On today’s show I talk about the highlights from the WWDC Keynote (there are many), Apple Music, and my thoughts on Apple’s new publishing platform slash RSS reader slash news aggregator, Apple News.

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• The New Uuni 2: Food. Fire. Uuni.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

I wrote about this on shawnblanc.net this past Wednesday. Today I want to share more about my own personal approach to money and how it helps me to do my best creative work. I also want as share some ideas to think outside the box for those who see money as a hurdle for doing work that matters.

Here’s a picture of someone doing her best creative work:

She shows up every day. When it’s easy and when it’s hard. It doesn’t matter. She is committed.

This is something only she can do. Yet even still, it might not all work out as planned. There is no clear path about comes next. There is a lot of guessing. There is fear.

Some days the work is so much harder than others. Some days everything comes together and it’s amazing. At the end of the day, it’s always rewarding.

She is telling a story. Every day she is trying to connect with others. Her work is emotional. Relational. There is learning. Teaching. Guessing. Loving. She is a mother.

* * *

When we talk about “doing our best creative work”, it’s easy to define creativity as “artsy”. Writing. Designing. Taking photographs. But creative work happens in a variety of forms.

I was recently talking to a friend of mine who is a project manager, and he very much views his work as creative. Creating a spreadsheet to analyze data — that is a form of creativity, and it should be validated as creative. The way a mother or father raises their children and the tactics they deploy. The choices we make as freelancers, small-business owners, founders, or CEOs. It’s all creative

The scope of creativity and meaningful work goes far beyond art.

Any degree of freedom you use to do your work means you have a choice about how you go about it. And that is creativity. You’ve been given the gift of choice, and you can use that to give back and do work that matters.

* * *

What do you think about when you think about art and creativity?

I think about emotions. Fear, doubt, joy, happiness, love, and honesty.

I think about telling a story. Encouraging, inspiring, educating, and entertaining others.

I think about people. Relationships and connecting.

* * *

Doing my best creative work is an amalgamation of both doing work that matters and also taking joy in the journey.

• Meaningful work, work that matters, is something that I have to do. I am compelled to do it. If it doesn’t work out, if nobody likes it, if I never make a dollar, that’s unfortunate. But I still had to do it. And so, if it didn’t work out or it didn’t make a dollar, I have to figure out how to keep doing it better.
 Meaningful work is also something which I hope will make the lives of other people better. Either by entertaining them, educating them, or helping them in their journey.

• Having joy in the journey is just that. Having fun. Pursuing “mastery”. Being present in the moment. Getting in the zone. Creating without inhibition. Trusting your gut.

Put these two together, and boom. You’ve got yourself a recipe for your best creative work.

When you define your best creative work like this, it changes everything. Suddenly it’s less about the quality of art you produce and it’s more about being valuable, meaningful, and honest.

And you realize that your best creative work is part of every area of your life: work, family, rest, personal life, etc.

Doing your best creative work every day is a choice. You get to choose to do work that matters.

I try to make that choice when I’m at my keyboard, when I’m on a date with my wife, when I have half an hour of quiet alone time, and when I’m playing catch in the back yard with my two boys. In those moments, it’s not about the context. Art. Relationships. Business. Each one is a chance to choose to be honest, true, vulnerable, and personal.

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• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

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• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Show Notes and Transcript

I used to hate to read. I didn’t think I hated it, but I did.

I never wanted to read. I never enjoyed it. Reading felt like a waste of time. Unless I was on vacation. But reading during work hours? No way.

Four years ago I had no idea what I was doing. When I first started writing shawnblanc.net full time, I was clueless and afraid.

In the words of Ray Bradbury, “I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eyes.”

Those early years of writing this site were difficult. They were fun, to be sure, but they were hurried. I held on to this sense that I had to keep up with the pace of the internet. And on top of that, I didn’t know what sort of writer I wanted to be or what sort of things I wanted to publish on the site. So I was running around in a hurry to publish who knows what.

Nearly all my attention was focused on publishing.

Frequency (not consistency). That was my primary measure of success. Or, at least, that’s what I assumed all the paying members wanted: more published words every day.

They tell you to ship early and ship often. As a writer, shipping means getting your words onto the page and then getting them out there into the world.

My focus was so intent on the frequency of my publishing that I rarely felt liberty to do anything that took me away from getting at least one or two links up every day. This was folly.

In his book, First Things First, Stephen Covey writes about what he calls “Sharpening the Saw”.

We often get so busy “sawing” (producing results) that we forget to “sharpen our saw” (maintain or increase our capacity to produce results in the future). We may neglect to exercise, or fail to develop key relationships. We may not be clear about what’s important and meaningful to us. If we fail to build our personal capacity in these areas, we quickly become “dulled,” and worn out from the imbalance. We’re unable to move forward as effectively in the other roles of our lives.

Maintaining and increasing our capacity is foundational for success in every area of our life. In short, don’t stop learning; don’t stop training.

But I rarely ever took time to read and study. I never took mid-day breaks. Even though I could set my own schedule, I usually worked evenings and weekends just to keep up frequency (not because I was working on something specific that had me motivated).

My intense focus on frequency burned me out. Many times. By the grace of God, I didn’t quit.

Here’s an entry I wrote in my Day One almost two years ago:

What do you do when you look at the work you’ve been doing for the past day or week or month and you think, this sucks? I don’t know if there’s an answer or not for getting past crappy work, but I bet you a sandwich the answer probably involves doing more crappy work.

Do as much as you can. Keep writing. Keep making. Write 1,000 crappy words every day. Then put them in a drawer and pretend they don’t exist lest you get depressed.

In my years of writing and doing creative-y stuff, I’ve discovered the difference between burnout and frustration. Between immaturity and fear.

Doing our best creative work every day is a hard and frightful task. But we’re in it for the long haul. We have to remember that there is a lot more to it than merely showing up to do the work.

Showing up to do the work is the brave and noble part of the endeavor. It’s what all the books and motivational posters focus on. And for good reason: if we don’t show up, well then, we’re not actually doing the work.

But let us not get so busy producing that we forget to maintain or increase our capacity to keep producing results.

For me, there were a lot of reasons I hated the idea of learning and improving in my “early years” as a writer. (I put “early years” in quotes because I’ve been a full-time writer for all of 4 years now. I’ve still got about 46 years to go before I’m out of the “early years”. But, the reasons I despised learning in those days were because:)

• I was focused on the new and the now.
• I cared too much about my site’s stats.
• I thought I needed to keep up with the speed of the Internet in order to be interesting and relevant.
• I didn’t have a long-term goal for any of my writing endeavors, other than to write about what was interesting to me today.

This is not to say that the work I was doing was bad, or wrong. Not at all. I’m exceedingly proud of the links and articles I have published here over the years. But where I needed change was in the foundation from which my writing grew.

I’m still as nerdy about apps and gadgets as I always was. Over the years, however, I’ve found a different pace that works better for me. Partly necessitated by becoming a dad.

