PNTV: Manage Your Day-to-Day by Jocelyn K. Glei (#275)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today, another great book, Manage your day to day by Jocelyn glei and the 99U team. Manage your day to day Subtitle Build your routine, find your focus and sharpen your your creative mind. Awesome little book. It's a compilation of many chapters from some of the world's leading thinkers on productivity ranging from Seth Godin, Dan Ariely, Steven Pressfield, Gretchen Rubin, Cal Newport, Todd Henry, a bunch of people we profile and a bunch of other brilliant minds. Philosopher's Note A bunch of my favorite big ideas. It's co produced or it's one of the books in the 99U series. Three of them. Read this one, loved it, just got the other two. Will feature those soon I imagine. For now, let's look at five of my favorite big ideas. So if you want to manage your day to day, the number one thing you need to do and the number one section in the book, they have four chapters. The first one is you need to create awesome daily routines. We talk about this all the time, but the greatest creative performers have the most consistent daily routines. You need to be boring in most of your life to be interesting in your creative work, in your deep work that matters. In the last note we just did on John Maxwell's 15 invaluable laws of Growth, we talked about the fact that he says if you want to change your life, you have to change something you do every day. Your life will never change unless you're willing to change something you do every single day. So the question for you is very straightforward. What in your day do you need to change? What do you need to start doing more of and what do you need to start doing less of? How do you dial in your routines a little bit more? Robin Sharma in our awesome interview, he said it's all about optimizing simplicity, removing all the things that aren't there, finding the marginal gains. Those tiny little improvements get your 4% better day in and day out. Compound that over time via awesome daily routines. So that's our first big idea. The second big idea is we want to move from reactive to creative. Notice same letters in reactive and creative. We just need to move this C to the beginning. We need to do our creative work first. So the most important thing we can do to manage our day to day is is to create great daily routines. And the first contributor to the book, Mark McGinnis, I believe, says that the number one thing you could do to improve your daily routines and your productivity is to make creative Work the first thing you do in the morning rather than reactive work, AKA email. So spotlight on you. Do you wake up and basically immediately check your email? If so, you jumped into reactive work. Now, if you want to do truly extraordinary work, you need to shift from doing reactive work first to creative work. Create a time block for yourself where you don't check email first thing in the morning. You figure out what's most important for you for your big dream projects, and you do that first. Dan Ariely has some great wisdom on this. We're going to talk about it in a moment at the end here as well. But he says, Look, IT managers should go to the IT department and say don't let email go out between 8am and 11am that'd be one of the most productive things we could possibly do. That's never going to happen, of course. So we need to create our own time blocks. And for most of us, our energy is best early in the day, right? We get going, we get started. We're doing pretty well in, in the afternoon. That's not when we're doing our best work. Right now, if we're using our best energy for reactive tasks, we're never going to do our best. Most important work. Therefore shift from reactive to creative as the first thing you do every morning. That's a huge, huge shift. Third big idea is going from wealth to poverty. So Jocelyn, the editor of 99U and of this book, quotes a researcher who in 1971 said that a wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention. 1971, a wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention. Now this is before the information that we can consume exponentially exploded right in that 40 plus years. Now we constantly have access to information at an absurd level. And what does that lead to? It leads to a poverty of attention. And Jocelyn and these other authors and so many other great teachers say our attention is our most valuable asset, particularly in a world and from a marketplace perspective, from a competitive perspective, when everyone else is fragmenting their attention. If you are the one who's able to sustain attention on deep work versus shallow work that Cal Newport talks about, if you can sustain your attention on deep work for a significant extended period of time, consistently and persistently, you will differentiate yourself dramatically from the rest of the world. And more importantly, in my interview with Sonia Lybomirsky years ago, I remember her saying that attention, the ability to put your mind where you want, when you want, was the most important asset we could have for happiness, for well being, for flourishing. And if we're constantly allowing ourselves to get paper cutted by all the push notifications and text messages and Facebook status updates and all these other things. Emails coming in. Our attention is going to get shredded. So we need to. And I know I'm