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Resources For Modern Workers

New content weekly to help you build your personal digital systems for productivity, self-improvement, knowledge, creativity & team work.

Browse By The Personal Systems You Want To Build...

Create Your Ultimate Digital Bullet Journal with Tana: Step-by-Step Guide

I have always loved the Bullet Journal system. It's simple & yet a profound way to get things out of your head and stay focused throughout the day.
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How To Create New Ideas From Old Content With A Simple GPT Prompt called 'Pretend Podcast'

Breath fresh life into old content with a simple chatGPT prompt that will get you thinking in ways you never thought of before
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4 Simple Strategies to Finally Review Your Notes Consistently

How to Turn Reviewing Your Notes into a Habit You Actually Enjoy
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How to Turn Your 1:1 Calls into a Goldmine of Content: Step By Step Guide

What if every time you jumped on a call with a client you could generate a bunch of content ideas at the same time?
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Turn Your Morning into a Creative Powerhouse with This Simple 3 Step Writing Routine

How I Went from Sporadic Blogging to Consistent Content Creation with One Simple Routine
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The Quirky Method I Use to Mine My Newsletter for Social Media Content

Ever feel like content creation is consuming your life? This method will save you.
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How to Find and Share Ideas No One Else Is Talking About

Three beliefs held me back from getting started sharing my ideas online. (And the simple shift I made to overcome them) ↓
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Simplifying My Day Page With Tana's New Core Features: Full Walkthrough

How I'm using my Daily Page now with the release of Tana's Core features like Related Content & Google Calendar integration.
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Talk It Out: 3 Effective Ways to Capture Ideas with Your Voice

Capturing ideas might be one of the most important practices we can develop as humans. But is writing or typing the only way to capture those ideas? Think again...
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3 Cheat Codes For Non Experts To Start Sharing Your Ideas Online

We live in a world where it has never been easier to share your ideas & build an audience (& a business) around your ideas.Think about how hard that would have been 100 years ago or even 50 years ago?So why then do we struggle so much to get started?
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Due Dates Are Dumb. Why You Should Manage Your Week Instead

1 min read
Due dates are useless for most people. I haven't set a due date for a task in years. I work in the context of weeks. Most of my tasks can be done within that date range. We set due dates because task managers make us. But this means we either make up an imaginary date & procrastinate because we know it's not really due. Or we totally leave it to the last possible day and end up trying to cram it in at the last minute.
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How I Get More Done Each Day With 'The Breadcrumb Method'

1 min read
In a perfect world we know we shouldn't task switch, but we don't live in a perfect world. Have you ever experienced this scenario? You're working on a project but have to close down on a Friday afternoon. You shut your computer down, go enjoy a beautiful weekend and when you log back on Monday you can't exactly remember where you left off.
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Building A Command-Line For Your Brain

Can I get my brain to work on command? This morning I had a pretty big presentation to work on. It had been a roadblock all week. It was going to take some serious deep work time to complete it.
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How To Trick Your Brain Into Being More Productive

Hi, I'm Ev & I'm a procrastinator. Yeah, I know, you thought I was superwoman and couldn't possibly have an unproductive day in my life. But it's been a few days, maybe a week that I've been slowly putting tasks off and I know something is up.
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Why You Need A Minimum Viable Day To Fall Back On

Some days just don't go to plan. Like today. There's nothing like waking up on a Monday morning ready to start a fresh week and instead be greeted at 6:30am with a message from a coworker informing me their Facebook Account had been hacked. And now our business manager was hacked, and all of the ad accounts of our clients were now hacked.
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Want To Be Better At Time Management? Just Do Less 👇

Why do we always think we can do more than we can? We try to cram all sorts of things into our days and weeks, telling ourselves that today will be different and we'll really get through all the to-do list items.
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When Making Everything Easier Becomes A Curse

People often tell me I make things look easy. While shipping every day is far from easy, the reason it looks easy is because I spend a disproportionate amount of time on the planning and preparation.
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Help Your Brain Out By Naming Things Right

What's in a name? Turns out everything. Interestingly I've had so many conversations this week about why naming things is so important. It all started with Danny Hatcher last weekend when we were talking about using plan language to describe the notes he was taking.
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Why Technology Can't Save You From Yourself

Notion will not save you. Neither will Roam. Or Obsidian. Or Asana. Or [insert other shiny new tool here]. Technology isn't a magic fix. Technology will only amplify your system.
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Why Taking Time To Prepare Will Help You Be More Present.

