Hey there!

I hope you've had a productive week! If you are new here, welcome! If you’re not, you’ll notice we have gotten a makeover to closer align with our goal of helping entrepreneurs and small business owners work smarter and live more.

I hope the new and improved version is a huge help!

-Jenae :)

What’s Changed

• Doers Express + Productivity Stacks Newsletters —> become twice weekly “Productivity Express”

• Fridays: Best no-fluff actionable articles on productivity and systems across the internet + Actionable insights and prompts to boost your energy

• Tuesdays: Interview case study + Downloadable Behind-the-Scenes Swipe file with a successful entrepreneur’s Tools, Systems, and Hires.

The Rundown

• 3 Ways to Increase Your Mental Resilience, According to Extreme Athletes

• Use Neuroscience to Hack Your Next Brainstorming Session

• AI Won’t Replace Humans — But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI

• The Results Are In: Working from Home / Remote Productivity

• Beware a Culture of Busyness (And How It’s Killing Productivity)

• OpenAI Might Release ChatGPT-5 Before the End of 2023

• Jetpack Launches Newsletter Product

• New Section! This week’s books, YouTube videos, etc. to add to your list

🔥Quote/Prompt

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)

Did someone forward this to you?

📈Performance

3 Ways to Increase Your Mental Resilience, According to Extreme Athletes

Building mental resilience is essential for high performance, and extreme athletes offer insights into developing this skill. They suggest facing daily challenges, personifying pain, and reframing hardships.

Key Insights:

• Embrace daily challenges: Introducing small moments of elective hardship in your daily routine, like doing tasks you dislike, can help build resilience. These moments prepare you for larger challenges in life.

  • Try this: Set aside time each day to tackle a task or project you've been avoiding. This could be cold-calling potential clients, addressing negative feedback, or diving into complex financials.

• Personify your pain: Endurance athletes like Courtney Dauwalter visualize pain as a tangible place, such as a "pain cave." By confronting and moving through this metaphorical space, individuals can better manage and overcome pain.

  • Try this: Identify a recurring challenge or fear in your business journey. Give it a name or visualize it as a place. Whenever you face it, remind yourself that you can enter, confront, and eventually leave this "space" stronger than before.

• Reframe your hardships: Viewing moments of difficulty as adventures or opportunities for growth can change one's perspective and improve endurance. This mindset shift helps in coping with and enduring challenges.

  • Try this: Whenever faced with a setback, write down three potential positive outcomes or lessons from the situation. This practice can help shift your perspective from seeing obstacles as roadblocks to viewing them as growth opportunities.

• Mental toughness is trainable: Just like a muscle, mental resilience can be developed and strengthened over time. By voluntarily introducing friction into daily life, one becomes better equipped to handle significant life challenges.

  • Try this: Dedicate time each week for self-reflection and personal growth. This could involve reading books on mental strength, attending workshops, or practicing mindfulness exercises to enhance resilience.

Use Neuroscience to Hack Your Next Brainstorming Session

Neuroscience offers strategies to optimize brainstorming sessions, enhancing creativity and collaboration.

Key Insights:

• Establish a Ritual: Rituals, like consistent routines or activities, can signal the brain that it's time for focused thinking. This is based on the idea that repeated actions can create associations in the brain, preparing it for specific tasks.

  • Try this: Develop a specific pre-brainstorming routine, such as meditating, listening to a particular playlist, or making a cup of tea, to signal the start of a creative session.

• Foster a Cooperative Environment: MIT research suggests that a non-competitive, cooperative setting for brainstorming leads to more ideas and creativity. This approach reduces conflict and makes individuals more receptive to constructive criticism.

  • Try this: Set clear intentions for each brainstorming session, emphasizing collaboration and open-mindedness. If you're a solopreneur, consider joining online forums or communities where you can share ideas without judgment.

• Incorporate Movement: A Stanford study found that walking can increase creative output by 60%. Walking may help in making connections between ideas and encourages more discussion.

  • Try this: Incorporate movement into your brainstorming process, such as taking a walk or doing short physical exercises. If you're indoors, consider pacing or using a standing desk to stimulate thought.

• End with an Open Question: Concluding sessions with an open-ended question can stimulate continued thinking and innovation. This approach emphasizes the importance of curiosity in the creative process..

  • Try this: Maintain a journal or digital note-taking platform where you can jot down open-ended questions after each brainstorming session. Revisit these questions periodically to spark new ideas and insights.

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⚙️Optimization

AI Won’t Replace Humans — But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI

AI is set to revolutionize the way businesses operate, with Harvard Business School professor Karim Lakhani emphasizing that while AI won't replace humans, those who leverage AI will outpace those who don't.

