Lifelog

It had been a fruitful and fufilling side project weekend! Launched 2 features for Lifelog:

- Typing sounds to improve productivity and writing experience.
- Placeholder text shows goal reminders as writing prompts.

This energizing experience really shined light on how being able to ship fast is such a key part of the motivation equation for indie hackers.

You get the dopamine rush of building something quickly and launching it out into the wild.
You get the satisfaction and fulfilment of using it yourself, or seeing your customers use it almost immediately.
You discover gaps and erros, and areas of improvements quickly, leading to an iterative build-launch-tweak virtuous loop.
You feel productive that tangible outputs were delivered.
You get more motivated and inspired by the fast feedback loops.
You had fun. That's the most important part.

Previously I didn't ship anything much for Lifelog for 2 years, and with that, the motivation also stagnated. Now, I look forward to every weekend when I get to ship something new, something fun. And there's an ensuing boost of fresh creative energy that spills over to everything else.

The end result is being able to sustain the long indie journey, to play the long game, to outlast.

Shipping fast, staying last.

I've been having a pretty sucky past few weeks to be honest.

But somehow being able to code and deploy something new for Lifelog this weekend lifted me up again. Now I'm enjoying the new audible feedback feature that I made myself. Every keystroke punctured by the sound of a mechanical keyboard. Relishing the fruits of my creative labour.

They say there's different kinds of indie hackers. There's the builder sort who just loves to code and make things. There's the marketing sort who enjoys storytelling and engaging and persuading others. And there's the CEO, entrepreneur sort who loves building and running businesses.

I'm totally the first kind - the builder. Just being able to build and code is such joy. It's not about the marketing or the cool stories I can tell. It's not whether I can make a business or boatloads of money out of this. Just the pure unadulterated joy of making a widget that does something when I push the button. I don't know why that gives me joy but it just does. It always feels like magic when I do. Especially with coding.

And on days or weeks when it feels sucky, getting in touch with that side of me had always helped uplift my spirits somewhat.

Joy is the ultimate creator.
But creating is also the ultimate joy.

[Jay's post-mortem](https://twitter.com/therealjayber/status/1658985390391586816) about how and why Zlappo (the Twitter scheduling tool I used) failed was instructive. The point about baked-in virality and product-led growth is particularly resonant.

The idea is that you want to bake in some sort of virality into the product itself, to make it easier to market your product. Like say you can set up a free website but at the bottom of the free site there's a "Powered by X" link. Mailchimp does that/ Carrd does that. Many successful products have that. The benefit of baked-in virality is how marketing becomes user-generated. When users share their websites, they are unintentionally marketing your platform for you, without even trying. You don't even need them to be affiliates – as part of the transaction of getting a free thing from you, they willingly accept the branding on their site, and the unintentional marketing they're doing for you.

Building a product is hard enough, and marketing makes it even harder. Make that 10x more if you're a solo founder. So anything that can automate or outsource that even a little will go a long way. Product-led growth is the way.

The hard question I had to ask myself: ***If I stopped marketing and the product stops selling, did I really have a good product?***

The real honest answer: No.

I look at Lifelog, and that was it's fate back then when I stopped mentioning it on Twitter. And Twitter wasn't even a great distribution channel for it.

I look at my Carrd plugins projects. It marketed itself in a small way, through SEO, word of mouth, free tools as top of funnel, and some baked-in viral elements like adding a link to my main site in the templates. Not enough to go super viral, but had some semblance to baked-in virality which was what made it promising. Promising, *but* not great.

I look at Sheet2Bio, and it had the elements of baked-in virality with the "Made by sheet2Bio" link at the bottom of each bio page. But product-market fit was lacking, and my execution of it even more so. So this was instructive too - baked-in virality is not a magic pill - it won't solve all your problems.

Each one of my 3 products provided a different facet and nuance to baked-in virality.

I wonder if my next product will look like if I combined all that I learned into it...

They say, when work becomes play, you’ll never work another day in your life. That's always been how I tried to do it. No matter which job, it had to be fun in some way. That's a major reason why I indie hack, because building new things is so fun. Trying to make work like play makes it easy.

But lately, I'm also realising over time, making work like play can bring about an opposite effect too:

**When play becomes work, you’ll never play another day in your life.**

It's like what they say about how it can be fun to do knitting but once your livelihood—your very survivial—depends on it, the fun bit gets killed. Certain hobbies are better off staying as hobbies.

Sometimes I wonder that a lot for my indie making.