In culinary kitchens around the world, you'll find chefs everywhere live and die by the three principles of Mise En Place: Preparation, Process & Presence. Preparation helps me to feel like I've got things under control (even if I don't) and that I'm bringing my best to everything that I do.
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Change Your Focus. Why Deep Work Isn't Everything.

The thing that distinguishes Nobel prize winners above everyone else is NOT that they can relentlessly focus. It’s that they know the KIND of focus they need at a specific time and task. Study by Oshin Vartanian. There is a lot of talk these days about deep work. Long stretches of uninterrupted time for us to get chunky work done. Deep work requires a tight focus. It requires we turn off distractions and narrow our focus to just one thing.
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Managing Your Time Is So 1990's. This Is What All The Cool Kids Are Doing...

I've experimented with A LOT of ways to manage my time. Traditionally I would think about how long a task would take me to complete and then use time blocking to schedule it into my day. But some days I would smash through some pretty big tasks and still be fresh at the end and other days I could hardly complete one relatively small task.
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4 Simple Strategies to Finally Review Your Notes Consistently

How to Turn Reviewing Your Notes into a Habit You Actually Enjoy
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How to Find and Share Ideas No One Else Is Talking About

Three beliefs held me back from getting started sharing my ideas online. (And the simple shift I made to overcome them) ↓
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Talk It Out: 3 Effective Ways to Capture Ideas with Your Voice

Capturing ideas might be one of the most important practices we can develop as humans. But is writing or typing the only way to capture those ideas? Think again...
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The Unexpected Way to Gain Deep Insights from Social Media

Social media gets a bad wrap these days. And for some good reasons. It's easy to get caught up with the doomscrolling, letting it distract us, getting into arguments we shouldn't, helping us procrastinate, not doing good things for our mental health. And yet. It's still my biggest category of saved items in my knowledge library & serves me up a wealth of new ideas every single day.
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3 Weird Things I Do to Stay Inspired Every Day

One weird habit has kept me consistently writing for the past four years.Before I was known as Ev Chapman, Prolific Creator. I was Ev Chapman, Wannabe creator.
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4 Simple Steps to Make Your Notes More Useful In Real Life Projects

What if you didn't have to start each project with a blank page?
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Forget Book Summaries: This Note-Taking Method Will Change How You Read Books

Unpopular Opinion: You don't need to create a book summary from your notes to make them useful. This isn't Miss Johnson's fifth grade class 🤓
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Ditch The Habit, Embrace The Practice: Watch Your Writing Transform

Every morning I sit down, choose an idea then start writing & exploring.Not to produce any particular content. But to find out what's inside me (& unlock it from the depths of my brain)
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Why Your Personal Knowledge Is Going To Waste (And How To Change That)

The ultimate guide to building a personal knowledge platform that turns information into insight & knowledge you'll actually use.
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How I Use Tana as My Commonplace Book To Unlock Everyday Wisdom

A renaissance practice for the modern information world: How to start a commonplace practice to organise your thoughts & build your knowledge.
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The Reading Workflow That Helps Me Turn Information Into Knowledge

For a long time I read a lot of books and never actually did anything useful with the notes I took.
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Supercharge Your Tana Day Page with Related Content - 10 Must-Have Sections

I've always loved how Tana keeps everything at my fingertips. But with the new Related Content feature, it's like having a supercharged dashboard right on my day page!
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Create Your Ultimate Digital Bullet Journal with Tana: Step-by-Step Guide

I have always loved the Bullet Journal system. It's simple & yet a profound way to get things out of your head and stay focused throughout the day.
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Unlock the Power of Tana's New AI Chat: A Step-by-Step Guide

Can AI really make your note-taking more powerful?
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Simplifying My Day Page With Tana's New Core Features: Full Walkthrough

How I'm using my Daily Page now with the release of Tana's Core features like Related Content & Google Calendar integration.
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Unlock the Power of Hybrid Note-Taking: Integrating GoodNotes with Tana

