Living well (A work in progress)

A letter to my kids

Why This Exists

I've been working out how I want to live. These ideas come from books I've read, people I've learned from, and careful thinking.

I'm writing this down so:

• I can come back to it every once-in-a-while and check how I'm doing
• You (my kids) can read it and decide what makes sense to you
• We have a shared way of talking about big questions

This isn't a list of rules. It's more like a map. You don't have to agree with everything. You can add to it or change parts. The point is to actually think about how to live, not just live without thinking.

A bit of back-story

For a long time, I was nowhere.

That's actually how someone described me once. I was at university, in residence, lying on my bed, fiddling with a dirty dish that was on the floor next to me. One of my roommates looked at me and said — half to himself, half to me: "You really are nowhere." I laughed at the time. The memory stuck with me, because he was right.

I felt directionless. I had low energy. I struggled to get myself going on anything. I'd save my limited energy for whatever crisis would come at me next from outside, since those I had no choice about. My own priorities never felt as important — or maybe just as urgent — as the ones other people imposed on me.

I didn't see the point of my studies. I couldn't get myself to do much if I didn't get how everything fit together, and there was a lot I couldn't make sense of. I had no purpose, no vision of my future, no goals, no plans. Just a growing pressure from outside and a growing void inside.

Then in 2007, I came across David Allen's Getting Things Done. I devoured it. No one had ever taught me how to be organised — I had thought it was something built into your personality, that you either had it or you didn't. The book showed me a system. I started using it, and my life began to change. I felt aligned. I had less overwhelm. I suddenly had energy to start thinking big.

That was the beginning. Over the years since, I've experimented, read widely, watched what works and what doesn't in my own life and in others, and slowly built up the framework you'll find in this document. Some pieces came from books, some from psychology, some from spiritual traditions, some from cybernetics, and a lot from years of trial and error.

One thing was always there, even when I was nowhere else: I would journal. Mostly about God — not the God of any particular church, but whatever the deepest thing is. I had this intuition early on that there's only one reality — that there couldn't be God "over there" and the world "over here." Whatever the deepest thing was, it had to include everything, including me. I didn't have the philosophy to back this up at the time. The dual-aspect monism that shows up later in this document is, in a way, where that early intuition finally found a real philosophical home.

Why I want you to have this

I'm writing this down because I don't want you to spend years being nowhere if you don't have to. I'm not going to pretend I've figured it all out — I haven't, and the kind of person who claims to have usually figured out less than they think. But I've worked out enough of a working framework that it would be a waste not to share it with you.

You're allowed to take what's useful and leave what isn't. You're allowed to argue with me about parts of it — please do, that's how thinking actually works. You're allowed to discover that some of what I've written here is wrong, and find better answers. That would make me proud, not threatened.

But you should know that the principles in this document didn't come from nowhere. They came from someone who was nowhere, who slowly figured out how to be somewhere. What follows is what I've learned along the way. It isn't the truth. It's my best current map.

The Three Things That Matter Most

This is kind of like my mantra – its easy to remember and I use it to ground myself and make sure I’m living in the way that I want to. Feel free to try it out yourself.

1. Be Present

Be here, in this moment. Not lost in worrying about the future. Not stuck in the past. Right here, where you actually are.

Most of us spend a lot of time somewhere else - replaying what already happened or imagining what might happen. But the only place anything actually happens is right now. If you're not here, you're missing your life.

This doesn't mean don't plan. It means: when you're doing something, do it. When you're with someone, really be with them. When you're playing a sport, watch the ball.

2. Be Sufficient

You're already enough, right now. Not because of anything you've done. Not because of what you might become. Just as you are.

This is hard to believe at first. We're often taught we have to earn being enough - get good grades, win the game, achieve something, make people like us.

But think about it: you're not a finished thing, you're a process. You're growing, learning, changing. That's what being alive means. A river isn't broken because it's still flowing. A tree isn't failing because it's still growing. You're not insufficient because you're still becoming.

Here's the strange part: the people who feel most enough usually do the most good in the world. People stuck feeling insufficient are too busy trying to prove themselves to actually help anyone.

3. Be Wise

Look at what's actually happening, and respond well to it.

Wisdom isn't being smart. It's not knowing lots of facts. Wisdom is being able to see a situation clearly and figure out what would be good to do in this particular case.

There's no rulebook for wisdom. The right thing in one situation might be wrong in another. You actually have to look at what's in front of you and decide.

This is why being present and being sufficient come first. If you're not present, you can't see clearly. If you don't feel sufficient, your fears get in the way of seeing clearly.

