Day 3 – Optimise | Design Your Day: Strengthen Focus, Willpower, and Brain State Control

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In Day 3 – Optimise | Design Your Day: Strengthen Focus, Willpower & Brain State Control, we show how to lead AI by managing your own brain state, building a practical 30-day performance plan, and using the Day Designer to script a focused, energised 24 hours.

The goal is simple: protect deep work, automate recovery, and use AI to accelerate routine “ice-cube” tasks so you can sculpt meaningful results with full attention.

You’ll explore:
• Why the AI Revolution is a once-in-a-lifetime leverage window
• How to measure Brain States and match task difficulty for flow
• The danger of Medium-Charge work and its impact on quality
• Applying the AI Success Cycle across a 30-day rhythm
• The Day Designer timeline — from wake to sleep
• Scheduling deep work, breaks, exercise, and shutdown rituals
• Super Habits for sleep, diet, exercise, and stress control
• Taking ownership for accuracy and accountability when using AI
• Building momentum — and coaching others to use the same system

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing The AI Challenge
• 3:25 Brain States And Task Types
• 6:09 Don’t Outsource Responsibility To AI
• 10:06 The AI Success Cycle Overview
• 13:01 Meet The Day Designer
• 17:01 Build A 24‑Hour Timeline
• 20:56 Scheduling High And Medium Charge Work

