7 *productive* things to do when brain-dead

A “constant creative peak” is an oxymoron.

There are times when I feel deflated. There are times I feel drained, as in “I can breathe, but everything else is optional”. A nap, or better yet, time off my desk is wonderful but not always possible. More often than not I have to find productive uses for these dreary, tired hours. Enter “7 productive things to do when brain-dead”.

This is not a typical “how to stay productive when you’re exhausted” post. I’m not going to tell you to tweak your nutrition, stretch, and get a nap. It’s solid advice, but sometimes you can’t jump-start creativity or muster enough optimism for a reasonably significant task. Sometimes you’re physically OK, but mentally or emotionally depleted. A stretch or an energy drink will only take you so far. 
This post is about stuff to do when you’re creatively brain-dead.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

7 *PRODUCTIVE* THINGS TO DO WHEN BRAIN-DEAD

1. Do free trainings from the experts you have long planned to do, but never found the time.

You probably have a list of those. Maybe these emails reside in your “Education” folder. Maybe you have a directory with pdfs buried somewhere under “Biz Dev” label. Maybe you have 674 unplayed episodes in your podcast app. Pick one and dive into it.

Bonus points if you jot down a list of next steps the training has prompted you to take. Double-bonus points for walking or running with a good podcast in your earphones.

 2. Check the financials

I’m not talking “Financial Planning for next quarter”. I’m talking “look at your numbers, check if your need to update some paid invoices or expenses, see if there any red flags”. Maybe look at your monthly Freshbooks report.

 3. Tweak headlines to planned content updates. Without commitment to the end result.

Headlines: an Art or a Science? The collective business community hasn’t reached a verdict yet. Jokes aside, your first attempt at a headline rarely produces your best one. If you’re like me, you probably have a cache of content pieces in various stages of completion. This is the time to play with headlines, with no commitment to nail down the final version.The last piece is important. If you approach this task with the intention to make that headline final already, the best you can hope for is an hour of resentful spitting through gritted teeth. The more likely scenario - you won’t even start.

If, however, you browse your content folder and you play  - that’s a fun, undemanding activity. Try going completely ridiculous. Say, instead of “7 things to do when brain-dead” write “7 things zombies eat when trying to lose weight”.

 4. Browse industry-specific Facebook groups guilt-free

Step one: set a timer. Facebook is a rabbit hole - you open it and the next thing you know it’s 8:30PM and where did the day go? Step two: browse your favorite groups, click Like on some posts, see what’s going on. If you have enough energy for thoughtful responses - wonderful. Way to show up and get your name out there. If not, that's OK too. Write down frequent questions  people are asking. Note most common challenges. It could turn into marketing gold later on.

 5. Look at stats

It doesn’t require any mental effort or creative juice. Just take notice which content is most popular, where people hang out, who opens your emails. Like many points on this list, this is about absorbing information rather than making decisions or creating something new. 

6. Install new versions of my software

Ideal for a zombie-state. This is a kind of mindless work that has to be done. No point wasting good productive hours on it, especially if the new version requires rebooting your computer. 

7. Read about the newest apps and tools in my industry

You know you need to do that from time to time to keep your business up to date. If you’re a nutrition coach, check out “Best nutrition tracking apps”. If you’re a graphic designer, google “Best iPad apps for pro designers”. If you’re a boat mechanic, search for “Best tools for marine mechanics of 2016”.
Just make sure to set a timer, because it’s easy to get lost in exploration.

A parting thought:

Using “brain-dead” times goes beyond "I really can’t afford to lose these 12 hours". It’s especially true when you’re emotionally invested in your work. It goes deeper than that: I know that if I lose a day to mindlessly surfing the net, I'm going to pay dearly with sharp guilt and a nose-dive in self-esteem.
This, in turn, will bring about debilitating paralysis of will, and require a huge amount of energy to lift myself back up to operational level. That means losing even more hours, and chipping away at my sanity.
I really cannot afford it on the deep psychological level.
 