I very rarely miss my paper notebooks now that I use Tana. But every now and then when my brain needs to arrange my thoughts visually & find myself longing for a simple workflow where I can go from notes → drawing → back to my notes.
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My Set & Forget Tana Weekly Review System

Confession: I've never been very good at a consistent weekly review habit.
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My Tana 5 Minute Daily Planning Routine (Inspired by Sunsama)

I am notorious for creating day plans that are unrealistic and have WAY too much packed into them. Which is why when I saw Sunsama's daily planning routine it really got my attention
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I Replaced A Full Time Admin Assistant With AI

How I Use Tana To Get Admin Jobs Done Faster & More Efficiently Than A Human Asisstant
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How To Use Tana's Random Node Feature: 5 Ways

In this video I show you 5 ways you can use Tana's Random Node Field to review past notes, mix up your journalling practice, and have a little fun.
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Easy Mode Unlocked: The Ultimate Tana Starter Guide

Tana is one of the most powerful knowledge management tools I have used. But sometimes all those powerful features can overshadow just how simple it can be to get started. And I guarantee that most people are overthinking it from the very start.
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Create A Custom Affirmations App In Tana: Step By Step Tutorial

Throw away your Affirmations apps & subscriptions and build your very own custom one in Tana
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Unlock the Power of Tana Supertags: How To Organise Your Supertag Page

How to organise just about any kind of information in Tana using the Tana Supertag page
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How To Create New Ideas From Old Content With A Simple GPT Prompt called 'Pretend Podcast'

4 mins 8
Breath fresh life into old content with a simple chatGPT prompt that will get you thinking in ways you never thought of before
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How to Turn Your 1:1 Calls into a Goldmine of Content: Step By Step Guide

2 min 37
What if every time you jumped on a call with a client you could generate a bunch of content ideas at the same time?
Read post

Turn Your Morning into a Creative Powerhouse with This Simple 3 Step Writing Routine

3 min 39
How I Went from Sporadic Blogging to Consistent Content Creation with One Simple Routine
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The Quirky Method I Use to Mine My Newsletter for Social Media Content

2 min 39
Ever feel like content creation is consuming your life? This method will save you.
Read post

3 Cheat Codes For Non Experts To Start Sharing Your Ideas Online

We live in a world where it has never been easier to share your ideas & build an audience (& a business) around your ideas.Think about how hard that would have been 100 years ago or even 50 years ago?So why then do we struggle so much to get started?
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Less Creation, More Communication: Why Your Best Ideas Deserve a Replay

When I post about sharing ideas in multiple ways the most commented thing ends up being:'Only a portion of your audience sees every post, so sharing it multiple times means everyone sees it.'But that comment misses the whole point of WHY we should share our ideas repeatedly.
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How To Build A Creative Practice Like The Great Artists

I struggled for a decade to be a creator without a creative practice Instead of practising daily, the only time I switched on my creativity was when I needed to produce something. No wonder I struggled for so long!
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How To Build Atomic Ideas (That You Can Turn Into Endless Content)

Three years ago I was desperate to build a consistent writing practice.
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How I Structure My Daily Writing Sessions To Unlock My Ideas

One daily habit pulled me out of years of inconsistency as a creator... Establishing a Daily Spark Writing Practice.
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8 Of My Go-To Frameworks For Turning Ideas Into Content

Content is simply the communication of ideas.Lots of people have ideas, but if you can't communicate them well all those amazing ideas are going to get lost in translation.So communication is the real game of content creation.
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How To Break Down Content Creation Into Easy To Manage Phases

If weekly content planning always feels like a big lift to you, try breaking down your planning into phases instead.
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How To Extract All Your Social Media Content From One Weekly Newsletter

Most creators don't need more ideas. What they need is to extract more from the ideas they already have
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No. You Don't Need A Lead Magnet To Grow Your Newsletter

Traditional wisdom tells us we should have a lead magnet to 'trick' people into signing up for our newsletter because no one just signs up for newsletters anymore right? WRONG. Every day, no less than 5 people sign up for my newsletter without having to be coerced or 'tricked' by a lead magnet.
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Why You Might Be Struggling To Grow As A Creator

2 min read
In 2 years I've grown from 0-18k here on Twitter and people are always asking me what the secret key or tactic or hack to unlock growth is.
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Why Every Creator Needs A Signature Platform

The biggest creators I know have started on one platform and then as they grew they branched out onto multiple platforms. Because being a creator on a platform isn’t just about the content, it’s about understanding the platform, engaging with people and a million other different factors.
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Social Media Is Not Your Enemy

2 min read
Social media can make us crazy as creators or writers. On the one hand, it's the perfect conduit to get our message out there and build an audience. On the other hand, we're constantly wrestling with algorithms, and the shortest shelf life for all of our content.
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Why Are All The Creators Leaving Twitter?

