A few days ago I wrote down everything I actually touch or use every single day.

The list was shorter than I expected:

  • World clocks (Edinburgh, New York, Tokyo, Malaysia)
  • Weather widget on my phone
  • Calendar and reminders
  • My electric car and its app
  • My home battery system and its scheduling
  • My laptop and phone
  • A music app and wireless earphones
  • Maths books
  • Investment portfolios (mine and my clients’)
  • The gym (swimming and weights, alternately)

Plus a few things that are not apps but are part of the structure:

  • Morning coffee (sometimes two)
  • Looking out of my bedroom window from the hill
  • Night drives to Tesco on rural roads, with Mozart or 90s R&B

This is not meant to be a productivity stack or lifestyle guide. It’s just an honest inventory of what I actually use.

What follows is a simple description of how these pieces fit together, and why they matter to me.

1. A small set of levers

If I group that list, it falls into four categories:

  • Time and coordination World clocks, weather, calendar, reminders.

  • Energy and infrastructure Electric car, home battery, laptop, phone.

  • Capital and intellect Portfolios, maths books.

  • Body and nervous system Gym, coffee, music, view from the hill, night drives.

There isn’t much more than this in a normal day.

I’m not claiming minimalism as a philosophy. It’s simply what seems to work for me. With a small set of levers, it becomes easier to see what happens when I change one of them.

2. World clocks and the view from the hill

The first thing I usually look at is time.

On my phone, I keep world clocks for:

  • Edinburgh
  • New York
  • Tokyo
  • Malaysia

I check them once a day, and always before I look at any portfolios.

Practically, this helps with markets and people I care about in different time zones. But it also does something else quietly: it reminds me where I sit in the wider system before I start moving numbers around.

I live on a hill in Edinburgh. From my bedroom window I can see a long way. Some mornings I’ll stand there with a coffee, look out across the city, and let my brain settle before I start work.

The view and the clocks are different ways of doing the same thing:

  • the window gives spatial distance,
  • the clocks give time distance.

This makes it easier for me not to treat every notification or price move as the centre of the universe.

3. Coffee, markets, and small rules

Coffee is part of my morning. One cup is standard.

A second cup is conditional:

I only take a second coffee if yesterday’s portfolio performance was very good.

It’s a small rule, not a grand system. There is a risk in tying rewards too closely to markets, but at this scale it simply keeps me grounded in the basic fact that results matter.

I don’t sit and watch my own portfolio all day. I invest long term, so I don’t need that level of noise. I check it occasionally.

My clients’ portfolios are different. Those I check more regularly. That is part of my job: to be more vigilant with other people’s capital than with my own. A simple split:

  • My portfolio: longer horizon, fewer checks.
  • Clients’ portfolios: more structure, more frequent reviews.

I’m not trying to make this heroic. It’s just how I keep responsibilities clear in my head.

4. Night drives, quiet cabins, and music

Most evenings, after work, I decompress with something very ordinary: a short night drive to Tesco on rural roads.

The purpose is basic – planning lunch and dinner for the next day – but the shape of the drive matters:

  • rural roads, not much traffic,
  • dark and predictable,
  • a car quiet enough that I can listen to music properly without turning the volume up too high.

I usually listen to Mozart, or sometimes 90s R&B.

The quiet cabin is important to me. My nervous system is quite sensitive, and a harsh or noisy interior makes me tired faster than it should. A calm, predictable drive is not a luxury for me; it’s a way of making the day’s last transition gentler.

These drives aren’t “errands” in my mind. They are one of the transition points in my day: a small piece of time where nobody needs anything from me and my brain can reset.

5. The gym as maintenance

I go to the gym almost every day, usually with my best friend, an orthodontist who shares a lot of practical knowledge about how to be healthier.

I alternate between:

  • Swimming – long, repetitive movement, breath and stroke.
  • Weights – mainly compound lifts like bench and deadlifts.

I don’t treat the gym as a personal improvement project. I treat it as maintenance of the hardware that has to run everything else.

Without a reasonably strong and stable body, the rest of what I do – portfolios, maths, writing, running businesses – becomes harder and more fragile than it needs to be.