So here you go - I’ve described the Coping Mechanisms I developed to use my brain-dead times and prevent meltdowns. By the way? They deserve a capital letter because they are so effective.

I bet I'm not the only one who has days feeling completely and utterly incapable. A quick post about creating your own list of "stuff to do when brain-dead" is coming out in a couple days.

Stay tuned!

Finding PEAK productive times, if you're NOT an obsessive productivity geek (like me)

You have heard this before: Do creative work at your most productive times, when your energy and motivation are at their peaks. This post is about finding these precious times, and including them in your weekly planning.  
I want to offer two approaches: one for the productivity-obsessed like myself, and one for the rest of the world.

Approach #1:

Track your Energy, Focus, Motivation and Creativity every hour. For at least 1-3 weeks.
This approach was presented by Rob Nightingale, who’s also have created the  Prime Time Calculator Spreadsheet for you to download and capture your rigorous tracking. You can read more about it here.
The insights you’d gain would be deep and meaningful, maybe even life-changing. But it’s an INTENSE commitment, especially if you’re already struggling with time management and focus. In weight-loss terms, it’s like a gastric bypass surgery.

Approach #2: 

Ask yourself a few simple questions. Once you have the answers, take the insights into account in your weekly and daily planning.

1. Let’s start with the easy one: are you a morning person or a night owl?

Schedule big blocks of creative work the times you’re awake. Simple.
For example - I can’t think straight at 8AM. As a parent to a school kid I am technically awake, but there’s no chance I will start penning my next masterpiece before 11AM. Not even a tweet. Nothing. It’s just not in my biology.

2. Human Interactions: do they make you more focused and energized, or do you do your best work alone?

Once you have answered this question, combine that with your previous response. Maybe you do your best work by yourself from 2PM to 6PM. Or maybe a morning brainstorm with a co-worker or a business partner gives birth to your most exceptional creations. Now you know what to do.

3. Do you tend to hyperfocus? Do you need setup times to settle into a creative task? Are you one of the precious few that actually can and should multitask?

Some people have the ability to hyper-focus on one thing, spend 6 hours with no bathroom breaks, and GET.IT.DONE. It is especially common among creative entrepreneurs - the words “creative surge” come up in most of my initial consults.

On the other end of the scale are people that work for 20 minutes, take a 20 minute break, then work for another 20. Ending up with an award-winning PhD and a most prestigious fellowship in their field, like a dear friend of mine. Pomodoro principle was probably invented by someone like that.

Take your focus patterns into account when planning your week. It's especially important for scheduling the recurring blocks of time, dedicated to creative work.

4. What are your productivity patterns around exercise?

Energy and focus patterns around exercise vary a ton - depending on your preferred type of exercise and the specifics of your biology. Some people feel at their peak as they finish post-workout shower. Others need 2 hours to recover the ability to concentrate. There are no wrong recipies, just the need to be aware of your own patterns.

5. Taking eating habits into account.

“Eating for Productivity” - an art or a science?  
I’m not going to advocate any specific eating style (although you may be interested in what the experts have to say), but I would encourage you to ask yourself - are you more productive between the meals? Do you experience after-lunch energy crush?  Again - your eating habits are absolutely none of my business. It’s all about being aware how your particular eating habits impact your focus and energy throughout the day.

6. A bonus question - do you get your best ideas in the shower?
This is so common, it could be defined as a "Local Peak".
I'd suggest keeping a notebook and a pen in the closest dry place. A smartphone works too - you can type or speak your idea into Evernote, Google Doc, or even a Reminder app.



Once you have these questions answered, look at your weekly planning.
Setup creative blocks when you know you're most productive. 
Repeat as necessary.

NOW WHAT? The magic of Next Action

In the mood for a light, uplifting story? Yes? Keep reading. It's a colorful illustration of a mega-important principle I want to talk about today. Don't feel like a good story? Skip right to the last paragraph.

