Originally, I hadn’t planned to associate this piece with lifestyle design when I first wrote about the ideas I’m about to share here, but I thought that much of what I’m gonna touch on is so fundamental to a quality life, that it may as well be put in the lifestyle design series. The basic topic for today is something like, “how do we build an environment and a lifestyle that allows for honest, deep work, maximum productivity, happiness and fulfillment?” Might sound like somewhat of a tall order to answer, but I think it’s important to set the standard as close to the bullseye of what we actually desire, such that even if we miss, we get reasonably close to it. To begin unpacking this question a little bit, one of the important components that I want to focus on mostly, is the space in which we work. In my case, I’ve designed a life where I can work at home, and more or less work on various projects at my own pace, where I feel I am as close as I can get for the moment to my “bullseye”. What I might suggest is to think about what one’s bullseye might be, and then try to figure out how you get more of what you want and less of what you don’t. What I find to be true about deep work for most people really doing amazing stuff, is that they thrive if they have a space where they can work in isolation, and be totally immersed and totally honest and effective when working on what they most care about. In my experience, many people have amazing ideas that they don’t take seriously because they worry about how others might judge them, or about how they might find the space to work on the ideas, and my solution to this is really to find time and space to sort oneself out alone. Exploring something like periods of frankly, being a hermit in the hopes of purifying one’s mind and letting the thoughts of others and the distractions of the world around us fall away, is crucial to getting at our most important ideas. Many of the best ideas in my experience will appear insane in many contexts, and may seem dangerous even to ourselves, and that perception can keep us from even entertaining these ideas in very low stakes settings. It should be noted, that I don’t mean to gloss over how one might find alone time, but this is super specific and I will leave that work to the individual.
Another element of the topic question I wanna talk about, is figuring out what productivity and fulfillment look like. In some ways, this is out of the scope of what I can advise on, but one thing I would like to point out, is that it is a very simple task to figure out whether or not one “feels” productive or whether or not one “feels” fulfilled. My way of handling this part of the equation generally, is just to check in with myself. I feel like a horse’s ass when I spend all day dusting or catering to “other people’s priorities” or OPP as they could be called, and I feel great when I sit down and write something I’m proud of, or code, or recently study Japanese, a language that I find fascinating and that I’ve been meaning to study for many years, and these signals are what I use to figure out where I am. It’s easy to judge my life one day at a time by looking at what I “appreciated” on some day and how I felt about it, and all the fulfillment takes care of itself once I feel that I’ve been productive based on my own authentic standard. I sense that this standard is individual, but I’m going off of my limited experience. However, I’d recommend that everyone get in the habit of listening to how they feel about the contents of their day, and whether or not they would call it a win or a step towards their ultimate goals, and also be damn sure to listen (and make changes) when you get the opposite signal.
I think I’ll leave it here for now, hope this piece has been useful to you in some way, and I hope you will be well.
Orion Aeneas Webster,
FourthEyeBlog author
FourthEye 
Leave a comment