So the pattern is simple:

  1. Cook a keto dinner.
  2. Go to the gym.
  3. Swim or lift, depending on the day.
  4. Come home slightly calmer than I left.

It’s not impressive. It’s just necessary.

6. Treating myself as an asset

The way I think about all of this is quite straightforward:

I treat myself as an asset I’m responsible for.

If I want to use this asset well – to think clearly, make good decisions, look after other people’s capital, and build the things I want to build – then I have to keep it in decent condition.

That includes:

  • enough sleep to avoid constant fog,
  • a body that can handle stress reasonably well,
  • a brain that isn’t overloaded with junk input,
  • and a daily rhythm that doesn’t constantly fight my own nature.

At the same time, after a while these things stop feeling like “discipline” and start feeling normal. Going to the gym, checking the clocks, planning food, looking at the view from the hill – they are not heroic. They are just how I run the asset day to day.

I don’t always get this right, especially when life is heavy. But thinking of myself as something I manage, rather than something I squeeze, helps me make more sensible choices.

7. A piano that is currently quiet

In my living room there is a mid-sized German grand piano that was built for me some years ago.

For a long time I practised daily and would describe myself as a classical pianist, with a particular focus on Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach.

About ten months ago, during a period of severe depression and while I was on Sertraline, I stopped.

Sertraline helped in the way it was meant to: it pulled me away from the edge and made life more manageable. But it also flattened my emotional range. Playing Mozart without the right internal colour felt wrong to me. I could still play the notes, but something important was missing.

So I chose to pause.

I don’t currently call myself a pianist. If I don’t practise, I don’t claim the label. That’s just how I prefer to think about skill and identity.

The piano is still there. I see it every day. Even silent, it reminds me that:

  • depth of craft matters to me,
  • some parts of me are simply on hold, not gone,
  • and when my system is ready, I can sit down and rebuild that part.

For now, music mostly comes through a streaming app, earphones, and the car. The grand waits quietly.

8. Writing in waves

This blog doesn’t follow a strict schedule.

There are periods where I write daily, and other periods where I write less often. I don’t force output just to keep a calendar happy.

Writing sits in my system in two ways:

  • It changes how I pay attention. If I think I might write about something later, I naturally look for structure and causes, not just events.
  • It clears space. When a thought has been spinning in my head long enough, turning it into a note like this frees up capacity for other things.

I don’t see the blog as “content”. It’s closer to documentation: a record of how I think about money, systems, and my own life at particular points in time.

9. Tools as part of the environment

On paper, my setup looks like a pile of devices:

  • a phone and a laptop,
  • an electric car and a home battery,
  • a music app and a pair of earphones.

In practice, they’re just part of the environment I live in:

  • The phone is where I keep time zones, weather, calendar, reminders, messages, and music.
  • The laptop is for maths, analysis, code, and writing.
  • The car and battery system make my home and transport more predictable in cost and less dependent on external noise in energy prices.
  • Earphones, a quiet car cabin, and a house on a hill give me some control over what reaches my senses.

If a tool adds more friction or noise than it removes, it eventually gets replaced or dropped. There’s nothing deeper than that.

10. A short conclusion

Looking back at that initial list, the main thing that strikes me is how small it is.

On a typical day, my life is mostly:

  • world clocks and a weather widget,
  • a few machines I know well,
  • some numbers on screens,
  • a pool, a barbell, a steering wheel,
  • a hill, a window, and a cup of coffee.

I’m not trying to optimise every minute. I’m just trying to keep the asset – my own mind and body – in good enough shape that it can do its job.

For now, the rough outline of my days looks like this:

  • Orient World clocks, weather, window, coffee.

  • Work Portfolios, maths, code, decisions.

  • Maintain Gym, food, sleep, simple routines.

  • Decompress Night drives, music, silence, sometimes writing.

This will change over time. Tools evolve, health moves up and down, responsibilities shift.

But the underlying idea is likely to stay:

Treat yourself as an asset you’re responsible for. Keep the system simple enough that you can see what’s going on. Then let the rest – capital, ideas, craft – build on top of that at their own pace.