A trick I have found in this regard is to always think about the win-win (not win-lose). How can I benefit AND the other person, or situation. Very often, win-win thinking leads to wise decisions.

What I've Come to Believe

About what's real

The world has an "outside" (what science studies, what you can touch and measure) and an "inside" (what it's like to be a thing - thoughts, feelings, awareness). Both are real. They're not two separate things; they're two sides of the same coin.

This means your mind isn't floating separately from the world. Your thoughts and feelings are real parts of reality, not just stuff happening in your head while the "real world" goes on outside.

About making things happen

You can't just wish things into being. The world has its own structure. You can't believe a rock into being a sandwich.

But also: how you see things really affects what happens. If you believe you can do something, you try harder, you keep going when it's hard, you find ways. If you believe you can't, you don't try, and you don't get anywhere – stuck in ‘nowhere’.

This isn't magic. It's about action. Beliefs that don't lead to action are just wishes.

About failing

Failing isn't bad. Failing is information. It tells you something - either how to do it differently next time, or that maybe you should be trying for something else.

The only real failure is closing yourself off from what failing teaches you. Stay open and you keep moving forward, even when individual things don't work out.

About faith

Belief means insisting that a specific thing will happen. Faith means trusting that you'll be able to handle whatever does happen.

Faith doesn't require the world to go your way. It just requires you to stay open enough to keep learning and finding meaning, no matter what comes. There is evil in the world, but the underlying principles of how things work are good and you can trust in it.

This kind of faith doesn't require any particular religion. It's a way of being.

About learning

Learning matters. It's part of being human. Learning can give your life meaning and purpose, even when you are not sure what your purpose is. In this day and age of AI, where information and knowledge is at your fingertips you may be tempted to think that learning is not so important anymore. But learning is crucial! It is a multiplier for what you are able to do and achieve in the world. AI is a tool and a tool is only as good as the master wielding it.

Why I Believe as I Do

These are the actual arguments behind the beliefs above. These arguments are not my own, but borrowed and personalized over time. It helped me immensely to get out of ‘nowhere’ and helped me answer the question: “Why should I care?”.

I write them out as logical steps so I can check them, and you can see the reasoning, and when something starts to feel uncertain you can look at the structure, becomes curious and ask questions.

Each argument has a name, the steps that build it, and a note about what it does and doesn't establish.

The Sufficiency Argument

Why I think I'm enough as I am, regardless of what I've achieved.

1. I am the kind of being whose nature is to strive — toward autonomy, meaning, mastery, connection.
2. This striving isn't a defect; it's what being this kind of being looks like in time.
3. I share this nature with all living beings, each of which expresses its essence through its own characteristic striving.
4. Sufficiency is therefore the condition from which striving issues, not something I earn through successful striving.
5. The felt sense of insufficiency misleads us — it makes us think that striving is evidence of lack in terms of who we are, when striving is actually how we know we are sufficient – a living process.

Therefore: I am sufficient as a process, regardless of any moment's success or failure.

Note: This grounds sufficiency in what I am rather than what I accomplish, so it doesn't depend on having a good day.

The Hierarchy Argument

Why "be present" sits at the top of everything.

1. Goals form a hierarchy — higher goals specify lower ones, and lower goals (i.e. ‘took out the trash?’ lead to higher ones, i.e. ‘be organized’)
2. “Be goals” (goals across time), typically supersede “Do goals” (goals in time), all the way up to our definition of our ideal selves.
3. The highest goal needs to operate continuously and be detectable in any moment, or it loses contact with where action actually happens.
4. "Be present" is unique among possible top goals because it can be checked directly in any moment.
5. Putting "be present" at the top creates a loop: the highest goal references the present, where all lower goals must actually happen.
6. This makes outcomes/goals important but not more important than being present and gives you a loose-grip on outcomes so that it is easier to learn on the way to the outcome. Insisting on an outcome means privileging a lower goal over the highest one (more on this later).

Therefore: "be present" sits at the apex, and all other goals serve it.

The Learning Argument

Why failure is feedback, not defeat.

1. Failure is information about the gap between what I intended and what actually happened.
2. That information can either update my methods (try a different way) or update my goals (try for a better outcome).
3. A system that stays open to either update keeps moving forward.
4. The only true failure is closing oneself off from learning, because that stops the process (what you are).

Therefore: success in the meaningful sense is available to anyone who stays open.

Note: This doesn't guarantee any particular outcome on any particular timeline. It only guarantees that the process of learning continues to bear fruit, given enough time.

