The Three Alarms
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
After a heart attack at 35,000 feet and a marriage that nearly ended, Partaker built a model around the three areas he judged to carry most of the 80/20 of a life well lived: health, work and home. The method turns each into an identity rather than a to-do list. He splits the day into three segments, names the superhero version of himself for each one, and sets a phone alarm labelled with that identity to fire at the transition point. The alarm's job is not to remind him of a task but to pose a question: how would that version of me walk into this gym, this workday, this front door right now? The mechanism is intentionality inserted at the moments where people default to reactivity.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Split your day into three segments
Map your day into the health block, the work block and the home block, based on when you actually train, work and arrive home.
- 2
Name your best-self identity for each segment
Write a label for the superhero version of you in each area. Partaker uses World Fitness Champion, world's best CEO, and world's best husband and father.
Pro tip The label does not have to be true yet. It describes who is showing up, not who you already are.
- 3
Set three phone alarms with those labels
Create one alarm per identity, using the identity itself as the alarm name so the label is what you see when it fires.
- 4
Time them to the transitions
Morning alarm before training, second alarm as the workday starts, third at the end of the day before you walk through the door at home.
Pro tip The end-of-day alarm matters most, because that is the transition people arrive at most depleted.
- 5
Answer the question, do not dismiss the alarm
Each alarm prompts one question: how would this version of me handle the next few hours? Then act on the answer immediately.
Watch out If you swipe the alarm away without answering the question, the system degrades into notification noise within a week.
- 6
Check the three legs stay level
Review whether one leg of the stool is quietly taking all the weight. Over-tracking on work at the cost of health and home is the pattern the model exists to catch.
In the wild
Partaker's wife told him he was present in the house but not really there, in his own world. The home alarm is his answer. It fires before he arrives, labelled world's best husband and father, and forces the question of how that person would walk through the door right now rather than continuing the workday inside his head for another hour.
→ He describes dialling in being far more present at home after the health work alone had failed to fix the relationship problem.
Common mistakes
Fixing health and assuming home follows
Partaker put his sleep, food and gym in order first and thought he had solved it, then his wife said she was leaving. Health, work and home are three separate legs; improving one does not repair another.
Labelling alarms with tasks, not identities
An alarm that says gym at 6 is a reminder. An alarm that says World Fitness Champion is a question about who is showing up. The identity framing is what produces the intentionality; strip it out and you are left with an ordinary reminder you will snooze.
From the transcript
“if we really focus on showing up at our best on the health front on the work front and on the home relationships front I…”
“world's best CEO for when the workday starts and then world's best husband and father and I took those as labels and created three alarms…”
“the idea with the alarms is there to help you live a more intentional life because I think you know a lot of the times…”
From the episode
Confronting my CEO coach - Eric Partaker
Eric Partaker