2 min read
Twitter Impressions are down. That seems to be the only thing I hear from creators at the moment. And yeah, it sucks. But it's not the first time they've gone through a dip, and it won't be the last.
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Why New Creators Should Go Deep (not wide) On Platforms

2 min read
Content alone isn't going grow your audience on content platforms. As creators, our main 'thing' is creating content, so it's easy to see social media platforms as just big distribution channels to get more people to see what we are creating. But if the internet is just one big distribution channel for your voice you are missing the point.
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Why It Took Me 18 Months To Start Writing On Medium

2 min read
It's the (new) age old question - Should you publish on Medium or your own blog? Over the past few weeks, I've had multiple people ask me why I chose Medium over my own blog or substack or the many other platforms I could write longer-form content on.
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4 Ways New Creators Can Get Started Publishing On Twitter

2 min read
Just over a year ago I got started writing on Twitter. I always viewed Twitter as a distribution platform. A place where you came to tell the world things you created. But these days Twitter has become my main publishing platform where I test ideas and get (mostly) instant feedback on them.
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The Quick Guide For Managing Twitter Without Having To Quit Your Day Job

1000 people. 30k essays. 7 million words.When I first heard that we had 1000 people in the January cohort of ship30for30 I thought I might have to quit my day job after all 🤣
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Every Creator Needs A Community

The creator economy is both wild and lonely at the same time. On one hand, I feel so lucky to be living in this moment where there are so many opportunities for creators. And on the other hand, it's an extremely lonely place that's easy to quit
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The Only Growth Hack You Need To Grow On Twitter

It's easy to get caught up in numbers on Twitter. There is literally numbers everywhere. Number of followers, number of likes, engagement rate numbers, numbers of notifications. It's enough to make you think that Twitter is all about numbers...
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How To Sell Digital Products On Auto-Pilot (Without Relying On Constant Launches)

You don't need a million-dollar launch to have a successful digital product.
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I'm Back From Creative Sabbatical & I Have Thoughts 😁

I've been on a creative sabbatical for the last 4 weeks and it's been the best thing I've ever done as a creator.
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How To Launch Your First Digital Product (& Survive 🫣)

So many creators I speak to are scared to launch their first product.I suspect there are a lot of reasons but the main one I hear is "Don't I have to have a big audience or following to launch a product?"I launched my first product with 500 followers, no email list & I made $3k in 4 weeks.
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When To Say Yes (& No) To New Opportunities As A Creator

Over the last couple of years, I've said yes to a million things as a creator. New projects, platforms, launches, content, newsletters, communities and more.
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My 2022 Creator Revenue Story: How I Almost Didn’t 2x My Revenue This Year

I almost wasn’t able to write such a glowing review of 2022. It was October and I was nowhere near reaching the (very reasonable) goals I had set for myself.
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I Cracked The Creator Content Funnel To Sell My Products On Auto-Pilot

I spent a ridiculous amount of time last year launching products. I think all up it was about 11 products from templates to courses to workshops to guides. I tried it all. And I made a fair amount of money doing it as a second income. Launches are fun (when they work) and they provide a nice windfall of cash for that month that you are launching. But they are also exhausting work and when you are not launching… no one is buying.
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The Evergreen Creator Funnel That Makes $2k Every Month

I spent a ridiculous amount of time last year launching products. I think there were 11 in total. Launches are fun (when they work). And they provide a nice windfall of cash. But when I wasn't launching... no one was buying.
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The Burnout Free Guide To Being A Creator In The Year 2022

Here's what no one is telling you about being a creator... it's relentless. Being a creator seems fun at first as you proudly hit publish on your first blog post, or write a Twitter thread that gets more than a few likes and suddenly you start to build a bit of an audience.
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Why You Should Always Launch Your Free Notion Template On Gumroad