The Faith Argument

Why faith is more durable than belief.

1. Belief insists that a specific outcome will happen.
2. Specific outcomes often don't happen, or don't happen on the expected timeline.
3. When belief fails, the believer either grasps harder (causing more damage) or collapses (losing meaning).
4. Faith trusts only that I can meet whatever comes, with appropriate response.
5. This kind of faith is consistent with hard things happening — it doesn't require the universe to be fair.

Therefore: faith stays open and viable across all outcomes; belief is brittle.

The Dual-Aspect Argument

Why mind is foundational, not just a byproduct of brain activity.

1. Physics describes the world entirely in terms of structure and dynamics — what things do and how they relate.
2. Physics is silent on the intrinsic nature of matter — what it actually is in itself, beyond its relations.
3. We have direct acquaintance with the intrinsic nature of exactly one bit of matter: our own brain, which we know from inside as experience.
4. The most economical hypothesis is that experience just is the intrinsic nature of physical processes.
5. This means mind and matter aren't different substances but two aspects (inside and outside) of one reality.

Therefore: mind is foundational, not magically emergent from non-conscious matter.

Note: This doesn't refute materialism, but it opens up the world to include mind as a foundational element. This view is typically called dual aspect monism. For some this requires a leap of faith – see the argument on utility.

The Benevolent Ground Argument

Why the underlying nature of reality is trustworthy — the case for what can be called a "good God." This argument underpins the Faith Argument by giving it metaphysical grounding.

1. Awareness is prior to individual mind and body — it is the ground in which minded experience occurs, not its product. (See the Dual-Aspect and Localization Arguments.)
2. Within this ground, living processes are intrinsically geared toward learning, growth, and self-organization.
3. The trajectory of these processes runs from mere survival, through individual thriving, toward collective thriving — each level genuinely fuller than the one before.
4. Suffering, properly understood, functions as feedback within this trajectory — the discrepancy signal that drives learning and growth toward fuller forms.
5. Being present supports this trajectory by maximizing learning and skillful response in the moment where action actually happens.

Therefore: the ground from which existence arises is oriented toward flourishing, and trusting this orientation is what faith means.

Note on what this argument establishes: it doesn't reach a personal God in the traditional theistic sense. What it establishes is closer to Whitehead's process God or Teilhard de Chardin's evolutionary direction — a ground of being with intrinsic orientation toward growth, complexity, and flourishing. Whether to call this "God" depends on how the word is used. For traditions that mean by "God" the deepest reality and its direction, yes. For traditions that mean a personal being with specific attributes intervening in particular events, this argument doesn't reach that far.

The Localization Argument

Why being an individual self and being part of universal awareness aren't contradictory.

1. There is one reality with one inside (awareness) and one outside (the world of forms).
2. Perception (as in what you experience) is the process of localized comparison between inputs and reference values.
3. Perception necessarily takes a perspective in order to function. These is no perspective from nowhere.
4. Each perspective produces the felt-quality of being a separate self, but in reality no one is separate.
5. The locus is real — only I can feel like me. The error is identifying ultimately with the locus rather than with the awareness that takes the form of localized perspectives.

Therefore: I am nested in universal awareness, with my individuality being its localized expression rather than a separate substance.

The Stewardship Argument

Why "survive in order to serve" beats both pure selfishness and pure self-sacrifice. This relates to wise action and a win-win orientation.

1. Pure self-sacrifice destroys the agent and produces burnout or resentment.
2. Pure self-preservation closes the system and produces alienation from others and from the larger world.
3. Stewardship combines both: maintaining the self in order to contribute to something larger.
4. Individual flourishing is therefore the precondition for sustainable contribution, not its opposite.

Therefore: take care of yourself so you can be useful to others and to the world. This is the foundation of ‘win-win’.

The Action>Manifestation Argument

Why action matters more than pure belief.

1. A belief about my future functions as a reference value — a target the system aims for.
2. Sustained action attempts to close the gap between current state and target.
3. Identity-consistent behavior accumulates over time into outcomes that can look "prophetic" in retrospect.
4. Belief without action is an unrealized target with no controller working on it.

Therefore: beliefs shape reality through action, not through belief alone.

Note: This explains why "manifestation" sometimes works without requiring magical thinking. The mechanism is sustained, identity-consistent action driven by belief, meeting a world that pushes back.

The Utility Argument

Why pragmatic considerations are a legitimate basis for belief when proof is impossible. This argument frames all the others — it explains why I commit to positions that aren't knockdown proofs.