Key Insights:

• AI Lowers Cognitive Costs: Just as the internet reduced information transmission costs, AI is reducing the cost of cognition, making thinking and decision-making more efficient.

  • Try this: Evaluate your business processes and identify areas where AI can streamline decision-making or automate repetitive tasks.

• Digital Mindset is Crucial: Both executives and employees need to develop a digital mindset. This doesn't mean becoming AI engineers but understanding how AI and digital technologies impact business.

  • Try this: Invest in training programs or workshops for yourself and your team to understand the basics of AI and its implications for your industry.

• Change Management is Essential: Companies need to view change as a core competency. The best organizations will be those that can continuously adapt and see change as a skill to be honed.

  • Try this: Implement a change management strategy in your business, ensuring that you're regularly reviewing and adapting to technological advancements.

• Generative AI is Transformative: Generative AI, which can produce content and assist in decision-making, is in its early stages but has the potential to be as transformative as the internet. It's crucial for businesses to experiment with its applications.

  • Try this: Explore generative AI tools relevant to your business and run test projects to assess their effectiveness and potential ROI.

• Bias in AI Reflects Existing Biases: AI can amplify existing biases in society. It's essential for leaders to recognize these biases and work towards creating more equitable AI systems.

  • Try this: Conduct an audit of any AI tools or systems you're using to ensure they're not perpetuating biases, and make adjustments as necessary. Consider consulting with experts in ethical AI.

⏲️Time Management

The Results Are In: Working from Home / Remote Productivity

This is a multi-article review – links below.

The latest reports say working remotely or from home means a drop in productivity, but is that really what the data say? Maybe not.

Key Insights:

• Latest reports might not be representative: The latest “bombshell” reports that remote work is less productive point to a study reported by NPR on police dispatchers and one conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research on data entry workers in India. These are not incredibly representative of business owners or a large portion of their teams.

• Wellbeing & work-life balance issues: Multiple articles cite work-life bleed including working during scheduled personal time as well as using work time for personal errands and tasks as a culprit in both harming wellbeing as well as decreased productivity but the articles also mention this can be solved by solid boundaries and expectations.

• Productivity paranoia: When leaders were asked, they had a low confidence level that their remote/work-from-home team was productive while their team members were confident that they were. This has been termed productivity paranoia. The solution became to gather data through tracking, which has backfired a bit as it turns out employees don’t love the ‘big brother’ feeling but there are other ways to gather data – setting KPIs, communication of expectations and results. As a business owner, there is another key takeaway here, tracking your own time and productivity will help you figure out if you are just being optimistic about your productivity or whether you’re really optimizing your time.

• Hybrid reigns supreme: If you or your team work from home, possibly not even by choice, rest assured – this isn’t bad news for you. Gallop reported 90% of people surveyed want to work remotely and moreover that when people work in locations they don’t work where they prefer, there is a higher rate of burnout and engagement. Moreover, Gallop also reported the importance of hybrid or remote options to attract top talent given that desire. While fully remote work is getting a bit of a bad rap, a Stanford working paper (not yet peer-reviewed) says that hybrid work actually improves productivity and Forbes ran an article discussing the use of AI and meeting recordings as ways to reduce meeting overwhelm. Multiple articles we reviewed seem to point to one conclusion: like it or not, if not fully remote, a minimum of hybrid is the future.

Beware a Culture of Busyness (And How It’s Killing Productivity)

The modern corporate culture often equates busyness with success, but this mindset can be detrimental to both personal well-being and your business’s productivity.

Key Takeaways:

• Busyness has become a status symbol. Many people now equate being busy with being important or morally admirable. This shift in perception has been influenced by societal changes and corporate cultures that reward visible effort over actual output.

  • Try this: Regularly evaluate your/your team’s tasks and eliminate activities that don't directly contribute to your business goals or personal growth. Prioritize tasks that have a tangible impact on your business's success.

• Overvaluing busyness harms organizations. Companies that prioritize and reward mere activity over genuine productivity risk decreased efficiency, increased employee turnover, and potential health issues among staff. A 2021 WHO report linked overwork to serious health risks, including heart disease and stroke.

  • Try this: Set clear boundaries for work hours and ensure regular breaks. Use tools like time trackers to monitor work patterns and ensure you're not overworking.

• The pandemic has prompted a reevaluation of work values. The shift to remote work and societal events like the viral TikTok post about “quiet quitting” have made managers and employees alike reconsider the true value of busyness.

  • Try this: Reflect on your/your team’s work habits post-pandemic and identify any unproductive patterns that have emerged. Adjust your schedule or work environment to better align with your productivity peaks.

• Organizations can combat the busyness culture. Solutions include rewarding output over activity, promoting deep work, enforcing genuine time off, modeling balanced work behavior from leadership, and building slack into systems to handle crises and day-to-day workloads.

