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

by Jocelyn K. Glei

It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility. While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen.

“What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”

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.

It turns out that guilt does work—but only short-term. Eventually, the guilt goes away.

Then finally, there is ego depletion, which deals with what happens throughout the day as we resist temptation over and over. The results show that it takes energy to resist each temptation, and that as we use more and more of this energy as the day goes on, we have less and less of it left, which increases the chances that we will give in to temptation.

“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.

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.