I enjoy the building aspect of indie making. The selling and making a business part, a lot less enjoyable. Would I be better off and happier having a main job and making projects on the side? But I can hardly imagine having any bandwidth or time after a demanding 9-5, toddler care, and still have any energy left in the evenings or weekends to build for fun. I can't imagine never building anything ever.

So even if being self-employed is the means towards being able to enjoy building, play becomes work problem persists. It creeps up on you. Sometimes I wonder if I had lost the ability to play and have fun for myself. Everything "fun" is also intimately tied up with making it profitable.

Was it when my consulting revenue dried up and survival became an issue?
Was it when I became a new dad and felt that I needed to provide more?
Was it when I got serious on Twitter and got influenced by all the successful indie folks?

Or it could be that life just got waaay busier in the past 3 years and I simply lost touch with my ability to play. It's easy to lost yourself in work, and parenthood.

Do I want my son to not remember seeing me play ever?
Do I want to just be that kind of father who protected and provided for everyone else other than himself?
Do I want my wife to see me not smile that kind of smile whenever I have fun with abandon?

No.

*When was the last time you played in a way that gave you deep joy?*

"Sometimes all you need for exceptional results is average effort repeated for an above-average amount of time." – [James Clear](https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/may-11-2023)

OK so if I followed what James Clear said for my indie hacking journey, what average effort should I be repeating for an above-average amount of time?

- I keep building and launching new average products with average performance, didn't go viral. But I keep building and launching for years. One day, I might hit an exceptional opportunity, or my skills at shipping fast or shipping complex apps get to a point where I can leverage on exceptional opportunities that way.
- Every week and month I put myself out there learning how to sell and market my stuff. The posts, emails, DMs, side projects do only average, but over years, I learn how to engage with customers and occasionally some go viral.
- Building an audience. Tweet and post on social media every day, and 90% of time it only gets average views. But over years I get the hang of the vibe and start to know what is most engaging.
- Staying healthy. Health is so underrated. We sit down for long hours, work 24/7, and wonder why we're less productive compared to a year ago. By keeping fit, having daily movement, eating well every single day for average effort, I keep my energy levels high so keep at the long game.
- Staying in business, not having to go back to fulltime employment. Just staying in business long enough means average effort put in for a long time. And in a long enough time span, you watch the competitors fade away.
-

*What other average effort in indie hacking is often underrated, but if repeated for a long enough time, would help us get to exceptional results?*

I started keto in September 2019. It's been almost 4 years, and how it had evolved since! Lately I'm moving through yet another phase, so I thought I should do a recap of how it's unfolding:

- **Year 1 - Strict keto phase**: It started with strict keto. Just 20g of carbs per day, high fat, some protein. And 16/8 intermittent fasting. Just following all the rules to the tee. No fruits except a few strawberries or blackberries. I got keto flu initially, recovered from it, but it was still hard. I got through by keto bakes and treats, and lots of coconut yoghurt. I lost 10kg in 3 months, went down 2-3 notches on my belt, but it was too much. I looked too guant and thin.
 

- **Year 1 - Maintenance keto phase**: I got slightly less strict. Tried to put back some of that lost weight but increasing some carbs from keto bakes, cruciferous vegetables. Stopped IF. Still didn't touch the bad boys like rice, sugar and milk. Still high fat, moderate protein. I gained back some water weight, started to look more normal.
 

- **Year 2 - Meat heavy keto**: Interesting, the body started to crave more protein at this point, so I went to high protein, moderate fat. Had more fatty pork, ribeyes, and leafy vegetables. I felt more satiated, and less queasy from not taking in so much fat. This was where the keto bakes started to taper off too, as sugar alcohols started to mess with my gut. The surprising thing was: I gained back all the lost 10kg of mass, but not the dad bod and belly (my clothes continued to be loose). Seems like the body was taking in all that protein from years of undereating protein and building it back into the body. I slowly lost interest in greens, and stayed on the meat.
 

- **Year 2 - Carnivore**: Then I went all in on carnivore. Mainly just meat and fat and eggs. No milk still. Almost no vegetables and fibre – when I eat it it's a bite or two in a week. It's pretty hardcore, but I started to develop a better sense of what my body needed. That embodied intuition was growing. Some days I would fast in the morning. Then when I started to feel tired or weak in the morning, I would stop fasting. My gut issues all but disappeared – no more bloatedness, no farts, queasiness or any issues at the toilet. It's the best it's ever been while on carnvore.
 