I love it when I see people launching their first Notion template. After all, it's where I got started. I launched my first free Notion template in December 2020 and countless more after that. And by far the best advice I ever received from seasoned template creators was to put it on Gumroad.
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The New Way To Pre-Launch A Product On Gumroad

Don't despair over Gumroad removing the pre-launch feature. Recently Gumroad removed their pre-launch feature. If you've been using it to pre-launch your products you might be wondering how the heck to do you do a pre-launch now?
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Why You Shouldn’t Quit Your Day Job To Become A Full-Time Creator

Here’s an Unpopular Opinion For You: Having a day job and being a creator are not mutually exclusive.You can do both well & enjoy them. I do. Most people assume I’m a full-time creator. But nothing could be further from the truth.
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Forget Goals, Focus on Intentions: My Yearly Planning Rituals That Set The Direction For A Powerful Year.

I used to hate yearly planning. And I think it comes down to my relationship with goal setting. I’m not much of a goal setter. A year is a long time and I don’t like to be locked into heavy goals throughout the year.
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Stop Cruising Through Life On Auto-Pilot & Open Up To New Possibilities

Most of us go through our lives literally just running on a hamster wheel.We wake up, we do the same things, we drive the same way to work, or eat the same meals, and we put things back in the same place.
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Why You Probably Don't Need To Be More Consistent In 2023

Consistency. I bet it's on your list of 'want more of it' in 2023. After all, it's the holy grail of productivity & self-improvement. And yet most of us feel like we're failing at it most of the time. But what if locking yourself into a rigid view of consistency is actually hindering you rather than helping you?
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3 Lessons Strength Training Taught Me About Consistency

Strength training has taught me more about consistency than any other thing I've done in life (including growing as a creator). The other day my trainer programmed inverted rows (under a low bar and pulling/rowing up). Every time I've attempted them before I have had to do them in batches. So when she said 15 reps I yelled an expletive in my head.
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Want To Accelerate Your Results? Find Ways To Show Up Daily

When starting something new you should probably find a way to do it daily. For years I thought the way to become a creator was to write two blogs a week (or 2 podcasts or two vlogs). After all, that seemed like a reasonable amount of writing each week.
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Three Ways To Finally Do The Thing You've Been Putting Off

I almost signed up for an 8 week summer book writing bootcamp this morning on Instagram. I don't need another Bootcamp or mastermind or course to actually write my book. I have an outline, I have half the content for it already! But I thought maybe this is what I need to get this thing finished.
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You Don't Need Another Guru To Tell You How To Live Your Life

Reminder: You are under no obligation to play by anyone else's rules. Most of us don't remember a time before the noise of the internet (& Twitter) meant every time you scroll you see another influencer or person with a social media account telling you how you should be doing everything in your life.
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If You Didn't Track It, Did It Even Happen?

I am the queen of unused trackers. A few days ago I threw out a tweet declaring tracking bankruptcy. It came as I looked at my Daily Page and realised that the tracker I set up to track my mood daily that I thought would be interesting, I had used a total of 2 times out of 50.
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Chase More Of What Lights You Up Inside

I have a decent library of books that sits in and around my desk. I designed it that way. Literally, my desk is built into my bookshelf. Every book holds a significant moment or memory or reason for being on that shelf.
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How To Fall In Love With Consistency

Consistency is hard. But when you master it, it's addictive as hell. 2 months ago I started training again with a personal trainer after taking a break for about 6 months. Starting again was HARD. Especially because I know what strong feels like. But what seemed hard on that first day is now starting to feel easier (if you can call lifting weight easy!).
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How To Tell If You're Stressed & Why You Should Stop Ignoring It

I've been a little MIA this week. You might have noticed, maybe not? On Monday I landed myself in the hospital after having chest pains & thinking I was having a heart attack. Don't worry, I was cleared of any heart problems.
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Consistency Is Hard Dammit.

This is going to be an uncomfortable essay about consistency. I am going to put a caveat at the beginning to say I am NOT the queen of consistency. Most of the time I write about things I'm currently experiencing and thinking about. So take this as much as an essay I'm writing for myself as for anyone else.
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