Matt Warren

Category: Productivity

Systems, habits, workflows, and personal optimization

  • My 2026 Resolution: Rebuild the Morning

    My 2026 Resolution: Rebuild the Morning

    I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. Most of them are wishful thinking dressed up as commitment. But this year I’m trying something different—I’m not adding new habits, I’m recovering old ones. Not setting goals, just simple routines.

    These are habits I’ve had before. Habits I know work for me. Habits I let slip during a busy year and need to bring back.

    The Foundation: Sleep

    Everything starts with sleep. When I sleep well, everything else gets easier. When I don’t, willpower becomes the only thing holding my day together—and willpower is a finite resource.

    The habits I’m rebuilding aren’t complicated. They’re foundational. The kind of boring, unsexy practices that don’t make for good social media content but actually move the needle on quality of life.

    Here’s the thing: I’m not trying to optimize my sleep with gadgets and sleep scores. I’m trying to remove the friction that prevents good sleep from happening naturally.

    Phone Out of the Bedroom

    This is the single biggest change I’ve made to my sleep quality in years. And I keep forgetting it.

    When my phone is on my nightstand, I check it before sleep. I scroll when I should be winding down. Then in the morning, I lie in bed catching up on notifications instead of getting up.

    The fix is absurdly simple: the phone stays on the charger in my office. If I’m in bed, I’m either sleeping or I’m bored enough to get up. There’s no third option where I’m doom-scrolling at midnight or hitting snooze until I’ve wasted half the morning.

    The 10-Minute Walk

    I’m adding a morning walk to the routine. Just 10 minutes outside before I start work.

    I’ll be honest—I’m skeptical I’ll stick to this one. It’s January in Canada. The appeal of stepping outside into -15°C weather is… limited.

    But the evidence is hard to ignore. Morning sunlight resets your circadian rhythm. Movement wakes up your body. Cold air (unfortunately) wakes up your brain. Everyone I know who does this swears by it.

    So I’m committing to the experiment. If I can build the habit during the hardest months, it should be easy to maintain when spring arrives.

    Morning Ketones

    Here’s where things get a bit more experimental.

    I don’t eat a big breakfast. Never have. My brain needs to work in the morning, but my body doesn’t need a carb-heavy meal.

    I need fuel for the challenging cognitive work I do early in the day. The solution I’m testing: ketones.

    Ketones are an alternative fuel source for your brain. When you’re in ketosis—either from fasting or a low-carb diet—your body produces them naturally. But you can also supplement them directly.

    I’m starting with powdered MCT oil, which is a precursor to ketones. Your liver converts medium-chain triglycerides into ketones relatively quickly. The powdered form mixes easily into coffee and doesn’t cause the digestive… adventures… that liquid MCT oil is famous for.

    If that doesn’t give me the mental clarity I’m looking for, I’ll try ketone salt powders next. And if those don’t work, there are direct ketone ester shots—expensive and allegedly terrible-tasting, but effective.

    The goal isn’t ketosis for weight loss or any of the other popular reasons people try it. The goal is giving my brain high-octane fuel first thing in the morning without spiking my blood sugar.

    Why Recovery, Not Optimization

    I’ve noticed a pattern in my life. I discover habits that work. I practice them consistently. Things improve. Then life gets busy, the habits slip, and I spend months wondering why I feel worse.

    The answer is usually obvious in retrospect: I stopped doing the things that were working.

    This year’s resolution isn’t about finding new hacks or optimizing my stack. It’s about acknowledging that I already know what works for me—I just need to do it again.

    Phone out of the bedroom. Walk in the morning. Fuel the brain without crashing the blood sugar. Go to bed at a reasonable hour.

    Nothing revolutionary. Just the basics, rebuilt.

    Here’s to a year of doing the boring stuff that actually works.

  • Goals and Goal Setting

    Goals and Goal Setting

    I’m one of those people who have stubbornly made new years resolutions for many years. Sometimes they stick and sometimes they don’t.

    What I’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t comes down to these core lessons:

    1. focus on action rather than results
    2. Write it somewhere you will look at regularly – and rewrite the goals often as you break them into monthly, weekly and daily actions
    3. measurable is best

    Lets dig in.

    Action over Results

    I might have in my mind that I want to lose 10lbs this year, but the effective resolution that will help me get there has been to record my weight every day. When recording my weight it keeps things in mind often enough that progress happens by default – because I can take action everytime that my weight unexpectedly goes up.