I don’t want any of my websites to publish at the speed of the Internet. Because it is impossible to keep up with unless you neglect everything else in your life. And even then, you can only keep up with a tiny sliver of the real-time Web. It can be fun for a while, but it’s not healthy or sustainable for anyone who wants to do meaningful work for decades.

Far more valuable to me than speed and ”First!” are things such as thoughtfulness, whimsy, helpfulness, and long-term relevancy. In my experience, many of these values hide themselves from environments where urgency is the dominant motivational factor.

Who can be thoughtful when they’re in a rush?

Hurry up and be thoughtful! Hurry up and be clever! Hurry up and be helpful! Hurry up, but don’t mess up!

For me, I find much more satisfaction creating something with a long-tail of relevancy than a momentary flash in the pan. And it’s out of this contentment to publish at a slower frequency that I re-discovered the value of learning.

* * *

The value of learning

Would you scoff at the farmer who spends time keeping his tools in good working condition? Would you scoff at the painter who spends time cleaning her brushes? What about the scientist who spends time doing research and experimenting? Or the athlete who practices?

Of course not.

There is a strong connection between practicing and learning and then doing.

You must have both. Some people spend their whole life in school, never creating anything on their own. Others create, do the work, but think that’s the only thing that matters.

I know I fell into that latter group. All my focus was on making and doing and publishing. So much so that I despised learning and researching and giving my mind time to rest and think.

Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Cheeck-sent-me-hai—lee) is a noted psychologist, and the architect the notion called Flow.

Csikszentmihalyi’s theory is that people are happiest when they are in a state of Flow — a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.

Finding flow in our everyday lives is important for several reasons.

• It increases our happiness
• It gives us a focus on effectiveness
• It’s where we do our best creative work
• It’s how we make progress
• It helps us to learn new skills

However, finding flow can be challenging; it requires more activation energy. It’s much easier to just turn on the television than it is to get out the paint brushes and a new canvas and change into our artist’s painting clothes. But the latter is where we are more likely to get in the zone, to become lost in our work.

But here’s what I’m getting at: The experience of flow acts as a magnet for learning.

When we are working on something that is challenging to us and which requires the highest level of our skills, then we want to learn. Not only do we learn in the midst of our work, but our work drives our desire to learn more.

And learning — or, as Stephen Covey puts it: “sharpening the saw” — is critical to growth and quality for all the areas of our life: spiritual, physical, relational, recreational, vocational, and economical.

How Thirsty Are You?

As part of my own journey in creating The Focus Course, I’ve become a student of topics such as doing meaningful work, diligence, focus, distractions, work/life balance, and more.

I’ve always been a student of these, but mostly through my own trial and error. Now that I am building a platform to teach others, I wanted to know what smarter men and women than I have had to say about these topics.

Between my bookshelf and my Kindle there are more than 50 books about creativity, business, time management, goal setting, imposter syndrome, productivity, workaholism, parenting, and more. I’ve read all but the last few.

For a while I was getting a new book delivered 3-4 times per week (thank you, Amazon Prime). My wife, lovingly, joked that I’d gone off the deep end…

Hubby is writing a book on productivity. Either that or the self help books arriving daily in the mail are a serious hint hint. #okayalready

— Anna Blanc (@annablancihop) March 17, 2015

I bought the books in paperback or hardback because I wanted to highlight them, write in them, dogear them, put sticky notes in them, and have three books open all at once to compare and contrast them if I wanted to.

In his book, What to Do When it’s Your Turn, Seth Godin writes that “the internet means you can learn anything you want, if you are thirsty enough to do the work to learn it.”

And yet, despite this vast ocean of awesomeness, most of us don’t really want to learn anything. We’d rather zone out on Twitter or Netflix. Or burn out trying to make something with the sole aim that it’ll go viral.

Godin continues:

More than 100,000 people regularly sign up for advanced computer science courses online, courses that are taught by great professors and are free to all who enroll. Shockingly, 99 percent — 99 percent! — of the students drop out before they finish the course.

Not thirsty enough.

Learning is a chance to take a risk. To try something new. To observe and evaluate. To ask a question and then listen to the answer. It’s a chance to discover. To have a revelation. To have a conversation.

We learn by reading, listening, observing, doing, teaching, failing, fixing.

We can maintain and increase our capacity in all areas of our life. Ask your spouse if she has a new favorite song. Ask your co-workers what they’re struggling with at work. Watch a YouTube video about woodworking and spend the weekend making a wobbly bench with your kids.

Learning helps us to do better work. It also helps us connect with others.

It took me a few years to come to grips with the fact that it was okay for me to take time away from “producing” in order to maintain and increase my capacity to do creative work. And once I did, I realized how valuable it was to always be learning.

I studied martial arts for over a decade, and we did the same stretches and basic moves at the start of every class every time. Even after I received my black belt, we were still practicing basic front stance and middle punch.

You write a book by writing it. Thinking about it, outlining it, researching for it, yeah you’ve got to do these. But you’ve also got to sit down and write it. Even if you can write 1,000 words every day, you’re looking at a couple of months to write the first draft.

Something the best musicians, the martial artists, and writers all have in common is more than just commitment and fortitude. More than just routine. They have a joy in the journey.

And while the musician, martial artist, and writer all have goals they’re working toward, the goal is not the primary motivation. When we delight in the journey, then the daily grind becomes what we get to do. Not something we have to do.

In his book, Mastery, George Leonard writes that “love of your work, willingness to stay with it even in the absence of extrinsic reward, is good food and drink.”

When we’re doing work that matters there is no finally moment. The tension and the difficulty never go away. The distractions and excuses will always be around. Hard work will always be hard work. The goal is not to eliminate the tension but to thrive in the midst of it.

* * *

In my experience, the most successful, productive, and joyful people are those who live with a dual state of motivation:

1. They are driven to attain their goals.
2. They delight in the journey and live in the moment.

I’ve had an iPhone since the beginning. It’s my favorite gadget of all time. Literally for like 8 years this thing has never been more than an arm’s distance away. But the advantages of the technology also bring some disadvantages.

It’s not so easy to be bored anymore. Like, you have to choose to be bored. It used to be that boredom chose you — you were somewhere and you were waiting and there was nothing to do and you were bored. Now, you’re never bored. You can see pictures of some stranger surfing on the other side of the world, or get a live video stream of someone’s hike over Tokyo. This stuff is amazing.

So I have to be proactive about my boredom and my down time. We all do. Which begs the question of how the Apple Watch comes in to play? For those who want to waste less time with their digital devices, will Apple Watch make that easier or harder? Honestly, I don’t yet know.

Show Notes & Other Links

• How to Show Up Every Day
• The Just Checks
• Alternatives to the Just Checks
• Dumb
• Real Life with Shawn Blanc

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• Elgato Avea: transform your home with beautiful dynamic light moods.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

This topic is one of the most important issues of my life. I have a personal commitment to live with intentionality in as many areas of my life as I can. I want to be intentional in my marriage and in how I raise my boys. I want to be intentional with my business and family finances, with my creative work, with how I spend my time, with my diet, and more.

A daily habit / a lifestyle practice is something you do as part of your normal routine of life.

