Being more productive, relaxed, and physically healthy can be as easy as playing the numbers game — using 3 numbers as your guide.
How many times have you tried to change your habits, only to fall right back into the old ones?
You try new workouts, new apps, new routines. You read a self-help book, try to log and measure your results. You journal for 20 minutes, meditate for 30, spend time preparing healthy meals in order to lose weight. You absorb yourself in the minutiae of self-improvement. And in the end, the new routines don’t stick, and the improvements you made fade away.
For those of us looking for a simpler, more common-sense approach to living more productively and with much less stress— here’s a fairly simple solution. It’s three numbers — three percentages, to be exact: 80%, 40%, 10%.
The 80% number is for your diet. It will help you build a healthier relationship with food and with your body — and thus feeling better.
The 40% number is a reframe to help you push past roadblocks, plateaus, and self-doubt.
The 10% number kills two birds with one stone. It gets you managing your time more effectively, and as a result, helps relieve a lot of stress and anxiety.
80%: A Healthier Relationship With Food
Our relationship with food is broken.
We all need to eat, but dieting and food have become problematic — especially for those of us looking to improve our health. Dieting can be a veritable minefield of frustration and bad habits. Many of us eat too much, eat the wrong things, eat at the wrong times, or a combination of all three of those things.
Many of us have researched various diets or nutritional hacks in order to lose weight, avoid gaining weight, or simultaneously lose fat and gain lean muscle. Still, our relationship with eating tends to fill us with a sense of uneasiness.
Enter the Japanese philosophy of hara hachi bun me.
The idea is simple. You don’t count calories or eat only certain foods, but rather, you follow one simple rule: eat until you are about 80% full. That’s it.
Eating until you’re 80% full may seem a little difficult at first — especially if you’re used to cleaning your plate every time you eat. But if you dedicate yourself to it, you’ll find that two you end up paying more attention to how your stomach feels. You become more in tune with when you’re actually hungry, as opposed to when you’re bored, or looking for the comfort of food.
If you really pay attention to how you feel when you only eat to 80% capacity, you’ll notice that post-meal lethargy will mostly go away. Much of that fatigue after a work lunch, or dinner out comes from being overfull, and our bodies needing to shift into digesting mode.
For those looking to lose weight, the 80% rule can help you lose weight pretty simply. As you grow accustomed to eating to 80% fullness, that 80% slowly becomes your new “full”. So eating to 80% of your new full feeling can segue into eating less and less, until you’re only giving your body what it needs.
40%: Getting More Out of Yourself in Work and Life
Growth requires consistently pushing yourself. But in most circumstances, we can forget just how much we can push ourselves. As a result, we tend to miss opportunities for exceptional growth. Instead, we plateau or stagnate in our journey toward growth.
We’re told all the time to “break out of our comfort zone” in order to grow, but that alone is not very helpful advice. Luckily, ex-Navy SEAL, elite athlete, and author David Goggins has introduced us to the 40% rule — relayed here by Chris Myers:
The 40% rule is simple: When your mind is telling you that you’re done, that you’re exhausted, that you cannot possibly go any further, you’re only actually 40% done.
I don’t perceive this to be an exact science, but the idea is that we tend to vastly underestimate what we’re capable of. This is true physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Physically, we can usually endure much more than we tend to think we can. As long as you’re not in the kind of pain that is indicative of an injury, you can usually push past the discomfort or feeling that you want to quit — and into the realm of making your body (and mind) grow.
Mentally and emotionally, we often underestimate how strong and resilient we are. We tend to throw in the towel at the first sign of difficulties in thinking through a problem, or discomfort with our feelings. We shy away from hard conversations, or don’t dive into feelings that we don’t like. But if we remember the 40% rule, we can push ourselves to sit with that discomfort, and remember that we are strong enough to deal with it, and move past it.
You can test this as you try to work on difficult projects, as well. Set up a block of time, be it 30, 60, or even 90 minutes. Challenge yourself to work for the entire time. Note the points where you feel like giving up or allowing yourself to be distracted. When that happens, remind yourself that you’re only 40% spent; you have more gas the cognitive tank. Then keep working.
When you’re done with the time block, you’ll feel really good about yourself, and really energized. And even though you may have expended more effort than you normally would, you’ll actually feel energized to take on more. Funny how that works, right?
10%: Better Use of Your Time
They say time is money — and that we ought to be conscientious about how we spend both. That’s why it’s important to build in margins for both your time and your money — meaning you put some aside for what might come up later.
Most budgeting experts recommend you save 10% of your income each year as the foundation of your retirement. If you do that from a reasonably young age, and make even conservative investments, it should be enough to provide for a comfortable retirement. Ideally, you should prioritize saving that 10% first, and then budget whatever other spending around that 10%.
This same budgeting strategy works for time as well. If you schedule 10% of your time as “savings”, you build some buffer in your days and weeks — which will almost always come in handy. Thing always come up, and you’ll always find a place for that time to go.
Here’s how 10% of your time breaks down:
- each week has 168 hours, so 10% of that is 16.8 hours.
- If you only want to count waking hours per week:
168-(8x7)= 112. Assuming you get a luxurious 8 hours of sleep every day, that’s 112 waking hours remaining. - 10% of your waking hours is 11.2 hours.
So if you want to be conservative, allow 11.2 hours of time as buffer time. Let’s round it down to 11.
The result of building this margin is — like with money — you have extra time that can help you deal with the inevitable things that “come up”. You won’t get stressed, time-crunched, or feel like you can’t get the urgent things done.
To be clear, that 11 hours needs to be unassigned time. You can’t fail to set aside time for things you know you’ll need to do during the week, and then take time from that 11 hours. That’s not truly buffer time.
This means that you have do a little prep work. You have to think of all the stuff you expect you’ll have to tackle this week, fit that in somewhere, push the rest out — and leave 11 hours open.
It might feel odd to have this much unspoken for time in your schedule, but don’t worry. Not only will it get filled up with stuff, but the stuff that ends up filling it might be the kind of spontaneous and cool stuff that turns into something great. Consider it life’s gift to you, for making time for magic — so to speak.
This will take upfront work, and the building of a habit of scheduling your weeks, but it is well worth it for the stress you save. But not as much time as you think. You can get away with spending 20 minutes just doing some rough estimations of what you’ll need to spend time on each week, and you’ll capture most of what needs to be captured.
And with 11 hours of buffer built into your week, you should feel poised to take on the unplanned or unexpected. And it will feel great.
Implementing 80/40/10 in Daily Life
Making this method work in daily life is as easy as remembering the numbers, and using them. No matter what productivity system, morning ritual, or daily practices you have, you can integrate these three simple practices into them.
- You’ve got 3 meals (give or take), so sit down to each one prepared to stop when you think you’re 80% full.
- Pick something you’re working on, or your workout that day, and remind yourself when you think you’re done, you’re only at 40% done.
- Set aside 10% your time as a buffer: It’s 11 hours per week, or 1.5 hours per day. Leave that time unassigned, to allow you the opportunity to take on anything.
I recommend checking in with yourself on these regularly. If you journal, reflect on how well you’ve adhered to this. Put the three numbers on a sticky note on your bathroom mirror — to see it every morning. However you do it, keep the numbers visible, and hold yourself accountable for sticking to them. They just might be the game-changers you’ve been looking for.
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