<It's an exert from a blog I love, translated to the best of my ability. Names were omitted to protect the guilty>.

Smelling unfamiliar perfume, the almost-husband said, "you know, baby, marriage is a crucial step, let's check our feelings, liven-up out routine..." 
Judging by the smell of perfume the livening-up has already begun.
She thought it was love. Turned out – routine.

She waited.
In the end, they will be together.
He promised, after all.
 
In May called and asked, " How are you? Fine? Miss you, baby, look, we're off to Vermont,  my old red jacket is in the basement, fix that worn out pocket, would you? I’ll swing by Friday, pick it up, love, kisses, bye baby!" 

She took out a box of threads and needles and accidentally pricked her finger. Painfully.
Holding the bloody finger under cold water, she felt something in her mind finally click.
 
"Everything? You threw out... everything?" he gasped the next day, " You're out of your mind? And the gray suit too? Do you remember how much it cost?!  You’re crazy, I’m coming, we’ll talk it over… What do you mean – changed the locks?!" 

And this, friends, is the power of Next Action.

Once our heroine took that next action and threw out the old red jacket, she finally had the momentum to get rid of that jerk's presence. She threw out everything (imagine what a project that was), and even changed the locks.

The Next Action habit is one of the most powerful tools I’m familiar with.
It’s mind-boggling how much time and agony this little step saves. Like a Jedi mind trick. For every project (project = more than one task), ask yourself: What the next action should be?

Define it using a verb, then put it in a trusted system, where you can see it when the time comes. Or get to it right away, using the powerful momentum you've just created. If the Next Action has to happen at a specific time, put a reminder for it in your phone or calendar.

It is incredibly effective against procrastination. We often procrastinate because we’re not entirely clear on what to do next. Once we have this clarity, our energy levels go up, and resistances sink down. I mentioned it a couple sentences ago, but it's worth repeating: Having the next action defined before you embark on a task or a project, creates momentum, and lo and behold, stuff gets DONE!


Now, I want you to think about your most burning project. What's your next action?
Feel free to reply in the comments. Accountability is magic...
And if you're in a generous mood, click below.

DECADENCE as means Getting Things Done

If you're new to my online home - welcome!
It's fun around here, especially today. Today we're going to talk about DECADENCE.

May I share a #MomWin  with you?  
Above is a decadent, scrumptious, and a pain-in-butt to make chocolate raspberry cake.

But that’s not the #MomWin. The Win is my smarty-pants 7-year-old that insisted (honest to God, insisted! For the entire evening!) that I teach her Planning. She heard me teach it in my group, and wanted to understand what’s mommy talking about.
We believe in answering kid's questions as best we can, so I tried to show her what Planning is all about. Our daughter is seven, so even a month is too long for her to grasp. We settled on planning a couple days ahead.
She wanted to make a cake.

I asked: what kind of cake? What does it look like? 
She closed her eyes, sniffed the air, and declared “Chocolate-raspberry. With berries on top. Made of three cakes”.
“How big is it?”
“This big” (About her height. She's going all out with this)
“What is it made of?”
“Chocolate. And cream. And strawberries and raspberries”.
”Good. What are you going to do now?”
“… I’ll find a recipe. I’ll go to the grocery store… No, first I’ll check what I have in the pantry. But we don’t have raspberries, so I’ll have to go to the store… Then I’ll make the cake.”
“Wait. How will you make the cake?”
“I’ll bake the cakes. Then I’ll decorate. Then I’ll put it all together”.
“Imagine the cake again. Are the cakes stacked on top of each other, or does each stand on its own platter? Is it going to be easier to first put the cake together, then decorate? Or maybe the other way around?”

We fantasized like this for a good few minutes. 
She went to bed dreaming of the cake, having a clear Plan, and also having secured a promise we’ll make it for her birthday. (There’s some time till then, so I might get off the hook). 

