DIFA

Dosage
Intensity
Frequency
Attention

DIFA makes or breaks most things, endeavours, relationships or habits in life.

Here’s a quick rundown on the semantics of those terms:

Dosage: We can tweak the popular adage into ‘The devil is in the dosage’ to render it more potent. Dosage determines the outcome, potency and adaptation. Too little dosage and nothing comes of it. Too much and it can be counterproductive, painful and lethal. The right dosage is sustainable, safe, productive and shows in all the right ways. How much you eat, how much you sleep, how much you run, how much you squat, how much you walk, how much protein you eat, how much antibiotics did you take.

Intensity: When you’re doing something, how hard are you working as a percentage of what you are capable of. If you can eat 10 slices of pizza and you eat 1 slice of pizza, you would rightly call that a light day of eating pizza. Extrapolate this to exercise, eating, sleeping. They all deserve a certain amount of intensity and gravitas.

Frequency: How often you do something. Skill takes time and repeated regular bouts. Be it language, cooking, sport, quality of how you move, work, reading. Anything really. Only if you do it often enough will you get better at it. Do it too often, you risk getting bored. Do it too infrequently, you risk not getting enough practice to yield anything useful.

Attention: Your ability to juggle all the things you need to do versus what you want to do comes down to choices and constraints. You will never have enough time, energy or attention for all the things you need to do. What you direct your attention to matters a whole lot. You might need to pay more attention to things you don’t quite enjoy. Or less attention to things you naturally gravitate to spending too much time on. Not everything is fun, but it might still need your attention to ensure you do enough of it, often enough and intensely enough.