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

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

The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.

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 rat

One of my most helpful Secrets is, “What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”

The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.

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.

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’s the task that’s never started that’s more tiresome,”

large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.

The first is that sleep is more important than food. You can go a week without eating and the only thing you’ll lose is weight. Give up sleep for even a couple of days and you’ll become completely dysfunctional.