I recently tried Bryan Johnson's tips for anti-aging. And while drinking lemon water and going for a walk before work have significantly helped to start each day feeling physically better, the color-coded Google Calendar staring back at me is inevitably causing some gray hairs.
But after reading about Elon Musk's favorite mental model of First Principles Thinking, I decided to give it a try. Musk famously used these principles to realize that the raw materials of a rocket only cost 2% of the finished product, leading him to build SpaceX. I wondered: What if I stripped the "raw materials" of my productivity down to the physics?
Because I'm not a rocket scientist, I gave the job to ChatGPT. I told the AI: "Ignore every productivity 'hack' ever written. Use First Principles Thinking to deconstruct the concept of a 'workday.' What are the fundamental truths of human output, and how can we rebuild a schedule from scratch based only on biology and physics?"
The AI’s response was a cold, hard slap in the face to my weekly grind. Here's what happened and how it double my deep work focus.
