A quick browse through Quora & you quickly realise people are obsessed with productivity. We have become programmed to fill our days with as many tasks as we can. And we call it productivity. Wearing 'busy' around like a badge of honour. But what if true productivity was about doing less?

I'm an Introvert. Yeah yeah. I can tell you're shocked. Most people are when I tell them. Because people assume that I'm an extrovert because they see me 'out there' online or chatting comfortably at an event, or hosting Twitter spaces or doing a thousand other things. Basically they don't see me acting 'shy' so think I must be an extrovert.

If there is one thing that has derailed me on many a 30-day experiment, it's submitting to the voice in my head. You know THAT voice. You've probably experienced it too. You're trying to build a habit. You start off so well, you might even get a week in, and when you're not seeing the results you thought you would... BAM doubt starts to creep in.

I have ONE GOLDEN RULE for capturing new ideas. I never capture an idea without doing a quick brain dump. Never. Like Never. Did I mention... Never

I might be killing it with Atomic Essays, but that doesn't mean I've got my whole life together. For instance, In the last two weeks, I haven't done any washing, I've been to the gym a mere 3 times and my house is a chaotic mess. Sure I've had some big things happening, like launching my first paid product. But surely not everything needs to go to crap.

The world is full of people who have ideas but can't articulate them. A few years ago, I sat in a seminar listening to one of my coaches. I was completely in awe of the way someone would ask him a question and he would always have the exact right metaphor or be able to draw the right model to illustrate his point.

This year I started timeblocking my days. Breaking my day up into hour-long chunks and scheduling tasks to do within that time. It all started so well. Then a meeting would get scheduled in the middle of my morning and I wouldn't be able to get into any kind of significant work, because all I felt was the meeting looming.

Every experiment starts with a hypothesis. It's one of the only things I learned from year 7 science. No one is performing experiments just for the fun of it. OK, we may or may not have had some fun with the bunsen burners... but I digress.

Reading one book a time is hugely inefficient. I've always been an avid reader. My favorite place to hang out at school was in the library. But there was always one thing that bugged me about reading. The advice that you should only read one book at a time.

I've been struggling to focus lately. I'm flitting from one tab to another, constantly checking my phone, jumping on Twitter every 5 minutes (reading all the amazing essays). But getting any kind of focused work done has been painful and fleeting. So, this afternoon I grabbed my headphones, headed for a sunny corner in a cafe, and switched on a rather magical playlist. Almost INSTANTLY I was transported into a state of calm, relaxed, flow.

Creativity thrives in constraints. As creatives and creators, we often balk at that idea. We want wide open space to be able to create and explore unlimited possibilities. But in reality, has your best work really been produced when you've had unlimited time and resources?

45 days ago most of my tweets went unnoticed. It's amazing how quickly showing up daily compounds. Now the engagement on Twitter is literally crazy some days! And I'm running to keep up. I can't remember the last time a tweet had 0 engagement. But something else has happened beyond just likes and comments.

Consistency is a skill... One I thought I'd never build. Until I did. If you want to be more consistent as a creator, read on. I spent years beating myself up for not being consistent as a creator (& I still beat myself up for going months between Youtube videos!). The only place I've found consistency is here on Twitter... where I show up everyday, here's a few of my secrets to consistency.

Most creators let their best content get lost in social media feeds never to be seen again. Rather than simply throwing your content into the stream of social media feeds to let it drift away into the anals of the algorithm, what if you could build a library of leveraged content. Here's how...

It seems everyone is about content marketing these days... 10 Years ago I was banging on to business owners about content marketing. To me, it seemed so simple. Create content, attract an audience of loyal people, and they buy from you as a result.

My coffee machine broke on the weekend and it's completely disrupted my writing routine. You see every morning I have exactly the same ritual. Wake up. Make Coffee. Sit down and write. It's my favourite time of the day. But now it just feels like something is off.

One of the best things I learned when I was a new online writer was the art of writing ugly words on a page.You might not think there is an art to writing ugly words, but let me tell you there is. Most people are afraid of ugly words.

All the normal indicators would suggest I don't suffer from Imposter Syndrome... I don't have a fear of putting my ideas out there, I'm OK to make mistakes publicly & even change my mind on occasion. And I certainly don't suffer from perfectionism in any way.

Every Sunday after I've done my meal prep for the week, I do my creator prep. Just like a chef might sit down and prepare the menu for the following day or week, I sit down and prepare my menu for the week. Rather than run around each day like a crazy person in my creator kitchen, I take the time to prepare the menu & my ingredients so I can gracefully and effortlessly push out plate after plate of content.

Despite pumping out generous amounts of content everyday I don't work to a content calendar. In the marketing world, content calendars are king. Because you have a product that needs selling. But as a creator, I AM THE PRODUCT. I can afford to be more curious, to follow my interests and the signals that come back on the content I produce.

Can I tell you a secret 🤫 No one cares about your effort. They care about your output. So why do we feel the need to make things hard for ourselves? Like making it harder for ourselves means more. But no one is giving you a gold sticker at the end of the day for your effort.

You might not believe me but I used to be very unsure of myself. Whenever I walked into a room I thought everyone else was better than me, knew more than me, or was wayyy further ahead than me. Writing & creating online changed that. I'm more confident about who I am, what I believe & what I put out into the world. And people have noticed.

I'm fanatical about showing up daily. I wholeheartedly believe the more you show up the better you'll become. Not because you do the same thing over again, but because each time you do it you learn and adjust.

This time last year I thought I would start a blog. Except I wrote 3 blog posts that I think just my dad read. Starting a blog is hard, you end up putting so much effort into content that no one is reading (especially in those early days).