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:41

Hello, habit mechanics, Dr. John Finn here. Hope you're having a fantastic day so far. We are into day three of our four-day train your brain for the AI revolution challenge, where we're going to be talking about how to thrive, how to become unstoppable in the AI era, how to capitalise on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So you don't look back in six months or twelve months and regret not getting ahead of this curve that's going to move faster than anything we've seen before. We are actually having some building works around Tucker Mind's office today. So if you hear any of that, that's what that is. But I don't think it should distract us. So you should by now have measured your brain states and have a brain state score. If you haven't done that, go back to day one. You can see it further down the feed. You should have also started to map out your future ambitious, meaningful story. And most crucially for today, have a good sense of the type of medium charge tasks and the type of high charge tasks that you want to get completed in the next 30 days. Remember, medium charge tasks we think of as freezing ice cubes and high charge tasks we think of building up ice sculptures. And for our medium charge ice cube freezing tasks, there is lots of that work now that we can start to outsource to agentic AI. And you're probably doing some of that already without even calling it that. Warning: do not try to do high charge work with an LLM when you're in a medium-charge brain state. That's going to lead to poor quality work, lots of mistakes. You may have seen a news story recently where I don't want to um say the wrong name. So it was a big one of the big four consultancy firms got sued by the Australian government for making a sizeable error in some documents they provided. My suspicion would be that is a human error because the human was over-relying on the AI, and they were working with the AI, not in their high-charge brain state. When we're working with generative AI tools, we're not outsourcing the responsibility to them. We are still the leader. The book stops with us from uh typos, which you won't get many of, if any, with this technology, but certainly um data being correct. Where's it being sourced from? Um you have to be the responsible for ultimately the validity and the reliability of the document that you submit to your clients. You cannot outsource that to the AI, but the AI will help you to get there faster. Um so what we're gonna do today is, and I'm just gonna share my screen. So this is also on YouTube if you want to watch the video. Um so I've just brought up the AI success cycle, which is from train your breath or the AI revolution. If you've got your copy in front of you whilst we're doing this, that's helpful. Or you might just listen through and then revisit the copy later. You can get a copy for what just one dollar on uh our website or a link via this uh podcast or video, depending on what which medium you're consuming this content. So, yeah, the four-step uh uh success cycle. Number one, measure your brain states. That's what we did on day one of the challenge. Number two, plan. So work with the task director to work out your long-term strategic plan and understand how that long-term vision works back to today. Um, very much focused on the next 30 days. Um so having that clear list of ice cubes, ice sculptures, or medium charge, high charge tasks, prioritize it, okay, especially for your um high charge work, how long each task is gonna take. So if you've got a five-hour task in high charge brain state, you're probably gonna struggle to do that in one day. So you might break it up across two or three or even four or five days. And then today we're gonna move on to working with the day designer. And slight, well, it's not a detour, but just talking about the details of this. So anyone who's read the habit mechanic, you know the lighthouse brain. Um, horribly unhelpful emotions, your hue controls the beam of your lighthouse brain, that beam of light, essentially your attention, which is focused on the the present, the past, and the future, looking for problems, worries, stresses. And then the other character, which is Will Amina Power or Will Power, that lives in the lighthouse's library and acts as uh Q's mentor. And what we're doing in Train Your Brain for Their Evolution is we're we're introducing some of Will Power's assistants. So you've already met one of those assistants, which is the task director. Today we're going to meet a second assistant, which is the day designer. And the day designer is working as part of Will Power's team to help you to strategically plan your day. So you have a strategic plan for the long-term future, but we need to have a strategic plan for the next 24-hour period, and that's what the willpower story is for. So the willpower story has multiple layers in terms of um how sophisticated or simple yours can be. But if you're watching the video, that's a full overview of the template, and essentially it's it acts as like a timeline for your day, first and foremost. And you can do this right now. If you get a piece a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil, you can just draw a line on I'd turn the paper uh landscape so it's as broad as it can be, and just draw a line from one end to the other. On the left hand side, right in the middle of the page, pause if you need to go get the the necessary uh learning materials. But if you draw a line down the middle, and then um you on the left hand side write down either the time right now or the time you're gonna get up in the morning. So if you're writing the time right now, you're gonna plan the rest of the day. If you write the time you're gonna get up in the morning, you're gonna plan tomorrow, that next 24 hour period. And then at on the right hand side of the line, write down what time you want to go to bed either tonight, if you wrote on the left hand side the time right now, or if you're planning for tomorrow, think about what time you're gonna go to bed tomorrow night. That's how far we have to plan in advance if we want to give ourselves the best chance of being at our best. And then what you have in between is the time that you have. So let's just think about it for if we're doing it for a full 24-hour period, like for tomorrow. So, what you then start to do is you look at your list of um tasks that you need to complete in the next 30 days, and you identify the ones you've highlighted as the top priority tasks. So you might pick your top priority um high charge brain state eye sculpture building task. And because you might feel that you are cognitively most capable and freshest because you because you sleep well in the morning, and if you're like me, you do some exercise, and you I plan to do some exercise before I even start work, then I'm gonna uh block out a couple of hours first thing to work on that first that highest priority ice sculpture building task. And then what I might do is um plan a little bit of medium charge work either side of lunch time so you can look at the tasks that you need to achieve again from that list, and then I'm also gonna put in things like um recharge breaks. So at lunch time, I'm gonna go for a walk where I just focus on my breathing to reduce my activation levels. I might be thinking, what does activation mean? Don't worry about that. Um but it but in right now, but if