I have a few habits that most people think are slightly weird. Some friends have called them rude. None are flashy and none require an app subscription. They are small operating rules I picked up over the last few years that have made my life noticeably better. Here are the three I would actually recommend.
Habit 1: I make arbitrary decisions on things that will not matter
If something is not going to matter five days from now, I make an arbitrary decision and move on. Usually this is what I wear, which restaurant we go to when friends ask me to pick, or what I order on a menu. I find the first dish that sounds interesting and stop reading. I do not second-guess it.
The reason: you have limited decision-making capacity every day. Every choice uses some of it. By the time you get to the decisions that genuinely matter (work priorities, a tough conversation, a career move) you have less mental energy left. Cutting trivial decisions is one of the cheapest ways to protect that budget.
The brain is good at high-stakes thinking when it is fresh. Most people burn through that freshness on choices that will not matter in a week. Outfit. Restaurant. Coffee order. These do not need your best thinking. Save it.
This is also why I do not get drawn into the menu-debate game. I pick the first thing that looks decent. If it turns out to be a 7/10 instead of a 9/10, the cost is microscopic. If you have read my 9 career tips, this connects to the broader idea of keeping mental slack for what matters.
Habit 2: I capture every idea immediately, judge it later
I use an app called Drafts. When you tap the app icon, it opens a new blank note with the keyboard already up. Zero friction. Any time an idea hits, I open Drafts and dump it without judging. Out of my head, into the app, on with the moment.
Every few days I triage. Each note gets one of three outcomes. Do the thing. File it in Notion. Think about it once more and delete it. Nothing sits in the limbo of “this might be a good idea, let me think about it later.” Either I am acting on it, storing it, or killing it.
This habit changed two things. First, my ideas got better because I stopped losing the early ones. Most good ideas are second or third drafts of mediocre first ones. Second, I stopped having that low-grade anxiety of “wait, what was that thing I thought of in the meeting.”
I capture ideas in conversations, meetings, while watching TV, on a walk. The unjudged-capture-then-judge-later split is the part that works. If you try to judge while capturing, you reject things you would have wanted in hindsight.
This connects to how to figure out what you actually want to do. Most signals that tell you what to pursue are quiet early ideas. If you do not capture them, you do not get to follow them.
Habit 3: I leave parties and gatherings at the peak
At a party, there is usually one point where the enjoyment hits its peak. After that, it gets less enjoyable to stay. That is when I leave. I go home and I sleep.
Two things made me start doing this. First, observation. People who left around the peak remembered the night as great. People who stayed until 4am usually woke up tired, regretted it, and lost most of the next day. Second, after I read Naval Ravikant’s book, it validated what I was already doing. When I am not enjoying myself anymore, I leave.
This sounds small. It is not. Compounded over a year, it is the difference between Saturdays where I get real work done and Saturdays where I am useless. Compounded over years, it is the difference between someone who shows up energized and someone always recovering from the previous night.
A few people have called this rude. It is not. You showed up, you were present, you connected, and now you are going home. Most hosts respect it once they see you do it consistently.
The principle behind all three habits is the same. Protect your high-quality time and decisions for the things that compound. Be ruthless about the things that do not. This is also why I have written so much about 5 key career learnings and saying no to wrong setups early.
The underlying rule: spend energy where it actually moves the needle
If I had to compress all three into a single rule: treat your attention and decision-making as a finite, refillable resource. Every day you get a budget. Spend it on the things that move you forward in years, not the things that feel productive in the moment.
Most people lose more output to chronic small leaks (menu debates, party hangovers, lost ideas) than to a lack of ambition. Plug the leaks first. The ambition takes care of itself. For the books that shaped how I think about this, see books before business school.