This week my email list helped me choose the cover for my upcoming book. You’ll see a preorder soon, which will have the lowest pricing for the book. Make sure you grab it then.

Other than that, good week with a routine getting established again after a move and a few weeks of family being out to visit us.

What I Shipped

Did you know that creative breakthrough is powered by time off work? On Monday I wrote about some research that shows we’re more creative in the weeks after vacation. So maybe you need to take a vacation.

Tuesday I put together a video on how I use a 9.7” iPad Pro as my main web development platform. Is there any other things you’d like more information on for my iPad workflows?

How much planning did you do before you started your freelance business? Some people did a bunch, and some people were thrown into it because a job ended. Either way, Wednesday I walked through some of the things you need to plan if you want to launch a successful freelance business.

After another hiatus, I got an episode out of Should I Read It. This week we worked through Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday. Next week’s episode is already in the can as well, so that’s 2 in a row which is a bit of a record lately.

Friday Five

1. Maybe keep your day job says Justin Jackson

Good podcast exhorting us to maybe not go all in but keep something on the side. While you may have a dream, maybe you need to keep working the main gig to fund that dream.

2. Battling Procrastination

From Darius Foroux:

Every time I put off a decision, hit the snooze button, skipped the gym, or didn’t complete my tasks because I didn’t feel like it, I always had an explanation for my continual procrastination.

I told myself I was tired. Or that it could wait until tomorrow. Who cares if you put off something, right?

Well, you should care.

Because you’re the one who’s responsible for your life. Too often, we look at productivity tips, apps or tools as the magic answer to our problems. But that also means we allow ourselves to blame external things for our lack of productivity.

Remember that productivity tools are not magic. You’re still the one using the latest system that was supposed to solve your problems.

Maybe you are the problem.

3. The “productivity hack” of doing what you enjoy

This is an interesting thought about getting more done, maybe only do stuff that you enjoy. I try to do that, which is why you see so much writing from me. I enjoy writing and do it when I have the options of doing other things.

I’m starting to do videos on iOS productivity, and how I do web development full-time from iOS. Again, because I enjoy the work I don’t really make any money from it. In fact, so far I’ve spent a bunch of money improving my sound and video quality.

I review books because I enjoy reading and find that writing about them means I understand them and how they fit in their subject areas better.

So, maybe I do produce a bunch because I do what I enjoy. Now, if only I could get the recognition part flowing and maybe some more income from the content production game.

4. How Simon Reads

I’m a sucker for the ways that others interact with books and take notes on the things they’re reading. Simon’s post is very detailed, covering the four main steps in reading books.

  1. Sourcing
  2. Choosing
  3. Reading
  4. Processing

He even has some fancy scripts that send Amazon books to Airtable and then … that part got to be a bit much for even me. I have a Trello board and on that I organize the books I want to read. I just read the next one on the list. While I’m reading, if a book comes up that looks interesting, I add it to the bottom of the list.

The only change is when I’m working on a writing project and need to read a bunch of stuff in the same topic. Then I comb through the list and adjust it so that the books I need to read topically are at the top.

An interesting service he introduced me to is Readwise. I’ll take a big deeper dive into it later.

Instead of his index cards, I have my resources which I use regularly and contains more than just book highlights. It includes podcasts, academic papers, and interesting blog posts. Plus, you all can search them for content as well.

Do read the whole post Simon wrote on reading books.

Thanks to Rafael for pointing me to this.

5. On Switching Productivity Methods

Trello has some real science based reasons you may switch productivity methods and tools before the benefits really stick.

I think that it comes down to wanting to have some magic bullet to solve the problem of feeling overwhelmed because you couldn’t say no in the first place. Set better boundaries, and keep following the processes and you just may not need to change so often to feel like something is getting done.

Watch for Monday’s blog post to hear more on why I think we switch productivity methods.