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Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (Jocelyn K. Glei)
- Frequency keeps ideas fresh.
- Hardwork is the key to success Quote
- DON’T WAIT FOR MOODS. Show up, whether you feel inspired or not.
- What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.
- The work, the process, is the goal. It builds character. It makes us better.
- waiting for inspiration to write is like standing at the airport waiting for a train.
- To truly excel, you must also continue to create for the most important audience of all: yourself.
- Simple behaviors like regularly getting a good night’s sleep are shown to improve focus and self-control.
- Alternate challenging creative work with more mindless tasks to give your brain time to rest and refuel.
- The trouble with this approach is it means spending the best part of the day on other people’s priorities.
- Even a small time set aside for solitude each day—from twenty minutes to an hour—can make an enormous difference.
- All of the most fulfilled people I know focus more on the quality of their connections than the quantity of them.
- Don’t trust technology over your own instincts and imagination. Doing busywork is easy; doing your best work is hard.
- Move rhythmically between spending and renewing your energy by working in ninety-minute bursts and then taking a break.
- Book time on your calendar for uninterrupted, focused work—and respect those blocks of time as you would any client meeting.
- Commit to working on your project at consistent intervals—ideally every day—to build creative muscle and momentum over time.
- Repetition is the enemy of insight. Take unorthodox—even wacky—approaches to solving your stickiest problems and see what happens.
- Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and so on.
- If you want to create something worthwhile with your life, you need to draw a line between the world’s demands and your own ambitions.
- Keep your inner perfectionist in check by defining what finished looks like at the beginning of a project. And when you get there, stop!
- Creative minds are highly susceptible to distraction, and our newfound connectivity poses a powerful temptation for all of us to drift off focus.
- Tackle the projects that require ‘hard focus’ early in your day. Self-control —and our ability to resist distractions—declines as the day goes on.
- Creative minds are highly susceptible to distraction, and our newfound connectivity poses a powerful temptation for all of us to drift off focus.
- We’re using today’s technologies as prosthetics for our minds,when the real opportunity is for these technologies to be prosthetics for our beings.
- What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
- We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently.
- Yet there wasn’t a single day when I sat down to write an article, blog post, or book chapter without a string of people waiting for me to get back to them. It
- Like it or not, we are constantly forced to juggle tasks and battle unwanted distractions—to truly set ourselves apart, we must learn to be creative amidst chaos.
- Through our constant connectivity to each other, we have become increasingly reactive to what comes to us rather than being proactive about what matters most to us.
- Marking progress is a huge motivator for long-term projects. Make your daily achievements visible by saving iterations, posting milestones, or keeping a daily journal.
- At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.
- The part of our brain associated with decision-making and goal-directed behaviors shrinks and the brain regions associated with habit formation grow when we’re under chronic stress.
- If you want to succeed, you need to communicate. And grow a thicker skin. Show me a creative who’s never suffered a setback or a bad review, and you won’t be pointing at a superstar.
- Frequency keeps the pressure off. If you’re producing just one page, one blog post, or one sketch a week, you expect it to be pretty darned good, and you start to fret about quality.
- A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules. Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.
- it’s true that frequency doesn’t have to be a daily frequency; what’s most important is consistency. The more widely spaced your work times, however, the less you reap all of these benefits.
- sleep is more important than food. You can go a week without eating and the only thing you’ll lose is weight. Give up sleep for even a couple of days and you’ll become completely dysfunctional.
- What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.Day by day, we build our lives, and day by day, we can take steps toward making real the magnificent creations of our imaginations.
- Unlike computers, however, human beings aren’t meant to operate continuously, at high speeds, for long periods of time. Rather, we’re designed to move rhythmically between spending and renewing our energy.
- With one eye on our gadgets, we’re unable to give our full attention to who and what is in front of us—meaning that we miss out on the details of our lives, ironically, while responding to our fear of missing out.
- 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. And that emotional waiver is why this is your work and not your hobby.
- Frequency makes starting easier. Getting started is always a challenge. It’s hard to start a project from scratch, and it’s also hard each time you re-enter a project after a break. By working every day, you keep your momentum going.
