ŷ������

“Limit your daily to-do list. A 3�� × 3�� Post-it is perfect—if you can’t fit everything on a list that size, how will you do it all in one day? If you keep adding to your to-do list during the day, you will never finish��”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“One of my most helpful Secrets is, “What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“I think we need that self-awareness. That we don’t have time because it’s convenient not to have the time, because maybe we don’t want to challenge ourselves.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“The biggest problem we face today is “reactionary workflow.�� We have started to live a life pecking away at the many inboxes around us, trying to stay afloat by responding and reacting to the latest thing: e-mails, text messages, tweets, and so on. Through our constant connectivity to each other, we have become increasingly reactive to what comes to us rather than being proactive about what matters most to us. Being informed and connected becomes a disadvantage when the deluge supplants your space to think and act.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“I define Resistance as that self-created and self-perpetuated, invisible, impersonal, indefatigable force whose sole aim is to prevent us from doing our work, from becoming our best selves, and from rising to the next level of competence, integrity, and generosity. That”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Not everyone will be capable of shouldering this task of personal responsibility or of being a good example for their children. But the heroes of the next generation will be those who can calm the buzzing and jigging of outside distraction long enough to listen to the sound of their own hearts, those who will follow their own path until they learn to walk erect—not hunched over like a Neanderthal, palm-gazing. Into traffic. You have a choice in where to direct your attention. Choose wisely. The world will wait. And if it’s important, they’ll call back.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Our current relationship with technology is fraught. We feel overwhelmed and out of control. We dream of declaring “e-mail bankruptcy�� or maybe “going off the grid.�� But we are also addicted and entranced—constantly logging on to share our every thought, image, and idea. It’s easy to blame the tools, but the real problem is us. Rather than demonizing new technologies unnecessarily or championing them blindly, we must begin to develop a subtler sensibility. We must ask hard questions like: Why are we driven to use our tools so compulsively? What would it mean to approach e-mail and social media mindfully? How does being tethered to our devices impact our physical bodies—and even our imaginations? In this new era of technological invention, questioning how we work—which behaviors are productive and which are destructive—is an essential part of the creative process.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“You’ll also learn to watch your thoughts and not be controlled by them. As you do, you’ll have learned a key skill for focus: how to notice the urge to switch tasks and not act on that urge, but just return your attention to the task at hand.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“The reason you might be having trouble with your practice in the long run—if you were capable of building a practice in the short run—is nearly always because you are afraid. The fear, the resistance, is very insidious. It doesn’t leave a lot of fingerprints, but the person who manages to make a movie short that blows everyone away but can’t raise enough cash to make a feature film, the person who gets a little freelance work here and there but can’t figure out how to turn it into a full-time gig—that person is practicing self-sabotage. These people sabotage themselves because the alternative is to put themselves into the world as someone who knows what they are doing. They are afraid that if they do that, they will be seen as a fraud. It’s incredibly difficult to stand up at a board meeting or a conference or just in front of your peers and say, “I know how to do this. Here is my work. It took me a year. It’s great.�� This is hard to do for two reasons: (1) it opens you to criticism, and (2) it puts you into the world as someone who knows what you are doing, which means tomorrow you also have to know what you are doing, and you have just signed up for a lifetime of knowing what you are doing. It”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Day by day, we build our lives, and day by day, we can take steps toward making real the magnificent creations of our imaginations.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“KEY TAKEAWAYS �� Sharpening Your Creative Mind PRACTICE UNNECESSARY CREATION Use personal creative projects to explore new obsessions, skills, or ways of working in a low-pressure environment. WANDER LONELY AS A CLOUD Make time for your mind—and body—to wander when you’re stuck. Disengaging from the problem allows your subconscious to do its work. DEFINE “FINISHED�� FROM THE START Keep your inner perfectionist in check by defining what finished looks like at the beginning of a project. And when you get there, stop! DON’T GO ON AUTOPILOT Repetition is the enemy of insight. Take unorthodox—even wacky—approaches to solving your stickiest problems and see what happens. SEARCH FOR THE SOURCE When the well runs dry, don’t blame a lack of talent. Creative blocks frequently piggyback on other problems. See if you can identify them. LOVE YOUR LIMITATIONS Look at constraints as a benefit, rather than an impediment. They activate our creative thinking by upping the ante.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“When was the last time you made something that someone wasn’t paying you for, and looking over your shoulder to make sure you got it right?�� When I ask creatives this question, the answer that comes back all too often is, “I can’t remember.