1. It should provide regular space in your life to make progress toward your goal.

2. It’s something that in and of itself is a healthy thing to do.

Here’s an example: setting out your clothes the night before you go to bed.

Why? For one, this is something simple and easy to do at the end of your day that will make your future life a little bit easier. It’s the current you helping the future you by removing something from your task list for tomorrow morning. 


Also, setting out your clothes the night before is a way to help strengthen your independent will — your personal integrity. You’re are making a commitment to yourself about the outfit you’re going to wear tomorrow. When you follow through with that commitment, it’s a small step toward building your personal integrity. And I believe deep personal integrity is at the bedrock of living a focused life.

Setting out your clothes makes for a great daily habit because pre-deciding and placing routine around some of the trivial, everyday choices of life will give you more energy in your day-to-day to tackle difficult problems, do meaningful work, spend time with friends and family, rest, etc.

Steve Jobs wore a black turtleneck, jeans, and New Balance sneakers every day. Albert Einstein had his sweatshirt. Even President Obama wears only gray or blue suits.

I’ve written before about how productivity tends to be defined by how well we use our task management systems, how organized our calendar app is, how fast we can blaze through a pile of emails, and how fluidly we flow from one meeting to the next.

The problem with those metrics is that they usually reward effective busywork while giving little dignity to meaningful work.

More focus on consistently giving our time and attention to the things which are most important.

Daily habits are the ahem “essence” of meaningful productivity. The are set by your values and your vision, and by practicing them you are exercising your integrity, personal character, generosity, kindness, etc.

There’s this awesome Benjamin Franklin quote, where he says: “Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.”

When we have daily habits, they give us the opportunities to create little advantages every day so we are making real progress towards our goals and ideas.

So, all that said, here are a few other reasons why you might want to consider daily habits:

1: They create space

Henri Nouwen:

If I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential.

Urgent tasks will always find us. Which is why we have to be proactive about making time and space for the important tasks.

Daily habits keep us on track to accomplish our goals and implement our ideas. They make space for us to show up every day and do the important things. Without daily habits we just react to whatever is most urgent, rarely making meaningful progress on work that matters.

And here is another quote from Gretchen Rubin, from her interview in the book Managing Your Day to Day:

Because I write every day, no one day’s work seems particularly important. I have good days and I have bad days. Some days, I don’t get much done at all. But that’s okay, because I know I’m working steadily. My consequent lack of anxiety puts me in a more playful frame of mind and allows me to experiment and take risks.

2: They Serve as Bumpers

Bumpers in a bowling alley go up so that even when the bowling ball is rolling all over the place it at least stays out of the gutter. Daily habits serve as bumpers, just like in a bowling alley, that keep us on track. Lifestyle practices help you stay out of the gutter.

3: They help us do what we want

Something that causes great stress in our lives is when our actions and behaviors don’t line up with our vision and values.

When we have our daily habits in place, they serve as a plumb line for identifying what the important work is and enabling us to do it.

4: It’s how we thrive in the midst of tension

When our decision-making ability runs low, we tend to make dumb choices. But we can cut those dumb choices off at the pass, by determining ahead of time what to do in those moments of “weakness”.

Truth be told, when our willpower is low, it’s not actually a moment of weakness. It’s just part of life — all of us only have so much mental energy in a day.

However, that doesn’t mean that when our willpower is low the only option is to binge-watch Netflix with a bag of potato chips. If you know that you hit a creative slump every day around 1pm, then why not plan to go to the gym? Not only does this serve your goal to be physically healthy, it also serves as an excellent way to let your mind take a rest.

5: Automating Inconsequential Decisions and reserving our willpower

As I mentioned at the beginning, daily habits are a way to help our future selves.

We only have so much decision-making ability or creative imagination throughout the day. The more we can automate the inconsequential areas of our lives, the the more energy and strength we have for doing our most important work.

6: Help us to focus on the path and the joy of the journey, not just waiting to arrive at a destination

Lifestyle practices not only move us toward our goal, but also help us to produce the fruits of character and values that are important to us.

Say you have a long term goal that by the time your kids are seniors in high-school they’ll be able to make decisions all on their own. It sounds insane, right? But the moment they graduate and move out of the house they’ll be in that position, so why not let them get at least a year under their belt while living in the home to learn how to be responsible?

Well, you wouldn’t just send them to a class called “How to Be Responsible” the summer before their senior year. No, training them in the way they should go takes years and years of consistent role modeling, mentoring, teaching, and setting an example. A goal like that will literally not be achieved without a corresponding lifestyle practice.

7. One daily habit is like a “gateway drug” to another

What I’ve found is that each area of my life serves as doorway to the others. Once you establish a lifestyle practice in one area — say, budgeting your money — then that gives you the momentum to tackle another area, such as eating healthier.

Examples of daily habits

• Wake up at the same time every morning — early enough to write for 30 minutes or to come up with 10 new ideas (or both).
• Spend time in quiet prayer and/or meditation — forgiving other people, forgiving yourself
• Exercise, even just walking an extra 15 minutes a day will change your life
• Be non-critical and non-judgmental of others
• Be 100% honest (but not a tactless jerk)
• Read something motivational, educational, or inspirational
• Stop watching TV
• Cut out all the (negative) news intake of your day
• Quit Facebook
• Don’t eat sugar
• Don’t drink alcohol
• Don’t eat junk or fast food
• Always take the stairs
• Don’t use a credit card (use a debit card or cash instead)
• Journal
• Wear the same outfit every day (Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and President Obama all did this)
• Don’t set client deadlines for Mondays
• Work 1/2 days on Friday
• Give to charity
• Compliment others

Duty to delight

Do something simple. Don’t be a hero because if you go crazy your life will push back — things naturally like to stay in a resting state.

Once you’ve picked a single daily habit, try it for 30 days. And then commit for another 30 days.

At first it’ll be fun. But then it will be hard. So start with something you know you can do and stick with it.

In short, choose your attitude and your actions every day until eventually they choose you back.

Sponsored by

• KnowRoaming: a super-thin global SIM sticker that makes roaming simple. Enjoy pay-as-you-go roaming in 200+ countries.​

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

I share ins and outs, fears and motivations, challenges and victories. Highlights include:

• Why I quit my job to write shawnblanc.net for a living.
• The launch of my members-only podcast and how I thought it was so audacious to charge $3/month.
• The shift I see related to advertising as a significant business model.
• Building and launching Delight is in the Details versions 1 and 2 — including what I learned about how an idea needs to mature and grow, how my idealistic approach to marketing isn’t practical, and how I felt like a fraud when I wanted to charge $29 for the complete bundle.
• And my latest project, The Focus Course, and the challenges and fears I’m facing with it right now.

Episode Links

• Beginning — the post I wrote announcing that I was quitting my job
• Delight is in the Details
• How I self-Published My Book (the practical and personal aspects of building and shipping Delight is in the Details)
• The Focus Course

One very common issue is the issue of having more ideas than time. People have so many interesting, exciting, or important projects they are working on that they don’t know where to start. They feel overwhelmed by options. They have too much to do. And so one very common question is “How do I get it all done?”

