The 1% in May

What did the 1% look like last month? And what am I focusing on in June?

(As always, this voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. It’s unedited, and today you might hear the washing machine. If you like/need to listen to these posts I hope you enjoy it regardless!)

Happy Sunday, mates, and welcome to the monthly 1% post.

As you know, in these letters I look at some of the ways I’ve tried to apply the 1% to my life over the past month (you can see previous posts here and here) in an effort to make slow and steady change over time rather than taking big, unsustainable leaps occasionally. My theory for 2023 is that, by applying the idea of 1% gently and over time, I’ll see more positive impacts than hustling hard and burning out.

Sometimes practising the 1% looks like spending literally 15 minutes of my day on something, other times it’s more about making tiny incremental shifts to what I’m doing, either in the hope of creating significant change over time, or to recognise that a 1% improvement is still an improvement.

It's been an interesting month of recalibration if I’m being honest. I realised at some stage in May that while I have been saying all the right words about slow and steady change and how the real power of 1% lies in long-term evolution, blah blah blah, the reality is that I’ve still been thinking about it very differently.

I’ve been waiting for these slow and steady changes to have some big, impressive, cumulative impact and getting frustrated when it hasn’t happened. I found myself weeding the garden the other day, agitated that my 15-minute effort hadn’t yielded better results, so I ignored my timer — once, twice, three times. Of course, I got more weeding done than I would have, but I also overdid it, paying the price the next day when I was not only too wiped out to do 15 minutes of weeding, but too wiped out to do 15 minutes of much at all.

(Part of the 1% for me is also helping to manage my energy output as I figure out how to live/work with chronic health conditions. I’m a habitual envelope-pusher, so it’s very challenging but also very needed.)

It’s been a bit humbling, to realise that I’m still looking at the 1% like the hare, rather than embracing it like the tortoise, and I’m figuring out what it means to accept that these small efforts might never add up to the showy kind of result I’ve been waiting for.

How did I apply the 1% in May?