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The Rundown

• How to work more efficiently, according to a neuroscientist

• Grow A Personal Brand On LinkedIn: ChatGPT Prompts To Nail The Basics

• This 50-year-old concept is still the best way to make yourself productive, says expert: 3 simple ways to master it

• Everything you need to know about the Canva glow up

• Cloudflare’s new marketplace will let websites charge AI bots for scraping

• 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

How to work more efficiently, according to a neuroscientist

The author of the book referenced says that we have natural 90-minute cycles and her suggestions take advantage of this. Often, in the Doers Inner Circle, we talk about recovering properly. As business owners sometimes we want to or need to do “Sprints” and work late, or on a weekend, etc. but when we do, it’s important to schedule the recovery time. We cannot expect this to be sustainable. Consider this part from the article:

In general, you should limit intense mental work to no more than four hours a day in total. When you work intensely for longer, your mind is left so tired that it cannot recover after a night of rest and your fatigue is carried over into the next day, adding to that day’s load.

Yes, exactly! And this is all the more important when we are tackling high-bandwidth tasks or creative tasks. Here is the author’s basic work session suggestion, check out the full article for the full details and let me know if you try it!

• Perform the hardest tasks in the first twenty minutes.

• Do slower, easier work for the remaining forty to seventy minutes.

• Take a break for ten minutes.

• Repeat.

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⚙️ Optimization

Grow A Personal Brand On LinkedIn: ChatGPT Prompts To Nail The Basics

I, like many of you, am a business owner first and a creator second. Some of you may be creators first, and businesses owner second. But either way, it’s really hard in this day and age not to be both.

If you need help with ideas and getting your expertise into social media worthy posts, this article has got you covered. Recently, at VidCon, LinkedIn was once again mentioned as the next “it” platform with tons of room for creators to make a name for themselves. So, check out this article and boost your LinkedIn game!

This is just one prompt suggestion. Check the full article for all of them!

Define your unique selling point

What sets you apart from others in your field? Maybe you've developed your own methods, written books, or been blogging for years. If your experience dates back further than most, and you've got the credentials to prove it, make sure you share. You're not just another professional, you're a thought leader with substance. Use this prompt to uncover and articulate your standout qualities.

"I'm a [your profession] specializing in [your niche]. Ask me questions, one by one, to uncover 5 unique aspects of my experience or approach that could form the core of my personal brand on LinkedIn.”

⏲️ Time Management

This 50-year-old concept is still the best way to make yourself productive, says expert: 3 simple ways to master it

Oh I love this article. It is a perfect brain hack! The author gives the addictive nature of social media as an example of how your brain is working. And then gives advice as to how to make other tasks (e.g., work) work like that. He’s referring to the flow state, but this is an interesting way to hack your brain to flow! Excerpt below:

Reframe your tasks to add uncertainty

It may seem backwards, but the No. 1 way to induce flow is to increase uncertainty in your tasks, says Melnikoff. The more unknowns you face, the more opportunities you’ll have to turn each one into a certain outcome.

Most tasks can be reframed to add uncertainty, he notes. Trying to clear your entire inbox can feel overwhelming or unmanageable, so instead, set a timer for 15 minutes and see how many emails you can tackle within that time frame.

“If you want to foster flow in your own life, you really want to try to mentally represent or frame your tasks in ways that make your outcomes as uncertain as possible, so that by taking action, you can reduce as much uncertainty as possible,” Melnikoff says.

“You can be intentional with dopamine,” says Fletcher. “It’s a tool that’s available to anyone. Every time we take a moment and acknowledge our effort, we realize that we’re laying a bit of a foundation toward achieving a bigger goal.”

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💻 Tools & Technology

Everything you need to know about the Canva glow up

Canva just launched some big changes! Below is one of my favorites but check out the others in the article. I’ll be honest I resisted at first because I hate making my brain relearn where stuff is. But this time it was really intuitive! If you ar a Canva user check out what’s new!

3. A customizable workspace

Now, you can set up your space just the way you like it, helping you stay focused on the task at hand and making it easy to pick up where you left off.

‘Star’ your most important designs, folders, or brand templates, so you can always come back to what you need even as you move through Canva.

You can also highlight important team content. In your ‘starred for team’ section, team admins and brand designers can tag important items for everyone to see, and you can easily access the latest news and on-brand designs from your team.

🤖 AI

Cloudflare’s new marketplace will let websites charge AI bots for scraping

Talk about thinking outside the box! I’m hopping straight into the excerpt here but check this out:

Cloudflare announced plans on Monday to launch a marketplace in the next year where website owners can sell AI model providers access to scrape their site’s content. The marketplace is the final step of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s larger plan to give publishers greater control over how and when AI bots scrape their websites.

“If you don’t compensate creators one way or another, then they stop creating, and that’s the bit which has to get solved,” said Prince in an interview with TechCrunch.

As the first step in its new plan, on Monday, Cloudflare launched free observability tools for customers, called AI Audit. Website owners will get a dashboard to view analytics on why, when, and how often AI models are crawling their sites for information. Cloudflare will also let customers block AI bots from their sites with the click of a button. Website owners can block all web scrapers using AI Audit, or let certain web scrapers through if they have deals or find their scraping beneficial.

A demo of AI Audit shared with TechCrunch showed how website owners can use the tool, which is able to see where each scraper that visits your site comes from, and offers selective windows to see how many times scrapers from OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, and other AI model providers are visiting your site.

When the smartphone era began with the launch of the first iPhone in 2007 and the App Store a year later, part of the thrill of these devices was the sheer number of things they could do. Nearly two decades on, having a constantly distracting gadget that can do everything doesn't seem like quite such a good idea.

Some people have been turning back to feature phones to escape social media, instant messaging, and an endless barrage of content (now produced by AI as well as human beings). There are even dedicated phones built to stick to the basics, keeping useful features like driving directions and photo-taking, while ditching a lot of the noise and distraction that usually comes with a smartphone. But there’s no need to buy a new device to achieve dumb-phone zen; by installing some apps and tweaking some of your phone’s settings, you can slow the data deluge and reclaim some brain cycles.

If you're ready for a quieter life and keen to dumb down your smartphone, here's how to go about it on an iPhone or an Android device. These options are more comprehensive than simply uninstalling all your apps and turning off all your notifications, though you can certainly consider taking those steps too.

👀 Read, Watch, Listen

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

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Book)

From Amazon:

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?

The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems - the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort - but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:

• The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients

• The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping

• The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service

In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

🎉 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 got all of the billable done on time + also most of the monthly admin during the first week of September

• I made progress with my new service page and new blog article and I conduced my first market research interview, which was very insightful.

• Good catching up at the weekend

• I took pen and paper, works best for me, to be clear about what should be on my website.

• A bit of work on the site/new email addresses for [new website], got accountant documentation done and sent it, started working on finances overview

• Created and used new confidence audio, got myself out of low motivation phase, took things easy, got things done that I thought would be very complicated

• I published my new service page including my packages. 🎉 And I wrote a very long blog article.

• I've now laid the foundation for my services for the foreseeable future (at least the next six months) and can move ahead with my next big goal: increase my visibility and attract qualified leads!

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

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

• NEW: 90-Day Planning Formula is happening NOW.  Join here

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• Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: 5️⃣ Finances RSVP here

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

• Accelerators: October 4 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:

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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 :)