The Rundown

• More Than Muscles: How Olympic Athletes Use Psychological Strategies

• Get Help: Don’t Wait To Hire Until You’re Ready To Quit

• Build the Life You Want With the Hours You Have, Says Time Management Expert

• Too Much Email? Get Back 15GB of Free Storage for Your Gmail Account

• We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’

• Add this book to your reading list

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🔥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

The psychology of Olympians and how they master their minds to perform

What does this have to do with freelancers and business owners? Anyone who engages in the non-ordinary (that’s what extraordinary means, after all) is a peak performer or has the goal of peak performance. Olympic athletes are the quintessential peak performers and we all stand to learn a lot from them. Below is one section but all of them are great lessons for us as business owners.

Resilience

The ability to recover from setbacks, such as disappointing performances or injury is crucial. The role of mental processes and behaviour such as emotional regulation (recognising and controlling emotions such as anxiety) allows Olympians to maintain focus and determination amid the global scrutiny that comes with competing on the world’s biggest stage.

Resilience is not a fixed trait but rather a dynamic process that evolves through an interplay between individual characteristics, such as personality and psychological skills, and environment, such as an athlete’s social support. A 2012 study made in the UK investigating resilience in Olympic champions highlighted that a range of psychological factors such as positive personality, motivation, confidence and focus as well feeling like they have social support helped to protect athletes from the potential negative stressors caused by competing in the Olympics. These factors helped to increase an athlete’s resilience and the likelihood they will perform at their best.

Social support means that athletes don’t have to feel like they are going it alone. If they can call on strong networks of family, friends and coaches, it provides them with additional emotional strength and motivation.

Resilience empowers Olympians to draw upon individual skills and traits and protects them from the negative effects of stressors that inevitably come with competing in the Olympics. For example, a rower may need to solve problems such as changing weather conditions. Resilience allows them to maintain composure and adjust to the conditions, for instance by modifying their stroke technique.

⚙️ Optimization

Get Help: Don’t Wait To Hire Until You’re Ready To Quit

I freaking love the title of this newsletter because we should all be thinking of this. It applies whether you’ve never hired anyone or whether you’ve just not hired much. And maybe you HATE the idea of managing people. You what sucks worse? Starting a business to do what you love, and having it put you in the hospital — which is sadly not an uncommon story.

This “article” is a newsletter aimed at content business owners but the lessons here apply to you regardless of your business. The excerpt below gets you thinking about what this “help” could look like and the actual newsletter walks you through thinking about where to start or what the next step should be. We also wrote about this topic here.

Waiting a while to hire help for your content business can be a big mistake. It can delay growth or, worse, lead you to become so overwhelmed you quit the business altogether.

Decide how their help can best help you and your business. With the help of the ChatGPT tool, I pulled together this list of things virtual assistants in creator businesses might do:

• Administrative tasks – data entry, email management, calendar schedule, and document preparation

• Audience and customer service – responding to inquiries, comments, complaints, etc.

• Marketing assistance – social media management, email marketing, content creation

• Business operations – invoicing, expense tracking, financial reports

• Project management – project planning, research, and execution

• Research – conducting online research, compiling data, interviewing sources

• Content creation – writing articles, shooting videos, finding images

• Tech support – troubleshooting, backing up data, maintaining software licenses

⏲️ Time Management

Build the Life You Want With the Hours You Have, Says Time Management Expert

This is a great read and very inspirational. Not much needs to be said about it, so let’s hop into an excerpt:

Many people consume a lot of time and effort thinking about how to get things off their plate. Vanderkam advised a different strategy.

“We don’t build the lives we want by saving time,” she said. “We build the lives we want and then time saves itself.”

Every Friday afternoon, she suggested, people should list priorities for their career, relationships and self for the upcoming week to “turn what might be wasted time into some of our most productive minutes.”

Ideally, each item on the list is a step towards a larger goal. Unplanned things will always come up, so it’s important to tackle as many things on the list as early as possible in the week—on Monday or Tuesday. Making progress on priorities earlier in the week allows people to get to them before something interrupts their week or it gives folks time to get to everything.

Vanderkam regularly hears there isn’t enough time in the day.

“We won’t get to everything that is important to us in any given day, but we don’t live our lives in days,” she emphasized. “We live our lives in weeks. By looking at the whole of the week, we see just how much space there is.”

💻 Tools & Technology

Too Much Email? Get Back 15GB of Free Storage for Your Gmail Account

Anyone an email hoarder? I definitely use my read email as my filing cabinet for important things. And eventually it all adds up. It turns out there is a hack! Here is the hack — check the article for step-by-step instructions:

All you need to do is create a second Gmail account to store all of your current messages. There's no restriction on the number of free Google accounts you can own, which means you can set one up as a dedicated archive account, then transfer all your old emails to it.

🤖 AI

We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’

The TLDR on this: If you thought social media algorithms make your favorite SM platform addictive, AI is about to make that look harmless. Instead of an excerpt, here are the key points. The article is fairly long but I think it’s worth a read or at least a bookmark:

Researchers are raising alarms about the potential dangers of AI companionship, which they argue are being overlooked in favor of more dramatic scenarios. Key points include:

• AI companions are already popular, with sexual role-playing being the second most common use of ChatGPT.

• These AI relationships may become addictive due to their ability to cater perfectly to user preferences.

• Concerns include social isolation, atrophy of relationship skills, and consent issues.

• Economic incentives may drive the development of increasingly engaging and potentially harmful AI companions.

• Traditional regulatory approaches may be insufficient; new strategies like "regulation by design" and dynamic policies may be needed.

• Researchers call for interdisciplinary study to understand and mitigate these risks.

• The broader challenge is maintaining human dignity in the face of technological advances driven by narrow economic interests.

👀 Read, Watch, Listen

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

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout (Book)

Cal Newport's "Slow Productivity" challenges modern hustle culture, offering an alternative approach inspired by historical thinkers. The book critiques our current productivity definition, which leads to burnout and overwhelm. Newport proposes a more sustainable model based on principles gleaned from studying notable figures like Galileo and Jane Austen. He outlines strategies for workload management, introduces seasonal variation, and emphasizes long-term quality over short-term busyness. The book aims to revolutionize work culture by providing a roadmap for meaningful accomplishment without succumbing to constant overload, presenting a timely solution for those caught between relentless hustle and abandoning ambition.

🎉 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!

• I stuck to my routines and was intentional about my time most of the week.

• Continued working on website copy, asked for further feedback/help with it, created post for LI page

• I got a lot done this week. I launched the [new package] and got my first client the next day from my email list. Yay! I'm so thrilled about this.

• I created my newsletter that's due to go out tomorrow. It will be the 37th edition of the newsletter. Who would have thought I would have gotten so far? And it contains a link to my downloadable prompt guide that I know is going to be a gamechanger. I'm so excited!

What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

• Announcement: What book do you want to read for book club? Submit your vote HERE!

• Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: 2️⃣ Process & Productivity RSVP here

• Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: 2️⃣ Process & Productivity RSVP here

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

• Accelerators: August 16 is your Office Hours RSVP here

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As a reminder, you’re getting this twice-weekly newsletter because you opted in to receive awesome productivity and systems tips through one of these methods:

Doer Entrepreneurs, Doers Express Newsletter, Productivity Stacks, Success by Rx, ClickUp Facebook Group, Productive & Successful Translators Facebook Group.

If you’re not interested in improving your and your business’s productivity so you’d like to break up, that’s definitely a bummer. But, you can always use the unsubscribe link at the bottom if you do not want to get these tips — but keep in mind I am hyper-focused on making these twice-weekly emails as valuable as possible.

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I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)