    Here’s a couple more examples:

    Instead of 500 Youtube followers – goal is to publish at least 1 video a week

    Instead of the goal to build some AI software – it’s to commit code to git everyday.

    The lower the level of action that can be measured the more likely it has been for me to make progress on it.

    Write it Somewhere Obvious

    Goals that disappear behind and app, on a sticky note burried in a pile of paper, or in the middle of a journal will tend to be forgotten within days. You cannot hit a goal that you’ve forgotten about.

    Sometimes even if it’s just on a big billboard right in front of your face all day you can still be blinded by it.

    That’s why I like to re-write the goals often, revisit your goal list at the beginning of every month. Pick the goals that can be broken down into something that can be accomplished for the month and rewrite into a monthly goal, then every day of the month rewrite the goal into the day’s action to take.

    Write it by hand – makes it more real and the tediousness of re-writing adds motivation to get it done.

    Measurable Output

    Something like the goal of 500 YouTube subs isn’t entirely in your control. There’s algorithms, and luck involved in catching the right moment in time with the right video.

    Publishing a weekly video is in your control, it’s a cadence that you set, and hopfully can meet. The quality of that video can be as good as you can make in the time allocated to it, and hopefully with repetition, the quality improves.

    I prefer to have measurable items that are dependant on me and remove uncertainty about the finished result. Writing code vs features delivered, videos published vs subscribers gained, emails sent vs converted sales.

  • 3D Printing: is it Worthwhile?

    3D Printing: is it Worthwhile?

    I got my hands on my first 3D printer back in 2018. My goal was to use it to enable a couple projects that I had in mind but which I had hit a wall and unable to build them with the tools I had. The 3D printer was supposed to unlock a world of making things that don’t exist, and bringing ideas to life.

    Over the last 3 years, I have printed a lot of things. The 3D printer gets more use than the paper printer in my house. That’s a great accomplishment.

    some of the 3D prints have stood the test of time:

    • custom printed house numbers
    • A decrative doorbell cover
    • SD card storage box
    • soap tray
    • storage organizing bins
    • various wire management clips
    • decrative moon light (test with lithophane)
    • mounts for Alexa and Google devices
    • special organizing hooks and trays

    Lots of other projects were fun to build, and educational:

    • RC boat
    • mini geodesic dome
    • glider model

    Many of these projects just would not have happened without a printer in the house.

    Keeping it in mind is an important step to get the most out of tools like a 3D printer. I follow several social media accounts and Youtube channels that focus on 3D printing and it helps spark projects. If the ideas aren’t coming at you, it’s very difficult to see problems in real life and imagine how a 3D printer will solve that for you.

  • 2023 Health Strategy

    2023 Health Strategy

    Your health REALLY IS the foundation of running a successful business. Here’s a sustainable plan that has already helped me lose 35lbs this year.

    This year I have already lost 35 lbs. It’s a big visual change that has also improved several unexpected other health benefits.

    The benefits have been numerous:

    1. regaining the ability to run – and now working towards a half-marathon
    2. back pain have mostly gone away, a long standing issue with my thorasic spine has finally improved
    3. The weight loss makes simple things like getting out of bed easier
    4. I can do a lot more pull-ups (without trying to improve reps)
    5. better sleep, falling asleep faster and sleeping deeper, better energy in the morning
    6. significant improvement in resting heart rate, trending from 66bpm down to 57bpm, and seeing 52bpm more often now.

    There are 3 pillars to this working:

    1. Eating habits
    2. Exercise habits
    3. Measurement habits

    Ignore one of these habits and things fall apart relatively quickly.

    Eating Habits

    The strategy to do this starts with diet. I have tested a lot of diets – it can be fun to see how your body reacts to changing food. I’ve tested vegitarian, carnivore, slow-carb, keto, atkins, calorie counting, journaling, and various fasting schedules.

    The best approach has been the fasting protocols. Why do they work best for me?

    1. very clear simple rules – eat only within very clear times
    2. Fasting beyond just time while asleep, gives your body more hours to tap into fat for energy
    3. After adapting it’s very easy, and never feel hungry
    4. it’s not too prescriptive about what food you eat, burgers and fries and pizza are fine

    In addition to the fasting schedule I added one additional constraint to restrict snacks or treats.

    This year my fasting schedule has modified to reflect the measurements as time passed.

    At the beginning of the year I started with a simple schedule that restricted eating within the 9am-5pm window. Eating only during business hours. This essentially just cut any evening snacks. But I did have a little chocolate or something for desert after supper.