1. On the biggest questions life forces on us — what to value, how to relate to suffering, what reality is at its deepest, whether existence is trustworthy — evidence is genuinely incomplete. No proof is available either way.
2. Despite incomplete evidence, we cannot actually suspend judgment. Our daily lives proceed on whatever beliefs we operate with, whether we've articulated them or not. There is no neutral non-position to occupy while waiting for certainty.
3. The beliefs we hold (consciously or not) shape real things: what we attempt, how we treat people, whether we feel meaning or despair, how we meet hardship, what we transmit to those who come after us.
4. Given that the evidence won't settle the question, that we cannot opt out of having some answer, and that the answer has real consequences — it is reasonable to ask not only "is this likely true?" but also "what kind of life does this belief produce?"
5. William James argued in The Will to Believe (1896) that this is intellectually legitimate, not wishful thinking — provided the question is genuinely undecided by evidence, the choice is forced, and the consequences are momentous. All three conditions hold for the questions at the heart of this document.

Therefore: when forced to choose between beliefs I cannot fully prove, the option that produces a fuller, more meaningful, more responsive life is a legitimate choice — not as evidence that it is true, but as a reasonable response to forced choice under genuine uncertainty.

Note: This argument is bounded. It works as a tiebreaker when evidence is genuinely underdetermined; it does not override clearer evidence on the other side. It also requires honesty about whether the evidence really is underdetermined, or just inconvenient — wishful thinking can disguise itself as utility-based belief, and learning to tell them apart is part of the work. The Utility Argument doesn't justify believing whatever you want. It justifies committing to a defensible position when proof is genuinely out of reach.

A note on these arguments

None of these are knockdown proofs. They are my current ‘positions’ — defensible against alternatives but not certain. I hold them firmly enough to live from, lightly enough to update if better arguments come along.

The point of writing them out is that beliefs without articulated reasons drift over time. Reasons let you check whether your beliefs still hold up — and let other people (including future me) see what would need to be challenged to change my mind.

How to Live This Out

When something hard happens

• First, feel what you feel. Don't skip past it. Sadness, anger, fear - all real, all okay.
• Then ask: what's actually true here? Separate the facts from the fear-stories.
• Then ask: what would be wise to do, given what's actually true?

When you mess up

• Failing isn't the problem. Closing yourself off from what failing teaches you is the problem.
• Be kind to yourself. Beating yourself up usually makes you do worse next time, not better.

With other people

• Remember they have insides too. Even when they're being annoying. Even when you don't agree.
• Try for win-win, not win-lose. The best outcomes are when everyone wins something.
• Be honest, but be kind. You can do both.

When everything feels too much

• You don't have to fix everything. You're one person.
• Take care of yourself first - not selfishly, but so you actually have something to give.
• "Survive in order to serve." Look after yourself so you can be useful to others and to the world.

How I Organize My Mind and Time

The principles in this document need a practical system to live them out. Without one, even the best ideas slip away into busy-ness or distraction. Here's the system I use, built from cybernetics, from David Allen's Getting Things Done, from Mark Forster's Autofocus, and from years of trial and error.

The basic idea: your mind has limits. You can't hold everything you want to do in your head at once. If you try, you'll forget important things, feel constantly anxious, or burn out. A good system lets you trust that things will get attended to when they need to, so your mind can be present right now (which, remember, is the highest goal).

Goals are reference values

From the cybernetic perspective, anything you want to move toward or away from acts as a "reference value" — a target your system compares reality against. Goals, projects, outcomes, values, and to-dos are all the same kind of thing from this view. They're targets.

Some targets are short-term (finish a school project). Some last for years (graduate from university). Some last a lifetime (be a kind person). The short-term ones get done and disappear. The long-term ones stay with you and shape what you do over decades.

If you can figure out your authentic hierarchy of what you care about — what you actually want to move toward and away from, not what you think you should want — you have a real way to manage your life. Without that hierarchy, everything feels equally urgent and you end up exhausted.

Information is data plus a target

Here's something useful to know: data isn't information until it's connected to something you care about. Your phone shows you thousands of bits of data every day — most of it useless to you. What turns data into information is whether it relates to one of your targets.

This means your goals also act as filters. They help you sort the wheat from the chaff. Without clear goals, your mind tries to take in everything, and it gets exhausted. With clear goals, your mind knows what to attend to and what to let pass. In an age where there's far more information than any human can process, this filtering is one of the most important skills you can develop.