repeating myself here, but we need to reduce the amount of information we consume and allow our attention to be focused via deep work in time blocks, etc. And then being willing to be bored. Like we talked about with Cal Newport, that was one of his chapters in his book, we need to be willing to be bored. When you're sitting in line, you don't need to bust out your smartphone and spend that 28 seconds engaged in the latest bit of information that is leading to a poverty of your ability to focus attention, whether it's on just a creative thought or with your family. If you're constantly doing that. Not a good idea. Be comfortable with not having constant information and stimulation. And know that, as Thich Nhat Hanh told us in silence, that stuff that we consume is like a nutriment. He said it's like a type of food. And when you're constantly consuming all this information, your brain's chewing it long after the fact. I'm sure you've had this experience where you're going to fall asleep or whatever and you think of something you read earlier in the day. Maybe you're even dreaming about this stuff that you're consuming. That's a wasted use of our attention. Much wiser to reduce it. Focus on what's important. Let our subconscious mind chew on that. Fourth big idea is another big one, screen apnea. So one of the chapters is on learning how to work with our tools. Use technology as a tool rather than be used by it. Right. We need to tame our tools rather than the other way around. And one of the ideas is this phrase I hadn't heard of before, email apnea or screen apnea. Right. They're talking about conscious computing. And it's funny, in addition to having horrible posture at times, when I'm working on my computer, I'll hold my breath at times. Well, there's actually a phrase for that, screen apnea. Most people hold their breath, particularly when they're responding to email. Check in and see if you do that. Right. Take a deep breath in and deep breath out as we contemplate that. But when you are in front of its screen, whether it's a smartphone or a computer or television, notice if you tend to reduce your breathing, because if you do that, that shallow breathing is triggering a fight or Flight response, which is then triggering more impulsive and compulsive behavior and all the things you don't want to have. So notice if you tend to hold your breath and deliberately practice deep diaphragmic breathing such that you are not overstimulating the fight or flight response unnecessarily throughout your day. That's a big idea. And the fifth big idea is rats and emails. So Dan Ariely back to him. He's asked by Jocelyn, the editor, why is it that email is so she doesn't use this word, but basically addictive. Why is it so tempting? And he likens it to B.F. skinner's research, who worked with rats, and he discovered there's something called random reinforcement, where if a rat pushes a lever a hundred times and then gets a pellet or a ward of food or whatever, that's exciting for the rat. Push it, push it, push it, push it. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Push it, push it, push it. But the anticipation of getting something keeps him pushing or her pushing, right? Boom. I got my reward. Oh, random reinforcement. Now if you actually, that's just reinforcement over a certain period of lever pushes. If you randomize it such that it gets rewarded at a random interval, somewhere between 1 and 100 pushes of the lever, right, that's random reinforcement. He'll be even more excited. And Dan likens that to email. For us, most of the time when we check our email, it's not that exciting, right? But every once in a while, it's super exciting. So we, like rats, have been trained via random reinforcement to compulsively push the lever of our email or our smartphones, looking for messages or looking for Twitter notifications or whatever it is. And so I encourage you to check in on that and to see if you have that tendency. And next time you do it, imagine yourself dressed up as a rat responding to this random reinforcement and see if that's really how you want to show up. When I find myself compulsively checking whatever, it's always nice to step back and see it and go, really? I aspire to be a little bit more conscious than a rat. Let me step back from that. So check in on your habits and see how you're doing on that. And so much more we can talk about there, but I'll leave it at that. So rats in email, we want to gain control. We want to not check email and be reactive first thing in the morning, right? We want to be creative. Notice if you hold your breath when you're in front of a screen and remember a wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention and your attention is the most valuable asset you have. Preserve it, cultivate it, et cetera, and get your daily routines dialed in. What's one thing that you can do to optimize your daily routine and do it consistently and have a really, really strong positive impact in your life? Think about that, get on it and have another awesome day. Hope you enjoyed and if you did, I think you'll like the book. It's a great way to tap into a range of wisdom and a really fun short form style that I enjoyed and I think you will as well. Look forward to sharing more. Have another great day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that P&TV episode. 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