Want an easier week? Try this 30-minute Sunday routine

Below, Ben Meer shares five key insights from his new book, How to Be Good at Life: Simple Systems to Achieve More and Stress Less. Ben is the creator of System Sunday, a weekly newsletter on productivity and life design read by more than 250,000 people. He is an executive coach to founders and CEOs, and previously worked as a management consultant at Ernst & Young. What’s the Big Idea? We tend to assume that when something in our life isn’t working, the answer is to try harder. Be more disciplined. Have more willpower. But very often, the better answer is to change the systems around us. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Ben himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book. 1. Modern life is too complex for habits alone Life has always been hard, just in different ways. For previous generations, much of the burden was physical. Maybe your grandfather really did walk five miles to school. Now, much of the burden is cognitive. The modern world has increased convenience, but it’s also increased complexity. We gained access to nearly infinite information while our cognitive capacity stayed finite. That’s why life today can feel like running a small company you we…

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