 Hi, my name is Mark and this is going to be a very personal video. There are few resources in life that are valuable and my two most valuable ones are my time and my energy. If time and energy are so valuable and scarce, I want to spend it the best way I can and I can imagine you want to do the same. Today I want to share the 11 habits that made me a better person and that I have learned over the past 10 years. And I want to ask for your help because I feel there's a lot left to learn. So let's dive into the video and see what you can learn and apply as well. I really like Twitter and it's a great place to get upset about the state of the world. Twitter is great for the news, but I don't want to follow the news. I want to follow the new. The news is the accident that happened on the highway. The new, however, is that people take more electric transportation to work. So eight years ago I stopped following the news. No more news sites, no more newspapers, no more news shows. The news takes up time, headspace and it's rarely positive news, so it has a negative impact on me. I only follow topics that I'm interested in and things that I can actually influence. And I would highly advise you to stop following the news and start following the new. The second thing I did is I stopped reading my email. Email is other people's to-do list dropped into your inbox. I started checking my email once a day, then twice a week and I'm now at once every two weeks. And that is okay. If people really need me, they'll give me a call. Let's move on to number three. I spend a lot of time on getting more sleep. If I'm well rested, I make better decisions and I have a lot more mental bandwidth, so I can cope better with the things that life throws at me every day. I'm simply a better father, a better partner and a better colleague. Now I did a lot of research on sleep and I made a separate video on it, which you can find somewhere up here. That brings us to number four, owning the day. Four years ago I started journaling. It started very basic. What are the things that are on my agenda and what are the things that I want to do today? I slowly moved into a more extensive system and I'm now far more deliberate in what I want to do every day. In doing so, I learned a lot about both how I spend my energy, but also what gives me energy and what drains my energy. My day is no longer dictated by either my email inbox or my Slack messages or other external factors. It's me that owns the day. Journaling brings me to habit number five and that's building a second brain. My head isn't meant to keep a lot of information in, but it is very effective to find information when I need to. Whether I've had an appointment with a colleague, I make notes and write them down or find new ideas, I put them in a trusted third-party system. It makes it far more easy to both find and link information and it's made me tremendously more productive. If you want to be more productive, either as a person or as a company, I can highly recommend the video we made about building a second brain which you can find up here. Lesson six is learning how to pause. I'm very quick to react to things that people say or things that people do. My reactions are very primary and they either come from the head or from the heart. It's my body, however, that senses what I'm feeling at that moment. Listening to that feeling makes my reactions far more balanced. If I take a second to listen to my body and take a breath of awareness, I'm far more capable in giving a more balanced reaction or not reacting at all. Now I have to be honest, I'm still learning to do this and I'm still trying to do this better every day and I'm still learning to apologize to myself and have a little self-compassion if I failed, promising myself to do better next time. A photo freezes moments in time and I love capturing those precious moments. If I take those pictures with my phone, it takes me out of the moment. The reason for that is very simple. My phone is set up for other types of distractions. That's why I decided to bring my camera every day and I've both got a pocket option which is very small or a big boy camera. It's not only a great present for the people that I capture but it also brings back the moments like no other video I can. Point number eight. Make your devices dumb and don't let them get in the way. Your phone is a distraction device with every app on here screaming for your attention. Disable and remove are the two ways I use to combat my devices getting in the way of life. There's no email on this phone. There's no Slack, there's no Twitter, there's no Instagram. Notifications are even disabled and my smartphone only beeps when a call comes in or I have a calendar appointment. The average social media user spends two and a half hours a day on social media. I just save myself two and a half hours every day that I can spend on the stuff I do find important. Number nine is learning to say no. Learning to say no has been one of the biggest gains in my life. Saying no to the things I don't want to focus on gives me big opportunity to have a default yes for the things I do want to spend my time on. My kids and my partner they get a default yes for every activity they propose. The same goes for my friends and if my colleagues need my help I'm there for them and if I don't want to do it tomorrow I won't want to do it in two months either. In saying no I'll also protect my future self and this leads to number 10. Every action has a reaction. It sounds very logical when I say it but every action I take leads to a reaction and that reaction is often bigger than the actual action. Let me explain that with an example. Saying yes to speak at a specific event will mean that people will start emailing me about it. They will want to sync up I'll need time to prepare I'll need time to travel and I'll need to give the actual keynote. Doing less means I get to spend more time on the stuff I do find really important so keep in mind every action leads to reaction and that brings us to number 11 and the last habit on this list the side fast. I've learned myself to make decisions fast and everything you need to decide upon will linger somewhere in your brain. Making decisions fast removes those things from your brain and creates headspace for other things. I use a couple of systems to make decisions fast the default yes and no we talked about before being one of them. Since I've learned so much about making decisions both in my work and in my private life I've made a separate video on this which you can find up here. So these are the 11 habits I've learned over the past 10 years and try to apply every day. Since you're watching this video you must be interested in the habit subject and I reckon you have learned a lot of habits yourself which I and others would love to learn so please share them in the comment section that could lead to some really nice future videos. Thank you voice for making these videos possible thank you all for watching these videos and I would love to see you in the next one.