Two kinds of stuff to keep track of

Some things stay relevant for life: your ID number, your address, important documents, your values. These get filed under stable categories — "Personal," "Work," "Health," and so on. Easy to find when needed, no churn.

Other things are projects with a beginning and an end. These need different tracking, because they should eventually go away when done. You don't want stale projects cluttering your system years later, like dead emails that should have been archived.

Think of your projects like a long list of email subject lines: a thread of updates stays grouped under one outcome you want to reach. When the outcome is achieved, the whole thread gets archived together, and your inbox is clear again.

A good way to keep track of your projects is in a notes app, with each project as its own note – you have many options to choose from.

Write projects as yes/no questions

Here's a trick that's saved me a lot of confusion. Write each project as a closed-ended question — something you can answer yes or no to.

Instead of "get fitter" (which never ends), write: "Have I run a 10K under 50 minutes?" Instead of "improve at piano," write: "Have I memorized this piece well enough to play it for someone?"

When the answer is yes, the project ends. You archive it. Done. Your list stays clean.

This works because vague goals like "be fitter" or "be better at school" never let you know when you've succeeded. They become permanent guilt-generators. Closed questions actually finish.

This also helps with a real confusion in language: our "do goals" (specific things to achieve) and our "be goals" (ways of being, like the three anchors at the start of this document) can blur into each other. Closed questions force do-goals to actually be do-goals, which keeps the be-goals from getting cluttered with task-stuff.

Project status categories

My list of goals/projects are essentially just a list, and as such it can get quite long. I keep my projects organized by where they are in the process:

• Backlog: Things I might do someday. Not active, but I don't want to forget them.
• Planned: Things I've decided I'll do, but haven't started.
• WIP (Work in Progress): What I'm actively working on now.
• Stuck: Started but waiting on something — someone else's response, a decision I haven't made, a resource I don't have yet.
• Done: Completed. Eventually archived.

There's also a temporary category I use weekly called Sweep.

Sweep and Keep

Once a week, I do something I call "Sweep and Keep":

1. I move everything from WIP into Sweep (a temporary holding area).
2. I look at what's there with fresh eyes.
3. I pick the things that genuinely need attention this coming week, and move them back to WIP.
4. The remaining items go to Backlog (if I'll get to them later), Stuck (if I'm waiting on something), or Planned (if I've decided when I'll do them).

Why this works: it's much easier for our minds to pick what to keep than to cross things off a list. Daniel Kahneman's research on how we make decisions shows we have a bias toward keeping what's already in front of us (related to what's called the "endowment effect"). Sweep and Keep flips this — by moving everything out and only bringing back what really matters, you escape the bias.

This is the same principle behind Marie Kondo's approach to tidying ("does this spark joy?") and behind regular house edits — you don't decide what to throw out, you decide what to keep, and the rest goes.

The whole point is what David Allen calls a comprehensive trusted system. You want to trust that everything is captured somewhere, so your mind can let go and be present. But you also want the system to surface what really matters this week, so you don't drown in old, stale items. Sweep and Keep handles both.

Two lists, not one

I keep my projects (what I want to achieve) on a separate list from my tasks (what I can do this week). In your notes app, you could create a specific note for that week’s task list.

Why? Because one task can move multiple projects forward. If you nest tasks under/within projects, you end up with the same task duplicated in three places, your list becomes too long, and just looking at it makes you tired.

Projects sit on their own list as targets. Tasks sit on a separate list as concrete actions I can take this week.

When I do my weekly Sweep and Keep, I also ask: of these projects, what can I actually act on this coming week? This forces me to find tasks that are inside my locus of control — meaning, things I have the access and ability to actually do, not things that depend on someone else or wait for conditions outside me. Smaller outcomes within my reach, that move me toward the bigger ones.

Tasks work on a "last used" principle

When I work on a task, I do as much as I want. Then when I stop, I mark it as done, and I enter the next thing to be done, to the top of the list — like a bookmark.

This means the most recent tasks are always at the top, ready to pick up. Tasks I haven't touched in a while drift down. The list naturally organizes itself by what's alive for me right now.

This is similar to Mark Forster's "Autofocus" system. The principle: don't try to schedule everything in advance. Let the work tell you what's calling for attention, and trust that the important things will keep returning to your awareness. You'll know.

There's an old writer's trick that captures the same idea: stop writing in the middle of a sentence, not at the end of one. That way, when you come back tomorrow, you have something obvious to do — finish the sentence — and you're back in flow before you know it. Bookmarking your tasks works the same way. Don't end where you finished; end where you'll restart.