- People have a really bad habit of coming in and checking e-mail first thing in the morning. And for many people, the morning is the most productive time.E-mail is very, very tempting, so they basically sacrifice their productive time for e-mail.
- The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.
- Extrinsic motivations—such as money and reputation—have a negative impact on creativity. It’s only when you’re focused on intrinsic motivations—such as your fascination with the material or the sheer pleasure you take in creating it—that you do your best work.
- It’s no surprise that you’re likely to get more accomplished if you work daily. The very fact of each day’s accomplishment helps the next day’s work come more smoothly and pleasantly. Nothing is more satisfying that seeing yourself move steadily toward a big goal.
- I know tons of people who call themselves artists who were born with talents and never really had to push themselves to be good at it. They think they are entitled to make a living at this thing, but they are not willing to do the hard part—selling—that everyone finds hard.
- Perfectionism can inhibit your ability to reach your full potential. If you refuse to put yourself in a situation where you might give an imperfect performance, you’ll prevent yourself from receiving the proper feedback, input, and direction necessary for additional growth.
- Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of success is showing up. Having written and directed fifty films in almost as many years, Allen clearly knows something about How, when, and where you show up is the single most important factor in executing on your ideas.
- When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.Frequency nurtures frequency. If you develop the habit of working frequently,it becomes much easier to sit down and get something done even when you don’t have a big block of time; you don’t have to take time to acclimate yourself.
- every great leader must face his or her demons in order to overcome them. I’ve always known this, but I wasn’t aware of any immediate problems. But these days the demons are more insidious; they’re the everyday annoyances, the little things that suck away our potential to do big things.
- The basic combination of these three things: (1) that the world around us tries to tempt us; (2) that we listen to the world around us (e.g., choice architecture); and (3) that we don’t deal very well with temptation… if you put all of those things together, you have a recipe for disaster. So
- Today’s challenge is to keep your focus and preserve the sanctity of mind required to create, and to ultimately make an impact in what matters most to you. This can only happen when you capitalize on the here and now. To do this, alternate periods of connectedness with periods of truly being present:
- Deep and regular breathing, also referred to as diaphragmatic breathing, helps to quiet the sympathetic nervous system and allows the parasympathetic nervous system—which governs our sense of hunger and satiety, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function—to become more dominant.
- Studies show that the human mind can only truly multitask when it comes to highly automatic behaviors like walking. For activities that require conscious attention, there is really no such thing as multitasking, only task switching—the process of flicking the mind back and forth between different demands
- We’re all too willing to trade away an hour of sleep in the false belief that it will give us one more hour of productivity. In fact, even very small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our cognitive capacity. The notion that some of us can perform adequately with very little sleep is largely a myth.
- Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating.
- If you’re feeling frustrated with your progress toward your goals, it’s tempting to focus on what you lack that other people seem to have, to obsess over followers, engagement, traffic, or any other benchmark. The reality is that numbers don’t necessarily measure success, and they’re certainly not a requirement for fulfillment.
- Every time you’re doing something, you’re not doing something else. But you don’t really see what it is that you’re giving up. Especially when it comes to,let’s say, e-mail versus doing something that takes fifty hours. It is very easy for you to see the e-mail. It is not that easy for you to see the thing that takes fifty hours.
- The world around us, including the world in our computers, is all about trying to tempt us to do things right now. Take Facebook,for example. Do they want you to be more productive twenty years from now?Or do they want to take your time, attention, and money right now? The same thing goes for YouTube, online newspapers, and so on.
- when temptation hits, it’s going to be incredibly hard for us to resist. So if your e-mail is running and it is telling you that a message is waiting for you, that’s going to be very hard to resist. In your mind, you’ll keep thinking about what exciting things are waiting for you. Now, if you never opened your e-mail, you would do much better.
- Frequency is helpful when you’re working on a creative project on the side, with pressing obligations from a job or your family. Instead of feeling perpetually frustrated that you don’t have any time for your project, you make yourself make time, every day. If you do a little bit each day, you can get a lot done over the course of months and years.
