Author: Bardees

Build Your Village

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The author James Clear shared a great perspective in one of his podcast interviews about taking care of who you follow on social media.

He said curating your feed is like building your own village online and deciding who lives there and whose ideas get access to your mind. He also shared that he spent tens of hours selecting who to follow/unfollow. Thanks to these efforts, his twitter feed is now so rich of brilliant ideas that expand his horizons and provide him with great insights.

It’s a fresh perspective indeed on an important idea we heard many times. We might really need apply it by dedicating some time every week cleaning up our “following’ lists so we that get educated, inspired and motivated every time we log in to any of our favorite platforms.

Build Your Village

Clean Slates

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What is it with clean slates that we humans love so much?


I woke up excited just because it was the first of a new month and I wanted to begin it by crossing my habit chains right off the bat.

I went live yesterday on Instagram to share how to do a monthly review and prepare for a new month. The 2 favorite review questions that got most the engagement by people watching were:

  • In the new month I will say no to…
  • In the new month I will say yes to…

The answers were so inspiring like:
No to sugar, no to coffee after 6pm (studies say 2-3pm), no to breaking my diet, no to gossiping, no to hesitation, no to judging others, no to tasks delegated to me out of laziness, no to sleeping late, no to getting with others who bring me down.

Yes to waking up early, yes to learning more about the topic I’m studying, yes to sharing my gratitude with others, yes to improving my language, yes to keeping my mask on (a COVID19 survivor).

I’m grateful we shared these uplifting messages together. I’m also grateful for learning these 2 questions from Lara Casey.

A good question to think of today is:

By the end of this month I will have achieved/finished/started/committed to … ?

Happy New Month everyone. Let’s end quarter 1 of the year proudly.

Clean Slates

One Month of Daily Writing

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With this post I hereby announce I have committed to my new practice of writing daily on this blog for a whole month. It’s such a good feeling to have a quick win already so early in the year.


Currently, my writing habit context is so tightly associated with my work office and not home office, so last weekend I almost went to bed without writing my daily post, hence posting at 11pm yesterday. Accordingly, I need to start getting my writing done so early in the day in weekends to keep my practice and not miss a day by mistake or due to being too sleepy to remember.

During this month, I have noticed I’m starting to pay more attention to beautiful words I am reading to include them in future posts. I also realized that I need to try writing more than one post per day when I feel the flow in order to have some writing in queue and not necessarily post stuff the same day of writing them.

This means I will keep writing daily as one of my official annual goals for this year, and maybe, have this as a permanent practice?

That is the dream I don’t dare to share just yet.

One Month of Daily Writing

Deep Work Tools I Love

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During working hours I try to keep my focus and track my deep work sessions using the below tools;

  • Keep a daily tally of 30-minute focus sessions using pen and paper according to Cal Newport’s’ advice. My personal minimum target is a total of 90 minutes per day.
  • Use Forest app to keep me from touching my phone for any reason while also growing trees as a proof of my focus. I highly recommend this app.
  • Turn on Do Not Disturb Mode on my phone.
  • Turn off Bluetooth so my smart watch won’t buzz.
  • Use noise cancellation headset.
  • Play music with no lyrics, just instrumental music.

The below are other tools I use that I pay some premium for , but totally worth it:

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Deep Work Tools I Love

For The Love Of Timers

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My podcast short format artwork, featuring Time Timer

I use timers all day long, they are one of my favorite tools to keep me conscious of time passing and to motivate me to do daily tasks.

My first timer was a digital kitchen timer that I used to track my morning routine and and to get myself started on house chores like washing dishes.

Then I got this big, gorgeous timer for my kids called Time Timer that I am featuring in my photo above to help them visualize what I mean when I say they need to do just 5 minutes of clean-up for example and to manage their screen-time, so when the timer goes off the TV gets turned off.

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For The Love Of Timers

Monthly Digital Hygiene- Feb 2021

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It’s been 10 days since I ended my 45-day digital declutter challenge, so here is an update.

Good habits that I am keeping:

  • No Whatsapp in the evenings
  • No posting on or checking Instagram until my hourly window in the evening, after kids’ bedtime.
  • 5 minutes daily for Gmail on desktop, mostly after lunch break.
  • Netflix in evenings is on big screen only.


Blurry lines I need to think about:

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Monthly Digital Hygiene- Feb 2021

Pausibility

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Pausibility. What a lovely word I ran into 1 year ago when I was writing an assignment for altMBA.

There is much magic that go on when we take a pause, and the one I’m talking about today is during conversations. Have you ever thought why are we so eager to skip pauses?

You see, I’ve been the kind of person quick to fill the silence in conversations, business and personal ones. I  couldn’t stand the tension. I had a coaching session about this issue with my altMBA coaches where they helped me practice silence in conversations by counting to 5 between full sentences. That was so hard! Looking inward during that silence, I felt unease in my heart, like I was taking up too much space and time out of people in front of me, and they might have other things to attend to than give me their full attention including my pauses. What an insight of a limiting belief I had. That was also a very good explanation why I used to (I hope) talk so fast.

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Pausibility

Leave Bread Crumbs

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I learned this concept from the book Start Finishing. The author noticed how it takes us so long to jump back in a project when we leave it for a while, for example for the weekend or when we need to pause it for some reason. Instead, he recommends writing the exact steps you need to follow next time you start working on this project:

Here are some ways to leave yourself bread crumbs:

  • At the end of a work session — which may be the end of one focus block or the end of the last of back-to-back focus blocks — leave a quick note to yourself about where to pick up.
  • If you were truly in flow and lost track of time, your fallback time to leave yourself bread crumbs is at the end of the day. While it’s not as optimal as at the end of the working session, it’s better than starting cold the next morning or at your first focus block of the day.
  • Consider using author Ernest Hemingway’s trick of stopping before you’re empty and leaving something easy to start with. You want it to be easy enough that it doesn’t take a lot of brainpower but difficult enough that you have to engage with it.

I try to write bread crumbs every time I quit working on an excel sheet, either for a break, or due to some kind of interruption, and definitely as part of my workday shutdown ritual.

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Leave Bread Crumbs

Milestones

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Yesterday my podcast reached a wonderful milestone of 10,000 downloads since its launch 11 months ago. The 18 episodes I created up to that point have been listened to this many times and that is such an honor.

I am grateful that my message is resonating and I’m happy to be reaching and helping many people I probably will never meet in person in my life.

Thank you for your trust.

For me, I will keep showing up, and that’s a promise.

Milestones

Woke Up On The Wrong Side Of The Bed?

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Maybe you did not sleep well, maybe you did not sleep enough, maybe as a woman, it’s your hormones and you are in your winter, which I believe is a time you need to be totally resting, but you still need to show up for life. Maybe you are anxious about an upcoming meeting or a work load that needs to get done this week.

So what should you do? How do you keep this energy form ruining your day, week and being picked up by people around you? Energy is contagious after all.

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Woke Up On The Wrong Side Of The Bed?