- **Year 3 - Low carb**: Somewhere along the carnivore path I contracted COVID, and felt like I needed to have some carbs during that period. I just fed what the body needed – rice, fruits, fibre. Thus began the experiments back into carbs again. This sounds like a low carb phase but actually it felt more like mostly carnivore, sprinkled with some carbs here and there. I started taking some fresh milk in my coffee. Butter was morning breakfast. I had occasional cheat days—around once a week—where I took some sugary treats after my main carnivore meal.
 

- **Year 3 - Intuitive paleo**: Now I'm following more intuitive eating. Foods-wise, more like paleo. Whole foods like meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds. I still stick to more fatty meats, leafy vegetables and low sugar fruits, some nuts. I still avoid most processed foods, sugar, soft drinks, ice cream, though I treat myself on some days. I limit my intake of grains and carbs like rice - around a few mouthfuls, depending on how I feel that day. Some days I don't take any grains altogether if I'm feeling 'off'. My gut is protesting more now especially during festive periods, so occasionally I go back to carnivore mode to rest the system. The best part is, I check in and listen to my body during every meal now. I've finally established a better relationship with my body. I got more embodied. The weight is still off, and yet I feel mostly fine on a higher carb routine. To say it's intuitive paleo phase lacks nuance actually. Truth is, I switch between keto, carnivore, and paleo based on what my body tells me. These ways of eating are now tools in my toolkit.
 

I think this journey that started from keto to now intuitve eating was really about getting back to a better relationship with my body. To become less disembodied. To stop emotional eating.

3 years on hitting year 4, I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere.

Thank god.

Them startup founders: We're happy to announce we just raised $100M for our startup!

Us indie hackers: Look mom, I earned $1 from the internet!

We're not built the same.

Here's a totally biased take on why that $1 is better for most of us:

- That $100M isn't even yours to take home. It's mostly for hiring 10x developers, buying ads on Google and Facebook, and the remaining for a cool office. Most of them earn nothing for years, all in hopes for an asymmetric payoff (if it even does). That $1 is all yours to keep (of course, not accounting for taxes yet).
- That $100M comes with lots of strings attached. Too many, including giving away your first-born. That $1? Only what was promised in the sale.
- You just got yourself a boss (your VC funder) with that $100M. I stay being a boss with that $1.
- The more you raise the more you lose freedom. The more you earn the more you gain freedom.
- Getting that $100M means you signed up to work as a slave with zero work-life balance for the next 5 to 10 years. Earning that $1 means you are getting towards better time freedom and balance *within* the next 5-10 years.
- Being happy with $1 keeps me grounded and real. Drinking the tech startup Koolaid of changing the world, going big or going home, makes me lose sight of reality.


*What other reasons are there to go for that $1?*

They say, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication". It's easy to over-complicate. Making things simple is 10x harder.

Products are like that.

What we often think customers want: Clean design, cheap price, cool branding, latest tech stack, 100 Lighthouse score, etc. But that's because we take cues from successful indie folks who do all that, and assume they are successful because they do that.

So we complicate.

But lately I realised that being focused on what the customer says rather than what the indie influencers say, is way simpler. Way more effective. Speaking to customers, engaging them on their issues, and hearing directly from them their feedback, gives a clearer picture on what truly matters to customers: Helpful product, fast support.

See proof – Exhibit A 👇


That's it! That's all to it.

This isnt a one-off email. It's just an example of the many others I get after heloing and talking to them. In the end, it's very simple for customers. It's just us who over-think it, and over-complicate things, when we look to the wrong people for direction.

Focus on what your customers say is the best way to simplicity.

Burnout seems increasingly common amongst indie hackers and creators. Every month I see someone on Twitter say they're leaving, deleting Twitter or taking a break (and never come back).

I'm feeling it too, not just Twitter but everything. But having been through it a couple of times, I think I know how to manage it and get through it without drastic measures. Sometimes it's due to working too hard or too long without a break. Sometimes, it's feeling disengaged from the work because you're 'forced' to do it, or failing too often. Other times, it's the exhaustion from office politics or difficult colleagues/supervisors.