I often have to ask myself this question. How am I going to get it all done?

Last summer, I was in San Francisco for WWDC, and I was talking about this issue with a friend. He’s an iPhone app developer and he literally has dozens of apps and web services out there. I ask him how he juggles his focus and priorities.

For me, at times I feel stretched thin with “just” my 3 websites and podcast. I know that I do my best work when I am head down and focused on just one project and it’s all I think about until I’m done.

But sometimes that’s not an option (or is it?).

My friend said that to have multiple projects you have to be okay with letting one or more of them be neglected for a time while you work on the others. And, in his experience, coming back to an app and working hard to ship a big update, he often wouldn’t even see a big spike in new sales. So the update wasn’t even worth it all that much in the short term.

Let me start by saying that I don’t know the answer, here. There isn’t one universal rule here. You have to trust your gut and know your situation to make the call if you’re going to keep juggling many projects or if you’re going to let some go to focus on one.

That said, for those of us who have several projects and ideas all going at the same time, how do we juggle them?

Here are some suggestions:

1. Identify your roles and goals: you need balance in your life, so step back and identify your roles (parent, boss, employee, self-improver, etc.) And make sure that you’re not spending the vast majority of your time in just one of those roles.

2. Reduce the scope: consider scaling back what “1.0” looks like, so it’s something that is attainable. And consider lowering your bar of perfectionism — my friend Sean McCabe says we ought to aim for 90% complete (instead of 99%).

3. Reduce your project load: do you have to be doing all the projects right now? Can one or more of them be put on pause? Instead of doing three projects all simultaneously, can you do one at a time? Even on a week-to-week basis?

4. Get help: consider delegating and/or hiring others to help you.

5. Learn to say no to your own ideas: In The Focus Course, there is a day dedicated to ideation and strengthening our creative imagination. One of the benefits to this exercise is that you learn you have more ideas than time, and you don’t have to be a slave to your good ideas. We all will have ideas that we want to do, but the existence of them doesn’t mean we are now obligated to flesh them out.

6. Spend less time on counterfeit rest: things like television, video games, social media, mindless internet surfing — these things can be time sinks. Moreover, they don’t leave us feeling refreshed, motivated, or recharged. You most definitely need breaks and time to rest, but there are some great ways to do it other than zoning out.

7. Plan ahead: your productive tomorrow starts today. What is one thing you can do now that will improve life for your future self? Go to bed on time, set out your clothes for tomorrow, write down the first thing you’re going to do when you sit down to work in the morning, etc. This will give you a head start on your projects.

You’re stressed out at work, because there’s a big project coming up. The deadline is looming. So you cancel your plans Friday night and work late. You go in to work on Saturday and Sunday, working over the weekend. And then come Monday you stay all through the week.

Why is it that when things get tough and work needs more attention, we so quickly deem everything else as less important? In order to do our best work as fast as possible, we cut out relationships, rest, exercise, etc. Yet these are the very things that give us energy, clarity, and keep us sane.

In her book, ‘Inner Excellence’, Carol Osborn (co-founder of Overachievers Anonymous) writes: “There has to be something more in in life than success born at the expense of your personal and spiritual needs and values.”

Anxiety and stress over time decrease our ability to perform.

* * *

We hear a lot about work life balance: that having meaningful relationships, eating healthy, exercising, getting rest and taking breaks from work, learning, having fun, etc.

This is what “Thriving in the Midst of Tension” is all about. It’s about having a support system in place, having health in our whole life, and finding joy in the journey.

If we tell ourselves that I’ll be happy once I can meet “ABC” goal, the problem is that the goalposts are always moving. You got a nice car, now you have to get a nicer car. You have 1,000 twitter followers, now you have to get 2,000. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades. Etc.

Or, our happiness is dependent upon the state of our inbox and to-do list. When there’s a stack of emails to go through, we’re low. When we have inbox zero, we’re high.

How many of us are putting off rest and happiness until we buy just one more thing or accomplish just one more goal?

People say find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life. But I love to work. Find a job you love, and you get to work every day of your life.

In his book, The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor makes the case that success doesn’t bring happiness. But, rather, happiness will lead to success. And not just that the happy person feels successful (which they do), but that the happy person also attains the levels of success for which others are clamoring toward. Meaning: The Happiness Advantage is that happiness gives you and your team a competitive edge.

Put another way, if you think that once you attained a certain level of success in your career or finances that then you’ll be happy, then it’s likely that neither will happen. But if you choose to be happy now, then you it’s likely that you’ll also be successful.

* * *

In our “choose yourself” economy, many people are looking to build an audience. And I think especially so within those of you who are listening to this show.

I’m a huge proponent of Kevin Kelly’s idea of 1,000 true fans — it was how I was able to make a living writing and publishing my websites.

But when you seek to build 1,000 true fans you’re also quite likely to get 10,000 haters along the way. Well, it just seems like 10,000. The vocal minority who think what you do is a waste of space, is noise in the system, is unoriginal, uninspired, or just plain bad.

The haters are going to hate. And if we base our mood on their feedback then it will rob us of joy and happiness in the journey of doing our work.

In short, doing our best creative work is frightful. It could fail. People could reject it — or worse, be apathetic about it.

And yet, the secret to doing our best creative work is to have fun. To delight in the journey. To work from a positive state rather than neutral or negative.

Back on the 5th episode of this show, I had my friend Patrick Rhone on as a guest. We were giving advice for people wanting to build an online audience for their writing, and one of the foundational principles we both agreed on was the immeasurable importance of having fun.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. In fact, publishing your creative work to the internet for all the world to see is often a very not-fun thing to do.

How do we have fun? How do we increase our baseline happiness levels? How do we use that to our advantage to create meaningful work?

Well, I’ve said before that isolation, ambiguity, fear, anxiety, shame, doubt, comparison, and disillusionment can all stifle our creativity and choke out any fun from our lives.

And then things like community, clear goals, trusting your gut, experience, rest, and diligence can boost our ability to do our best creative work.

Moreover, we need whole-life health. Or work/life balance. Things like rest and meditation, exercise, generosity, meaningful relationships, acts of kindness, meaningful experiences, and more. These give us perspective on life, raise our baseline mood of happiness, and ultimately they make it easier for us to dance with our fears and do our best creative work.

“I can easily get so caught up a project that it becomes the only thing I think about all the time.”

Examples:

• You’ve started a new personal project, and when you’re at your work or when you’re with your family, all you can think about is when you’re going to get back to working on your project.

• You’re buying a house, and it’s all consuming.

• You’ve just met someone special and he or she is all you can think about. (Not that a person is a project.)

• You usually “bring work home with you”.

* * *

I know that for me, my tendency is to do a project in sprints. I’ve usually got one or two major work projects going on at a time. Each one takes between 1-3 months to complete.

George Leonard, in his book Mastery, might call me a dabbler.

The Dabbler approaches each new sport, career, opportunity, or relationship with enormous enthusiasm. He or she loves the rituals involved in getting started, the spiffy equipment, the lingo, the shine of newness.

