us, causing us to fail.

Now, I'm not trying to perpetuate some type of victim mentality. I'm not saying that there's nothing you can do about it, that your environment is against you, some third party is involved, and responsible for changing your life. In fact, I'm saying pretty much the exact opposite. Because our behavior shapes our environment, and in return, our environment shapes our continued behavior. These things feed into each other.

So, let's talk about how we can leverage this principle to use our behavior to shape our environment in a smart way, to create downward slopes into living the lifestyle that you've always wanted to live. So the first thing you should do is go room to room and ask yourself, "What is the goal of this room?" Then observe all of the little features of the room that are inhibiting that intended purpose.

How do you make a better bedroom? Well, what's your bedroom for? It's probably for sleeping and alternative forms of exercise. So how do you create an environment that fosters those things, that makes those things better? Well, first and foremost, you probably want that place to be clean, welcoming—a nice, warm, comforting environment. So when you rest your head on your pillow at night, you're not shaken to your core at the absolute chaos that surrounds you.

So, step one is probably to clean up your room. Don't have clutter lying around everywhere; oh, that's no way to treat your clothes. If you're like me, your bed takes up 85 percent of the real estate of the room because I live in a little closet. But even with my limited floor space, I can still have a nice little lamp in the corner, maybe buy a plant, put up a mirror, maybe a painting, buy one of those little closet organizers, and get rid of a lot of the clothes that I don't wear.

After I do these things, then all of a sudden, sleeping in my bedroom is just a more enjoyable experience. A change like that can be restful. It doesn't work that way for me; it works for your father. You'd be shocked as to how much better you'll sleep in a clean room versus a chaotic, dank, used underwear-laden goblin hole. You know, I bowl with your dad every week; he has a great time.

Another thing I noticed that was seriously inhibiting my quality of sleep was the fact that I was just on my phone all the time before I go to sleep and the minute I wake up. There are a couple of ways you can tackle this. In previous videos, I've suggested putting your phone on a charging station across your room at night so that you have no option but to just sleep in your bed. You can't go on your phone if it's across the room, right?

No, that works great, but honestly, I have a hard time sticking to that as well. So what did I do about it? Clearly, I don't have a ton of willpower at my disposal, so I bought blue blockers. So when I'm on my phone at night, I'm not assaulted with the blue light, which inhibits my ability to get into deep sleep.

Here's the trade-off, though: you're like, "Okay, you're just gonna be on your phone in bed for like three hours." No. What happens is when I'm on my phone at night with my blue blockers on, all of the colors on my phone are so washed out, and my phone charger cable is so short that it's just so uncomfortable to be on my phone that I don't go on it anyways, and I go to sleep.

The solutions don't have to be neat and perfect, but that's what's working for me. So I went from a messy room with a long iPhone cable and no blue blockers to just cleaning up my room, adding a couple decorations, having a shorter iPhone cable, and blue blockers, and all of a sudden I'm getting way better sleep.

Now we move into the kitchen. So what's the goal of a good kitchen? Is it to mess around? Is it to sit there in despair as you eat indomie for the fifth day in a row feeling like crap about yourself? No, the goal of a good kitchen is probably to make eating and cooking healthy food as easy as possible so that you can energize your body, so that you can go forward in life with exuberance and zeal.

So, what does your kitchen look like? How is it inhibiting those processes? If you have different goals for your kitchen, that's all well and good. But for my kitchen, I realized that I was eating way too much junk food. I was buying things that I didn't actually want to eat, but I was buying them because I was hungry in the grocery store.

He was hungry and he had some money. So when I walked into my pantry, I asked myself, "Do I want to eat indomie or indomie because it's the only thing I bought?" I mean, I bought other things, healthier things, but they're in my fridge, and it requires effort. I have to actually cook the chicken breasts, chop vegetables. I don't want to do that.

I'll eat the indomie. Do you see how dumb this is? Through my purchasing decisions, I invited things into my house that were counterintuitive to the way that I wanted to live my life. Indomie is extremely delicious and easy to eat, and it's very quick to eat. So that when I'm hungry, I come into my kitchen and basically the question is: do I want food now or do I want food in like 35 minutes when I figure out the right way to cut a chicken breast? Obviously, I'm going to choose the indomie.

