Are You Hunting Antelope or Chasing Mice?

Today’s Theme: Hunting Antelope vs. Mice

If I looked at your calendar right now, would it reflect your priorities or your distractions?

Each time you spend your best energy on low-value work, you’re robbing the very goals you say matter most. You’re feeding urgency and temporary satisfaction instead of importance and long-term progress.

Today we’re going to unpack a metaphor that can reset how you view your time and connect it to a principle that explains why our days so easily get consumed by the wrong things.

By the end, you’ll have a framework to hunt what matters most and stop reacting to what matters least.

The Antelope Test: Are You Focused on the Right Game?

In his book Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss shares a question and quote he first heard from Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives: “Am I hunting antelope or field mice?”

Here’s the idea:

A lion is capable of hunting field mice, but the reward isn’t worth the energy required. Field mice might provide a small burst of satisfaction, but they won’t sustain the lion or its pride.

Antelope, on the other hand, require more skill and effort to catch, but the reward is abundant. A single antelope can feed the lion for days. The lion’s survival depends on the consistent pursuit of antelope, not the easy temptation of mice.

When you translate this to human performance, the message is clear:

• The Lion = You

• The Antelope = Your high-value priorities

• The Mice = Low-value distractions that eat up your time and energy

In sports, the “antelope” are the fundamentals we know promote sustainable excellence (e.g. consistent sleep, quality training programs, good nutrition, mental skills training). These are the proven 1% improvements that compound over time.

The “mice” are the hacks and shortcuts that promise quick results, but deliver little in terms of substance. In essence, we chase the 0.01% while neglecting the 1% that actually moves the needle.

In every day life, if you spend your days chasing mice (e.g. checking meaningless notifications, attending aimless meetings, reacting to every email, etc.), you’ll burn energy without making real progress.

But if you focus on hunting antelope (e.g. high-impact priorities), you’ll create meaningful results that sustain you and move your mission forward.

Why Constraints Improve Focus

When people ask me what separates elite performers from others, one of my most common responses is this: They are intentional.

They’re deliberate about where they direct their focus, what they give their energy to, and how they spend their time. They design their day instead of drifting into it (something I discussed in my one of my first podcast episodes “No One Drifts Into Greatness”).

One of the most effective habits I’ve seen from high performers is taking the time to decide tomorrow’s priorities before today ends. If you know exactly what you’ll work on and when you’ll do it, you remove guesswork, reduce decision fatigue, and increase your commitment to follow through.

And this is where our metaphor merges with psychology. Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted. Give yourself all day to clear your inbox and it will take all day. Give yourself 30 minutes and you’ll make considerably more progress.

Leave your day wide open and you’ll default to chasing mice because without constraints, you fill time with what’s easiest, not what’s most important. But when you impose clear boundaries and timeframes, you’re forced to focus on the high-value work that matters.

That’s why constraints matter. When you decide in advance what matters most and when you’ll do it, you stop being a passive participant in your own day. You start driving your life and creating the conditions for meaningful progress.

In the clip below, former NFL star JJ Watt shares a piece of advice that changed how he approached his days by breaking the day into ten-minute increments and then, at night, reflect on how many of those increments you wasted.

This “incremental blocks of focus” exercise forces you to become hyper-aware of where your attention and energy actually go. It can be a humbling audit to see how much of your day gets fed by “mice” instead of “antelope.”

Design Your Day Before It Designs You

Here are a few ways to get better at creating your life instead of reacting to it:

1. Identify Your Antelope (and Your Mice)
   Write down the 2–3 things that, if done consistently, will create the biggest impact in your life. Those are your antelope. Then write down your most common and enticing low-value priorities (aka “your mice”).

2. Plan Tomorrow, Tonight
   Before you go to bed, decide exactly what you will do tomorrow and when. Schedule your antelope time first. Everything else fills in around it, not the other way around.

3. Apply Parkinson’s Law
   Give yourself strict, short deadlines for low-value, but necessary tasks. Contain the mice so they don’t take over the antelope’s time.

4. Defend Your Hunting Time
   Treat your antelope time like a flight departure where once it’s in motion, you don’t cancel it. Turn off notifications, close unnecessary tabs, and make it hard to get distracted.

5. Review and Reset
   At the end of the day, ask yourself: Did I spend my time on what matters most or did I get caught chasing mice? Use that answer to adjust for tomorrow.

Final Thoughts:

The difference between a full life and a fulfilled life is what you choose to hunt.

If you let your days be shaped by whatever pops up, you’ll find yourself chasing mice. You’ll end up exhausted and malnourished (aka “busy without progress”). But if you decide in advance what matters, schedule it, and protect it with discipline, you’ll create momentum that lasts.

So here’s your challenge: Tonight, before you go to bed, schedule tomorrow’s antelope. Block the time. Guard it fiercely. Hunt it with focus.

Inspiration for This Piece:

• Ferriss, T. (2017). Tools of Titans: The tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing.

The Threshold Lab Podcast:

If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter, you’ll might enjoy diving deeper into these stories and concepts on The Threshold Lab Podcast. Here are the five most popular episodes from July that listeners couldn’t get enough of:

1. Interview with Kevin Eastman, Former NBA Assistant Coach & Executive (97 min)

2. Huygens’ Clocks (6 min)

3. Interview with Chris Petersen, Former D1 College Football Coach (67 min)

4. The Progress Principle (7 min)

5. Where Do You Want To Be Famous? (6 min)

If you haven’t tuned in yet, you can listen to all past episodes here: The Threshold Lab Podcast.

With gratitude,

ZB