Omar Usman – Productivity 3 Things I Learned from the Book Manage Your DaytoDay 99u

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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