I was existing in an environment that created a downward incentive slope into eating indomie. So what I did about it was two things. First of all, obviously, I stopped buying indomie and other food that I don't actually want to be eating. Secondly, I stopped buying chicken breasts just to let it rot in my fridge. It's criminal to waste food like this; think of the sand wasp.

I started buying other healthy foods that are actually easy and quick to eat, so that when I'm hungry, I can eat quickly and healthily. But Joey, I don't know how to eat healthy. What are these good healthy foods that are quick to eat that you're talking about? The first thing, the first item on the menu is what I like to call advanced granola.

I think it's technically called muesli. I don't know how to pronounce it, but I'm sure you have this in your grocery store. It's got a bunch of good stuff in it; there's nothing like sketchy. But I like to get my oats in. If you respond well to oats, it's high in calories, it's got good fiber.

I don't just eat the oats because I'm not a madman. I like to douse it in ultra-filtered milk. If you have this where you're from in your country, I would highly recommend it because it's kind of a cheat code. The nutrition facts on the back are insane. It has so many vitamins and nutrients in it, and the protein is way higher than regular milk, and it's lactose-free. So if lactose tends to make you feel weird, it won't be a problem with this milk.

Another thing I like to eat all the time is eggs. You can't go wrong with eggs; eggs are a superfood. You can only go wrong with eggs if you're a vegan. Everyone knows I don't need to talk about eggs—just eat your eggs if you're not morally opposed to it.

I don't buy chicken anymore. Why am I morally opposed to chicken? No, chicken's delicious when other people cook it. Chicken is sketchier to cook; there's more food poisoning involved. I just buy steak now because you literally can't go wrong. You slap it on a hot grill; you can cook it for like three seconds or three minutes—it's still edible, and it's like 40 grams of protein, good fats in there.

The final thing I'm going to talk about is just a little hack that I have, and that's just to have some grabbable vegetables. Grape tomatoes can't go wrong with cucumber or carrots—just have things around you can just grab when you're hungry. Little easy solutions like this solve the problem of reaching for something like Doritos, reaching for something like indomie. It doesn't need to happen; there are healthier alternatives to grab-and-go food.

So I hope you enjoyed this little breakdown. Okay, if you made it this far into the video, look at the merch room. Look at all this merch! I physically have this merchandise—these inaction is a slow death hoodies in my possession. I lovingly pack it into a box when you buy one. Actually, Jared does that; I don't touch it.

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So head on over to betterideas.com, get yours before they're gone forever. Alright, let's talk about the house in general. What is the goal for a house? What do you want the goal for your house to be? Maybe you don't have a house; I don't own this one; I'm renting it. Maybe you live with 16 different people. Maybe you live in a college dorm room; maybe you live with your parents.

Whatever the case is, you have control over probably a small section of it. Maybe it's just your bedroom. What do you want the goal for that space to be? For my own house, I live alone, so I get to have a lot of control over that question. I get to have a lot of control over the answers to that question.

For me, I want to create a space that I don't actually spend a lot of time in. You know I want to go be a person in the world, be part of communities. I want to go play hockey; I want to go for walks. I don't actually want to spend a lot of time in my house being a recluse. But while I'm here in my little goblin hole, I want it to feel a little less like a goblin hole.

I want to create a space that recharges me and refreshes me, that's orderly, where I know where things are. After a long day of being a person in the world, I want to come home and feel like my life is in order, you know, things are okay. I want to eliminate sticky corners of my house, and what I mean by that is not like a she-labs layer reference. I want to reduce sticky corners, like my office.

When I'm at my worst, I spend a lot of time in my office in front of my 42-inch OLED TV, either gaming, browsing the internet, or gaming. And I don't want to do that all day; that's just a sad existence. That's not me taking action; it's not me being a person in the world injecting myself into the various corners of the Earth.

As sexual as that sounds, that's me decaying. That is exactly how I don't want to live my life. So try to figure out the overall theme of whatever space that you have control over. Ask yourself, "What is the goal of this space? How do I want this space to help me live my life? How do I want my environment to help shape my future behavior?"

Because when you figure out the answers to these questions, you might be shocked as to how counterintuitive your environment is to achieving those goals. Hopefully, through this video, I've given you a couple of ideas as to how you can tweak your environment to create downward slopes into the behavior that you want to be doing, so that living the life that you want to live is as easy and as simple and as irresistible as possible.

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