The underrated benefits of always having oatmeal at lunch

For me, eating oatmeal at lunch every day is almost a spiritual experience. Let me give you my rundown:

• it’s healthy and cheap
• it’s a great and efficient routine, one decision less each day
• counterintuitively, it enables a wide variety of tastes

Healthy and cheap

Healthy, cheap and vegan. You can enrich it with bananas or goji berries for extra nutrients. You can use oat milk or other fluids that are enriched with stuff you might be lacking, like vitamin D and calcium.

Great and efficient routine

You have more time in the lunch break to do whatever. You can legitimately get down the ratio you like better each time you make it. If you skip breakfast, you are craving food by lunchtime¹.

Tribal creatures we are, there is always an undercurrent of “what will my work colleagues think about this?” Doing it anyway builds genuine self-confidence. I also think it’s secretly high status: you open the door for your work mates to do similar weird shit at lunch.

It doesn’t even mean you eat worse overall. My work colleagues might doubt this, but I cook really nice dinners. Oatmeal at noon is what enables that, in a kabbalistic way I can’t describe.

Variety

I’ll try to describe the exoteric side anyway: if you constrain your life in one area, it opens up a lot of options in another area. If you constrain your sleeping and wake-up time, that’s the only real way to have a routine where you write each morning, or exercise each morning, or do whatever each morning. Variety comes from constraint.

You can min-max your oatmeal with whatever nutrition (and taste) you need, and can even do morphological analysis on your combinations:

I swear, I genuinely feel people are missing out on the greatness of oatmeal at lunch.

The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have

~ William Irvine

No days off

In the theme of 2026 and new habits, here’s what worked for me: the no days off principle¹.

Let’s say you want a good sleep rhythm, start exercising for reals this time, write more, etc. When dreaming up these habits, you automatically visualize the gold standard: the perfect 8-hour sleep, the unbelievably energizing exercise, the writing of exactly one hour in the morning, getting one article done per day. Ah, beautiful.

The flip side is that if you don’t achieve this dreamed up scenario, you feel bad and lose the habit. Also, because you have such a high expectation of the habit, you’re less likely to start. So in reality, the daily decision matrix looks like this:

Skipping an activity you swore to do is such a normal thing that I don’t think I need to further explain the matrix and its implications. Some days, you skip the habit because of low motivation.

There’s a better way to frame the problem, in which skipping the habit is the ultimate enemy. This is the framing of the no days off principle — do a little even on days with no motivation. Here is the decision matrix with the new framing:

Let’s reframe the good sleep habit we want to achieve with this new matrix. The first insight is the trick of having good sleep is not really waking up early, but going to sleep early. But life happens, throughout the year you won’t always control when you sleep. You can, however, always wake up at 7am. So let’s reframe the habit to “Wake up at 7am each day”. Of course, of course, getting 7-8 hours of sleep is the gold standard. But! Internalize that the gold standard isn’t always possible, and skipping the habit is the enemy. So wake up at 7am, even if it means less sleep. In fact, we know that being regular in your sleep cycles might be more important than getting the perfect amount of sleep each night.

Reframing the other habits: exercise (a little) each day, write (a little) each day. That way you stay in motion, you beat the enemy. If you haven’t done exercise, just go out and do a little — just do some pushups, man, if you really have no time. You will notice that you will exercise more regularly, and once you started with just a few pushups, you’ll likely do more.

Instead of defining your habit goals as “exercise more” or “lose x amount of weight”, rather write them as doing something every day, and never stop. You also compound if you do it every day, and long-term, a little gain beats a loss. No excuses!

Two tweets for twenty-sixteen

staysaasy

@staysaasy

If I’m leaving 2025 with any core reflection, it’s that I increasingly believe that the world has no place for those who lack conviction, that mistakes are forgiven while tameness is ignored, that perfection loses to done every time, that commitment and tenacity and audacity and self-promotion and risk-taking compound more than anything, and that all of this always starts with one very achievable next step that looks like a cliff but is much closer to the ground than you realize.

Jan 1, 2026 Link ↗︎

gaurav

@gaxrav

quit brainrot. unfollow trolls. read essays. go down rabbit holes. have a calendar. maintain a todo list. read old books. watch old movies. turn on dnd. walk with intent. eat without youtube. chew more. train without music. plan for 15 mins. execute. organise your desk. take something seriously. read ancient scripts. act fast. find bread. eat clean. journal. save a life. learn to code. read poetry. create art. stay composed. refine your speech. optimise for efficiency. act sincere. help people. be kind. stop doing things that waste your time. follow your intuition. craft reputation. learn persuasion. systemise your day (or don’t). write. write. write. write more. iterate violently. leave your phone at home. walk to the grocery store. talk to strangers. feed the dogs. visit bookstores. look for 1800s novels. experience art. then love. sit with a monk and offer them lunch. don’t talk shit about people. embody virtue. sit alone. do something with your life. what do you want to create? turn off your mind. play. play a sport. combat sports. notice fonts in trees. fall in love. notice patterns on a table. visualise it. talk to people with respect. don’t hate. be loving. be real. become yourself. cherrypick your qualities. discard the useless. rejections aren’t permanent. invite what aligns. accept what does not. read great people. be different. choose different. do great work. let it consume you. lose your mind. value your time. experience life.

Oct 15, 2024 Link ↗︎

The Exemption Outsourcing Pattern

Two observations about how people interact with differing opinions they encounter:

• it’s easy to mistake someone else’s opinion for an attack on identity
• people rarely agree with things that feel like an attack on their identity

Pick a subject, nearly any subject, and there will be people flipping out about differing opinions. Nothing new here, no need to elaborate.

