Manage your day-to-day

manage-your-day-to-dayLast month I read Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind by assorted authors. Each chapter was an essay written by productivity/life-hacking experts like Leo Babauta, Seth Godin, Scott Belsky etc.. It was a great read considering it had helpful, distilled, ideas by great leaders in this area, all for only $4 on Kindle.

The book itself is meant to help creatives harness their energy to get their work done. Writers, designers, speakers etc sometimes have a hard time getting to the “real work” because they’re too busy responding to emails or putting out fires set by other people. Here are a few of the quotes that really stuck out to me:

Gretchen Rubin On Writing

“Because I write every day, no one day’s work seems particularly important.”
“What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”

Seth Godin on Honing your creative practice

“Because lots and lots of people are creative when they feel like it, but you are only going to become a professional if you do it when you don’t feel like it.”

“The reason you might be having trouble with your practice in the long run—if you were capable of building a practice in the short run—is nearly always because you are afraid.”

“These people sabotage themselves because the alternative is to put themselves into the world as someone who knows what they are doing.”

Tony Schwartz on Building Renewal into your workday

“What’s changed is that between digital technology and rising complexity, there’s more information and more requests coming at us, faster and more relentlessly than ever.”

“Sleep is more important than food.”

And my favourite:

“Waiting for inspiration to write is like standing at the airport waiting for a train.”

-Leigh Michaels

These essays reminded me of what I already know and have said many times: you have to fight to prioritize the important stuff, even if it’s your job to do that stuff. I particularly appreciated the sections on writing. They were a good reminder, that “real” writers don’t wait for inspiration to hit, they have to show up every day to “work” too, even if it is their make-shift kitchen table office. Great food for thought.

I recommend it if you’re trying to figure out how to manage your physical energy, time or creative energy. It’s a steal at $4.03!

Mistakes in Overthinking Productivity

thinking
Source

Now that the long weekend is over and you may be trying to get back into the groove of things after some time off, here are some great tips from TimeManagementNinja: 7 Mistakes You’re Making By Overthinking Your Productivity.

  1. Having Too Many Tools
  2. Waiting for the Perfect Time
  3. Overplanning
  4. Thinking There is Only One Way
  5. Creating Too Complex of a System
  6. Not Making Decisions
  7. Not Starting

Read the rest of the article on his blog to see the details.

“Keep Your Goals To Yourself”

“What are your goals for your summer?” a group of us were asked with regards to this summer. A coworker replied, “I’m not telling,” and shared this video. I wanted to share it with you for the sake of discussion.

While I see where he’s coming from (research and science do have sway, that’s for sure), I’m naive enough to believe that I’ve averted this problem by sharing extensively about the journey of getting to my goals. I can see how this is probably true for a lot of people, though.

What did you think? I’d love to hear if you agree, mostly agree, disagree and why. Share in the comments.

The Energy Project

energy-audit

I found this quiz on the weekend that I wanted to share with you. It’s called the Energy Audit. It asks a series of questions about your performance at work, how you feel at work, whether you are doing the things you want to do etc and then ranks you out of 100% on being physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally energized. I scored 40%, lowest on the mental energy score which I would tend to agree with. I received an email in my inbox highlighting the problematic statements I affirmed, which helps me to hone in on what to improve. None of them surprise me, I knew they were bad as soon as I clicked them:

  • I often eat lunch at my desk, if I eat lunch at all.
  • I frequently find myself feeling irritable, impatient or anxious at work, especially when demand is high.
  • I have difficulty focusing on one thing at a time and I am easily distracted during the day, especially by email.
  • I spend much of my time reacting to immediate demands rather than focusing on activities with longer-term value and leverage.
  • I rarely have any time when my mind is quiet and free of thoughts.
  • My decisions at work are often more influenced by external demands than by a strong, clear sense of my own purpose.

I have to admit, if I had done this test this time last year, the scores would have been a whole lot different. Since then, and since the inception of this blog, I have made a lot more positive changes.

To take the Energy Audit yourself by clicking here. Don’t forget to come back and share in the comments your score with some ideas on how you can improve!

Laughter is good medicine

ostrich

The other day I was watching How I Met Your Mother on Netflix. I know, not exactly the best TV show for a lot of reasons (Barney being a huge dirtbag being one of them) but I realized that watching every episode of the first 6 seasons is partly why I stayed sane since September at work.

I realized I had a lot of internal stress for reasons I don’t exactly know. Even when I don’t feel stressed my body tells me I am by making me have stomach aches etc. It’s frustrating and confusing because I love what I do (or at least I think I do?). I can now identify things that were stressing me out which has instigated some changes at work that I’m happy about.

As I watched an episode of HIMYM and found myself laughing and laughing. It felt really good and really freeing to laugh despite people getting bombed and raped and bullied to death and battling my self telling myself that I suck (insight into the real internal dialogue that I battle).

Last night, I found myself reading buzzfeed over and over. 25 Photos You Need To Really Look At To Understand, for example, had my husband and laughing quite hard. I kept clicking and kept laughing. It was really nice.

As life gets more and more complex, as we hear about terror plots between Montreal and Toronto and about other things that make me want to stick my head in the sand, I need to remember just to find a way to laugh. Laughter is a wonderful stress reliever, spirit-lifter, and is linked with — you guessed it — better productivity.

Do you ever try to make yourself laugh when you’re stressed or upset? What’s your go-to TV show or movie? How do you get your laughter quotient in? Leave a comment to share the funny wealth!

Keep starting

start

“The response to fear is procrastination and the response to procrastination needs to be: to start.”- Overcoming Resistance

 

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