do you ever feel overwhelmed by the need to constantly improve your skills we all want to level up but the reality is that life gets busy priorities shift and sometimes we just want to enjoy what we already learned without the pressure of getting better in this video I'll discuss how to maintain your skills efficiently allowing you to allocate your freedom time and energy to other Pursuits whether that is focusing on one skill or a few skills or simply to relax and have fun before diving in let me just clarify what I mean by maintaining and
building maintaining refers to the minimal effort required to keep your current skill level without improving or decaying building refers to the effort required to effectively increase your current skill level after reaching a certain level in a skill there's a huge difference between just maintaining that skill and effectively improving it for example in bodybuilding if you want to effectively build muscle you might need to workout five times a week whereas maintaining your physique might only require two workouts per week this implies that if you're not really focusing on improving your physique anymore or for a period
of time there is a significant inefficiency Zone that you should avoid spending time and energy in this inefficiency zong is a bit of a waste and you will probably be much better off spending that time and energy somewhere else another example is with language learning I spent months in South America when I was there I was actively working on my Spanish skills I watched Spanish courses I watched Series in Spanish spoke to the locals and practiced every day day this immersion led to Rapid progression there were also periods when I didn't focus on improving my
Spanish because I had other priorities during these times I noticed that just speaking to the locals was enough to maintain my Spanish skills however I knew that if I wanted to effectively improve my Spanish again I had to immerse myself again in other words I knew that there was a big difference in the time and effort needed to effectively improve versus just maintain these examples illustrate the important difference between building and maintaining a skill spending time and effort without a clear goal is inefficient and essentially wasted that could have been time and effort spent on
other meaningful things decide whether you want to improve or maintain a skill and allocate your efforts accordingly before moving on I just want to quickly mention my free newsletter if you want to dive even deeper into self-improvement Concepts get my free notion templates for a limited time or just get to know me better join my free newsletter that is linked below now let's get back to the video I received a lot of questions from my earlier video about how to actually find your maintenance level I've been playing around with this concept for years so I
forgot how unintuitive it can be if you haven't heard of it before but the answer is much simpler than you think and that is to just experiment you can analyze and make your best estimate But ultimately you have to experiment a simple three-step process for implementing this is to estimate experiment and auto regulate estimate refers to analyzing and giving your best guess for how much time and effort is needed to maintain your skill experiment refers to actually doing it and testing it auto regulate refers to adjusting your maintenance level based on your results to Auto
regulate you can also use a three-step process add maintain or subtract for example if you feel like you're not maintaining and losing your skill after your first estimate for the first week or two add add one or two more sessions and test that out if you feel like you're maintaining after your first estimate continue with the same maintenance level if you feel like you're actually getting better or that you can easily maintain with less effort after your first estimate subtract subtract by one or two sessions and test that out do this for a while and
you will start to get a more precise awareness of where your maintenance level are at quality also affects your maintenance level by quality I mean how focused or present you are during your practice or activity two Focus sessions are often better than four distracted ones for example two guitar sessions concentrate on challenging chords or skills are more effective than four guitar sessions where you're just dabbling around unfocused playing songs you already know this implies that higher quality practice can reduce the number of sessions needed to maintain your skill you can try to find the maintenance
level for all the skills you want to maintain it's a fun and interesting exercise and will give you insights into different maintenance levels across different areas however realistically probably won't have the time and energy to maintain everything everything you want not only can't you progress in everything in life but you can't even maintain everything in life some things have to go and that's why you need to prioritize prioritization is key recognize that you can't maintain everything and that's okay but also recognize that you're not necessarily sacrificing them for good you're just putting them aside for
a period of time you can always revisit and re prioritize later so prioritize and experiment I recommend starting with fewer priorities to ensure you can maintain them without feeling stressed or overwhelmed gradually adding more if you find you have the capacity if you start with too much you risk getting overwhelmed and stressed and worst case scenario not maintain anything you might also even find that starting with fewer priorities is too much if that's the case you have been faced with a harsh truth about how little time and energy we actually have remember the key is
to find a balance that works for you prioritize wisely estimate experiment and auto regulate embrace the process and you'll find a sustainable way to maintain your skills [Music]
