Your Language Makes Excuses for Your Poor Habits
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Your language is a window into what your actual thoughts are. When you say “I have to…” what you’re most often saying is “Other people expect me to … and I can’t say no”. When you say “But people will be upset about ….” What you’re really saying is “I can’t get over maybe disappointing…
Sorting Your Tasks Based on Energy For Better Deep Work
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So far in my series on deep work we’ve covered: How to get deep work in when you have random urgent tasks to do The Mullet Method of Deep Work You’ve Only Got 100% to Give For a Few Hours, Then You Have 20% Notifications are stupid If you’ve read them all, you’ve got a…
All Those Stupid Notifications Don’t Matter
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The day after I talked to Eric about his focus times I tried to derail him in Slack. The message went something like this: You shouldn’t be seeing this Eric. You’re supposed to be focused on work. So focus. What do you NEED Need is a hard word because often those around us try to…
Stop Making Things Easier
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Don’t just jump to the easy tool or the easy option. Sometimes, oftentimes adding friction to a process can improve it. With friction in place you’re forced to evaluate if the job is worth doing at all. Without friction it’s easy to push tasks off to ‘future you’ and never evaluate them until your lists…
Stop Being a Chronic Starter and Finish with the help of Jon Acuff
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How many projects have you started and never finished? Little bits of leftover code sitting around. Half written drafts of stories. That shelf you were supposed to build and still sits like a lurking troll in the garage. Yup we’ve all got some projects started and not finished around, but what if all you have…
You’ve only got 100% to give for a few hours then you have 20%
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Yesterday I talked about my Mullet Method of focused work. One of the keys to that method is that I take a big break from 9 – 12. This break fuels me up for my Manager time later in the day and then for some more Maker time. In October and November 2017, I cut…
The Mullet Method of Deep Work
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There are two pictures of me that I think are stellar. I’m 6 or 7 in them. In one I’m missing a front tooth, and I’m wearing a red plaid shirt. I have short hair up top, and you guessed it, long hair in the back. The other picture is almost the same, except I…
How Do I get Deep Work Done in the Midst of Random Priority Distractions
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A reader name Eric reached out to me recently with this question: I just Instapaper’d a couple of your deep work articles but I had a question: what can you do to get the most deep work possible when a good chunk of your time is taken up by unscheduled, urgent, and energy draining tasks…
Reading for November 2017
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We’re trying something a bit new. I read a bunch so on the last Saturday of a month I’ll bundle up the best stuff along with a short summary on why you should read it too. If you don’t like it let me know. If you do like it let me know. I’ll do it…
Which tasks will you Decide to Suck at This Week?
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My secret project is done now because I decided to suck at a bunch of tasks this week until the big one was done. It was easy to decide what to do when I answered this ONE question: “What is the one task this week I can do that will make everything else easy or…
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