you go to the uh appendices of train your brain for the air evolution, uh there's a full section in there about activation. Activation really is about the neurotransmitters that sit behind brain states. But we're not gonna worry about that right now, but we're gonna use this willpower story or just the basic timeline that you've you've drawn out, it's like a container for the day or a container for the rest of the day, if you've just mapped it out for the rest of the day. And by planning ahead around what we're gonna do, and we're not just talking about work tasks, we're talking about what time we're gonna be in bed. When do we need to drink our water, or how much water do we need to drink today so we're hydrated enough to sleep well, for example? When are we gonna stop drinking caffeine? Like you don't have to list down every single thing that you're gonna do, but you want to spotlight the super behaviors that are gonna give you the best chance of being at your best. So for me, going for that run first thing, for me, doing that, having that exercise break at lunchtime where I focus on my breathing, for me, finishing work at a set time, for me, so that I can properly switch off, sleep properly, and be ready again for the next 24-hour period or the next the next day. Um, making sure I do my three-to-one reflection at the end of the day. And what starts to happen is that um you just automate lots of those super habits and they become second nature because they're a habit, right? And once you've automated one of them, you can then focus on managing the next one. So, this is what the Willpower story does. It has layers of sophistication, but the core ingredients really are your brain states, activation levels, which sit behind brain states, and the things that you need to prioritize getting done. Not just the things at work, but the things you need to do to be healthy, happy, and at your best, including high quality sleep, eating properly, exercising properly, proactively managing stress. Um, and the AI success cycle is just the foundational system that we put in place to give us a rhythm to every 30-day period. What we then do is we focus on, if you read through step two properly, you'll see that then we start to focus on um building super habits, like some of those things I just mentioned. So I want to build a better sleep diet exercise habit, so I'm gonna build in a diet exercise, sleep swap plan into this. I want to build a better stress management habit, so I'm gonna build in a daily wabber, a written earth brain argument, and so on and so forth. So this is just the starting point, but it's the essential foundation. So we understand where our brain states are at, we've got that score. We then have a sense of why we want to be doing what we're doing. Um, our long-term strategic plan in the fam story, we focus that down to the next 30 days, and then we every day we build this core habit of creating a willpower story, even if it's just as basic as mapping out that timeline on a piece of paper. And the more we do this, the better we get at it. So that's the that's day three of the challenge, and again, you can go into um so step three optimization with the day designer starts on page 105 of Train Your Brain for the Air Revolution, and it covers uh chapter 20, 21, 22. Um, even if you look at the audiobook, you'll you'll see the the steps are very clearly denoted. So if you want to see what what are the chapters for step two again, just just look and you'll you'll easily see them. Um the book is organized around these four steps, or there's actually five steps because the bonus step is starting to learn how to coach others, and that's the beauty of this system, that's why we design it like this. This is the same system you use not only to coach yourself but to help others, whether it's your children or your direct reports, or you want to set up your own coaching business. And as I keep saying, the gold standard of being able to do this for yourself is becoming a certified having mechanic coach, even if you don't actually want to use these tools with anybody else uh formally, because it's the set it's the old saying, you don't know it until you can teach it. Um the world is more complex than ever before. In the UK right now, there are 5,000 people every single day being signed off onto the sick, largely, so onto sick benefits, largely with anxiety and depression. We're overwhelmed, right at the point in history where if our brain is working really well, we have this unprecedented ability to supercharge being at our best because AI is just like brain power that's cheap and accessible to everybody. What most people are not recognizing is these AI tools that are now currently available for between free to maybe um twenty dollars a month or something, they are like enterprise level tools that have cost hundreds of billions of dollars to put together. They're at your fingertips. Um I know, I know if you're listening to this, I'm kind of preaching to the converted because you you're bought in and you just want to get using your brain properly first, and then slowly layer the tools on. So that's it. That's all I wanted to cover today. Um, but again, the key is not knowing this, not just listening and saying, Yeah, that's a good idea, John, is doing it and putting it into practice. I do this every day. I do it every day. You can do this on your days off because it gives you a better chance of doing what you need to do on your days off to actually recharge or actually get done what you need to get done. It's spending minutes to save hours, and that doesn't do it justice because you're spending minutes to supercharge your health, happiness, and performance. By I'd say, if I don't do a willpower story, if I don't get my super habits fired up on a work day, for example, I'm probably 50% less effective. So I'm spending minutes to be 50% more impactful on my day, not just work. That includes sleeping better, it includes eating more healthily, it includes speaking to myself in a more helpful way. So this is simple, but it's very complex in what you're doing. But you don't need to know all of the complexity. Like when you write this out, it actually activates your neocortex, and that's why it's powerful. But we don't need to go there, you just need to do it. Trust me. Um these tools are not just made up, they're developed over a long period of time, um, with a lot of thought and a lot of refinement so that you can just use them and start helping others to do it as well. So that's all I wanted to say. Um, if you're if you need to, you can go back and just rework through day day one, day two, day three. You might be just touching the core insights today, and then you're gonna go back over the weekend, maybe where you feel have a bit more time and just work through all four on one day or work through two steps on Saturday, two steps on Sunday, or you have a bit more time, it's fine. Uh do whatever you need to do that's most helpful for you. But the information is here. If you don't have a copy of the book, you just you can just get it for uh one dollar free is free. But we just literally, anyone who runs a business knows the cost of of of software and bills are going sky high, so we do have to charge a one dollar just for processing fee. We're still losing money on that. Um, but yeah, there you go. Thank you so much for listening, and I will be back tomorrow. And remember, you only have a one rent habit away.