- Establish hard edges in your day. Set a start time and a finish time for your workday—even if you work alone. Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and so on. These hard edges keep tasks from taking longer than they need to and encroaching on your other important work.
- Treat your work as a refuge—an oasis of control and creative satisfaction in the midst of the bad stuff. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not on fire creatively every day—give yourself credit if you show up for work and make even a small amount of progress. When you put down your tools for the day, you may even see your personal situation with a fresh eye.
- Once the contract is signed and the deal is done (whether it’s an album,client commission, or a job), put all thoughts of rewards out of your mind and focus relentlessly on the work itself. It may help to have a studio or other space dedicated to creative work—a place you never contaminate by talking business or daydreaming about success while you’re there.
- A great novel, a stunning design, a game-changing piece of software, a revolutionary company—achievements like these take time, thought, craft, and persistence. And on any given day, this effort will never appear as urgent as those four e-mails (in the last half hour) from Client X or Colleague Y asking for something that can likely wait a few hours, if not days.
- No one likes the feeling that other people are waiting— impatiently—for a response. At the beginning of the day, faced with an overflowing inbox, an array of voice mail messages, and the list of next steps from your last meeting, it’s tempting to clear the decks before starting your own work . When you’re up-to-date, you tell yourself, it will be easier to focus.
- Treat your work as a refuge—an oasis of control and creative satisfaction in the midst of the bad stuff. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not on fire creatively every day—give yourself credit if you show up for work and make even a small amount of progress. When you put down your tools for the day, you may even see your personal situation with a fresh eye. POVERTY
- Paradoxically, you hold both the problem and the solution to your day-today challenges. No matter where you work or what horrible top-down systems plague your work, your mind and energy are yours and yours alone. You can surrender your day-to-day and the potential of your work to the burdens that surround you. Or, you can audit the way you work and own the responsibility of fixing it.
- Set a start time and a finish time for your workday—even if you work alone. Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and so on. These hard edges keep tasks from taking longer than they need to and encroaching on your other important work. They also help you avoid workaholism, which is far less productive than it looks.
- We’re asked to apply our intellectual capital to solve hard problems—a creative goal that requires uninterrupted focus. At the same time, we’re asked to be constantly available by e-mail and messenger and in meetings—an administrative goal that creates constant distraction. We’re being asked, in other words, to simultaneously resist and embrace distraction to advance in our careers—a troubling paradox.
- While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen.
- Our bodies follow what are known as ultradian rhythms—ninety-minute periods at the end of which we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level. It’s possible to push ourselves past ninety minutes by relying on coffee, or sugar, or by summoning our own stress hormones, but when we do so we’re overriding our physiological need for intermittent rest and renewal. Eventually, there’s a price to pay.
- If you’re like me, you have far too many things you want to do, read, see, test, and experience. Your inbox is a treasure trove of possibilities. To a creative mind, that’s very enticing. It’s easy for an optimist to keep fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand e-mails hovering in their inbox in the hopes that, someday soon, they’ll get a chance to give each opportunity the precious time that it deserves. But guess what? That’s never gonna happen.
- I don’t bring technology into the bedroom. You shouldn’t be checking your e-mails before you go to sleep. Your brain gets overstimulated. You need to just unwind your mind.I’m also a big believer of curating who you follow on social media. You’re letting those people into your brain and they’re going to influence your thoughts.I find that I even dream about some of the people I follow. We need to be really mindful of who we let into our stream of consciousness.
- There are many ways to use positive distraction techniques for more than just resisting marshmallows. Set a timer and race the clock to complete a task.Tie unrelated rewards to accomplishments—get a drink from the break room or log on to social media for three minutes after reaching a milestone. Write down every invading and negatively distracting thought and schedule a ten-minute review session later in the day to focus on these anxieties and lay them to rest.
