Exile Lifestyle

One of my favorite assignments in design school involved going through my old class work and re-appropriating something I had done before into something new. I took old photographs and turned them into new album covers. A once-glorious illustration became a newly-glorious social poster. A really-quite-bad infographic became a really-quite-funny t-shirt.

The idea of reaching back into your near- or distant-past for inspiration can be taken beyond scrapping old projects for new raw materials. Case in point: I’m in the process of selling off everything I own, and my trusty old guitar is sitting in the middle of my living room (which has become Purgatory for my items in transition).

If you’re anything at all like me, your time is very valuable to you. You only have 24 hours in a day and ostensibly only a portion of those hours are yours to use for productive things, so you do your best to make the most of them, cut out the chaff and increase your output the best you can.

Needless to say, this kind of mindset is not conducive to breaks, naps, lollygagging or friends (just kidding on that last one….or am I!?).

But despite my own and your propensity for productivity, I want to propose a non-intuitive method for increasing effectiveness, alertness and mental health. I call it Your 20 Minutes of Awesome, and I want to tell you why you should utilize this method every single day.