Designing A "Day of Wins"

I'm Lisa 👋 Welcome to the latest edition of Stream of Consciousness!

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Hey 👋

Happy Sunday ☺️

I recently saw this post by Eric Hinman about how he designs his “perfect day”.

He builds each day around a list he made of tiny wins - things like:

• Sleeping for at least 7 hours

• Creating something

• Going on an adventure

While a lot of people might look at this and go, “this is totally unrealistic with my work schedule”, I think there's a ton of value in the work of figuring out what your boxes even are and then seeing how many of them you can tick.

I often find we skip that first step and shut ideas down and converge before we really give ourselves the freedom to be open and ask ourselves, “If this were a completely blank slate - what would I really WANT?”

My favorite part of his process?

What he discusses in the video at the end - before writing his wins list, he did an audit of all the things in his life that were draining his energy or where he wasn't fully present or where he wasn't adding value.

He then used that as data to fuel his “perfect day”.

While I cringe at the word “perfect” as a recovering perfectionist (and know nothing is ever truly perfect - everything in life is flawed and I don't think it would be as enjoyable if everything always worked out 100%), I started implementing my own daily wins list.

So far, I really like it, specifically because I think it fits my personality really well.

I'm a free spirit and love to just go with the flow. Planning stresses me out and makes me feel trapped.

The flip side of that is it can create chaos and can be too “open” - as humans we have essential needs and not paying attention to them or planning around them in some way can really bite us in the ass.

I like this approach because it's a happy medium between the two - “let me tick the boxes to keep me disciplined, but give me the freedom to choose the how and when and where each day.”

FWIW: Doing one creative thing every day is also on my list so I've been trying to write more, which is why some readers have noticed my frequency has increased lately.

What approaches have you found help you with your life design?

What would you do differently if you did an honest life audit?

What would your wins list look like?

Stuff That Stuck With Me Recently 🫠

I am neurodivergent and can get sucked down wormholes of research very easily. The most recent one has been lucid dreaming communication - in a story right out of Minority Report, there's a startup called REMspace that was able to achieve communication between two people who were lucid dreaming.

I found out there's actually a significant amount of research that's already been done in this field, including a landmark 2021 international study that was able to show lucid dreamers, while dreaming, can communicate with the outside world (in this case, experimenters involved in the study) and answer simple questions and do simple math problems while asleep.

I haven't watched every episode of Black Mirror (ironically because I felt the content of the earlier seasons became our reality very quickly after the show came out) so I'm not sure if this has been covered yet but it feels like it easily could.

The potential implications and applications of this are, like most new tech developments, both exciting and terrifying.

Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this post and it inspired you to think slightly differently about how you design your life.

Thank you for supporting me, for following along, for emailing me, and sharing your thoughts and ideas 🙏

Always open to your feedback on each edition - it helps me feel less like a robot behind a glass wall.

Here’s to navigating life off of autopilot together.

Lisa ✌️