�� It’s so easy for creativity to become a means to a very practical end—earning a paycheck and pleasing your client or manager. But that type of work only uses a small spectrum of your abilities. To truly excel, you must also continue to create for the most important audience of all: yourself. In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron discusses a now well-known practice that she calls “morning pages.�� She suggests writing three pages of free-flowing thought first thing in the morning as a way to explore latent ideas, break through the voice of the censor in your head, and get your creative juices flowing. While there is nothing immediately practical or efficient about the exercise, Cameron argues that it’s been the key to unlocking brilliant insights for the many people who have adopted it as a ritual. I’ve seen similar benefits of this kind of “Unnecessary Creation�� in the lives of creative professionals across the board. From gardening to painting with watercolors to chipping away at the next great American novel on your weekends, something about engaging in the creative act on our own terms seems to unleash latent passions and insights. I believe Unnecessary Creation is essential for anyone who works with his or her mind.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Bringing incredible creative projects to life demands much hard work down in the trenches of day-to-day idea execution. Genius truly is ��1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.�� But we cannot forget the flip side of that 99 percent—it’s impossible to solve every problem by sheer force of will. We must also make time for play, relaxation, and exploration, the essential ingredients of the creative insights that help us evolve existing ideas and set new projects in motion. Often this means creating a routine for breaking from your routine, working on exploratory side projects just for the hell of it, or finding new ways to hotwire your brain’s perspective on a problem. It also means learning how to put your inner critic on mute, banish perfectionist tendencies, and push through anxiety-inducing creative blocks. To stay creatively fit, we must keep our minds engaged and on the move—because the greatest enemy of creativity is nothing more than standing still.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“We have become so trusting of technology that we have lost faith in ourselves and our born instincts. There are still parts of life that we do not need to “better�� with technology. It’s important to understand that you are smarter than your smartphone. To paraphrase, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your Google. Mistakes are a part of life and often the path to profound new insights—so why try to remove them completely? Getting lost while driving or visiting a new city used to be an adventure and a good story. Now we just follow the GPS. To “know thyself�� is hard work. Harder still is to believe that you, with all your flaws, are enough—without checking in, tweeting an update, or sharing a photo as proof of your existence for the approval of your 719 followers. A healthy relationship with your devices is all about taking ownership of your time and making an investment in your life. I’m not calling for any radical, neo-Luddite movement here. Carving out time for yourself is as easy as doing one thing. Walk your dog. Stroll your baby. Go on a date—without your handheld holding your hand. Self-respect, priorities, manners, and good habits are not antiquated ideals to be traded for trends. Not everyone will be capable of shouldering this task of personal responsibility or of being a good example for their children. But the heroes of the next generation will be those who can calm the buzzing and jigging of outside distraction long enough to listen to the sound of their own hearts, those who will follow their own path until they learn to walk erect—not hunched over like a Neanderthal, palm-gazing. Into traffic. You have a choice in where to direct your attention. Choose wisely. The world will wait. And if it’s important, they’ll call back.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“PRIORITIZE BEING PRESENT Today’s challenge is to keep your focus and preserve the sanctity of mind required to create, and to ultimately make an impact in what matters most to you. This can only happen when you capitalize on the here and now. To do this, alternate periods of connectedness with periods of truly being present: Be aware of the cost of constant connection. If your focus is always on others—and quenching your appetite for information and external validation—you will miss out on the opportunity to mine the potential of your own mind. Recognize when you’re tuning in to the stream for the wrong reasons. We often look to our devices for a sense of reassurance. Become more aware of the insecurity that pulls you away from the present. You cannot imagine what will be if you are constantly concerned with what already is. Create windows of non-stimulation in your day. Make this time sacred and use it to focus on a separate list of two or three things that are important to you over the long term. Use this time to think, to digest what you’ve learned, and to plan. Listen to your gut as much as you listen to others. With all the new sources of communication and amplification, don’t let yourself be persuaded by the volume of the masses. Nothing should resonate more loudly than your own intuition. Stay open to the possibilities of serendipity. The most important connections—whether with people, ideas, or mistakes that lead to key realizations—often spring from unexpected circumstances. By being fully present where you are, you let chance (and the curious universe we live in) work its magic. You are the steward of your own potential. The resources within you—and around you—are only tapped when you recognize their value and develop ways to use them. Whatever the future of technology may hold, the greatest leaders will be those most capable of tuning in to themselves and harnessing the full power of their own minds.