Thing is, we often associate burnout as physical burnout, like from working too hard. It's so much more than that. This post by [@addyosmani](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/addyosmani_motivation-productivity-wellbeing-activity-7060855435334995968-YuvN) shows there's 3 others we never knew:


Interpreting this for indies:

- Mental burnout:
- Staring at your screen for long hours resulting in cognitive strain.
- Working with phone notifications on, so constantly context switching and distracted.
- Being perfectionist about your product, always feeling like the product is never good enough and the resulting constant dissatisfaction/

- Physical burnout:
- Can't sleep because you're constantly 'on', replying to support emails at night, getting woken up by pings
- Working 12h days, 7 days a week, no vacation, because you're going "all in".
- Lack of exercise and movement from sitting in chair

- Social burnout:
- Seeing everyone's MRR tweets and feeling like a total failure.
- Getting embroiled in toxic online drama and outrage.
- Chatting with too many people, spending too much time on Twitter.
- Self-doubt from seeing and comparing how everyone seems to be doing well.

- Emotional burnout:
- Chronic stress from constantly hustling, needing to hit revenue goals for investors or yourself. Might manifest as constantly feeling tired and drained despite getting enough sleep.
- Can't bring yourself to do the work, no motivation.

Listing it out this way made me realised I definitely experienced more than 1 type in the past. It's a complex issue, and an even more complex condition. Not something you can just sleep it off.

[James Clear's](https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/may-11-2023) has a knack for asking interesting questions. In his latest newsletter, this one struck me:

> What's the one action that moves the needle more than 100 other actions? What's the one choice that renders 1000 other choices irrelevant?
>
> Most things are not worth optimizing. Master the big moves and move quickly and peacefully through the other stuff.

That got me thinking:

What are some of these "most things" that are not worth optimizing in indie hacking? What do *I* try to optimize frequently that are actually not worthwhile doing so?

Things frequently optimized that are not worth optimizing:

- Refactoring codebase to achieve clean code. No customer cares about clean code (obvious caveat is of course, if you're selling a boilerplate to other developers).
- Getting to the last few points of Google Lighthouse score, because there's not much difference in terms of a user's experience between 98% and 100%.
- Optimizing your second brain note-taking systems when 99% of your notes are unused or applied.
- Making a product perfect (but not launching). Perfection is the enemy of great. If your product is perfect but no one sees or uses it, does it exist?
- Rewriting tweets multiple times before publishing. For ephemereal tweets with an average lifespan of 24h-48h, you're over-doing it if you had to rewrite and edit it multiple times before publishing. Your tweet just needs "good enough" level to send out.
- Spending weeks editing a blog post. Similar point above re: tweets. You can tweak the blog post using feedback after publishing.
- Sleep biohacking without getting enough sleep time (e.g. 8h). I do a lot of sleep hacks, but nothing beats just getting enough sleep hours to start with. The rest are just toppings. I didn't have a choice when it comes to sleep hours back when the kiddo was still a baby, so the hacks helps me keep my head above water, but they are only stop gap measures.
- Getting a LLC, bank account, logo, before you have a product. No you don't need those things. Get a product out first. Get interested customers.
- Perfecting the business plan. The plan will change the moment you launch. Yes, have a rough plan, but you don't need to get to 100%.
- Getting likes, impressions, followers. Those metrics doesn't always translate to revenue. If it does, yes knock yourself out and chase it. But very often, our customers are not directly on Twitter, so going viral on social media isn't mission-critical.

*What are some other things you frequently optimize that are not worth optimizing?*

Been feeling off. Like I need some deep rest. Could be burnout...

A dear friend asked me yesterday: What does rest look like to me? What image comes to mind?

Immediately what came to mind:

I'm back in Ubud, Bali. Alone. Like I always do at the end of the year for one of my personal retreats, before fatherhood and the pandemic. I wake up in my villa. No sounds of traffic, just birds chirping, the blades of the rice plants rustling in the fields. Dawn's just breaking. I can see Mt Agung in the distance. I sit for a while in meditation just soaking this in. Next, breakfast at one of the lovely cafes in Ubud central, serving food made with wholesome, organic, local produce. My body sings from eating that. Then I laze away the morning at my favourite coffee place, sampling their local single origin. *What should I do today? What adventures call out to me today?* I decide, on a whim, to ride the scooter to the beach. Traffic's crazy along the way, but interspersed with occasional rides through sleepy village roads lined with coconut trees on both sides, and ripening rice fields in the background. It's bliss to ride on the wind through such beauty. I hit the waves. Maybe surf a bit. Swim and float around, letting the sea do its soothing magic. I end the day sitting on the beach, watching the impossible sunset of yellows, oranges and purples. Content. Calm. Rested. Alive.

