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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 small business owners, freelancers & 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

• New Study Highlights Simple Hacks to Boost Brainpower and Improve Decision-Making

• Harnessing the Power of Mind Wandering for Entrepreneurs According to Psychology

• Build the Bucket — Why Your Habits Might Be Failing

• Akiflow: “The ultimate time-blocking app”

• Add this item to your shopping 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

New Study Highlights Simple Hacks to Boost Brainpower and Improve Decision-Making

This article breaks down a study that discusses how working memory works and relates it to business owners and freelancers like you. Oftentimes we don’t do what we need to do as business owners to optimize our working memory and what we end up doing instead is OVERUSING our bandwidth for things that could have easily been optimized thereby depleting our “Bandwidth Bank Account” which could and should be used for other things. Check out this tip from the article and definitely read the full article for the other great tips.

Context matters: How location and timing act as reference points to help us remember

The study also talks about how space (like remembering where something is located) and time (the sequence of events) play roles in recall and focus.

The mind uses location and time as a scaffolding or landmark on which to anchor memory contents. We create a ‘spatial map’ in our minds and use locations of things we see relative to the environment or relative to ourselves to help us remember. 

You know how when you try to recall something someone said, you close your eyes and reimagine the situation? Where you were talking, where was this person relative to you, what time of day it was? These are the kinds of anchors and reference points that help us retrieve information.

Time as a reference also helps us remember and focus better apparently, as seen in the results of this study. Participants were asked to detect changes in a sequence of objects that were presented with a particular spatial and timing configuration. During test conditions, working memory performance was poorer when the space and time information were removed. 

Action Plan: Be more deliberate about using spatial and temporal references to help with recall and organizing information in working memory. Sometimes, this means simply being more mindful of the context in which new information is presented. Like when meeting new people, the order in which they introduce themselves and their relative positions to each other can help you remember their names more easily.

Not everything we need to remember is a visual input though, for example, a series of words or numbers. Interestingly, a study has found that our brain tends to create a mental map of these non-visual inputs by default, and when we try to recall them, the brain activity is similar to looking at a horizontal array of objects (first items in the sequence on the left, last items at the right). 

We can leverage this mental map tendency to organize and recall things more easily by being more intentional about that mental map. Combined with a predictive cue to remember an upcoming nonvisual input (like someone dictating a phone number), you can create a visual representation of the sequence of numbers in your mind that you can more easily recall. 

Taking down notes can also create a spatial frame of reference for complex ideas that do not lend themselves easily to visual mapping. Having the ability to associate certain ideas with how and where they are written on the page of your notebook helps with better recall, too.

⚙️ Optimization

Harnessing the Power of Mind Wandering for Entrepreneurs According to Psychology

Mind wandering is often seen as something you should generally avoid. You might frequently scream at your brain, “Stop it! Focus!” But did you know that while having your mind wander in the middle of high-bandwidth tasks might not be ideal, there are a lot of times that mind wandering can actually optimize your business and your productivity?

Below is one awesome way mind wandering is a huge benefit but read the article for several more.

Finding Meaning:

Use daydreaming to reflect on past experiences and imagine future events, giving your experiences a sense of purpose and personal significance. Integrate your experiences into a meaningful narrative to enhance your well-being and fulfillment.

You could integrate this reflection and imagination of the future into a narrative that gives your work a sense of purpose or help you determine the North Star of your business. This can enhance motivation and fulfillment, driving you to work harder and achieve your business goals. 

And like most things, mind wandering comes with downsides too. Here’s one way to minimize them but check out the article for other strategies too.

Meta-Awareness:

Regularly check in on your thoughts and notice when your mind starts to wander. Pay attention to whether you are drifting away from the task at hand. Mindfulness training can help you develop the habit of noticing when your mind wanders.

You might set reminders on your phone or computer to check in on your thoughts throughout the day, noticing when your mind starts to wander from the task at hand. This could help you bring your focus back to your work when necessary, improving your productivity.