Two modes: Planning and Doing

Through any given day, you're really in one of two modes:

• Planning mode: Reflecting on where things are, where you want them to go, what to change. Sweeping and keeping, deciding tasks, organizing.
• Doing mode: Actually working on the tasks. Making the changes happen.

Use the project list when you're in planning mode. Use the task list when you're in doing mode. Don't try to plan and do at the same time — your mind isn't built for that, and you'll do both badly.

The calendar as hard landscape

Following David Allen, I treat the calendar as the "hard landscape" — the firm structure of my day, where time-specific things go. Doctor's appointments, classes, meetings, scheduled commitments. Things that have to happen at a particular time.

Everything else (projects, tasks, ideas) lives in my project and task lists, not on the calendar. This keeps the calendar clean and my real time visible. I can look at any day and see what's actually fixed, then decide where to fit the flexible stuff around it.

If you put everything on the calendar — every task, every "I should do this" — the calendar becomes useless because you can't see what's actually fixed versus what's negotiable. Keep the calendar honest.

How this serves a life of presence

The whole point of this system is that it serves the deeper principles, not the other way around.

A trustworthy system means your mind doesn't have to keep cycling through "did I forget something?" anxiety. It knows everything is captured somewhere safe. This frees you to be present in whatever you're actually doing right now.

Closed-ended projects mean things actually end. You don't carry the weight of half-finished business indefinitely.

Sweep and Keep means your attention stays focused on what really matters this week, instead of being scattered across everything you've ever wanted to do.

Two lists with two modes means you don't try to plan while doing or do while planning. You can be fully in the mode you're in.

The calendar as hard landscape means time becomes visible and manageable.

All of this points back to the three anchors. Present is what becomes possible when your system handles the rest. Sufficient is what you can feel when your mind isn't clogged with unfinished business and forgotten promises. Wise is what becomes available when you can actually see what's in front of you, instead of being lost in a fog.

The system isn't the point. Living well is the point. The system just makes living well easier to do, day after day, year after year.

How I Move Through My Day

The previous section was about the structure of the system — projects, tasks, calendar. This section is about how I actually use it day to day, specifically how I let the day flow rather than forcing it.

This is where Bashar's recipe comes in: act on your highest excitement, to the best of your ability, with zero insistence on the outcome.

That single sentence is one of the most useful things I know about how to live a day well. Each part matters.

Why "highest excitement" works

A classic to-do list is extrinsic motivation from your past self. Past-you decided what present-you should do. The problem is that no one can consistently act from extrinsic motivation. Even if past-you was right, present-you doesn't feel the same urgency, and the to-do list becomes a source of guilt rather than action.

What you actually want is intrinsic motivation — doing things because something in you is alive to them right now. Deci and Ryan's research shows over and over that intrinsic motivation produces better work, more persistence, and more wellbeing than extrinsic motivation. The trick is figuring out how to make sure your intrinsic excitement actually moves you toward things that matter, rather than just toward whatever is shiny in the moment.

The answer is priming.

What priming is

Priming means subtly making certain ideas more available to your conscious awareness — like magnetising them so they pull on your attention.

Here's why this matters: your attention is like a magnifying glass. Whatever fills your attention also brings energy with it — vital energy you can use to take action. If too many things cycle through your attention too quickly, that energy turns into stress instead of action. You want to be mindful — present with one thing at a time, so you can focus on it and then move to the next.

If you've primed the right things, then when you "act on your highest excitement," what you feel excited about will naturally be among the things that matter. You're not following random impulses; you're following an inner pull already aligned with your priorities, because you set it up that way earlier.

The daily flow

When I'm not doing something fixed on my calendar, here's what happens:

1. I act on my highest excitement among the things I've primed. Whatever I most feel like working on out of those, I do.
2. If a new idea comes up that I don't want to act on right now but don't want to forget, I write it on my task list. So my task list also acts as my inbox for new ideas during the day.
3. I don't review my full task list every time I'm wondering what to do next — that would just turn it back into a todo list. I trust that the morning priming has done its work.

This way my day runs on intrinsic motivation, but the motivation has been shaped by the priming.

Setting a daily intention

Once a day, usually first thing in the morning, I prime my list and pick three items I want to make progress on. Three is the limit. Less than four is important — it's roughly the limit of working memory, the amount your conscious mind can hold and actively work with at once. Add more, and you start losing track and getting scattered.

Three is the sweet spot. It focuses your mind on what matters today. It also engages your subconscious — once those three items are clearly in mind, your subconscious helps you make progress on them even when you're not consciously thinking about them. Ideas come to you in the shower. Connections appear while you're walking. The work continues underneath.

