Nights had turned into days; couches had turned into beds. Energy was drained and yet life had never felt more electric and exciting. This is what my life had devolved into for the whole of 2021. As I’m sure a fair bit of you reading this had felt during the Great 2021 Bull Run, I couldn’t look away for fear of missing a literal average American salary at any given minute. Showers were accompanied by a Bluetooth speaker piping out the sweet melodies of MVHQ voice chat, and the little sleep I accidentally succumbed to was not without an Airpod fitted tightly in my ear.

 

Everything felt grand in the moment of that mania, and only after the fact when I had time to breathe during the bear did I realize: wow that was rough. A very valuable practice in markets is to evaluate the previous bull or bear run once the market takes a turn in the opposite direction. When a market takes a turn, usually previous mindsets like mania and euphoria are reset and one can get a clearer visual of the previous market pattern. One of the key pieces I identified from the Great 2021 Bull Run was information overload, it had crippled me at times. The space is young, therefore the pipeline of information is young and very spread out.

 

Following the identification of that pain point, I made it a point to focus on implementing new efficiency systems as well as shoring up systems that I already had in place. Within this month’s Relic’s Edge article, I want to cover some of those ideas and systems that have helped me to be a more organized trader.

 

Look For Outside Help

Early in 2021, I realized that having only two hands and one brain in this space was not nearly enough. I needed a teammate on my side that wasn’t also trading NFTs on their side, so like a lot of people in this space I looked into hiring a virtual assistant. The following solutions were implemented:

 

1) Systems to give my assistant full resources and ability to fulfill the complete timeline from sourcing projects to entering my wallets once an allowlist is secured, with zero input from me.

 

2) An efficient and easy-to-use dashboard to effectively keep track of secured allowlists and relevant information.

 

3) A daily morning message sent to me that lists my daily mints, meetings, and a list of daily to-dos in and outside of the web3 space.

 

4) An added responsibility of sitting in on some of my meetings to take notes for myself and the other participants.

 

Streamline Your Information Intake

Another aspect of efficiency that I implemented during 2021 was the addition of a widescreen monitor and the usage of FancyZones within Microsoft’s PowerToys program. This allowed me to create ‘zones’ on my monitor to which I could snap certain windows into to ensure they had a home that I could always see. Moving away from constantly changing Chrome tabs when I wanted to see certain information effectively added additional instant information to my vision. While this initially sounds like it goes against the principle of this article, the efficiency that this information was then delivered to me made this change a pro rather than a con.

 

Focus On Your Health

As I mentioned, my mental and physical health had started to decline due to the lack of sleep, exercise, correct eating, etc all due to the feeling of FOMO. I felt I needed to know about every drop at all times, and if I missed a middle-of-the-night cook it took a physical toll on me. This led to short sleeping hours and more often than not sleeping on the couch in order to stay up long hours on the computer without waking my wife. Shout to the Nightcrew, but I saw far too much of you all. I’ve since realized that I did not need to ‘work’ extended hours to be majorly successful. The long hours may have actually resulted in poorer performance than if I had taken my time and chosen my spots more precisely and effectively while getting a healthy dose of sleep, exercise, and everything else your body needs to feel full of life.

 

To come to a concise conclusion: 

• Allow for outside help 

• Spend time now to develop efficient systems as they will be invaluable when the market ramps up

• Organize and streamline your information intake

• Look after your mental and physical health 

• Don’t feel the need to hit every single mint 

• And most importantly, find a group of friends that you can share information with and receive information in return, this is what makes MVHQ the best place in Web3