Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

Edited by Jocelyn K. Glei

My husband gave me a book for Christmas that he heard about on the Chiot's Run organic blog, Manage YourDay-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your CreativeMind. It's a collection of essays on the topic, edited by Jocelyn K. Glei. I’ve been reading a bit of it every day.

Just as the title suggests, the articles in this book focus on building a good routine, and focusing while using creativity to your advantage in the workplace, or building your creativity in any area of your life. They are short and easy to digest. There are some great reminders and good information.

Just the simple admonishment to do the thing that is most important first in your day instead of trying to get all the other little things out of the way first, is so obvious and yet counter to my typical thinking. I tend to think that if I get things tidied up or cleaned in the house first, then I’ll be better able to concentrate, but then something always seems to come up and the creative work keeps getting pushed aside. It really has profound implications for all areas of my life – my work, my child and my writing.

The article on Harnessing the Power of Frequency by Gretchen Rubin really spoke to the heart of my writing dilemma. It helped me to realize that the key to my writing productivity is going to be writing smaller amounts more frequently.  There is just no other way in my current schedule to make room for writing.

Building Renewal into Your Workday by Tony Schwartz was a good reminder too. My boss is always saying that we are given vacations and breaks for a reason. If you don’t take them then you are doing yourself a disservice and you will become less productive over time.

The article on multitasking, Banishing Multitasking from Our Repertoire by Christian Jarrett, really echoed my thinking. I’ve been hearing that multitasking is counterproductive for a long time but he put it in a different light that I appreciated by explaining that there’s really no such thing as multitasking, just switching between tasks really fast.  However, there’s always some lag as your brain switches gears and you do the tasks you are switching between more slowly than if you had just focused on one to begin with.

The articles are organized into sections on ROUTINE, FINDING FOCUS IN A DISTRACTE WORLD, TAMING YOUR TOOLS, and SHARPENING YOUR CREATIVE MIND from a multitude of authors. Honestly, there is so much in the short articles in this little book that it took me a while to digest it and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it again. I highly recommend it.