These three items are the one list it's okay to glance at multiple times during the day, to stay aligned. The full task list gets primed once daily, no more.

How I prime my list each morning

It takes a few minutes. The process:

1. Read the list top to bottom. Most recent items are at the top. As I read, I mark any duplicates or things I no longer want as done. This cleans the list.
2. Read the list bottom to top. This time I'm scanning for the three items I want to focus on today. Reading bottom to top makes me notice older items that might otherwise sink to the bottom and never get attention.
3. Pick the three. Whatever feels most alive among the things that genuinely matter.

By doing this, I've primed the entire list twice and set a clear intention. For the rest of the day, I only need to follow my calendar and act on highest excitement among the primed items.

Anything I get done during the day that wasn't among the morning three? It gets cleared from the list during tomorrow's top-to-bottom pass, when I mark it done. New thoughts that arose during the day are now near the top, where they can naturally pull on tomorrow's attention. The list stays alive and relevant.

Weekly task list refresh

Just like projects accumulate, task lists do too. There's always more to do than you can get done. Even with daily priming, the list slowly grows over time as new items are added.

So once a week — same time as my project sweep — I sweep the task list. I move all current tasks to a temporary holding place. Then I scan the sweeped tasks to see if there's anything I want to carry over to the fresh list, and add those. Everything else gets deleted.

The list resets, fresh for the week. The same Sweep-and-Keep principle from the projects section applies here: it's easier to pick what to keep than to decide what to discard.

Why this matches Bashar's recipe

Look at the three parts of the recipe:

• Act on your highest excitement. That's the daily flow — following what you feel like doing among primed items.
• To the best of your ability. That's intrinsic engagement — when you're doing what you actually want to be doing, you bring your real ability, not the half-effort that extrinsic motivation produces.
• With zero insistence on the outcome. That's the present-orientation we worked through earlier in this document. You do the thing because the doing is alive; you don't grasp at where it lands.

The system isn't about getting more done through pressure. It's about staying alive to what's actually moving in you, while ensuring that what's moving has been gently shaped by what matters. You end up doing what matters because what matters has become what you actually want to do.

A note on this approach

This approach has limits worth knowing about.

Some things genuinely need to be done even when you have no excitement about them — paying bills, finishing a school assignment by Friday, replying to that important email. Excitement isn't always going to find drudgery, even when drudgery is necessary. Usually, if these tasks are important it is because they do link to a higher order goal (i.e. be a good student/dependable employee), and it might help to ponder how it does and see where it goes. At other times, these items may need to be selected as one of your three intentions for the day. Often, when you’re feeling stuck on something, you need to feel the feeling, not resist it – there might be a lesson there.

Highest-excitement is also a poor guide when you're depressed, anxious, or otherwise out of touch with your real preferences. In those states, what feels exciting may be avoidance dressed up. When something is hard to start but obviously important, sometimes you just need to start, and the engagement (or even the excitement) shows up after you've begun. It helps if you can break the thing down into the smallest part you can make progress on (i.e. turn on computer, or pick up my socks).

Traps to Watch For

Insisting on outcomes. When you absolutely must have a specific thing happen or you'll fall apart. This makes you tight and afraid, and tight, afraid people don't make good decisions, or reach those outcomes!

Trying to earn enough-ness. Thinking you have to do something to deserve being okay. You don't. The order is: you're enough, then you do things from that ground.

Spiritual bypassing. Using big ideas about peace and oneness to avoid dealing with actual feelings or real problems. "I'm above all that" usually means "I'm running from something."

Confusing your ego for who you really are. Your ego (the part of you with plans, opinions, fears) is real and useful. But it's not the whole of who you are. There's a deeper you that the ego serves, not the other way around.

People Whose Ideas Helped

These are some thinkers worth knowing about. The descriptions are short. If you get curious, look them up.

David Allen — American productivity consultant who developed "Getting Things Done" (GTD), emphasizing the importance of capturing everything in a trusted external system so the mind can be clear and focused.

Aristotle — ancient Greek philosopher who about 2,400 years ago distinguished theoretical knowledge from practical wisdom (phronesis), the capacity to discern right action in a particular situation.

Bashar — the entity claimed by American channeller Darryl Anka. The recipe attributed to Bashar — act on your highest excitement, to the best of your ability, with zero insistence on the outcome — captures something true about intrinsic motivation and present-focused action, regardless of how one regards the source.

