I recently saw a tweet storm by entrepreneur/investor/philosopher Naval Ravikant. He was challenging people to meditate sixty minutes a day for sixty consecutive days. The view from the location of my 60th hour-long meditation session. Here’s a quote from Naval about his meditation challenge, from The Naval Almanack: Meditation isn’t hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Just sit down. Close your eyes and say, “I’m just going to give myself a break for an hour. This is my hour off from life. This is the hour I’m not going to do anything. If thoughts come, thoughts come. I’m not going to fight them. I’m not going to embrace them. I’m not going to think harder about them. I’m not going to reject them. I’m just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I’m going to do nothing.” An hour a day of doing nothing? I thought, “That’s crazy!” So, I did it. It changed the way I think about productivity. Who can give up an hour a day? Giving up an hour a day for two months seemed impossible. But I knew if I didn’t at least try it, I’d be a hypocrite. I had just finished writing a book called Mind Management, Not Time Management, after all. Taking on this challenge meant I’d be giving up an hour a day in the midst of launching a new book – which is always a busy time. But it also looked like the best possible test of my belief that time management is dead. I’d give up an hour a day of “doing” to just sit. I’d place less emphasis on time, and more emphasis on my mind. Here’s how it went. Meditation killed my motivation (in a good way) The first couple weeks were the strangest. My mind was blank. I felt numb. I lost all motivation. But probably not in the way you think. Usually, when people say they’ve lost motivation, they feel bad about it. They feel they should be motivated, but they are not. Instead, I lost motivation in a good way. I didn’t feel bad about my loss of motivation. I didn’t think, “Oh no, I want to do things but can’t find the motivation!” But I sensed my brain needed to discover new routes to motivation. What would that be like? I wanted to find out. So I kept going. Do it, Delegate it, Defer it. How about Forget it!? My lack of motivation didn’t manifest itself as a lack of motivation to do things I otherwise wanted to get done. Instead, when I thought of something I might do, I’d say to myself, “Nah! That’s not important!” I’ve long been a practitioner of Getting Things Done (which I summarized on episode 242). One of the keys to making GTD work is to write down everything you think of doing – big, small, unimportant, important – even things you might do, “Someday/Maybe.” After you write something down, you either do it, delegate it, or defer it. Thanks to meditation, I discovered a fourth option: forget it. In other words, don’t even write it down. Just let the thought pass. This is easier said than done. GTD works because it closes “open loops” in your mind. If you don’t write the thing down – GTD wisdom states – you’ll keep thinking about it. By meditating an hour a day, suddenly I was able to think of something I might do, decide it was unimportant, then forget about it completely! But as I decided not to do the things I would otherwise do, the things I wasn’t going to do started bubbling to the surface. Meditation sharpened focus on the things I did do Setting aside an hour a day where I couldn’t do anything but let thoughts flow had two effects. It reduced the time I had to “do” the things I intended to do. It increased the time I had to think about things I would do, “if only I had the time.” These effects had a symbiotic relationship: I didn’t have as much time to “do” things I intended to do, so I had to be more efficient with things I did do. Doing begets more doing. Each time you do something, it reminds you of other things you could be doing. The more you do, the more entropy sets in and you make bad decisions. By meditating an hour a day, I had less time to do things, and m