Knowledge Work

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.

I am a master procrastinator. Not because I don't know what I should do or because I'm not motivated - but because most of the time I just don't have the headspace to get stuff done.

I was listening to an Instagram reel the other day from Sahil Bloom talking about finite v infinite games. If you're not familiar with the concept...

Yesterday I searched Google for the phrase 'How To Stop'I couldn't exactly articulate what I was trying to find, but basically, I wanted some advice on what it looks like to slow down, stop, & rest. I assumed I'd find some advice on this exact thing. Except I didn't.

I love this time between Christmas and New Year. It's always so full of hope. It's quiet and gives me time to think, plan & dream for the new year. And like everyone I'm thinking about goals I want to accomplish, creating concrete plans of reaching those goals.

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?

Daily planners are not a new thing. It's literally the simplest & most powerful way to plan the day. Take a sheet of paper (or screen), put the date at the top & start organising your day. I remember getting my first Filofax and then going on to design my first paper (then digital) planner pages.

Despite what it looks like, I'm not one for complicated systems.And while I admire all the people who can put their head down for days and go through long yearly reviews & planning rituals, that is not for me.

Unpopular Opinion: Procrastination has nothing to do with your motivation (or discipline) levels. I constantly defer tasks on my list to tomorrow. So much so that I created a list in my daily planner called 'All The Thing I'm Putting Off Till Tomorrow.' At first, it was a joke, but it's become a key way of noticing patterns in my behaviour.

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.

We all Need More Headspace. You know - time & space to think & make better decisions. More time & space to be creative at a deeper level. A magical place where you can achieve more with less effort.

I'm always better with a plan. Planning gets a bad wrap from hustle culture - as if it's some kind of procrastination for weak people who can't just get in and get work done.

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!).

I both love & hate Slack at the same time. A few weeks ago I tweeted out in a mad rage about how everyone should learn to use shift+enter in Slack messages. To my surprise, so many people just had no idea you could do that. And actually thanked me.

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.

I am the worst for putting things off. Even easy things that I know won't take long and that I've probably done a thousand times before. Like last week when I was trying to write some landing page copy. I wasn't even writing from scratch, we had done this event multiple times before.

I'm lazy. There I said it. Most people look at me and think Woah, she's super organised! And it might look that way at first glance. But if something isn't immediately easy, I'm very unlikely to do it. Or continue doing it. Instead of beating myself up over it, I lean into it and build systems to make the things I want to do easier.

Today is day 7 of the #75hard challenge for me. This is the second time I've done the challenge. The last time was WAY back in 2019. And no matter how many times you do it before, it's still HARD!

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.

18 months ago I was done with business planning. We had tried ALL the things. Quarterly planning days, 90 Day Years, Yearly planning retreats. Nothing worked. We would start off gung-ho and ultimately fizzle out and accomplish very little.

I spend a disproportionate amount of my time thinking about How I Work. Productivity gets kind of a bad wrap these days. And I struggle most of the time to describe what I write about because I don't want to be seen to feed into 'productivity culture.' I started calling it Anti-Productivity, but the truth is I'm not anti-productivity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good intentions don’t work. Mechanisms do... Jeff Bezos. I was sitting in a workshop two weeks ago where I challenged my clients to a challenge to show up on social media for 100 days. It was a Friday, the challenge was set to start Monday. Some decided to start straight away. Admirable, but foolish. Their motivation died over the weekend and they had to start at 0 by Monday.

Why are habits so hard to stick to? I think because on a daily level they seem to make such an insignificant difference. It's often hard to see the change that those habits are making when we are caught up in the daily minutia. So how do we stay motivated to keep doing habits without seeing results every day?