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- #224: 5 Tips to Make Fast Progress on Any Goal
#224: 5 Tips to Make Fast Progress on Any Goal
8 Easy Ways to Trick Your Brain Into Doing Hard Things
Jenae Spry
October 10, 2025
Productivity Stacks Newsletter
(Formerly Productivity Express)
Issue No. 224
The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
5 Tips to Make Fast Progress on Any Goal
Instagram Reaches 3B Users, Launches New UI
8 Easy Ways to Trick Your Brain Into Doing Hard Things
WhatsApp can now translate messages on iOS and Android
Cloudflare offers way to block AI Overviews – will Google comply?
👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here
🔥Quote/Prompt
One today is worth two tomorrows.
Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.
A bit from mine:
(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)
That moment you realize Franklin was basically describing compound interest for productivity.
Here's the thing, every task you push to "tomorrow" doesn't just delay that ONE thing. It creates a […]
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
We all have that list of goals collecting dust in our minds - the home projects, the strength training plans, the "I really should learn AI" thoughts that never turn into action. This article reveals how taking action itself transforms what seems possible and uncovers strengths you didn't know you had.
"Most of us have more good ideas we don't try than bad ideas we do try. Even finding out an idea didn't work moves you forward because it takes that idea off your mind. Try the best (or just quickest to implement) idea you've got now, rather than waiting for a better one."
Key Insights:
Progress happens through showing up, not planning. For example, spending 10 hours exploring AI tools without a specific goal often leads to more learning than months of researching the "perfect" approach.
Weekly consistency beats sporadic perfection. Dedicating just one hour every Monday to a goal for four weeks creates more momentum than waiting for the ideal time block.
Solutions that work often weren't guaranteed to work. If you only move forward when you're certain of success, you'll miss discoveries that only come from experimentation.
Read the full article for all five strategies and specific examples of how action transforms both your thinking and emotions around stuck goals.
⚙️ Optimization
Instagram hitting 3 billion users sounds impressive until you realize that's over a third of all humans on Earth checking the app monthly. This milestone comes with UI changes that could significantly impact how you use the platform for your business.
"Reels is also the focus of this second update, which is a UI change relating to the lower bar icons, which IG hopes will make it easier to switch between the Home feed, Reels and DMs from the main app screen. As you can see in these example screens, Instagram's updating its icons, and moving the DM button from the top of the screen to the bottom, so that all three of the app's main functions are easily accessible along that function bar."
Key Insights:
The new topic customization feature lets you actively shape your Reels algorithm by adding or removing topics you want to see. For example, you could remove competitor content while adding more from your industry niche.
Moving DMs to the bottom navigation bar signals Instagram's shift toward treating messages as a core feature rather than an afterthought. This could mean more emphasis on direct customer communication for businesses.
With Reels now the most-used element of the app, Instagram may eventually open directly to Reels instead of the home feed. Businesses still focusing primarily on static posts might want to reconsider their content strategy.
Read the full article for details on the new UI changes and what Instagram's growth to 3 billion users means for platform strategy.
⏲️ Time Management
Your brain's default setting is to dodge anything uncomfortable - whether that's starting a big project, having a difficult conversation, or even just folding laundry. But these expert-backed strategies can help you outsmart that resistance by working with your brain's wiring instead of against it.
"The brain isn't wired for what's good for us, it's wired for what feels safe and efficient. Difficult tasks trigger uncertainty, effort, or potential failure, which the nervous system reads as risk. Physical activation cues your nervous system to shift states, breaking the freeze that comes with overwhelm."
Key Insights:
Reframe obligations as choices to activate reward pathways. Instead of "I have to finish this report," try "I choose to finish this report because it moves my business forward."
Use temptation bundling to make tedious tasks more bearable. For example, save your favorite podcast exclusively for when you're doing admin work or answering emails.
The five-minute technique leverages the Zeigarnik Effect - once you start something, your brain wants to finish it. Set a timer for just five minutes with full permission to stop, but you'll often find momentum carries you forward.
Read the full article for all eight strategies including optimal timing for difficult tasks and how body doubling can boost your productivity.
💻 Tools & Technology
Chatting with international clients or managing a business across language barriers just got easier. WhatsApp's new translation feature lets you long-press any message and instantly translate it without leaving the app - perfect for those quick business conversations where you need to understand the basics without hiring a translator or interpreter.
"With more than 3 billion users in over 180 countries, we're always working to keep our users closely connected, no matter where they are in the world. But we understand that sometimes language can be a barrier to getting things done or expressing how you truly feel. That's why we're excited to bring message translations to WhatsApp, so you can more easily communicate across languages."
Key Insights:
Translations happen directly on your device, keeping messages encrypted and private - crucial for sensitive business communications or client conversations.
Android users get automatic translation for entire chat threads, meaning you can set it once and forget it. For example, if you regularly communicate with suppliers in Brazil, all future messages can automatically appear in English.
iPhone users have access to 19 languages compared to Android's 6, but Android gets the convenient auto-translate feature that iOS currently lacks.
Read the full article for details on supported languages and how to enable translations for group chats and Channel updates.
🤖 AI
Your content feeding AI answers without sending traffic back to your site? Cloudflare just launched a way to tell Google "yes to search, no to AI Overviews" through simple robots.txt directives. The catch? Google hasn't committed to actually honoring these instructions.
"Cloudflare's new Content Signals Policy is meant to give publishers more control over how crawlers and bots use their data, beyond traditional directives that only regulate crawling and indexing. The policy adds three new machine-readable directives to robots.txt: search (permission for building a search index), ai-input (permission to use content as input for AI-generated answers), and ai-train (permission to use content for training AI models)."
Key Insights:
You can now explicitly separate search indexing from AI usage. For example, allowing Google to index your content for traditional search while blocking it from AI Overviews that don't drive traffic back.
Cloudflare predicts bots could exceed human traffic by 2029, making these controls increasingly critical for protecting your content's value and maintaining traffic to your site.
These directives aren't legally binding - they're essentially a polite request that AI companies can choose to ignore. Publishers wanting stricter control need to combine these signals with bot management and firewall rules.
Read the full article for implementation details and why Cloudflare released this as an open standard under CC0 license.
🎉 Celebration Corner
Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!
Morning routine comes naturally now.
Good progress on new leads and outsourcing.
What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!
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I hope you found this valuable!
Wishing you much productivity!
- Jenae :)
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