⏲️ Time Management

Build the Bucket — Why Your Habits Might Be Failing

This has been on our list to write a full article about but it’s too important to wait so we’re just throwing into the newsletter for you awesome people who get frustrated when your new habits don’t stick OR if you’re the kind of person who goes from time blocking nothing to …”I’ll time blocking alllll the things”. Not to worry — you’re pretty normal!

If you tend to have issues with habits (basically anything you want to repeat on a regular basis from time blocking your day to building an SOP that your company follows or even going to the gym regularly), there’s a good chance you are not building the bucket BEFORE you optimize what is in the bucket.

What do we mean by this? Let’s say you want to work on your business for at least one hour every week. If you haven’t already been doing this, then setting aside an hour might feel really difficult. So perhaps you set aside 25 min instead. BUT most people ALSO try to optimize what happens in those 25 minutes. And the bandwidth required to build the bucket (25 min bucket) AND optimize what’s done often causes the habit to fail. Instead, set aside 25 min even if that means you just spend time freewriting about your business with no real goal in mind. Once setting aside the 25 min seems effortless, you can either add to the time (move to one hour) OR you can optimize what happens during the 25 minutes…but not both. Test this out and see how it works for you.

If you’re a visual person, this Instagram post is a great way to visualize the difference.

💻 Tools & Technology

Akiflow: “The ultimate time-blocking app”

Full disclosure, we came cross this recently and have not tested it…BUT for those who aren’t in love with ClickUp and want something closer to Sunsama but with a different twist, it’s worth checking out. It has the ability to combine multiple apps in one. Definitely worth a look! You can try the product for free and then you have the option of $19/month (billed yearly) or $34/month (billed monthly). ([This is not sponsored, just a cool find!)

👀 Read, Watch, Listen

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

BOOX Tablet Note Air 3 C E Ink Tablet (Product)

👋 OK — Jenae, here. I’m a little obsessed so this is reappearing. Here’s why though: I recently was asked an Office Hours question about how I’m using this product because this person had one but wasn’t integrating it into her workflow.

So here’s my short answer: for any low-use or single-use product (this one is low-use, a Kindle Paperwhite would be single-use…reading) it’s important to have an idea of how you will use it before you buy it. For me, this product is primarily for my strategy and work on business sessions. I have a different room I go to with it for these sessions and a different setup. This is all to trigger my brain faster to go into deep work strategy mode. If you’re skeptical, this is the same triggering process as to why we tend to eat at similar times (our body is suddenly hungry at the time we normally eat) or work out at similar times. Once a habit is built, the triggers (even physically being in the gym) happen on their own.

So, this past week I worked on my computer, then stepped away for strategy time with my Boox. Here’s the 💣 though: I went back to work at the computer and the screen seemed SO bright and aggressive to my eyes. I admit was in DEEP focus on the Boox, but this was pretty eye-opening (see what I did there? 😜) in terms of the difference in what is happening to your eyes and brain as you look at this product vs. an LCD screen. If you want to really nerd out with me, I found this article by McGill University Office for Science and Society breaking down how the technology works on e-ink tablets. Enjoy! And let me know if you get one or have one and how you use it! (Just hit reply to this newsletter!)

🎉 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!

• Accomplished writing for LI on Monday, some networking during an event in my Coworking Space, and maybe new business opportunities [will come] from that.

• I have a lot of Billable coming in currently and managed to finish a 15k translation job as well as a few smaller jobs. Although this has taken most of my energy this week, I was still able to keep with new job requests and communicate with clients accordingly. I think I wouldn't have been able to do that a while ago.

• I managed to stick with the overall structure and made progress on different tasks/WOB/personal issues

• Managed to do my morning gym every morning!🏆

• I got the things I was looking forward to done. […] Also, I started using the board again (YAY!). It feels good to be back. Putting three things to look forward to made me check the board and putting different things rather than the same thing to "check off" every day made it more of a novelty.

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

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

• THIS Monday: Doers Monthly Mastermind RSVP here

• Announcement: Book Club is Set RSVP here

• Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: [Customer Fulfillment] RSVP here

• Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: [Customer Fulfillment] RSVP here

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

• Accelerators: February 16 is your Office Hours RSVP here

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I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)