Productivity & Health

Feeling stuck in a rut creatively? Try meditation to kickstart your creative process.

Celebrities aren’t easily reachable and have guardrails to protect them from overzealous fans and communication overload.

Inundated with meeting requests? Burned out from another video call?Shorten your meetings using a program like Loom to record status updates, describe a document you’ll be sharing or otherwise prep your attendees.

Do you reach the end of your day with tasks completed but nothing that moved the needle? Task-switching leads to decision fatigue and feeling “busy,” but busy isn’t productive or useful.

How many times have you missed out on an experience because you were fiddling with your phone or posting to social media?The next time you’re on vacation, challenge yourself to one no-photo vacation day.

Did you know that staring at a computer screen can cause you to breathe more shallow and even hold your breath? Focusing on the screen, especially in meetings where we see ourselves (hello Zoom!) or are intensely concentrating, decreases the number of times we sigh or breathe deeply.

Last month I accidentally deleted my entire task list, and it wasn’t recoverable.

How many times do you block out your calendar for focused or creative work, and it gets swallowed up by meetings? Do you move it around until you have 30 minutes left on Friday when you have no discipline or energy left to think?Creative people need uninterrupted time without distractions to prevent status-quo decision making and to focus on innovation.

In my 20s, when I was put in charge of a 25-person marketing team spread over two floors at The Charlotte Observer, I observed our biggest weakness was communications.

When was the last time you sent a card in the mail to let someone know you were thinking of them? When COVID hit, I started writing to people I thought were most affected.