Manage Your Day-to-Day

Manage Your Day-to-Day is a collection of essays — not my favorite book format. However, I did find some interesting tidbits in here, and I thought I'd share them with you.

Mark McGuinness has one sentence that really struck me:

A truly effective routine is always personal — a snug fit with your own talent and inclinations.

Tony Schwartz writes convincingly about the importance of sleep, but he also says this:

Our bodies follow what are known as ultradian rhythms — ninety-minute periods at the end of which we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level.

So if you're feeling the need for some short breaks throughout the day, that could be why. Tony writes more about this in an article called The 90-Minute Solution.

Christian Jarrett follows in Tony's path, introducing me to another new term (and the concept behind it):

Let's say you're working on a writing project in the morning and — for the sake of variety — your decide to leave it unfinished and work on a creative brief in the afternoon. This may seem like a harmless change of pace, but research has shown that the unfinished morning task could linger in your mind like a mental itch, adversely affecting your performance later on — an effect that psychologists call "attentional residue." ...

If 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.

And finally, I love this point from Tiffany Shlain, who alerts us to the dangers of another type of clutter:

I'm ... a big believer of curating who you follow on social media. You're letting those people into your brain and they're going to influence your thoughts. ... We need to be really mindful of who we let into our stream of consciousness.