    As I hit a plateau on weight loss from this schedule, I shifted to 11-5. having only a black coffee in the morning at about 9am.

    At the next pleateau, I shifted to 12-5, and removed any snacks. I often removed carbs from the lunch. I ate a lot of eggs/omlettes for lunch during this period.

    Next plan changes were to increase protein proportion of food. This was driven from lingering muscle fatigue. I try to take 100-150g of protein per day, most of that is from whey – 2 scoups for lunch + 2 scoups just before supper.

    I will continue to tweak depending on how my measurements go over time. One of the biggest lessons from this has been to not trust your emotions and feelings about food.

    A 4 day business trip threw a wrench in my eating habits, I got back home 5lbs heavier. This trip took 3 weeks to recover from and get back to the pre-trip weight. Things like this happen.

    So what food am I actually eating these days?

    • black coffee at 9am
    • Lunch (noon):
      • protein shake (60g) mixed with water
      • and peanut butter sandwich
    • Supper (5:30):
      • protein shake (60g) mixed with water
      • balanced meal that usually includes chicken/beef/fish with a starchy food like rice/potatoe and some other vegetables.
    • Eating Nothing after 6:30pm
    • A lot of water, usually with some zero calorie flavoring added.

    Exercise Habits

    I have attempted to exericse more many times. and it’s never stuck. Working out is a struggle, and I usually end up with some sort of minor injury that derails any habit building. Avoiding injury has become a key consideration of any exercise plan.

    This year, I focused on walking. Low impact, easy.

    I added walking to the mix of things around March. It started with outdoor walks, but really ramped up when I got a walking treadmill in mid-April. The treadmil is too bulky and heavy to move out of the way, so I rarely sit down. I walk 6-10 hours per day, and have many days > 30,000 steps now.

    Walking daily at this level was hard at first, but has gotten easier. It fixed some posture issues since it’s very difficult to hunch over while walking.

    Walking uncovered some issues that I didn’t know were issues as well. For example, I developed some pain in my quads on the right leg, after some research I found out it was muscle adhesion that required some active release. Active release proved to be a 5 minute fix that resolved it for weeks. This muscle adhesion would be reducing the efficiency of my muscles so discovering and fixing this will improve running performance.

    Now that my weight has come down (<160lbs), running is easier on joints and less likely to result in injury. I’m starting very low distance (less than 1km).

    Running brought to focus cardio. My heart rate and lungs cannot keep up with a long run anymore. unfortunately my treadmill cannot handle a run, so these are outdoors and weather dependent which makes it harder to work into the day.

    Measurement Habits

    I dislike wearing watches, last year I tried to wear an Apple watch but it just never worked well for me. In December 2023 I got a fitbit Charge 5, and that proved convenient enough to stay on my wrist. The slim design doesn’t push into my wrist, and the battery lasts 5 days at a time, so it stays on.

    The fitbit primarily measures steps. The measurement of steps started out as goals – 250 steps every houry, and 10,000 steps a day. Over time the goal of hitting those numbers has faded away and the benefit has just been in seeing the trends over time and collecting the historical data.

    One surprise from having the fitbit has been seeing my resting heart rate trend down along with my weight. This has proven to be an extra motivation that this exercise and diet program is working and I should stick with it.

    Another basic measure I take daily is my weight. I weigh myself as part of my morning ritual, it’s first thing in the morning before consuming any water or coffee, before getting a shower. This is generally the lowest weight I have throughout the day. In the past I have gone so far as to measure my weight before and after doing things to see what the impact is. Before and after meals, before and after using the restroom, before and after showering, before and after exercise, before and after sleeping. Weight can fluctuate by several lbs through the day. Consistency helps makes the measurements more stable and comparable between days.

    Tracking weight daily helps to identify some of the effects of what actions you take on a short enough timeline to learn the association, and make micro adjustments. Things can go sideways a lot over the course of a week.

    I record my weight in the fitbit app because it’s convenient.

    Motivation

    What I’ve found is that these three pillars of eating, exercise and metrics work together to maintain momentum and encourage sticking with it. Food eating habits alone are hard to change, without metrics caving on a plan once can often derail the habit and it can be hard to jump back on the train. Doing a food plan with measurements but without exercise can hit a plateau that becomes frustrating enough to give up.

    If this is helpful, or you have questions, connect with me on Twitter. It would be great to know if it’s valuable, or if there’s room for improvement.

