Hey there!

I hope you've had a productive week! If you are new here, welcome to our Friday Roundup.
What is the Friday Roundup?

A roundup of the best in productivity & systems for freelancers, small business owners, and founders who need to get a LOT done without giving up the joys of life.

Be on the lookout for our Tuesday Swipe file & Case study! Every Tuesday a free behind-the-scenes swipe file from a business owner with the systems, tools, and hires that helped them build sustainable success.

-Jenae :)

The Rundown

• Quick Tip: Always late? Always early — both are not productive!

• Better Memory According to Neuroscience — and why YOU need to care if you’re a freelancer or small business owner.

• Communicate Better According to Neuroscience

• From Procrastination to Productivity in the New Year

• 10 ChatGPT prompts to cut your work-week in half, by 2x your productivity

• Add this video to your YouTube queue

🔥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

10 Simple Habits That Lead to Better Memory, According to Neuroscience — And why freelancers and small business owners should care… a lot.

We’ve already these 10 habits or tips or steps lists — but this one is truly worth the read. You might think your memory is fine, or even that it doesn’t affect your life or business anyway. After all, we can Google anything or pull up the flagged e-mail anytime, right?

Well, memory affects a lot more than just your ability to remember what you need besides milk at the grocery store. Imagine that you had to check your smartphone or notes for everything. How long would it take? As you age or get stressed (yes, stress affects things too…not that we freelancers and business owners have stress or anything 😉) would you even remember to flag the email or write the note?

Below are three of our favorites because two are extremely simple to implement and the last…well we have GOT to give it a try.

7. Wear a sleep mask at night.

This was a long study with a simple takeaway. Writing in the monthly peer-reviewed journal Sleep, a research team spanning universities in the U.S., the U.K., and Italy studied 122 human subjects. They determined that those who wore sleep masks at night had better episodic memory and alertness. 

8. Improve your lighting.

This one was simple, too. Researchers at Michigan State University studied whether lab rats' memories were affected by the quality of light around them -- specifically bright lights like a sunny day, or dimmer, fluorescent lights like in a stereotypical office.

You can probably guess the results: rats in dim lights had about 30 percent less brainpower and were more likely to "perfor[m] poorly on a spatial task they had trained on previously."

⚙️ Optimization

Three Steps for Communicating Better, According to Neuroscience

If you’re a freelancer or small business owner, you HAVE to communicate well. Maybe you’re great at communicating with clients but less so amongst colleagues, employees or vendors. Maybe it’s the reverse…and maybe, just maybe…you have no idea that your communication might be lacking. It happens to the best of us! And that’s what this article discusses and gives you actual neuroscientific explanations for why these tips help you get your point across taking into consideration how our brains process information.

Below is just one tip. Even if you think you’re already succinct, check out why this is important, and hey, throw that draft email into ChatGPT to see if you can reduce your word count even further!

Be succinct

Being succinct means using as few words as possible to get your message across. One of the biggest problems with workplace communication is taking longer than necessary to convey your ideas. Whether speaking or writing, we tend to meander.

Here’s the issue: Our ability to process information is finite, and our working memory can hold only a few items at a time. When your sentences are bogged down with unnecessary verbiage, you increase the other person’s cognitive load, and your message becomes more difficult to grasp. To respect the limits of working memory, only offer essential information. It may seem counterintuitive, but using fewer words makes your ideas easier to understand.

For example, a manager discussing a new feature for a software product may say, “As the manager of this group of individuals, I’d like to take this opportunity to provide some much-needed guidance as we prepare to embark on our latest project. As you all are no doubt already aware, this quarter, we’ll be taking on the challenge of developing a new and groundbreaking feature for our software product.”

Or, the manager could say, “This quarter, we’re developing a groundbreaking new feature.”

The best way to be more succinct is to slow down. Before you speak, pause and think about what you want to say. Then, say it in as few words as necessary.

⏲️ Time Management

From Procrastination to Productivity in the New Year

The beginning of this article gives you an awesome breakdown of how rewards affect your motivation and why you might be choosing the wrong ones for the task at hand so it’s worth a full read but below we’ve chosen a couple of the author’s “Transform Procrastination Into Performance” tips that are definitely worth testing out!

Reflect on your own patterns of procrastination.

There are three types of procrastination:

• Perfectionism: “I have to get it right or I won’t do it."

• Avoidance: “I hate doing this thing, it seems impossible, so why bother trying?”

• Productive: “I’m going to do other things that need to get done and feel good but stay away from the bigger thing that I don’t like.”

Take some time to consider the ways that you procrastinate. Do any of the three types of procrastination resonate with you in particular? Does more than one? Which thoughts or beliefs come up for you when you think about why you might procrastinate? When you understand your patterns of procrastination, you’ll feel more empowered and prepared to decrease your delay tactics.

[…]

Acknowledge Your Achievements

We are looking for progress and a sense of pride in your accomplishment. Motivation benefits from encouragement, so focus on what is going well not what isn't working. Instead of saying to yourself "I'll never finish this on time" or "It won't be very good anyway," try acknowledging what you have accomplished with, “I’ve gotten started. I found a credible source for my group project, I read the article and took notes." That's forward motion regardless of whether it met your goal. You did something. Lean into your inner coach to keep trying and growing.

[…]

The ideal positivity ratio should be around three positives for every negative statement. Is this how you regularly speak to yourself? Start today by catching yourself doing something you’re proud of, notice it, and give yourself a pat on the back. This is how you pivot from disengagement to productivity.

💻 Tools & Technology

10 ChatGPT prompts to cut your work-week in half, by 2x your productivity

If you clicked above already — awesome. Also, you might have discovered it’s actually a Twitter (ugh, X) thread. But a worthwhile one! We’ve chosen 2 prompts worth checking out below but all 10 are honestly useful if you are a freelancer or small business owner. He also includes a video example of him using each prompt with an example so you can see what ChatGPT produces. Click the title to go directly to his tweet/video for that prompt or click above to view the full thread and all videos.

4. Develop persuasive sales copy

Prompt: Create compelling sales copy for my [product or service], focusing on its unique features and benefits.

5. Assist with decision-making 

Prompt: Help me weigh the pros and cons of [decision or choice], and provide a suggestion based on the analysis.

👀 Read, Watch, Listen

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

You’re Not Lazy: 3 Keys to Effortless Productivity (with Ali Abdaal) (YouTube Video - 30 min at regular speed)

Raise your hand if you became a freelancer or small business owner to drudge through your day, life, or business tasks — no one? Yeah, me neither. And yet…we occasionally procrastinate or maybe don’t use our time as productively as we could and sometimes because not every task we need to do is the most interesting or fun thing we’ve ever done. This video is a fresh perspective on how to alter the way your brain treats these tasks so that you get things done and actually enjoy it too.

🎉 Celebration Corner

Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made!

• I was able to complete the Bash quickly and it took me about 3,5 hours.

• I've made big changes to my ClickUp structure.

• I've come far in my reflection and intention-setting work with all of this.

• I was able to take it easier on Thursday and Friday and even managed to attend the Goal Planning Workshop on Friday.

• I finished all my work before the holidays. Yay!

• I had a call with an SEO client on Friday and they decided to increase the amount of content we're going to publish next year due to the good results.

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

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

• Congratulations to the winner of the 90-day planning formula - View Here

• Monday: Doers Monthly Mastermind RSVP here

• Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: Mapping

• Wednesday: Doers IC Book Club - RSVP here

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

• Accelerators: Jan 12 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.

Got a tip? Hit reply!

I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)