A mental warm up

This technique requires 2 steps:

• Deep immersion into a subject matter without specifically looking for an answer to your problem.
• Letting go completely while you process that information (actually walking away from it), to allow good ideas to bubble up from the subconscious and into clear view.

This is the ability to reach beyond a specific field of expertise and create new uses for an older thing. It’s about taking one thing and using it for a different purpose than intended.

For example: Apply a cooking recipe to a marketing strategy or use a spreadsheet program to organize words for your poetry.

Productivity is directly related to your energy level.

Find your most productive hours — the time of your peak energy — and schedule Deep Work for those periods. Do low-value and low-energy tasks (also known as shallow work), such as responding to emails or unimportant meetings, in between those hours.

Before going to bed, spend 5 minutes writing your to-do list for the next day. These tasks should help you move towards your professional and personal goals.

You’ll be better prepared mentally for the challenges ahead before waking up and there won’t be any room for procrastination in the morning. As a result, you’ll work faster and smoother than ever before.

Urgent but unimportant tasks = distractions.

Urgent tasks put us into constant “reply mode.” Important work is related to planned tasks that move us closer to our goals.

Anytime you are pulled away from your tasks, it takes time to readjust to them when you jump back in (sometimes it can take up to 25 minutes).

Interruptions (notifications, loud noises, social media, checking email etc.) harm your concentration.

• Prioritize: The clearer your priorities, the more focused you can be on the task at hand. 
• Generate: Build a creative habit. Make a daily deliverable, whether it’s 100-words a day, a 30-second song etc...
• Explore: When you Explore, you collect the raw materials for the insights you’ll have when you Generate.
• Research: To solve a creative problem, you have to learn whatever you can about that problem.
• Recharge: When you rest, you allow your unconscious mind to work on your creative problems.
• Polish: A great idea won’t work if you don’t execute it well.
• Administrate: make it all work, so you can keep doing what you’re doing.

1. Build a tiny creative habit: Find the time of day with the best creative energy and make your daily deliverable so small, you can’t stand to fail.
2. Take time to Prioritize: Once you’ve established a habit, dedicate an hour a week to a “weekly review”.
3. Rest with a purpose: Establish times during your day and your week when you’ll do something that Recharges you.

Saying yes to everything puts you on the fast track to being miserable. Sometimes you have to set clear boundaries.

The alternative is that you’re going to do a half-hearted, poor job at each task, be stressed beyond belief, and feel like you’re stuck in an endless cycle of failure and frustration.  

• Wake up every morning and figure out what the most important 3 things are for the day, and cut out the rest. 
• Address your other obligations right then and there, and tell the associated people that your plate is full. 
• Instead of task-switching, give each task some allotted time.

Caffeine has a range of positive impacts beyond keeping you awake: from increased alertness and reaction time to improved learning, memory, and even mood. 

And coffee isn’t just effective on a chemical level: scheduling coffee breaks so that the entire team took it at the same time increased productivity.

Taking breaks during the workday is important for workers to replace workplace “resources” - energy, motivation, and concentration. 

These resources are limited and they need “charging” by doing activities that require less effort or use different resources than normal work or are just something the worker enjoys.

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” – Socrates

Don’t take on more tasks and responsibilities. You end up doing many things in a mediocre way. Instead, focus your time and energy on a few important things.

“Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.” – Plato

Set 3-4 important tasks that will directly contribute to what you want to achieve in life.

To-dos arrive from a variety of sources. Your boss sends you an email, you get a Slack message from IT, a bill arrives in the mail, or a coworker asks for a favor in the hallway.

In order to prioritize your task list efficiently, you need a master to-do list that contains all of the tasks you need to prioritize and complete from all of those sources.

Go through your list, review each task, and decide what you want to do with it. You have 4 options:

• Do: complete the task now
• Defer: complete it later
• Delegate: assign it to someone else
• Delete: remove it from your list

Take your calendar and plan on organizing your time around achieving all your goals. 

Each week you will have specific goals that you want to accomplish. Throughout each week, you will have a To-Do list that you will work on every day.

Share your goals with your spouse or a good friend. 

When there is someone else other than yourself holding you accountable, you are more likely to get your tasks completed throughout the week. 

Motivation is often the result of action, not the cause of it. Getting started, even in very small ways, is a form of active inspiration that naturally produces momentum.

Newton’s First Law applied to habit formation: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. 

Once a task has begun, it is easier to continue moving it forward. In other words, it is often easier to finish a task than it was to start it in the first place.