*What does rest look like to you?*

The latest issue of the [Small Bets newsletter](https://open.substack.com/pub/cattlenotpets/p/use-optionality-dont-hoard-it
) struck a chord.

Tl;dr – Counterintuitive but true - reducing optionality actually makes us happy, or happier.

It made me think about all the time when I hoarded. It could be anything - money, time, online articles, artefacts. The more I hoarded, the more optionality I had. But in itself, optionality just sits there. You need to use it, act on it, in order to truly enjoy the fruits of your optionality.

And that's the whole point of the newsletter article – after building up optionality, you got to reduce it to enjoy it, to let it make us happy. And the most important decisions in life is when you act on the optionality and reduce it, *intentionally*. So many ways to say this:

- Money can buy happiness, but up to a point. Beyond that, more money doesn't make you any happier. You got to use it.
- Having more choices is nice, but too many choices we get paralysed. If you have too many brands to choose from, it actually gets *harder* to choose.
- Having constraints is helpful for creativity and decision-making. You'd think being creative requires unbounded space, but actually that makes it harder.
- Less is more for contentment and life satisfaction. Why does living life simply make us happier? Reducing optionality.

The caveat the author pointed out in the comments is this:

> Optionality isn't bad, it's a focus on unnecessary optionality AND not recognizing the costs of gaining the optionality that's bad. Small bets addresses both of these points because you listen to your own motivations and the bets you place are small, therefore have lower costs in time and opportunity cost. And as your small bets succeed, you gain skills which do give you more optionality. But the gaining of that optionality is something you would have done anyway. The Small Bets philosophy brings means and ends closer together in my head.

In and of itself, building up and hoarding some optionality isn't a bad or un-virtuous thing. The question is: "At what cost?"

That made me think deeply about how—even though I prefer building a lot of products as small bets to mitigate platform risk—beyond a threshold point, the extra optionality is costly in terms of mental bandwidth, time and energy. So reducing some optionality—be it timeboxing the effort, or scoping the feature set down, killing dead projects—is actually helpful. (The other side of the coin is when you just focus on 1 bet, you have no optionality, which is not ideal either)

So to be happy or happier, build some optionality so that you can get to reduce it.

My side projects always seem to end up doing better than my main projects. The ones you least expect to succeed are the ones that actually do. Either this is cruel fate, or it's a deep lesson in there about how expectations can help, or hinder. For me, it hindered, because it was not easy to be emotionally equanimous about my products. Sometimes the deep desire for expression through one's product can help propell it to success. But in my case, when it comes to making something profitable, it hindered more than helped. It blinded me to the real world market realities. So since [late last year](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1591430940290535424), my 'hack' was deciding that everything on my portfolio of products is a side project. I dropped Lifelog back then as main project to side project status.

No more main projects.
Everything's a small bet.

But there could be the exception to the rule, as I recently learned from [@jdnoc](https://twitter.com/jasonleowsg/status/1655558175838584833). He talked about how he should have went hard on Closet Tools when it was on the up and how:

> ...Focusing 100% of your effort on one project for a shorter period of time is still a small bet. You're intentionally capitalizing on it to hedge against future failure. Rather than treating your businesses like you're going to work on them forever, treat them like you're going to sell when the timing is right. The serial entrepreneur mindset is still within the small bets framework - "multiple streams of income" just not all at the same time.

I love the nuance there. Timeboxing your effort on a validated opportunity and not treating it like a baby are both very small bet-esque. And if a project's growing like crazy, continuing to treat it like a side project might be hindering its potential.

So there *are* exceptions to the rule, even though I now say no more main projects, even though between focusing on 1 product versus a portfolio of small bets, I always chose the latter. If there comes a time where there's a huge opportunity in front of me amongst my different bets that demonstrably show continuous growth and has the real world market data to prove product-market fit, I should focus on it for a time, instead of holding myself back just because "small bets".

No need to be dogmatic even if we mostly prefer small bets right?

Just do what works, because ultimately the endgame is freedom, not some silly status game of which camp are you in.

Talking about [things I had to unlearn](https://golifelog.com/posts/unlearning-greater-learning-1683428184962) on my indie journey got me thinking deeper about this particular one:

Info products are not “real businesses”.