---

Now back to you:
In my experience, when you're  Visionary Entrepreneur, you tend to
 - a) be pretty good at setting goals
 - b) manage the day-to-day minutia very effectively.
But!

The breakdown happens at Mid-term Planning.

Which is Reason #1 you may feel planning sucks.
Reason #2 is that we are taught to plan top-down: make a goal, create an outline, break down the outline into smaller tasks, the smaller tasks into even smaller actions, until you have a Gantt chart and your project is planned to death.
Very few people truly enjoy doing that.

Instead, let me walk you through a model that works for most people I’ve met. 
Say, you've set a goal. As we've already established, you are very good at this.

Now imagine what the best Outcome would look like.

The operative word here is “IMAGINE”.
What’s your best way of imagining? Are you a visualizer? An audial person? Someone who is very sensitive to smells? Or, maybe you’re a verbal processor like me, in which case you can best define your Outcome talking to yourself or to a friend/partner/stranger on a street.
Once you goal is vivid in your mind, it’s time to take a step back and let your brain come up with ideas. Clarity nourishes creativity, and once you have a clear picture of an Outcome, ideas start to flow.

After the brainstorming session, it’s time to organize your ideas. Look at what you’ve written down or clipped into Evernote. After a short while you'd see patterns – what needs to be done by whom, what ideas/actions can be grouped together, etc. A natural order will emerge too - what should happen first, and what comes next (find recipe, look in the pantry, then go to to the grocery store).

Time to organize your ideas into a coherent flow. A narrative, if you will.
Once your have a narrative, think “Next Action” on each of the key aspects of your Plan. We’ll talk about it the very next time

So to recap:

 - Imagine a vivid, possibly decadent Outcome
 - Let your brain get flooded with ideas
 - After that - look for patterns and natural order. 
 - Organize ideas and tasks into a flow
 - Decide what the Next Action.

That’s it. Try it, and if you're in a sharing mood, click on the icons below.

WHY you hate Planning and how to STOP IT

The "Importance of Planning" is hyped all over the place. We all know that achieving our goals/dreams/next paycheck requires it, and sometimes we even get to it.
Sometimes.

But I wonder - how many of my readers have planning sessions on a regular basis? And among those, how many of you are looking forward to these sessions?

Why?

People avoid planning for many reasons. Here the most common, in my experience:

Reason 1:  THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF SUCCESS

As you plan, the fact that your plans might not become reality gets pretty harshly shoved in your face. You’re an entrepreneur, so your goals are probably very close to your heart.
Often it’s not just what you do, it’s who you are.
Being a Visionary you can imagine all too vividly a number of scenarios when plans FAIL.
Sometimes on an epic scale.
The very plans that are so strongly tied to your sense of self, to your sense of self-worth.
Really, it’s pretty damn scary. (My parents will disown me. Everyone will know I'm a useless fraud. My kids will be embarrassed to talk about me at school. I will end up in debt jail, alone and forgotten).

When you plan, the FEAR OF FAILURE is just beneath the surface.

What to do:
In my experience, two tactics can help:
1. Awareness.
As woo-woo as it sounds, telling yourself  “it’s not real, it’s my fear talking”, takes the edge out of the mental image of living in a dumpster.

2. Find someone to plan with.
Often, when we voice our plans out loud, they seem more tangible and achievable. Fears, on the other hand, tend to sound stupid when brought to the surface. And that's before we mention accountability.

Reason 2: PLANNING CAN BE TEDIOUS and BORING.

True. Writing down lists and figuring out logistics is not often a strong-suit of the Visionary type.

What to do:
1. Speak it out loud
Try talking, rather than writing stuff down. You can edit it later. Talking doesn’t feel as restrictive, it’s easier to start, and therefore increases the chances of you having an actual, fruitful planning session.

