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- Issue No. 170: How to identify and eliminate the 3 biggest time sucks in your day
Issue No. 170: How to identify and eliminate the 3 biggest time sucks in your day
Why Change Is So Hard—Even When You Want It
Jenae Spry
April 04, 2025
In partnership with
Productivity Express
Issue No. 170
The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
Why Change Is So Hard—Even When You Want It
5 ChatGPT Prompts To Make An Old Social Media Post Go Viral
How to identify and eliminate the 3 biggest time sucks in your day
Forget Notion and Obsidian, 5 reasons Google's AI note-taking tool is the future of productivity
Introducing 4o Image Generation
Add this book to your reading list
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🔥Quote/Prompt
First say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do.
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)
This quote is hitting me right in the productivity feels today!
Let's be honest, we've all been guilty of diving into the "doing" without first defining the "being." It's like trying to follow a recipe without deciding what dish you're making.
The most effective business owners I know […]
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
Here we are in April…are you one of many (i.e., almost everyone) whose New Year's resolutions have already crashed and burned? You're not alone. We're all experts at wanting change while simultaneously sabotaging our own efforts—and it turns out there's some actual psychology behind this frustrating pattern.
We often assume that wanting to change is enough. You gather the tools, remove the obstacles, make a plan—and yet, somehow, nothing shifts. You stay stuck. But why? You might be saying to yourself: 'I want to exercise more, so why do I keep skipping the gym?'
Key Insights:
Most change efforts fail because your goal isn't actually meaningful to you—it's something you think you "should" want rather than something connected to your core values, leaving you with zero authentic motivation when things get tough.
The Sylvia Plath trap is real—getting so paralyzed trying to pick the "perfect" path that all your options spoil while you deliberate, when the truth is that almost any direction is better than permanent indecision.
Your unrealistic expectations are killing your progress—setting overly ambitious goals that ignore your current capacity is a recipe for the all-or-nothing mindset that makes you quit entirely when you can't do something perfectly.
Read the full article for all six psychological barriers that keep us stuck and practical strategies for pushing through them to create meaningful, lasting change in your life and business.
⚙️ Optimization
Remember that brilliant social post you wrote last year that took 3 hours to craft and something like three people saw? The one that made you think, "Wow, I'm actually pretty good at this!" before it died a quiet death in the algorithm graveyard? It's time for a resurrection!
Most social media content dies after 24 hours. But your best ideas deserve a bigger audience. That old post sitting in your archive might be a few moves away from changing everything for your business.
Key Insights:
Your first line might be killing your reach—try the "10 hooks" prompt to generate punchy, 5-7 word opening sentences that create curiosity gaps so powerful people physically can't scroll past them.
People share content when they feel personally attacked (in a good way)—the "make it relatable" prompt helps you add such specific examples that readers will tag their friends with "This is literally us!"
Most social posts lack a strong call to action, which is like throwing a party but forgetting to tell people where the drinks are—the CTA prompt gives you five alternatives that actually get people to do something besides thinking "neat" and moving on.
Read the full article for all five ChatGPT prompts you can copy-paste today, plus expert tips on when and how to transform text posts into different formats for maximum algorithm love.
⏲️ Time Management
Ever look up from your laptop and realize it's somehow 4 PM and you've accomplished approximately nothing on your actual to-do list? You're not alone. Between notification pings, drive-by meetings, and that black hole formerly known as your inbox, modern work life is basically designed to waste your time.
It's rarely possible to be 100% efficient, 100% of our workday. We need breaks and working with others means we need time and space for that collaboration to happen. But oftentimes, a needed break or interaction can balloon into an unneeded time suck that leaves you feeling frustrated.
Key Insights:
Start with honest awareness about your time wasters—you already know checking your email every three minutes isn't helping anyone, so admit it and address it head-on instead of pretending it's "staying responsive."
Tame your screen time with the nuclear option—if you can't handle social media during work hours, use blocking tools that prevent you from undoing your better judgment when the dopamine cravings hit.
The "office hours" hack is brilliant for handling drive-by meetings—set specific times when you're available for drop-ins, and outside those times, people need to book your calendar like the valuable resource it is.
Read the full article for a practical three-step system to identify where your time is going, plus specific techniques for organizing both your environment and your energy levels throughout the day.
💻 Tools & Technology
Remember when we thought organizing digital notes meant endless hours manually linking our scattered thoughts? While you've been painstakingly creating connections in Notion or Obsidian, Google quietly launched something that might make all that effort feel a bit... unnecessary. I can see this being awesome for making sure our work is in line with client specifications (especially when those specifications seem endless) as well as maybe uploading transcripts of calls or other content and asking questions to help us get to the nuggets we really want.
NotebookLM transforms your collection of resources into an interactive, intelligent knowledge base. With traditional tools like Notion and Obsidian, you need to manually sift through vast amounts of data to get accurate and relevant answers.
Key Insights:
The contextual understanding feature lets you ask direct questions about your sources and receive intelligent answers, eliminating the endless scrolling through notes to find that one crucial detail you need.
Unlike Obsidian's manual link-building or Notion's structured databases, NotebookLM actually understands your content, making connections automatically so you can focus on thinking instead of organizing.
The audio overview feature transforms your notes into a podcast-style discussion between two virtual hosts—perfect for absorbing information while multitasking or when your eyes need a break from screens.
Read the full article for a detailed breakdown of all five reasons NotebookLM might replace your current note-taking system, plus practical examples of how it handles complex projects.
🤖 AI
Those clunky image generators that couldn't get text right or follow specific instructions? OpenAI's latest update might finally solve those frustrations. They've integrated image generation directly into GPT-4o, turning AI from a text-only tool into something potentially useful for visual communication.
GPT‑4o image generation excels at accurately rendering text, precisely following prompts, and leveraging 4o's inherent knowledge base and chat context—including transforming uploaded images or using them as visual inspiration.
Key Insights:
The model excels at accurately rendering text in images, making it useful for creating menus, signs, and diagrams that actually communicate what you intended.
Unlike other image generators that get confused after 5-8 objects, GPT-4o can handle up to 20 different objects in a single image with proper positioning and relationships.
The multi-turn generation lets you refine images through natural conversation, ensuring consistency across iterations when designing characters or concepts.
Read the full article for a detailed breakdown of the model's capabilities, limitations, and safety measures, plus examples showing its performance across various generation tasks.
👀 Read, Watch, Listen
This week’s awesome books, YouTube videos, newsletters, etc. to add to your list!
"Tiny Experiments" by Anne-Laure Le Cunff challenges those rigid life timelines we often follow. Instead of fixed plans like four-year degrees or decade-long career paths, this neuroscientist suggests viewing life as a playground for experimentation.
The book shows you how to design small personal experiments to uncover what you truly want, break free from limiting beliefs about success, and make decisions that align with your authentic self. Rather than endlessly searching for purpose, it's about actively living with purpose.
It’s praised by thought leaders like Adam Grant and Oliver Burkeman because it offers a refreshing circular approach to growth where goals evolve naturally through engagement with the world around you.
🎉 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!
The "alternative time blocks" are making it easier to work on [business] and reducing decision paralysis and head-in-sand syndrome.
Time management went well this week, things felt under control
I made good progress on my daily and evening routines
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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