  • Factorio

    Factorio

    I don’t often get to play video games, but I have put in 242 hours on Factorio. These are my favorite kind of games – resource management. And this one in particular focuses on one of my favorite things to think about – factories.

    The game features a complex tech tree of products that need to be built, and you design the full vertically integrated factory that extracts basic resources, refines them, and builds increasingly complicated parts. You get to layout all the complicated conveyor belts and machines to move things from one place to another.

    The most interesting things that end up complicating what you build tend to be around matching the production and consumption rates of various parts of the system – how many things fit on the conveyor belt, how fast can it deliver items, how reliable is the source material – does it need a buffer, what’s the ratio of particular production of sub-components required so you don’t have 1000’s of one thing, but none of another part.

    The game also has an element of battle with the aliens who occassionally attack and destroy everything (this is probably the least fun part of the game)

    There’s enough depth to the gameplay that I could definitely put 1000+ hours into it and still not be an expert in all the more advanced things like train management and control signals. And once you have explored the stock game, there’s a massive librarly of mods that can completely tweak everything.

    This is a game that teaches some valuable thinking skills. Managing complex systems and how best to abstract and organize things. I definitely got my money out of this game. Lots of fun. Highly recommend.

  • Pace of Innovation

    Our ability to be productive is the most critical metric that determines quality of life. It’s a fundamental measurement of how the economy is doing, identifys where we are stagnating, and shows where the biggest gains are.

    There are many factors that go into improving productivity – capital investment in tooling, factories and better software, also education and training. Those examples all suffer from limits. With the best people, using the best tools and methods you’ll hit an upper ceiling of productivity that cannot be surpassed without an innovation.

    Here’s a story I heard about the UK cycling team. In 2002, the UK had an abismal record of only 1 gold medal in the previous 76 years. It had gotten so bad that not only did they have a difficult time finding a bike company to sponsor the team, but several bike companies actually requested that the UK team NOT use or be seen using their bikes for fear of being associated with such poor performance. However, in 2002 they got new leadership from Sir Dave Brailsford who focused intensely on innovating in every minute detail. They found new ways to shave weight from the bikes, new clothing, better diets for the athletes, improved routines, tested supplements, tweaked aerodynamics, and tried various greases and lubricants. Every possible variable that could be optimized was systematically researched for innovations and many of them eeked out small improvements of less than 1% performance gains. In aggregate however these small changes had an outsized impact and resulted in a dramatic turnaround from absolute failure to domination.

    Not only are the individual innovations important but the pace at which those innovations happen can quickly become a massive advantage.

    So what kinds of things can you do to increase the pace of innovation. Here’s some ideas:

    • shorten iteration cycles of build-test-learn-repeat
    • focus on quantity early on rather than doing it right the first time
    • apply project planning on what can be done in parallel
    • be creative at un-blocking people and their tasks – avoid being stuck waiting for external people/services/deliveries etc.
    • replace external dependencies with more reliable internal ones
    • reduce parts
    • simplify or eliminate processes
    • everything is wrong, it is only temporarily the best solution
    • look out for local maximums and have the courage to back out to try something better (one step back, two steps forward)
    • put things in place to reduce the time it takes to get a new person up to speed – good documentation, simpler onboarding
    • always try to find analogues in other industries
    • apply A/B or multi-variate testing where possible
    • know the goal, keep it in focus
    • calculate the fundamental limits
    • periodically step back to get a 10000ft view
    • periodically dig into the minutia
    • use the right words for things
    • make change easy
    • encourage ideas from everyone and everywhere
    • even small changes are worth doing

    I think it’s worth spending considerable effort on things that improve the pace of innovation. Leave a comment if you have more ideas for things that will accelerate innovation personally or where you work. I’d love to collect as many ideas as I can

  • Global Kick Towards Abundance

    The utopian future portrayed in Star Trek takes place is a post scarcity society where money has lost it’s importance and people more or less have the access to food, energy and housing they need to live as well as the freedom to acheive their personal life ambitions without worrying about where the next paycheque is coming from.

    We’re not there yet.

    But we do live in a time where technology is advancing very quickly, and around the forseeable corner is things like self-driving, automated factories, delivery drones and AI that could smash millions of jobs out of the economy faster than we can adapt. Technology is driving a deflationary effect that is causing prices to drop at an accelerating pace. This has been happening for a while now (though not always apparent) and the only way that the global finance system has staved off deflation is by printing massive amounts of money to counteract price drops. This has been critical to avoiding the situation where the massive amounts of debt in the world cannot be possibly paid off with future dollars that are more abundant due to inflation. For over a decade now, we have had near-zero interest rates and massive government spending attempting to goose some inflation, but it’s been less and less effective at doing so.