Carver and Scheier — psychologists who explained personality and self-regulation through the lens of feedback loops.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — Hungarian-American psychologist who studied "flow," the state of being completely absorbed in something at the edge of your capacity.

Antonio Damasio — Portuguese-American neuroscientist whose Descartes' Error showed that emotions and reasoning aren't separate in the brain — they work together.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan — psychologists who identified three things humans need to flourish: autonomy, competence, and connection with others.

René Descartes — 17th-century French philosopher famous for "I think therefore I am." Made the influential mistake of thinking mind and body are completely separate things.

Carol Dweck — psychologist who showed that believing your abilities can grow ("growth mindset") helps you learn far more than believing they're fixed.

Viktor Frankl — Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who showed that meaning can be found even in unavoidable suffering.

Mark Forster — British productivity author who developed the "Autofocus" time management system, which uses intuitive task selection rather than rigid scheduling — letting the work tell you what's calling for attention.

Steven Hayes — psychologist who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, combining mindfulness with values-guided action.

Joe Hudson — American executive coach whose work and podcast The Art of Accomplishment focus on emotional fluency and welcoming difficult feelings as a foundation for effectiveness and presence, drawing on contemplative and somatic traditions.

William James — American psychologist/philosopher who developed pragmatism — the idea that the practical effects of a belief matter when judging it.

Carl Jung — Swiss psychiatrist who distinguished the small ego from the larger Self, and showed how the unconscious affects daily life.

Daniel Kahneman — Israeli-American psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on cognitive biases and decision-making, including how we systematically misjudge probabilities and tend to keep what's already in front of us.

Søren Kierkegaard — 19th-century Danish philosopher who described faith as a "leap" beyond what reason alone can prove.

Marie Kondo — Japanese organizing consultant whose KonMari method emphasizes keeping only items that "spark joy" — choosing what to keep rather than what to discard.

Iain McGilchrist — British psychiatrist who argues we've become too dominated by analytical thinking and lost touch with a more holistic way of seeing.

Iris Murdoch — British philosopher and novelist who argued that paying real attention to what's there is itself a moral act.

Stephen Porges — neuroscientist whose polyvagal theory explains how the nervous system shapes whether we feel safe and connected.

Hartmut Rosa — German sociologist who diagnosed modern life as too fast and disconnected, and proposed "resonance" — meaningful connection with the world — as the alternative.

Gilbert Ryle — British philosopher who criticized Descartes' mind-body separation as a "category mistake," coining the phrase "the ghost in the machine."

Erwin Schrödinger — Austrian physicist who, beyond his famous quantum work, argued consciousness might be fundamentally singular — one thing appearing as many.

Richard Schwartz — psychologist who developed Internal Family Systems, treating the mind as a Self leading interacting "parts" with different roles.

Donald Schön — philosopher of practice who showed good professionals don't just apply rules — they "reflect in action" and reframe problems.

Baruch Spinoza — 17th-century Dutch philosopher who argued thought and matter are two attributes of one substance. The original dual-aspect monist.

Rupert Spira — contemporary British teacher of non-dual awareness, working in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta.

Galen Strawson — contemporary British philosopher who argues consciousness must be a fundamental feature of physical reality, not something that magically emerges from non-conscious matter.

Charles Taylor — Canadian philosopher who mapped the costs of modern "disenchantment" — the sense that something is missing in a purely scientific worldview.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and philosopher who argued that evolution has a direction — toward greater complexity and consciousness, ultimately toward what he called the "Omega Point." A bridge between science and spiritual orientation.

Paul Tillich — 20th-century theologian who described faith as "ultimate concern" and as the courage to be in the face of life's difficulties.

Eckhart Tolle — German-Canadian contemporary spiritual teacher whose books The Power of Now and A New Earth introduced the practice of presence and dis-identification from the ego to a broad popular audience, drawing on Buddhist, Christian mystical, and non-dual traditions.

Chögyam Trungpa — Tibetan Buddhist teacher who warned about "spiritual materialism" — using spiritual practice to inflate the ego instead of releasing it.

Max Weber — German sociologist who diagnosed modern life as "disenchanted" — drained of meaning by rationalization.

John Welwood — psychologist who coined "spiritual bypassing" — using spiritual ideas to avoid doing real psychological work.

Alfred North Whitehead — English philosopher who argued what's most real is not things but processes of becoming.

Norbert Wiener — American mathematician who founded cybernetics, the study of feedback and control in animals, machines, and societies.

Ken Wilber — American philosopher who identified the "pre/trans fallacy" — confusing pre-rational states with trans-rational ones, both of which lack a strong ego.