I know that that's a lie – info products can be a lucrative business. I'm no longer opposed to creating it, so it's just a matter of finding the right idea or topic that fits. I know the right info product can bring in revenue fast, which is what I need right now. I know that it doesn't need months or years of work and can be instead done quickly within a month or two, which is also something that works for a timestrapped dad like me. I did launch them before, so it's not for lack of experience:

- Keto List Singapore
- Grant Hunt
- Safe Distancing SG
- VisualAid
- Coffice City
- Public Design Vault (defunct)
- Public Design Jobs (defunct)
- Space Nomads (defunct)
- Public Design FAQs ebook (never finished)

And best of all, I got a few info products in my pocket – 80% of each one had already been written because I write them out occasionally as learnings. But I never got round to putting them together to launch:

- A [series of learnings](https://jasonleow.github.io/200wordsaday/articles/counter-intuitive-things-i-learned-about-nutrition-while-on-intermittent-fasting-and-keto-423975f00843835a30/index) from starting out on a keto diet
- A [Twitter info product](https://golifelog.com/posts/tiny-twitter-hacks-i-learned-and-love-part-6-1674712438527) containing the various tactics and hacks I used to grow my account
- A resource ebook on [sleep biohacking](https://golifelog.com/goals/26), maybe for my sleep biohacking community

So why did I not launch them?

Something that [@DmytroKrasun](https://twitter.com/DmytroKrasun/status/1654585734819454977) mentioned was the counter pushback:

> But why not? I am not joking. You have your own take, and you might have an audience for it. If you see an opportunity, it might be it.

I replied, saying something like how there's so many of such Twitter courses available (like a good one is Dagobert's), just not sure if I can add anything valuable to the knowledge pool. But truth is, that's a shite reason.

Market saturation is a poor reason to not try.
Trying to be unique is a dumb way to not try.
Worrying about others is a silly excuse to not try.

So I've run out of excuses.

*So when?*

The hardest thing being indie isn't learning marketing/coding, but unlearning old reflexes. When I started I operated from an employee mindset, thinking the more hours I put in, the better the business. That didn't work out well.. (* cue burnout)

Hard work ≠ success

Years on I find I'm still unlearning that! Looks like it take a while to shake off those conditioned reflexes after decades.

Unlearning unhelpful narratives seems to be a rite of passage for every indie.

That got me thinking... *What else did I have to unlearn along the way?*

- Money is dirty
- Billionaires are scum
- Marketing is slimey and unethical
- A real business = SaaS
- Subscription revenue (MRR) is the best type of revenue.
- If the product is great, it'll market itself and I won't need to.
- The market is too saturated is a good excuse to not try.
- If I do these habits consistently (waking at 5am, cold showers, journaling etc) I will succeed at indie hacking.
- Info products are not "real businesses".
- {Popular indie hacker} is successful because he/she got a huge audience. It won't work for me.
- I need to set up a perfect second brain note-taking system, otherwise I'll lose all my good ideas!
- What if no one cares?!

I used to think all that when it comes to indie products. I was sooo wrong. Must be this, must be that. Artificial rules about how to run a business and build a product which seems to make sense but are totally removed from reality. Ultimately, my endgame is just freedom. It shouldn't matter how I do it, as long as it's legal and I like the work. Money is money is money.

"When you're living a good day, what is one habit that tends to be part of that day? Can you find time for that habit today?" – [James Clear](https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1/may-4-2023)

Intriguing question from James Clear's 3-2-1 newsletter. Made me think, and now I want to list out these habits and why they give me a good day:

- **Sleeping well** – 8h, with score above 90%. Waking up fresh and awake is the best feeling ever. That tends to decide how I'd feel for the rest of the day. If I slept poorly, even small challenges are a struggle. If I slept well, big problems are more manageable.

- **Meditation** – In the morning when I wake, and at night before I sleep. It grounds me, starts off my day in a calm and mindful manner. And that tends to decide the trajectory of my mood for the rest of the day too.

- **Creating something.** – Even just shipping a small feature or a plugin, or working on a creative project, a piece of writing, is super fulfilling. It could be done just within 1-2h in the early morning. Nothing makes me feel more accomplished than having *made* something out. Anything.

- **Eating well** – This is all too easy to screw up, and easy to go unnoticed, but when I eat well, I feel strong, alert but light, no bloat, no gas, no mental heaviness. If the first 2 sets the tone of the day, diet is the thing that can mess it all up.

- **Being out in nature** – My morning walks in the park is one thing that I've come to appreciate a lot. On rainy or busy days when I don't get to do it, I feel lesser for it. On weekends when I spend time outside instead of in shopping malls, I naturally feel better too.

- **Being out with my wife and son** – No explanation needed. Being with my loves, is always a joy.

That's it. Just 6 things.