- Double-tasking isn’t our only affliction. Perhaps even more insidious is our habit of superficially committing to focused work while leaving e-mail or social media sites open in the background. All it takes is a whistle from one of these apps offering the thrill of an unexpected communication, and bam, we’re off course.But we don’t just lose the time spent answering a message when this happens; we also struggle to rediscover the ‘flow’ we were enjoying before we were disturbed.
- Frequency makes starting easier. Getting started is always a challenge. It’s hard to start a project from scratch, and it’s also hard each time you re-enter a project after a break. By working every day, you keep your momentum going. You never have time to feel detached from the process. You never forget your place, and you never need to waste time reviewing your work to get back up to speed or reminding yourself what you’ve already done. Because your project is fresh in your mind, it’s easy to pick up where you left off.
- Human mind can only truly multitask when it comes to highly automatic behaviors like walking. For activities that require conscious attention, there is really no such thing as multitasking, only task switching—the process of flicking the mind back and forth between different demands. It can feel as though we’re super-efficiently doing two or more things at once. But in fact we’re just doing one thing, then another, then back again, with significantly less skill and accuracy than if we had simply focused on one job at a time.
- An adult who spends an average of six hours a day watching TV over the course of a lifetime can expect to live 4.8 years fewer than a person who does not watch TV. These results hold true even for people who exercise regularly.Researchers tell us that when we’re sedentary, our skeletal muscles,especially in our lower limbs, do not contract, thus requiring less fuel. But the negative impact of sitting is just the tip of the iceberg. Screen time also feeds into a vicious cycle of chronic stress in a way that most of us don’t even realize.
- We have become so trusting of technology that we have lost faith in ourselves and our born instincts. There are still parts of life that we do not need to better with technology. It’s important to understand that you are smarter than your smartphone. To paraphrase, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your Google. Mistakes are a part of life and often the path to profound new insights—so why try to remove them completely? Getting lost while driving or visiting a new city used to be an adventure and a good story. Now we just follow the GPS.
- self-control is not genetic or fixed, but rather a skill one can develop and improve with practice.One of [the] strategies is to develop a seemingly unrelated habit, such as improving your posture or saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘yeah’ or flossing your teeth every night before bed. This can strengthen your willpower in other areas of your life. Additionally, once the new habit is ingrained and can be completed without much effort or thought, that energy can then be turned to other activities requiring more self-control. Tasks done on autopilot don’t use up our stockpile of energy like tasks that have to be consciously completed.
- We may tell ourselves that we’ll just answer one quick e-mail or make one short phone call. But in reality, switching tasks sends us down a rabbit hole,pulling our attention away from our priority work for much longer than we anticipate.Even if you have cast-iron willpower, the mere fact that the Internet is lying in wait on your computer takes a toll on your work performance. The very act of resisting temptations eats up concentration and leaves you mentally depleted. In short, committing to ignore distractions is rarely enough.we must strive to remove them entirely from our field of attention. Otherwise,we’ll end up using half our mental energy just keeping ourselves from breaking our own rules.
- OPEN YOURSELF TO SERENDIPITY Chance encounters can also provide enormous benefits for your projects—and your life. Being friendly while standing in line for coffee at a conference might lead to a conversation, a business card exchange, and the first investment in your company a few months later. The person sitting next to you at a concert who chats you up during intermission might end up becoming your largest customer. Or, two strangers sitting in a nail salon exchanging stories about their families might lead to a blind date, which might lead to a marriage. (This is how I met my wife. Lucky for me, neither stranger had a smartphone, so they resorted to matchmaking.) I am consistently humbled and amazed by just how much creation and realization is the product of serendipity. Of course, these chance opportunities must be noticed and pursued for them to have any value. It makes you wonder how much we regularly miss. As we tune in to our devices during every moment of transition, we are letting the incredible potential of serendipity pass us by. The greatest value of any experience is often found in its seams. The primary benefits of a conference often have nothing to do with what happens onstage. The true reward of a trip to the nail salon may be more than the manicure. When you value the power of serendipity, you start noticing it at work right away. Try leaving the smartphone in your pocket the next time you’re in line or in a crowd. Notice one source of unexpected value on every such occasion. Develop the discipline to allow for serendipity.