2. Make it ENGAGING.
Imagine the outcome as vividly as you can, using all your senses (we’ll talk more about next time, in a few days). Dreaming up your next product in all its colorful brilliance is more fun than writing a list. You’d still have to make the list (later), but now you gave your brain a natural path to identify steps. The list-making will be connected to the pleasant experiences conjured up by your imagination.

Reason 3: THE SENSE OF SHEER UNENDING-NESS.

Just sooo much to do…  Paradoxically, planning session can create a strong sense of overwhelm, making it easy to slip into doing “very urgent stuff”.
 
What to do:
This one is short: pick 3 things. No more. Three is better than none, which is what you get if you don’t plan. And there is a surprising bonus: when you have planned three things, you may realize that you actually have some energy left to plan a couple more!


So there you have it.
I have tons more to say about Planning, it's one of my favorite subjects.
 

But for now - what are your own personal obstacles to Planning? Let me know - I might write an entry that addresses your struggle directly.

NAIL THE CAT TO THE DOOR

 “I’m going to unpack the cups. Oh, and nail the cat to the door”, I told my mom, standing in the kitchen. We’ve just moved, and the little things, hiding in unknown boxes, were driving me insane. That’s why I needed to nail the cat to the door.
To finally have a place for my keys, like I used to.

OK, I admit, I said it for the shock value. It worked with my mom, her expression was p-r-i-c-e-l-e-s-s. Well, for that short moment before she realized what I really meant.

I have this funny key holder, shaped like a deranged cat. I love it. As soon as I unlock the door, keys still in my hand, I hang them on its paw. It’s an ingrained habit that makes me not lose my keys ten times a day.

They say that the difference between a successful entrepreneur and a struggling one lies in their habits.  What does this actually mean, and what’s the most effective way to acquire these successful habits? Or any habits, for that matter.

SUCCESS LIES IN OUR HABITS. BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

First of all, good habits make sense: reviewing your balance once a week lowers the odds of idiotic expenses. Writing daily to-do list results in more stuff getting done. Gym every Tuesday and Friday makes you fitter and more lucid.

When does a habit become EFFECTIVE? 
When something it’s easier to DO than NOT to do. Repeatedly. 
This is the type of habit you don’t need discipline for. Notice that I didn’t say a “good” habit. Smoking is definitely a habit, and I’m told it’s easier to take a cigarette that to NOT take it.

For instance, it’s easier to brush your teeth in the morning than NOT to do it. You don’t consciously think about feeling gross with un-brushed teeth. That knowledge is just there, prompting you to pick up the toothbrush.

It’s easier for me to spill my daily to-dos on paper, than have tasks and ideas partying in my head. I don’t think twice about opening my notebook.

 LET'S GET TO WORK

Let’s do a little thought exercise. Name 3 habits that fit the definition above: things easier for you to DO than NOT to do. They don’t have to be all virtuous habits, and you don’t have to think strictly about habits you’d like to get rid of.

Here are some of mine:

1.      A habit of relaxing in front of a screen in the evenings.  Read: I have this habit of finding excuses to not exercise. My morning habits do not include exercise either, because I find it way easier to have my coffee, check my emails and forums and start working. Going to the gym? That would be breaking a habit.

 2.      It’s easier for me to plan my week first thing Monday morning, than NOT to do so. If I don’t spill my ideas and commitment on paper, it feels like ants of anxiety are crawling all over my body. I HAVE TO unload this anthill into a notebook and properly organize it for the coming week.

 3.      A wonderful habit I learned from Shawn Achor: morning gratitudes. Writing down three new things I’m grateful for each morning (the NEW part is what makes it really work). If I don’t write them down, I’d feel restless and it’ll be much harder to fight the negative thoughts that plague most people that work by themselves. Just like with teeth-brushing, I don’t consciously think about the consequences of NOT doing it anymore. The knowledge is there, triggering the habit each morning, without passing through the conscious part of my brain.
 

Now - your turn. Write down three habits you have that are so ingrained they are easier to DO than NOT to DO.