Or an obsessive:

The Obsessive is a bottom-line type of person, not one to settle for second best. He or she knows results are what count, and it doesn’t matter how you get them, just so you get them fast. In fact, he wants to get the stroke just right during the very first lesson. He stays after class talking to the instructor. He asks what books and tapes he can buy to help him make progress faster.

There is also the hacker, who, after sort of getting the hang of a thing, is willing to stay on the plateau indefinitely. Meaning, he or she doesn’t bother going to conferences to learn more; in tennis she is the player who develops a solid forehand and figures she can make do with a ragged backhand; etc.

While I know that I certainly have little bits of all of these traits, I feel like I’ve taken my “dabbler” and “obsessive” characteristics and put them to good use on the overall-path of what Leonard calls “mastery”.

Meaning, my 1-3 month project sprints fit in line with my big-picture goals for my life (in business, relationships, and personal).

I’ve always been like this. And I think it’s one of my greatest strengths. Being able to have a laser-sharp focus on just one or two things means I can quickly build something that is high-quality, interesting, fun, has a lasting value, and I can actually complete the project through to the end.

But at the same time, this has its disadvantages: namely, that the tendencies of a dabbler and/or an obsessive — with that laser-sharp focus on just one or two things — means that I am oftentimes thinking mostly about the top idea in my mind.

* * *

In last week’s episode of the Weekly Briefly, I talked about rest and workaholism. That healthy work can keep our mind invigorated — especially when it involves learning and expanding our skill set.

But workaholism is also an addiction.

In his book, First Things First, Stephen Covey writes about how our roles will sometimes become “imbalanced” — meaning, there is a particular project or area of responsibility that we focus on at the expense of others.

And that, sometimes, this imbalance is healthy. He writes:

There are times when imbalance is balance, when a short-term focus contributes to our overall mission in life. […]

However, he also says that:

it’s easy to get caught up in imbalance to the point that it no longer reflects mission or principles. Rather than being mission-driven, we become urgency driven.

In short, it’s okay to be ramped up about a particular role or area of responsibility, but it should not be our perpetual way of life.

For me, as a husband and a father, one of my biggest challenges is leaving work at work when I’m spending time with my family. My wife is extremely generous and gracious, and she is always interested in talking about the projects I’m working on. But what sort of husband would I be if I let the work-centric top ideas in my head be the center of my marriage?

It’s important to let those ideas be at rest when I’m somewhere other than work. As Dr. Barbara Killinger writes, wisdom comes from balance.

* * *

And so I want to present a few ideas and suggestions for how to maintain that “balance”. How to keep ourselves from becoming imbalanced and obsessive about one particular thing to the detriment of many others.

1. Consider if you have an addiction to urgency and/or to your inboxes. If you are frequently checking in on email, twitter, Facebook, and other such services then you’re not actually putting those things to rest. You’re not letting go. Mentally, you’re keeping a foot in both camps and you can’t be two places at one time.

   So let the inbox addiction go. Let the urgency addiction go. Be in one place at a time, and trust that there is “wisdom in the balance”. Trust that if you let yourself take a break from working on that project, when you do come back to it (and you will), if you’ve truly rested from it, then you’ll have more to contribute when you next come back.

2. Turn off those outside notifications that can interrupt you when they have no right to. Don’t let your phone buzz you with an email from your boss at 8pm at night.

3. Understand that there is no “division” or “separation” between our personal life, our work life, our relationships, etc. All of who we are is all of who we are. This is good news because it means healthy relationships contribute to meaningful work, and a healthy body contributes to a happy heart. If we’re freaking out about a work project and are anxious that we’re not making meaningful work — trust that there is the “side door” approach: keep the other areas of your life healthy and balanced and it will “raise the water level” so to speak, on the project you’re working on.

   This is easier said than done at times. It takes experiential knowledge to realize its truth. So maybe keep a journal and log your progress and feelings, reminding yourself about that time you were stuck on a problem at work, took a break to hit the gym, came back to work and the solution suddenly seemed so clear. That’s no a coincidence, that’s how things work.

4. Speaking of journaling — this can be invaluable tool to helping your mind “put work to rest”. Record your daily progress, acknowledge your victories, etc. De-brief yourself about the project, and do a brain dump of all the things your excited about, anxious about, still working on, etc.

5. Give yourself a buffer to transition. For me, I work at home, and sometimes I have about 10 seconds to transition between work and done. That’s not enough time. So I try to quit early so I can let my mind shift gears before I go do something else. This is also when I’ll journal about my progress for the day.

6. Plan — if you’ve got a plan of attack for how and when you’re going to work on your project, then that can help alleviate some of that stress. You know when there will next be a time to tackle it, and so you don’t have to stress out about “why am I not working on it right now?”

7. Consider focusing on the meaningful outcomes at a weekly scale rather than a daily one. This 7-day timeline can help free you up from the urgency of feeling that you need to get all the meaningful work done “right now”, but also a week is short enough that you can keep a brisk pace of meaningful progress.

They are more worn out on Monday morning than they were on Friday evening.

Benjamin Franklin

When men are employed, they are best contented; for on the days they worked they were good-natured and cheerful, and, with the consciousness of having done a good days work, they spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome.

Idleness does not equal rest. It does not recharge our mind, body, or emotions.

Let’s define “rest” as time taken to relax, refresh, and/or recover strength.

If your energy, attitude, or motivation are suffering. Then, ideally, after you’ve rested — after you’ve taken time to recover your strength — then you should see an improvement in energy, attitude, or motivation.

The average American watches 5 or more hours of television every day. Some reports say as much as 7 – 8 hours. And, we spend more than 2 hours per day on social media — Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Television and social media, in moderation, are fine. But we are a culture of excess.

Here’s my informed observation about why and how we rest wrongly:

1. We spend the day at work, doing knowledge work. We’re juggling emails, meetings, interruptions, checking our social networks on the side, and mostly spending all day long putting out fires and reacting to the urgent issues that arise.
2. This makes us mentally exhausted
3. We’re not very physically active (we’re sitting at a desk all day) and this leaves us physically tired
4. Thus at the end of our day, we’re un-motivated. We lack physical and mental energy. So we default to watching television as something to do because we just don’t have any energy.

I’m not trying to say that our jobs are horrible and that watching TV is horrible. But I think many of us are probably closer to the side of unhealthy work habits and excess time spent on TV and glowing screens.

Now, there’s no way I can unpack this whole issue in one podcast. There is SO MUCH research and information about how to properly rest, relax, and exercise. Not to mention all the studies about the good and/or bad effects of TV and glowing screens in general.

My aim today isn’t to prove a point because my hunch is that most of you already agree: you’d like to have more energy, a better attitude, and increase in motivation. I mean, who doesn’t want that, right?

Today, I simply want to challenge how we’re spending our time and to get us to ask ourselves if we can do better.

• Do you often feel completely drained at the end of the work day?

• Do you rarely have motivation to work on anything that’s not an urgent burning fire crisis.

• Do you usually spend your evenings watching TV and/or scrolling through timelines on your phone?