    The gobal situation with massive job losses, and work from home, lockdowns are a potential trigger that could cascade into a future where deflation finally takes over and prices start to fall. Suddenly people are being forced to use online shopping, click and collect groceries and finding out that there are a lot of products and services they don’t need. Stores may start to adapt by making contactless delivery the preferred way to purchase. and as a result start scaling back on retail presence. Ultimately the cost savings from this will turn into lower prices for consumers.

    I’ve always thought that things will transition to the point where ultimately the end-to-end creation and delivery of a product will not require humans in the loop – automated mining machines composed of high-quality mining equipment parts or farming or tree cutting will deliver materials to factories built and operated by automated robots, powered by electricity from solar panels made and installed by robots. The only scarcity will come from patents, information access, and land-use.

    What would happen to the cost of electricity if robots could turn sand into solar panels and ship them to your house with zero humans required? What if the robots were open-source designed and mostly 3D printable?

    Despite the unprecedented amounts of money that governments around the world are using to keep the current system going, I’m not sure it will be enough to restore consumer confidence and get people back into their old habits of spending and borrowing and investing. Time will tell if the current experiment with helicopter money directly into people’s pockets keeps things rolling forward for long.

    Right now millions of people are finding ways that working from home can be productive. Businesses are going to be looking at the productivity benefit of having office space and many will come out of this forced work from home with a realization that the ROI on office space is not worth it in some cases. retail shopping will take another shift towards Amazon for everything.

    We will have perhaps a year or more of people investing in ways to continue operating their businesses without needing to have people interacting with eachother with physical proximity. These investments will accelerate towards more robots and drones.

    The march towards abundance is unstoppable. Staving off deflation will necessarily fail at some point as a result. This current crisis will be the kick that forces a re-think of many of our most established institutions and accepted norms.

  • Change Begets Change

    It’s amazing just how much making a change can trickle to other changes in life. Moving and a new Job are things that can kick off a cascade of other impacts. This year I did both of those things.

    Switching from a self-employed, and renting back to employed in a normal 9-5, and owning + mortgage resulted in many changes in my day-to-day.

    I used to be engaged with personal projects – multiple websites I was working on launching plus writing, drawing, and creating a youtube series. These were things based on my interests and ambitions. I had time to go to the gym everyday.

    Since buying a house, all of those things have stopped progressing. Of the 24 hours in a day – 8 are sleeping, 8-9 are working and the remainder are spent in traffic, eating and working on the house.

    It’s been a near complete change in my day-to-day patterns of living.

  • Beast Mode

    It can be amazing what is possible to accomplish in a day, week, month or year with the right motivation and habits. My life is documented in over 1500 blog posts on this website. My weekly routine for blogging has fallen to the wayside the past little while because of – new house purchase, packing, moving prep, planning a renovation, helping launch 2 businesses, and doing 3 people’s jobs at work.

    Beast Mode is part of the secret that makes it possible to do so much stuff.

    If you ever played the old SEGA game “Altered Beast”. Beast mode is the power-up you get that gives you extra abilities to defeat more enemies in the game.

    Beast mode for me is a frame of mind that is hyper focused on getting things done. When cleaning the house this turns into a bit of a race, tidying things at a running pace. With computer stuff, it is usually being focused at getting something good enough to ship and getting it done before moving to something else. Be hyper productive.

    The process of going into ‘beast mode’ to get things done quickly has been a helpful mental tool.

  • Da Vinci

    The Science and tech museum hosted an exhibit about Leonardo da Vinci which we went to go see over the weekend.

    One thing for sure is that it made me feel inadequate. He was able to get so much stuff designed and built that it just makes my efforts to be productive look like a snails pace. Designing everything from military weapons to musical instruments, flying machines, and cities. Then still having time to become a master painter. Truly prolific.

    The exhibit left me with more questions than answers. How the hell did Da Vinci accomplish so much. There must be some secrets. It got me curious enough to order a copy of Walter Isaacson’s biography of him to try to find out more.

    One question that entered my mind was: Is it even possible to have another Leonardo Da Vinci today? There is no question that our access to information has improved greatly since his day, but it is also incredibly difficult to have the time dedicate to deep thinking between jobs and abundant distractions.

    What do you think? If someone with the aptitude of Leonardo was born today would they achieve the same astounding historical significance or would they be found in a cubicle somewhere?