The Deload Week for Work and Life
Why you should be taking 12 weeks off per year…
“In life, we must have flexibility. Our spirits must be able to move freely. To be too stiff and rigid is to be brittle and lacking in responsiveness.”
–Musashi
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that I’ve obsessed about work/life balance for a long time.
If you own 100% of your time you decide when to work, when to stop, and when to take a few days off. It’s a lot easier to just work endlessly while stressing out about how you’re not really ‘living the dream’.Continue reading >>
Reading a Book a Week and Other ‘One Things’ in 2016
One of my favorite books on productivity is The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results.
If you haven’t read it, the premise is simple: to accomplish any goal, do the next thing makes all other tasks else easier or irrelevant.
That ‘one thing’ is the lead domino in a sequence that will take you where you want to go. All you have to do is stay focused on the next piece.
These ‘one things’ can be individual tasks or projects, or they can be routines, habits, major life upheavals, and so on. The hardest part is being clear-headed enough and doing the work to find the key next step.
And sometimes I just stumble into them. They’re usually incredibly simple and have been right in front of me the whole time.Continue reading >>
Morning Scripts: Wake up, Kick Ass Every Single Day
Summary: Below you’ll find an explanation of how priming myself with a scripted morning routine has been a major positive change this year. I’ve also included the exact morning routine I’m using now.
Is it possible to make yourself location-agnostic, bulletproof to circumstance, resilient in a way that ensures marching down the road to high-level outcomes every damn day until they happen?
I consider myself extremely motivated, but plenty of mornings I wake up and don’t want to move. It’s not that the obstacles are too big or that I don’t enjoy what I do, but some kind of meta-level inertia has clogged the gears. Writers would call it writer’s block. Motivational speakers would call it “needing a state change.”
It can be caused by almost anything: lack of sleep, overtraining, burning out on work. No matter how motivated I was yesterday, sometimes the muse just left the building over night.
But what if you could reboot your brain–in 10-30 minutes–and get into a state of focus and effortless output regardless of your current mental/physical/emotional crisis? Continue reading >>
4 Gmail Hacks to Dominate your Inbox and Cure Email Addiction
Update: Revised on 2/7/15 from 3 hacks to 4 hacks!
If you check your email every 5 minutes, I’ve got news for you: this not the best way to get things done, and it may be adding a lot of needless working hours to your day.
Unless your primary responsibility is “respond to any and all email,” or there’s a mission critical contract out that needs to get signed, or your project management solution has completely failed and there is absolutely no other way to get a hold of you, I would suggest another approach.
Email is, after all, asynchronous communication. It’s not a chatroom, it’s not a project management tool, and it won’t substitute for talking to someone on the phone or in person. It can also wreak havoc on brain-intensive tasks (28% of your time could be wasted by interruption).
Like any tool, there are efficient and not so efficient ways to use email. Here are a few game-changing productivity hacks, some I’ve been doing for years and a couple game-changers I’ve implemented just recently:
The Key to Freedom isn’t Making More, it’s Spending Less
Photo: El Hombre, the most chilled out man in the world. Chicama, Peru.
If you’re trying to cast off the anchors of modern society, the key isn’t making more money, it’s needing less. Doing this requires voluntarily self-destructing the mindset that makes you think you need more in the first place.
After traveling through ‘less-developed’ countries around the world, returning to the US is a shock. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would need a Chevy Tahoe, the newest version of the iPhone, or any of the other nearly unlimited and arguably useless consumer products available to anyone with a credit card.
I used to be a part of this system, but I’ve been progressively weaning myself from it. Turns out there are some amazing benefits to be had from completely checking out.