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Tackle a clearly identified and isolated task. If you have to write an article, for example, do the research ahead of time, so that when you get to your focus block you can put your word processor in fullscreen mode and turn your entire attention to your prose. Consider using a different location for these blocks. Move to a different room, or a library, or even a quiet place outside to perform your focused work. When possible, do your work with pen and paper to avoid even the possibility of online distraction. The battle between focus and distraction is a serious problem—both to the competitiveness of our companies and to our own sanity. The amount of value lost to unchecked use of convenient but distracting work habits is staggering. The focus block method described above does not fix this problem, but it does give you a way to push back against its worst excesses, systematically producing important creative work even when your environment seems designed to thwart this goal.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“The reason you might be having trouble with your practice in the long run—if you were capable of building a practice in the short run—is nearly always because you are afraid. The fear, the resistance, is very insidious. It doesn’t leave a lot of fingerprints, but the person who manages to make a movie short that blows everyone away but can’t raise enough cash to make a feature film, the person who gets a little freelance work here and there but can’t figure out how to turn it into a full-time gig—that person is practicing self-sabotage. These people sabotage themselves because the alternative is to put themselves into the world as someone who knows what they are doing. They are afraid that if they do that, they will be seen as a fraud. It’s incredibly difficult to stand up at a board meeting or a conference or just in front of your peers and say, “I know how to do this. Here is my work. It took me a year. It’s great.�� This is hard to do for two reasons: (1) it opens you to criticism, and (2) it puts you into the world as someone who knows what you are doing, which means tomorrow you also have to know what you are doing, and you have just signed up for a lifetime of knowing what you are doing. It’s much easier to whine and sabotage yourself and blame the client, the system, and the economy. This is what you hide from—the noise in your head that says you are not good enough, that says it is not perfect, that says it could have been better.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“I have a long list of “Secrets of Adulthood,�� the lessons I’ve learned as I’ve grown up, such as: “It’s the task that’s never started that’s more tiresome,�� “The days are long, but the years are short,�� and “Always leave plenty of room in the suitcase.�� One of my most helpful Secrets is, “What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.�� Day by day, we build our lives, and day by day, we can take steps toward making real the magnificent creations of our imaginations.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of success is showing up. Having written and directed fifty films in almost as many years, Allen clearly knows something about accomplishment. How, when, and where you show up is the single most important factor in executing on your ideas. That’s why so many creative visionaries stick to a daily routine. Choreographer Twyla Tharp gets up at the crack of dawn every day and hails a cab to go to the gym—a ritual she calls her “trigger moment.�� Painter Ross Bleckner reads the paper, meditates, and then gets to the studio by 8 a.m. so that he can work in the calm quiet of the early morning. Writer Ernest Hemingway wrote five hundred words a day, come hell or high water. Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating. At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Through our constant connectivity to each other, we have become increasingly reactive to what comes to us rather than being proactive about what matters most to us. Being informed and connected becomes a disadvantage when the deluge supplants your space to think and act.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Leigh Michaels, prolific author of more than eighty romance novels, once said that “waiting for inspiration to write is like standing at the airport waiting for a train.�� Conditions to produce one’s craft are rarely ideal, and waiting for everything to be perfect is almost always an exercise in procrastination.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.�� Frequently”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Tactics are idiosyncratic. But strategies are universal, and there are a lot of talented folks who are not succeeding the way they want to because their strategies are broken. The”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“To stay creatively fit, we must keep our minds engaged and on the move—because the greatest enemy of creativity is nothing more than standing still.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“It would probably be best if managers went to the IT department and asked that e-mail not be distributed between eight and eleven every morning. The idea that the best way to communicate with people is 24/7 is not really an idea about maximizing productivity.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“ERIN ROONEY DOLAND is editor-in-chief of Unclutterer.com, a website providing daily articles on home and office organization, and author of the book Unclutter Your Life in One Week. She is a writer, productivity consultant, and lecturer. Writing and simple living are two of her greatest passions.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Now, I think that’s pretty much Planning 101. You put the things that you really want do into your calendar.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Studies show that the human mind can only truly multitask when it comes to highly automatic behaviors like walking.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“To make great ideas a reality, we must act, experiment, fail, adapt, and learn on a daily basis.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

“Screen apnea is the temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing while sitting in front of a screen, whether a computer, a mobile device, or a television.”
― Jocelyn K. Glei, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind