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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 evidence-based productivity for freelancers, small business owners & founders to help you work smarter and live more.

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

-Jenae :)

The Rundown

• Quick Tip: Super Important Tip for Freelancers & Small Business Owners

• The Effective and Simple Post-It Note for Productivity

• How to Actually Feel Fully Recharged.

• How To Manage Your Time - The 60% Calendar System

• Music’s Healing Notes: Traits Trump Genre for Stress Relief

• Add This Tool to Your Toolbox!

• Congratulations on your wins this week -- check 'em out!

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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 Effective and Simple Post-It Note for Productivity

This is really similar to the “white paper method” that many of you who follow us know already. I talk about it a lot in my membership as a strategy to use to help you focus especially when you are having difficulty focusing. It involves having a sheet a paper with only 1 thing written on it — the thing you should be doing right now, until you’re done, when you throw it away and get a new one with only one thing on it.

Here’s another take on that. From the article:

The small size of the standard 3” by 3” Post-it note, coupled with its limited real estate, forces the user to contain the number of words scrawled on the pad. Suddenly, I need to prioritize the undertakings.

I drew a small dot less than 1/8 of an inch in diameter and wrote the first job. I ended up with six tasks, including those completed very quickly and those that truly required breaking down into action steps. […]

Writing a list and crossing items

This can give the user a sense of accomplishment and a small dose of endorphin.

Endorphin is the hormone released when a human engages in activities that lead to success. The body also releases endorphins with physical activity. It's interesting to compare list-making and crossing out written words with running, fast walking, and trampoline bouncing.

⚙️ Optimization

How to actually feel fully recharged.

7 different (and not-so-obvious) types of rest.

This is a little different as it is a LinkedIn carousel but absolutely worth the flip-through.

⏲️ Time Management

How To Manage Your Time - The 60% Calendar System (Video)

This video is really helpful in figuring out where you are in your productivity journey including feeling like you don’t need productivity because you’re not all that busy anyway all the way to feeling totally overwhelmed. I love her take on the “tiers” and matching your strategies to where you are.

💻 Tools & Technology

Music’s Healing Notes: Traits Trump Genre for Stress Relief

I know what you're thinking, “ why is this in the tools and Technology section?” But stay with me! In this article, music is reviewed as, well, a tool for handling stress.

Also, if you’re not a fan of classical music, there’s some great news for you. Getting some playlists together following the results of this study can help you as a business owner or freelancer in a lot of ways so check out their ways of leveraging this readily accessible tool — music!

Summary: Specific characteristics of music, rather than genre, play a crucial role in stress recovery. The research, involving 470 participants, identified that stress-relieving songs often share common features, regardless of their musical style.

The study demonstrates that people who listened to music with certain traits recovered faster from stress compared to those who listened to random musical notes. This research highlights the importance of focusing on audio characteristics over genres in music therapy.

👀 Recommendations

This week’s awesome recommendation is a product we’re loving!

BOOX Tablet Note Air 3 C E Ink Tablet 10.3 ePaper 4G 64G Paper Tablet (Amazon)

This is a cross between a Remarkable and a tablet without doing too much (at that point it’s really just an iPad, right?). So far we’re loving it.

BUT we thought you might have some questions about why even buy something like this. Why not buy an iPad or just a small computer?

So here are two articles that are worth reading to think about your own use of products like this EInk Tablet.

Harvard Study Shows E Ink’s ePaper Is Up to Three Times Healthier for Your Eyes Than LCD Screens

From the article:

The average adult spends about 13 hours a day behind a screen, according to Nielsen. All of this screen time comes with a price: high-energy blue light, found in standard liquid crystal displays (LCD) and LED screens, is potentially harmful when emitted into the eyes for hours at a time. Blue light poses a hazard to retinal cells in the eye, and exposure to blue light near bedtime reduces levels of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, disrupting the circadian rhythm and restorative sleep.

Symptoms from excessive screen time cost the U.S. $73 billion a year, study finds

From the article:

As a result, symptoms of “excessive screen time,” or more than seven hours of screen time a day, are costing the U.S. $73 billion per year, the report said. The figure was determined by analyzing the direct financial costs incurred by health systems, the symptoms’ effect on productivity at work and their perceived effect on an individual’s well-being.

Keep in mind that “screen time” means LCD screens and does not include reading on Eink or looking at Eink!

🎉 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!

As a reminder, focusing on your small wins each week actually affects the way your brain works and increases your likelihood to win in the future (small AND big). Need some inspiration? Here are wins from our Doers!

• New morning routine is lush (🇬🇧), I enjoyed it!

• Today I surprised a new client by delivering work rather quickly, and was able to agree with an existing client that I'd take on her next project. […] I’m hopeful this is a good start to my year.

• My third email newsletter goes out tomorrow morning and I've really been enjoying the process of writing it. It's my favourite form of content creation so far, even more fun than LinkedIn and blogging. I'm so glad I stopped procrastinating about it and made it my goal for last quarter to set up and launch my newsletter.

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

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

• Announcement: Book Club is Set RSVP here

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

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

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

• Accelerators: February 2 is your Office Hours RSVP here

• Monday Feb. 16: Doers Monthly Mastermind RSVP here

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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 :)