If yes, then I think something you should consider is if you can learn to rest in a healthier manner? Can the cycle of urgency addiction and vegging out be broken?

Our mind, our body, and our emotions all need to rest.

There is a healthy way to rest and an unhealthy way.

What can we do that will re-charge our emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical energy?

In his book, Mastery, George Leonard has a chapter on getting energy for the journey of mastery.

He says humans wear out from lack of use. Physical exercise gives us more energy. Decisiveness and intent to act often gives us mental energy.

He recommends several ways to help keep up our energy levels:

• Maintain physical fitness
• Acknowledge the negative and accentuate the positive — meaning, be a positive thinker and be kind to others, but don’t pretend that negative things don’t exist.
• Tell the truth
• Set your priorities: be decisive about what you’re going to do; clarity creates energy; accept your limits to find liberation.
• Make commitments and then take action. Don’t procrastinate a decision, be bold and follow through.

I mean, these are just meat and potatoes lifestyle practices. And they’re pretty much the opposite of the whole “check email and sit in meetings all day, then come home and watch 5 hours of TV” lifestyle.

When we rest in a healthy manner, it recharges us. When we rest in an unhealthy manner, it leaves us feeling lethargic.

It might sound totally bonkers and the most monumental, difficult task ever, but what if after a long day at work you came home and chose to rest in a manner other than by watching TV?

So often, when we’re on the edge, we think that we need a big break. A vacation. We can’t wait for the weekend. We’re holding on each day, just getting by, waiting for our chance to finally unwind again.

But what’s a small little wrench we can throw into our routine that will snap us out of that draining lifestyle?

Cut out sugar. Read a book for 30 minutes before you allow yourself to watch television. Start taking a 15 minute walk during your lunch break. On date night, don’t watch a movie but pour a glass of wine and talk about life. Write in your Day One journal about what you did today instead of checking Twitter. Start coming up with 10 ideas every day.

As an aside, I want to talk about the myth of working on the weekends.

I wrote and researched a lot of my book, Delight is in the Details, when I was on vacation in Breckenridge, Colorado.

When my wife and I had the opportunity to visit Hawaii in 2011, I spent hours every day writing.

What’s great about this type of work is that it’s true, important work. It’s not urgent. It’s not busy work. It’s important. My mind thrives on this type of “work”.

The same way many people still go on hikes and runs and to the gym when they are on vacation, why not also let our minds work?

There is a deeper issue that this points to, and it’s the issue of urgent versus important. The work we do that invigorates us, that moves us forward in our life goals — that IMPORTANT work — shouldn’t be reserved for evenings and weekends and vacations.

But breaking a lifestyle and environment that thrives on urgency addiction is a topic for another day.

So in closing, I’ll leave you with this.

If you’re feeling perpetually tired, perpetually lacking motivation, perhaps the issue isn’t that you need more rest or more time off, but that the way you’re currently resting is not true rest.

Challenge yourself to just try something different. Like I said earlier:

• Read a book for 30 minutes before you allow yourself to watch television.
• Sit in silence with your phone in another room for 10 minutes before watching TV
• Take a 10 or 15 minute walk during your lunch break.
• On your date night, don’t watch a movie but pour a glass of wine and talk about life.
• Write in your Day One journal about what you did today instead of checking Twitter.
• Start coming up with 10 ideas every day.

Links

• Honesty, Clarity, and Action
• The Power of a Focused Life
• The Fight Spot Newsletter
• The Procrastinator’s Guide to Progress

Sponsored by

• Sprint.ly: help your team ship faster.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Show Notes

I’ve read a lot about productivity.

Methodologies, best-practices, secrets, habits, etc.

And honestly, I love it. I eat this stuff up. I want to learn and grow, and I can seriously geek out over these subjects.

But at the same time, I want to throw it all out the window. Not because these teachings are wrong or bad, but because there is a bigger picture. There is a deeper foundation.

Focus in and of itself is not the end goal. The goal should be to provide value back to the world. To do work that matters. To create something meaningful. But there are things which can help us to do this, but none so much as our own internal commitment to do work that matters.

* * *

So, the two biggest takeaways I’m hoping my book will communicate are this:

1. What it means to have honesty and clarity with a bias toward action.
2. How to thrive in the midst of tension.

When I say “the power of a focused life” I’m not talking about minimalism, GTD, or life hacks.

I’m talking about a commitment to intentional living. But we cannot live with intention if we don’t know where the heck we’re headed, what the heck we want, or how the heck to get there.

I’m all for minimalism, spending less, owning less, having a trusted system for managing tasks and projects, doing less busy work, and routinizing the trivial parts of our life.

But The Power of a Focused Life isn’t about methodology. It isn’t a recipe for de-stressing your life. It isn’t a map to doing yoga on the beach. It’s about thriving even though our lives are crazy and messy and we’re tired and why are my kids throwing baskets full of train tracks down the stairs when I’m trying to record a podcast?

It’s not about getting rid of every distraction and relieving every stress so we can do our best creative work. It’s about doing our best creative in spite of our propensity to distraction and even though we’re scared.

* * *

I have asked a lot of people what their greatest challenge is when it comes to focus. And I’ve gotten so many amazing, honest, and challenging answers ranging from distractions to ADHD to depression to fear to incessant interruptions to a total lack of clarity, and more.

You know what my biggest challenge is when it comes to focus?

Life.

Maybe that’s a cheating answer, but it’s true.

Passion. Boredom. Frustration. Anxiety. Excitement. Unexpected emergencies. A bad night’s sleep. Not enough coffee.

This is life, right?

I know we can calm our anxiety and relieve our stress. And we can channel our passion and excitement. But the tension — the messiness — that is just the raw inherent nature of life never goes away.

ESPECIALLY if we are trying to do something meaningful.

True productivity is not about solving the tension that exists between our time, our ideas, our emotions, our fears, and our focus. True productivity has to be be about thriving in the midst of those tensions.

* * *

In my past job I would regularly work 60-70 hours a week, and there were many weeks when I’d work 80 hours. I did this for 3 years. Though the hours I worked were neither healthy nor sustainable, I most certainly loved the job. I had an amazing team and I loved our community and the work we were doing was meaningful and I was learning so much.

But when my wife and I got pregnant, my whole perspective on life changed. I saw things differently. Choices which once seemed ridiculous now seemed necessary. I knew I had to quit my job and start my own business.

There were a lot of reasons I quit. And of course, one of the obvious ones being that there was no way I could be a present father in the way I wanted to be while working 70+ hours each week.

If you’re working 70 or more hours in a week, something is broken. Either the system is broken, the leadership is broken, your priorities are broken, or your boundaries are broken. Or, most likely, it’s a little bit of everything.

I didn’t mind the long hours because I loved what I was doing. But I knew it wasn’t good for me.

But even after I quit that job and began working from home for myself, I still had (and have!) the tendency to work long hours. I’ve been working for myself since 2011, and it still takes diligence for me to keep my working hours at 40 per week. I could easily work from the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I pass out from exhaustion at night. Then wake up, wash, rinse, and repeat every day of the week.

