Find your joy, cut the noise, guard your data

🌱 HEALTHY

Build Routines That Bring You Joy

Self-care advice usually sounds like a chore. Meditate. Journal. Drink more water. Exercise daily.

It's all technically good for you, but if it feels like another item on your to-do list, you're not going to stick with it.

The routines that actually improve your mental and physical health are the ones you genuinely enjoy. Not the ones you force yourself through because they're "good for you."

You already know what brings you joy. The problem is you're not prioritizing it.

Maybe it's cooking a meal you love instead of defaulting to the quickest option. Maybe it's making time for a hobby you keep saying you'll get back to. Maybe it's seeing friends more than once a month instead of letting weeks slip by.

The goal isn't to optimize every minute or turn yourself into a productivity machine. It's to create small pockets of time where you're actively enjoying what you're doing instead of just going through the motions.

Mental health improves when your baseline quality of life improves. And that happens when you stop treating joy as something you only get on special occasions and start building it into your regular routines.

Takeaway: Pick one thing you genuinely enjoy and make time for it this week. Not something you "should" do - something you actually want to do. Build it into your routine and see if it shifts how you feel.

🪙 WEALTHY

Signal vs. Noise

Most of your to-do list is noise.

Emails. Slack messages. Formatting documents. Tweaking your website copy for the third time this week. It all feels like work, but none of it moves the needle.

The signal is different. Signal is the handful of tasks that actually change your trajectory. Writing that sales page. Reaching out to potential clients. Building the product feature people keep asking for. The stuff that matters six months from now.

Everything else? Noise disguised as productivity.

Here's the problem: noise is easier. It's comfortable. You can knock out 20 small tasks and feel accomplished while avoiding the one big thing that actually scares you because it matters.

The fix is brutal simplicity.

Write down everything you think you need to do for your project. Then look at that list and circle the top two or three things that will genuinely move you closer to your goal. Not the things that feel urgent or easy. The things that matter.

Now cross out everything else. Actually eliminate it from your focus.

If you can narrow it to two tasks, even better. One is ideal.

Then execute until it's done. Repeat.

The point is when you are working, work on the right things. Focus on signal, not noise.

Takeaway: List every task for your current project. Circle the 1-2 that will actually move the needle. Cross out everything else and don't touch them until your signal tasks are done.

📚 AND WISE

You're Training the AI You're Talking To

Most people don't realize their conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools are being used to train future versions of those models.

Every prompt you write. Every document you paste. Every question you ask. It's all potentially feeding into the system unless you've specifically turned that off.

For some people, this doesn't matter. Generic questions about recipes or travel tips aren't exactly sensitive. But if you're pasting client emails, business strategies, personal health information, or anything you wouldn't want floating around in a training dataset, you might want to know this is happening.

The good news is you can turn it off. Most major AI platforms have a setting that stops your data from being used for model training. It takes about 30 seconds to find and toggle.

Why would you bother?

If you handle confidential work, discuss private matters, or just prefer knowing your conversations stay yours, it's worth doing. Some industries require it for compliance. Others just want the peace of mind.

Even if your conversations aren't particularly sensitive now, turning it off means you don't have to think about it later when you do paste something you'd rather keep private.

For ChatGPT specifically: Go to Settings → Data Controls → Turn off "Improve the model for everyone." Done.

Takeaway: Check your AI platform settings this week. Look for options like "data sharing," "improve model," or "training data" and decide whether you want that on or off. Takes 30 seconds and you'll know your conversations are staying private.