Omar Usman – Productivity 3 Things I Learned from the Book Manage Your DaytoDay 99u
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the importance of creating a framework for creativity, which is defined as finding one's creative work and dedicating time to it. The speaker also emphasizes the importance of creating a nonnegotiable focus breaks and revisiting the importance of urgent tasks. The speaker provides three ways to address this challenge, including listening to one's emails and messages, creating a focus on one's art, and reemphasizing the importance of one's art.
AI: Summary ©
Today, I'm sharing 3 things I learned from
the book Managing Your Day to Day by
99U
and the basic premise of the book is
essentially this, that our daily routine or lack
thereof greatly affects our level of success. Now,
the book talks a lot about creative work
and when we hear creativity, we think,
you know, artistry or writing or photography or
graphics or things of that sort, but really
creative work is the work that you dedicate
yourself to. Whatever craft it is that you're
trying to master, that's your work that you're
focused on, and this book helps you figure
out how to best maximize
your effort and output in that type of
work. So the first lesson is that creativity
needs a framework. When we think about inspiration,
we have this idea that inspiration will just
strike, that a writer is sitting there thinking
and pondering, suddenly they come with a good
idea they're able to get in that state
of flow that we want to get into
and just churn out all types of work.
The reality
is that that type of work requires dedication
on a daily basis, and you have to
dedicate that time first before you get to
anything else. That means making sure that your
creative work comes before other people's agendas.
What are other people's agendas?
Emails, messages,
other people's demands on your time. Those things
will come but make sure that you've got
your items taken care of first.
When you take care of your things on
a daily basis and you have that repetition,
it builds frequency, and frequency is vital because
it gives you momentum. And momentum, as you
know, it's like in sports, when a team
has momentum,
things start becoming easier and easier and easier.
It lifts you up. It also actually develops
more creativity
because the more that you're engrossed in your
work and engaged with your work every single
day, the more that it opens up your
mind to other things, you make connections with
other ideas, and just being involved in your
work daily, you start to see things you
otherwise wouldn't see. The other thing that frequency
does is it makes you more productive because
now that you're in that you're in that
habit
of working on it every day, it makes
it easier to to maximize your effort. The
second thing I learned was renewal.
Now
we've all heard, you know, sleep right, exercise
right, eat right, all those things would be
more productive, and that's all true. But the
thing that I really took away from it
was this, it's understanding
that the demands on us
exceed our capacity.
And so there's more and more people trying
to get in touch with us. There's more
messages. Our inboxes are out of control. Even
the things we wanna dedicate ourselves to, there's
an endless ocean of possibility.
We don't have the time or capacity or
energy to do all of the things that
we want to do. So we have to
make sure that we're focused, that we step
back, and we put the effort in the
things that we want. We make sure that
we're not multitasking.
Multitasking is a huge trap. We think that
we're getting a lot done at the same
time. What we really end up doing is
task switching. So we go
tiny bits of attention to multiple different things.
And one of the best things that we
can do to kind of solve this problem
is not only to have focused work, but
give yourself
nonnegotiable,
uninterrupted
focus breaks.
That means time where you're not consuming
and you're not responding.
You're simply sitting there and you're letting your
imagination run wild. Let your mind wander. Let
the ideas in your head marinate. Let, you
know, just give yourself time to think and
to reflect.
It recharges your brain and it makes you
a lot more productive and it helps you
produce better quality work. The third thing that
I learned was making sure that we reemphasize
and we revisit that line between important and
urgent tasks. We're familiar with the quadrant
of important and urgent tasks. So there's not
important, not urgent, all the way up to
urgent and important. A lot of us live
in the urgent and important quadrant. That's basically
firefighting.
Everything that comes our way is super important,
super vital, and we have to get to
it right away.
It's the important, but not urgent tasks where
success really lies and that's our creative work
because those are the things that we have
to do day to day. The frequency that
we need is in that important, but not
urgent quadrant
because that's the work that you don't see
the returns 6 months down on your calendar
or even 12 months down. It's developing the
new scale, it's that massive project, it's that
thing that might take 5 years, but it
requires focus and consistent effort. If we're not
paying attention to that quadrant, we're not gonna
see those returns, we're not gonna see that
success. The challenge that we face is that
because of the digital age and the emails
and the messages and all the things that
we're inundated with every day, the line between
urgent
and not urgent becomes blurred. And so we'll
sit down thinking that our emails are really
urgent, and we'll sit down and knock them
out for an hour, and we feel like
we're really productive, we feel like we've accomplished
a lot, but the reality is we work
on someone else's agenda. We didn't give the
time that was needed to master our craft
and to work on the things that we
were trying to work on. That's 3 things
I learned from the book Managing Your Day
to Day by 99U.
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