Lately I’ve been struggling with my process for getting big creative projects done. They feel like they are taking forever to finish. Each step feels big so I put it off thinking I need a bigger chunk of time to deal with it.
Lately I’ve been struggling with my process for getting big creative projects done. They feel like they are taking forever to finish. Each step feels big so I put it off thinking I need a bigger chunk of time to deal with it.
Learning a new tool can be really frustrating. And if you've dived into Tana thinking it looks cool, only to find yourself clunking around not knowing what to do then today's video is for you
There is nothing more detrimental to finding flow in your digital systems than having to click around constantly to work on things. My Focus Sidebar in Tana keeps me focused on the most important things, wherever I am in my workspace.
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!
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.
In today's video, I'm going to show you three quick & easy command buttons you can add to your task supertag so you can spend less time managing tasks and more time actually doing tasks.I find that a lot of people are still not using commands either because they don't know how, they don't know what they can do with them OR it all just seems a little complex
I'm not usually a goal setter, but yesterday I found myself jotting down some goals on my daily walk. Goals are a weird thing. Some are big, some are small. Some are intentional others are off-handed. But every goal has focus, energy, time & attention attached to it. So if you're going to set a goal, you need to make sure it's worthy of those things.
Deep Work. It's all the rage. Spend four hours of your day in deep work without distractions & get your best work done.If only the real world was like that.
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.
I have 10k unread emails in my inbox & I couldn't be less stressed or anxious about it. I was a strict inbox-zero girl for over 10 years until a conversation with a friend made me completely abandon it. One day I looked at his phone and saw 500 unread messages. So I asked the inevitable question. How could you have so many unread messages without having an anxiety attack?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know this is going to come as a shock, but some days I am a terrible procrastinator. I sit staring at my task list, re-arranging, and talking myself out of doing things. I let myself be distracted and I get to the end of the day not having accomplished anything important.
Open loops are one of the biggest productivity and money drains in any organisation. I started my career as a receptionist and executive assistant. Early on there was one time when my boss drove an hour to an appointment that I had failed to confirm. And no one was at home 😱. Rookie mistake.
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.
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!).
Ideas take time to emerge. I rarely go from a new spark idea to a fully formed thesis in one spark writing session. They need time to soak & marinate. Often over days, weeks or even months.
I've been building what I now call my Spark Writing habit for the past 3 years. I'm not sure I've explained this before, but It's actually what set me on the path of becoming a creator and writing online. The more I built knowledge privately, the more I wanted to share publicly.
Even after 10+ years as a content marketer, I still hate that moment at the start of the week when I’m staring down the barrel of a blank screen, wondering what to post.So I swapped a blank screen for a 🏦 Content Bank full of ideas.
Capturing ideas is the single most important thing I do as a creator everyday.It's a cornerstone habit that cascades into every part of my content creation. When I sit down to 'do content' I don't have to spend any time brainstorming ideas. I have more than enough ideas to work with because I've captured them beforehand.
Most creators spend the majority of their writing time... writing content.And at first, this seems logical. You need to create content right? But if the only time you ever write is to produce content - you're on a downward spiral to burnout.Instead, I spend 80% of my time 'Think Writing' and 20% 'Content Writing'
Why do we subject ourselves to so many unwritten rules as creators and writers? One of these unwritten rules I decided to ditch was: If I didn't write it last week I MUST write it this week.
For the past 2 years I have had one morning routine: Wake Up Make Coffee & Write. It doesn’t matter if it’s a weekday or weekend, I'm on holiday, in the middle of a busy time at work, or whatever - I do the same thing each morning.
When I'm not creating content for the internet I'm a marketing coach.It took me a long time to embrace the role of coach in my life. When I first got started I thought I was supposed to have all the answers and that was why my clients were coming to me.
At the beginning of each year I choose a word to theme my year. It's a word that focuses me and provides a lens to make decisions, take action & frame everything I do. It's less of a goal or a 'thing to do' and more of an intention that infuses my thoughts, my actions, my goals & my days.
Most people stop learning when they finish school or university. School gives structure to our learning for the first years of our life. But when we finish school, unless we continue to be intentional about learning & growth, we end up wandering through life, maybe reading a few books (if we're lucky).
Learning a new tool can be really frustrating. And if you've dived into Tana thinking it looks cool, only to find yourself clunking around not knowing what to do then today's video is for you
There is nothing more detrimental to finding flow in your digital systems than having to click around constantly to work on things. My Focus Sidebar in Tana keeps me focused on the most important things, wherever I am in my workspace.
In today's video, I'm going to show you three quick & easy command buttons you can add to your task supertag so you can spend less time managing tasks and more time actually doing tasks.I find that a lot of people are still not using commands either because they don't know how, they don't know what they can do with them OR it all just seems a little complex
After years of trying to stay tool-agnostic when it comes to talking about note-taking, I’m willing to put it all on the line & say Tana has turbo-charged my note-taking & writing like no other tool I have used before.
You asked for it & you got it! Tana's new IOS Mobile App is here 🚀And it's pretty special. After using it for the last few weeks I honestly couldn't imagine my Tana workflows without it... and that's coming from me a girl who sits 90% of her day in front of a computer.
There are a lot of complex things you can to with the AI. But for normal everyday people just trying to get their work done it can be daunting. So in this video I want to show you how you can get setup easy & fast (it's SO easy) and how to create a chatGPT like experience right in your Tana graph.
There is nothing worse than getting your hands on a brand-new app, only to abandon it after a few days or hours because you just can't make it stick. In this video, I want to talk about three essential things to get set up in Tana to get your hands dirty using it every day.
The fastest way to get around in Tana is using the keyboard. Also, the most tedious way to use Tana is to open nodes, click into fields & make changes. So did you know you can create own Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Tana for the functions you use most often?
In today's video, I'm talking all about Tana's brand new feature that just launched - Tana Templates. Up until now, it was a bit of a hack to get templates into your Tana workspace, but the Tana Team have been hard at work creating a native solution so you can snag the workflows of some of your favourite Tana people (including ME).
Are you using Tana for Task Management? In this video, I show you five of the top ways I've picked up over the years to plan & categorise tasks. So I can make sure I'm focusing on the most important tasks each day.
Are you just relying on one main search per Supertag? While that's a good start, you'll quickly find that constantly fiddling with filters & sorts becomes tedious. So in this video I'm going to show you how you can level up your Live Searches & build hubs for each of your Supertags so you can find exactly what you need, when you need. it.
Being able to see multiple day nodes in one view comes in very handy for things like weekly and monthly reviews. If you use fields on your day page then it's actually quite easy to set up these table view 'logs' - I call them my Life Logs.
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!
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.
Constraints are a creative person's best friend.Most of us live in hope that if we can throw off the constraints of our life we'll finally reach peak creativity. We dream about quitting our job, going full time - thinking no constraints are the answer.But maybe constraints are a feature & not a bug for our creativity?
The common wisdom tells us we should focus & work on one thing at a time. So we dutifully create perfect content calendars for our creative work, and expect our creative spirit to fall in line with what we’ve planned.
On any one day I can have anywhere from 7-10 content ideas in different stages that I can choose to work on.Now usually, I'm a fan of focusing on just one thing. But not when it comes to content ideas. I find if I lock myself into working on just one thing my creative spirit rebels.So I like to have options.
I write much more for myself than I ever do for you (sorry, but not sorry).That's right, what you read on my feed or my blog or my newsletter is only a small fraction of what I actually write each day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🤣
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.