Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (99U)

you can, it’s best to find a good stopping point on a project—one that frees your mind from nagging questions—before moving on to another task.

Self-control has two elements. There are self-control problems and self-control solutions. Self-control problems are all about “now versus later.”

If you want to create something worthwhile with your life, you need to draw a line between the world’s demands and your own ambitions.

Manage to-do list creep.

Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and

Establish hard edges in your day.

Use creative triggers. Stick to the same tools, the same surroundings, even the same background music, so that they become associative triggers for you to enter your creative zone.

Less than 2.5 percent of the population—that’s one in forty people—feels fully rested with less than seven to eight hours of sleep a night.

DEFEND YOUR CREATIVE TIME Book time on your calendar for uninterrupted, focused work—and respect those blocks of time as you would any client meeting. FOCUS WHEN YOU’RE FRESH Tackle the projects that require “hard focus” early in your day. Self-control—and our ability to resist distractions—declines as the day goes on. KILL THE BACKGROUND NOISE Tur