Hi. My name is Shawn, and I’m a workaholic.

Just as an alcoholic is still an alcoholic even after he’s been sober for 20 years, so too can a workaholic be an addict even if he has the self-control to keep his work week to 40 hours.

What are workaholics running from?

Or, to make it personal: what am I afraid of?

I’m not trying to build a business so I can retire on an island and drink fancy drinks. My aim in business is to build a foundation where I can do the most meaningful work of my life.

So I know that in part, my propensity to work long hours is because I love the work I’m doing. I have many active projects right now and I’m excited about all of them. It’s hard to take a break from something when all the pieces are fitting into place and you’re excited about it and feeling motivated to work on it.

But I also know that my propensity to work long hours is rooted in fear. Over the years, there have been many times when I worked a 10- or 12-hour day despite my complete lack of excitement or motivation about a project.

• I’m afraid that my small online business will all fall apart if I step away for too long.

• I fear that my time spent resting or reading or playing with my sons is is keeping me from doing something else that I should be doing.

• Heck, I even fear that an important email is waiting for me in my inbox.

Fortunately, over the years, I’ve learned enough to know not to give in to these fears. I don’t let my fears and doubts make the decisions. But that doesn’t mean they go away.

There are days when I’ll backslide into workaholism because I’m trying to cope with the fear and to relieve the tension. The workaholic needs to take care of all this busywork so he can “finally” have the space he needs to create something meaningful.

But there is no such thing as “finally”. We never arrive at “finally”.

Do you want to know the secret to stress-free living? Well, maybe it’s not a secret, but I don’t ever hear anyone talking about it. And, I’m sure there are more secrets, too. But this is the one that matters to me right now.

The secret is this: settle the fact that if you want to do anything meaningful there is going to be resistance.

Resistance doesn’t mean you’re bad at keeping an organized task list. Resistance means you’re plowing new ground — you’re doing work that matters.

If you want the resistance to go away, then quit providing value to those around you.

But who wants to do that?

Instead of trying to remove the tension and the resistance, learn to thrive in the midst of it.

If you show me an artist who is consistently putting out meaningful work, then I’ll show you someone who is courageous. She may not be a productivity master or a minimalist guru — her desk is probably a total mess (so is mine). The reason she is consistently putting out meaningful work is because she’s willing to show up every day, in spite of her fears and the tensions of her messy human life. She is making the time and the sacrifices necessary to show up.

* * *

Guess what? I’m not a productivity master nor am I a minimalist guru.

And that’s why I’m writing this book about living a focused life.

Precisely because I don’t have all the tensions solved.

And because I don’t, I believe that makes me especially qualified.

For example: My work day schedule can be messy. My garage is cluttered because I’ve been ignoring it all winter long. I was 30 years old before I figured out how to budget my money. My Jeep needs an oil change and a car wash.

Did you know that I am super bad at email? I haven’t had a zero inbox since since the ‘90s. I drop things through the cracks all the time. But that’s okay — inbox zero isn’t required for me to pursue my best creative work.

Guess what else?

• I’m bad at getting up when my alarm goes off.

• I’m bad at scrubbing my to-do list.

• There are several projects around the house that I’ve been putting off.

• When I’m excited about a project I’m working on, I’ll just let everything else fall through the cracks. I get so single minded it’s all I can think about and I’ll ignore so many other important things.

• I check Twitter and email and other stats more often than I want to.

• If there’s a wrench in my day — like running out of coffee — I feel like the whole day is wasted and I can’t get back into a groove.

Yet despite all of these things — despite my messy life and my general propensity to be distracted — I’ve managed to make time to write every day. And guess what else? I just got an email from a long-time reader who thinks the writing I’ve been doing lately is the best work I’ve done yet.

You don’t have to solve the tensions of life before you can create something of value.

Your life probably isn’t half as messy as mine. Or maybe it’s twice as messy. But messiness isn’t the point.

The tagline of my book is this: “Living without regret in the age of distraction.”

It’s not “living undistracted in the age of distraction.”

Nor is it “Top ten weird productivity life hacks that will also make you a more attractive person.”

When I say living without regret I mean not quitting. I mean thriving in the midst of the tension.

Because at the end of the day, your best creative work doesn’t come from the proper environment, it comes from your commitment to show up every day.

Many people think they should try to pay off the credit cards which have the highest interest rate first. But there is a better way.

To do The Debt Snowball, you put your credit cards in order of balance: with the card holding the smallest balance first and the one with the highest balance last. Then, while still paying the monthly minimum payment on each card, take all extra money you can and pay off that first card (the one with the smallest balance) as fast as possible.

Congratulations! You’ve now eliminated one of the cards you owe money on. Feels great, doesn’t it?

Now, take the money you were using to pay off that card and roll it over to the next card until that one is paid off.

As you can see, the momentum builds as you pay off each card. You feel good about the small victories, and you feel less stress as you have less cards you owe money on.

This method of The Debt Snowball is a great picture for how we can rebuild our personal integrity in terms of being able to follow through with our commitments.

Just like many people think the best way to pay off their credit cards is to start with the ones that have the highest interest rate, so too do we think that if we are going to make a change in our life it should be a big change in a substantial area of life.

We want to eat healthier, begin exercising daily, create a comprehensive financial budget for our household, write a novel, start a business, etc. These are all wonderful goals. But for many people, these goals will never be realized. Not just because they’re prone to distraction and procrastination, but because they have a history of not being able to see their commitments through to the end.

And so, in the same way that the Debt Snowball has you starting with the credit card with the lowest balance, why not regain your personal integrity and develop a habit of commitment by starting small and simple. In the quoted passage above, Peter Daniels suggests placing your shoes in exactly the same spot each night without fail. Do that for a month as a simple way to prove to yourself that you can make and keep a commitment.

Th other problem is that we despise the days of small beginnings.

We think that putting our shoes away in the same spot every night is dumb. And so we don’t do it.

We also despise the marathon. We want to sprint for a week and accomplish all our goals.

It can be frustrating to “start small” with our goals. But making small commitments and keeping them is how we build the momentum we need to be people who keep our commitments. It’s a way to rebuild our personal integrity from something that is small to something that can become an unstoppable force.

I think we can all agree that fear is the biggest enemy to creativity. We’re born creative, but we learn to be afraid. After we’ve been hurt, wounded, scolded, rejected — we know learn what pain feels like and we become afraid. We don’t want to do something that could cause the pain again.

And we know that courage isn’t the absence of fear — it’s the ability to carry on even though we’re afraid. And the more we carry on in the midst of fear, the more courage we build up. Which is why, if fear is hindering us from creativity, the best way to do our best creative work is to show up every day. To build up the courage to be creative and to do meaningful work.

And if it’s important that we show up every day, it means procrastination is at direct odds with doing our best creative work.

• Procrastination robs us from gaining momentum in our projects.
• It lies to us, saying that we should work only when inspiration strikes.
• It has no intention of helping us hone our skills.
• It’s keeps us from doing our best creative work.
• It causes us to project a reputation of inconsistency, thus hindering our ability to build an audience.

