Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

by Jocelyn K. Glei

If you keep playing without any time-outs, your game starts to slip.

A great novel, a stunning design, a game-changing piece of software, a revolutionary company—achievements like these take time, thought, craft, and persistence.

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. This is what you learn in solitude, and it is everything.

(1) that the world around us tries to tempt us; (2) that we listen to the world around us (e.g., choice architecture); and (3) that we don’t deal very well with temptation… if you put all of those things together, you have a recipe for disaster.

Plus, there is that pesky truth that anxieties and self-doubt can multiply when fed with silence and an abundance of time.

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.

Self-respect, priorities, manners, and good habits are not antiquated ideals to be traded for trends.

“There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”