What I find interesting is one subtle way this plays out online. A subtle enough pattern that it’s worth talking about. Let me illustrate the pattern with an example, starting with a person posting their opinion/observation online:

When people encounter something like this, a fork happens: some get offended, some don’t. Most non-offended people agree with the opinion or simply scroll past. It’s the offended people who are more likely to engage with the post. The offended can be split into two groups again:

Here’s the part I find interesting: Someone from that small minority replies, explaining how the observation doesn’t apply to them. The majority, the ones it does apply to, then rally behind that reply/comment.

The majority latch onto the exception case that doesn’t apply to them. I call this pattern the Exemption Outsourcing Pattern. A pattern where people avoid being uncomfortable by hiding behind someone else’s valid exemption. This happens because dismissing the original opinion is cheaper than changing behavior.

Once you zoom out a little, you notice this pattern everywhere. Simpson’s paradox is an example from the statistics world. From the legal world there is the “Hard cases make bad law” concept.

Evaluating big life choices might be overrated

Two simple observations and my own two cents

Rational choice models of decision-making suggest gathering information on options and then proceeding with the option that best fits a person’s current preferences and values. Paul argues that such a decision-making process is not possible for some options, called “transformative experiences”, because the experience fundamentally transforms the person experiencing it. Paul offers a hypothetical example of a decision to become a vampire. Because a person would be fundamentally transformed by becoming a vampire, they cannot possibly know in advance what being a vampire is like. Other vampires might offer information, but their advice is likely shaped by their own irreversible choice. In this situation, a fully informed comparison of preferences and values is impossible.

~ Wikipedia summary of L. A. Paul’s “Transformative Experience”

Folks, you’ve heard it, evaluating too much doesn’t only lead to analysis paralysis, it also sometimes just isn’t possible . The question remains: why should you do something you can’t evaluate?

[Steven] Levitt invited individuals who couldn’t make up their minds about matters both major (like divorce) and minor (such as changing hair color) to avail themselves of a randomized coin toss.

...

Individuals whose virtual coin turned up heads were 25 percent more likely to make a change than those whose coin flip yielded tails. And, based on what they reported in two follow-up surveys over a six-month period, the nudge of a coin toss was just what these participants needed. Regardless of their responses to the coin tosses, participants who decided to make a change reported that they were substantially happier than those who did not.

~ Summary of Working Paper 22487, National Bureau of Economic Research

I have never ever regretted big life choices, even if they didn’t work out. Quitting a job with no money and no backup plan taught me a ton: I improved my network, learned how to ask for favors and introductions, and started to hustle. I learned I can go bankrupt and the value of social welfare systems. Next month I am joining a startup with all the responsibilities I wish I had in my previous job.

Let this post be the coin flip for your life choices.

Timeboxd

We fetishize time, let’s put it in a nice dress

Getting more done with less is knowing which tasks to delegate (to AI) and which tasks not to do at all. In other words, extreme clarity on the stuff you ought to do, and extreme focus while doing it. The most fundamental way I achieve clarity is by typing down everything, literally everything I do and think about. That’s a story for a longer post. This post isn’t about my typing tips; it’s a tribute to the timebox. And the focus you can achieve with ~dot~ it.

The gist of timeboxing is that you define a task time and set aside a limited amount of time to solve it. Here lies the first benefit of the timebox: actually thinking through what you want to do right now, and how long it should take. Just scribbling down things on the task at hand gets you much closer to working tidy. There are many posts and theories about maximum timebox efficiency, but I keep it lightweight.

I use Session as my timeboxing app of choice¹. Mostly because when the timer for the timebox starts, there’s a delightful animation to guide your breath:

I just stare at the dot and breathe, in and out. I always go back to the dot. Don’t want to work? Go back to the dot. Stressed? Go back to the dot. Dot.

Wouldn’t you know, staring at dot is a quintessential meditative and concentration practice. My tip: while breathing in, suck in the upper part of your stomach. It automatically becomes a meditation practice and fixes your posture.

The dot clears the noise so you can actually attune.

After dotting around, I start defining the task. The first timebox timer is for always 5 minutes long in which I fill out the following text form:.

- What should I be doing now?
  - 🔵
- goal@🔵
- async task: 🔵

(hint: "🔵" is my way of marking text snippets as "to fill out")

The generation of the text form is automated. The filling out is not. Basically, I view it as a Socratic monologue with myself about what is currently the highest priority. Like, not what I think is the highest priority, but what actually is the highest priority. Small tasks like replying to messages are done instantly. The highest priority task crystallizes through asking and answering abstract questions, like “is there a better way to do this?”.

Having found the task, I timebox it, like goal@8:30 - ship article. The async task field forces me to think about if I can use AI agents to aid me with the task, like doing research in parallel.

Here’s a filled out example from this morning:

- What should I be doing now?
  - Mhh, ship article? Or work on the app?
    - The app can wait, article is more important as I want to write everyday
  - Is there a more important task right now?
    - Nope, ship article
- goal@8:30 - ship article
- async task: Claude deep research breathing techniques

Usually I start working on the task before the 5 minutes are up. Then the 5 minute timer pops, I set the actual timebox for the defined goal, and keep going. When the timer runs out I take a break. The actual evaluation and reevaluation of the work happens after staring at the dot. Rinse and repeat.

I follow this order religiously: breathe first, then decide what to do, then timebox. When the timer dings, I stop. When I don’t follow the timebox and the dot, I have my least productive days. Most online productivity articles impose too much structure for my taste. My workflow is optimized for me, but the steps flow into each other naturally. No predefining of timeboxes and tasks.

Just asking what I should be doing, how long it should take, and what I can skip entirely. Over and over and over and over.

fin

dot