If fear is what keeps us from doing work that matters, procrastination is what keeps us from reaching our potential.

Episode Links:

• How to Overcome Procrastination
• The Fight Spot: My new weekly email newsletter
• The Power of a Focused Life
• Seth Godin: The Enemy of Creativity…

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• Thou Shalt Hustle: A practical guide to pushing past average & finding your purpose.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

If you’re interested in joining the newsletter, you can sign up at shawnblanc.net/newsletter/.

Sponsored by

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Many times the most important things we should be doing are ones which also feel mundane and tedious in the moment. And so we often distract ourselves from important work to do instead whatever seems more interesting or urgent in the moment.

There is more than one way to help us keep on track with doing our most important work day in and day out. And it goes beyond just white-knuckle focus and ripping our internet cable out of the wall.

It can be helpful to know what our high-level goals/values are for each day. And then we have a plumb line to see if the tasks we are doing fit into the big picture.

For example: many people have a goal of writing every day. Which is great. But what’s the high-level value that writing every day fits into? Is it the value of making progress on their book? Is it the value of improving their writing skills? Is it the value of getting better as a communicator?

For me, I have three work values for how I spend my time. When I am “at work” I want to either be building, maintaining, or resting.

• Building is doing work with the future in mind. This includes coming up with new ideas (many of which we’ll never even act on, but that’s okay), clarifying plans for a current project, making tangible progress on projects that haven’t yet shipped, learning something new, etc.

• Maintaining is doing the work with today in mind. Such as checking my email, updating WordPress, writing show notes, etc. This is the day-to-day work that is vital to be done, but in and of itself usually isn’t a significant contributor to the growth of my business and my creativity.

• Resting is simply taking a break from the work. Albert Einstein said: “Although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.”

All three of these are important, and each one goes in and out of its season of being the most important. For example, in the fall of 2014 I spent a lot of my time focusing on the building of the new Tools & Toys. Then, once the new website launched, all my time went to maintaining the site. Now that it has settled in, I’m once again back to focusing mostly on building our next project.

Sponsored by

• HipChat: Group chat, IM, file sharing, and integrations. Free to use.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Today’s show is about another aspect of doing our best creative work: our inner work life.

When we have a healthy inner work life then we are poised to be at are our best in terms productivity and creativity. And so, how do we stay happy and motivated so we can be productive and creative? That’s what today’s show is all about.

Sponsored by

• Macminicolo: Celebrating ten years of Mac mini hosting with the Decades Promo. Just $10/mo for ten months.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Episode Links

• Teresa Amabile’s Progress Principle website, 99U Talk, and book.

• Your Best Creative Work, Part I

• Fighting to Stay Creative

• Celebrate Progress

• The Flip Band

• Jerry Seinfeld’s Calendar

• Famous Writers on Keeping a Diary

And then, once we finally do sit down to begin creating (if we ever do sit down), in come the push notifications and the distractions. Text messages, Facebook messages, friend requests, piles of paper on our desk, open browser tabs and windows, and more.

But technology is not the enemy. Social networks, push notifications, team communication tools, email, websites, computers, modern software — all of these are amazing tools. Just as much as they can be distractions, so too can they empower us to do our best creative work, build an audience, and make a living.

Update: You can find part II right here.

Sponsored by:

• Dash: Realtime dashboards for your website, your business, and your life. Your first dashboard is free forever.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

And so, on today’s show I wanted to share more about why we decided to redesign the site, what our goals were, and what has contributed to the site’s growth (beyond just a redesign).

Sponsored By:

• Harvest Forecast: A whole new way to plan your team’s time.

• Artisanal Software Festival: No bundles, no gimmicks: just great prices on some of the most interesting and innovative software for working with ideas.

Who doesn’t love to find the best tools, the best coffee, the best food, the best experiences, etc? I know I do. But I realize that this can, at times, be an unhealthy pursuit. Too much focus on only ever doing and experiencing “the best” of something can lead to disappointment and complaining when we don’t have “the best”.

Which is why being content — and making each unique experience “the best” — is a choice.

See also: Episode 24: “Investing in Quality”

Sponsored By

• Curbi: Amazing parental controls for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

A good annual plan should help you:

• identify what you want to do
• identify what you don’t want to do
• discover what you need to do

And then, give yourself permission and freedom to do those things you want and need to and stop doing those things which you don’t want/need to do.

Sponsored by

• Yosemite: The Apple conference with a view.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Rest well.

It’s easier said than done, to be sure. But wouldn’t it be awesome to come back from your Christmas vacation with energy and motivation to do your best creative work? Wouldn’t it be awesome to come back feeling fueled up instead of tired and worn out?

Here are a few ideas for how to rest well (and I’m not just talking about taking long naps):

• It’s okay to be alone for a bit every day. It can be exhausting being around our entire family for days and days on end.
• Read a real book.
• Don’t check Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Email — I dare you to go a whole day, let alone the whole week.
• To keep your mind and creative juices flowing, come up with 5 ideas every day — but don’t worry about actually acting on them. Just exercise your brain.
• Go on a photo walk.
• Take lots of family portraits and pictures, but don’t Instagram them right away.
• Ask your spouse for the thing that is most important for them to do during the vacation, and then make it your first priority to help that happen.
• Ask one of your family members questions that will lead to more meaningful conversations. Such as asking about what is most challenging or most exciting to them right now.

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• PDFpen Scan+: Powerful Mobile Scanning and OCR.

Notes and links:

• Fuji XE2
• Fuji X100T
• Olympus E-PL5 and E-PL7
• Olympus E-M10
• Panasonic GM1
• Casey Liss’s photo of Erin and Declan
• Ken Rockwell’s X100T review
• Stu Maschwitz: How to take good photos for under $1,000
• Flare for Mac and iOS
• VSCO Film and VSCO Cam
• Lightroom review on The Sweet Setup
• Camera connection kit for iPad

Sponsored by

• Mandrill: Scalable, reliable, and secure email infrastructure service from the folks at MailChimp.

In today’s show I talk about the two current contenders:

• The impossibly thin Spigen 0.4mm case in Air Skin: a matte plastic case that doesn’t add much protection, but does remove the slipperiness of the iPhone’s aluminum.
• The handsome Twelve South Surface Pad: A wallet-style case that can fit two cards in the front inside flap.

Sponsored by:

• Symbolicons: Vector Icon Sets for Awesome Designers & Developers. Use use this super special link to get 40% off the master bundle (that’s every single icon from Symbolicons). Or use code TOOLSTOYS to save 20% of any individual icon set at symbol icons.com

Photos

• The glories and the perils of running your own business.
• Why showing up every day is important for building an audience.
• Why trust and transparency are important for keeping an audience.
• And why doing our best creative work has very little to do with the tools we use, and quite a bit to do with knowing where our best creative work is born.

Sponsored By

• TOM BIHN bags: designed and made in USA since 1972.

• The awesome members of shawnblanc.net: Their support makes the work I do a sustainable possibility.

Sponsored by:

• TextExpander touch 3: Now with custom keyboard.

• Yosemite: The Apple conference with a view.