  • Try this: Dedicate specific blocks of time for deep work, free from distractions. Use tools or apps that block social media or other distractions during these periods. Ensure you also schedule time for relaxation and self-care.

💻Tools & Technology

OpenAI Might Release ChatGPT-5 Before the End of 2023

OpenAI is gearing up to unveil ChatGPT-5, its next-generation AI chatbot, by the end of 2023, promising groundbreaking advancements in artificial intelligence.

Key Insights:

• ChatGPT-5 may achieve AGI: The upcoming model is predicted to reach artificial general intelligence, enabling it to perform tasks at a human-equivalent level.

• Multimodal capabilities on the horizon: ChatGPT-5 is set to handle various data types like text, audio, images, and more, offering a holistic understanding of diverse data streams.

• Introduction of long-term memory: This feature will allow the AI to retain memories over time, enhancing user interaction by making it more personalized and engaging.

• Enhanced accuracy and understanding: OpenAI aims for less than 10% hallucination in responses and a deeper grasp of context and emotion, making ChatGPT-5 a more reliable and human-like conversational partner.

Jetpack Launches Newsletter Product

Jetpack 12.4 introduces a new Newsletter product, enabling users to send blog posts as newsletters directly from the WordPress editor. This feature aims to compete with platforms like Substack and Ghost.org.

Key Insights:

• Jetpack's Newsletter is Free with Optional Paid Subscriptions: Jetpack's Newsletter service is free, but they collect fees from creators who offer paid subscriptions. The fee structure ranges from 10% on the Free plan to 2% on the Complete plan, in addition to Stripe fees.

• Existing Jetpack Infrastructure Utilized: The new newsletter feature leverages the existing infrastructure that Jetpack users have been using to send posts to subscribers via email. This ensures subscribers receive updates in their inboxes when new content is posted.

• Limitations on Subscriber Import: Currently, newsletter creators can only import up to 100 subscribers via a CSV file due to spam prevention measures. However, this limit is recognized as a barrier by the Jetpack team and is a priority to address. Paid plan users can upload unlimited subscribers.

• Unlimited Sends and Subscribers – For Now: Jetpack Newsletter stands out by offering unlimited email sends and subscriber lists for both free and paid users, contrasting with many popular services. However, this is an introductory offer, and the unlimited nature might change in the future based on usage patterns and feedback.

👀Read, Watch, Listen

This week’s awesome books, YouTube videos, newsletters, etc. to add to your list!

Daily Quick Newsletter “Get Smarter in 5 Minutes” with Morning Brew (Newsletter)

As you can probably tell, I hate boring newsletters but Morning Brew has a point with their “Get smarter in 5 minutes” tagline. I (Jenae) actually look forward to. They deliver news in a way that is enjoyable and isn’t just a collective of sensationalist headlines. They have over 4 million subscribers and send one email per day and of course, it is free.

Boost Your Productivity With AI (Newsletter)

AI is all the rage, but it is also overwhelming to try to keep track of everything going on in the AI space. This is also a 5-minute newsletter (can you tell I like short?) that helps you stay in the know and even has ChatGPT prompt suggestions, trending AI tools plus what major companies and governments are doing with those AI tools.

Time, productivity, and purpose: insights from Four Thousand Weeks | Oliver Burkeman (YouTube)

Warning - this video is 2 hours long so I would recommend adding it to your “listen” list for in the car or on a walk.

Humans often seek to control time as a way to manage the future and alleviate deep-seated worries. This desire can lead to over-planning and an obsession with productivity, sometimes masking deeper fears, like the fear of mortality. However, true fulfillment often arises when we relinquish some control, embracing shared experiences and valuing time as a collective good. While techniques like time boxing can aid in task management, it's crucial to recognize the inherent limits of time and prioritize what genuinely matters, allowing for spontaneous, deeply meaningful moments in our lives.

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day (Book)

The authors address the modern dilemma of feeling perpetually busy and distracted. Drawing from their extensive experience and experiments with personal habits, they present a four-step framework to help individuals design their days more intentionally. Rather than promoting a one-size-fits-all approach, the book provides a variety of strategies that can be adapted to fit individual needs. It doesn't advocate for drastic measures like discarding smartphones but emphasizes small, impactful changes to free oneself from the cycle of constant busyness. A guide for those seeking to reclaim their time, "Make Time" focuses on prioritizing what truly matters.

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

• VOTE: Vote for our book club book HERE 

• ​​​​​​​Monday: Doers IC Monthly Mastermind

• Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: Money

• Monday/Friday: Goal Setting + Plan Your Week Party

• Accelerators: Friday Office Hours

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I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)