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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

• Productivity Quick Tip: 3 ClickUp Integrations You Need to Know

• Distracted? Turn Your Screen Time into Mindfulness Time

• Our Brains Are “Programmed” To Learn More From People We Like

• How “Vacation Mode” Unlocks Your Prioritization Ninja (Hint: it’s not about self-care)

• 📅 FREE Live Webinar: The Perfect Week Blueprint

• Add this podcast to your list

Elevate Your Reading in 2024: Explore More with Shortform

Facing a backlog in your reading queue? Difficulty remembering key takeaways from books? Annoyed by the fluff in many books? Shortform is the breakthrough you need. Simple summaries are old news – Shortform delivers:

• Detailed summaries of each chapter

• Shortform’s unique insights and analysis

• Connections to other literary works and themes

• Interactive exercises for improved retention

• Audiobook versions for learning anywhere

With Shortform, quickly grasp the essentials of bestsellers like “Atomic Habits” and “Influencer,” spanning topics from Self-improvement to Parenting. 

Plus, the Shortform AI extension allows you to efficiently summarize and contextualize internet content (like that white paper that should have been a blog post!), included free with your subscription. 

Claim your free trial and a 20% discount on the annual plan to start absorbing more knowledge faster. 🚀

🔥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

Distracted? Turn Your Screen Time into Mindfulness Time

This is a great article for those of us who never seem to have time to start or keep up any kind of mindfulness or meditation practice. The first two steps are important but we felt like step 3 shows the value of this article best so it’s below for you to show you how short and sweet this method can be.

3. Try a Short Street Meditation

Mindful screen time is a powerful practice, but if you’re able to resist the seductive urge to pick up your phone, there’s an even more interesting option available: street meditation.

This practice isn’t like other formal styles of meditation. In the settings of real life, formal meditation is usually a non-starter. You can’t just drop down into a cross-legged seated position and close your eyes at the grocery store or in the airport security line. 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t meditate.

Enter street meditation. This is a different, more informal, way of practicing mindfulness. In this practice, you don’t have to sit in a special way or change the position of your body, nor do you have to close your eyes. All you have to do is bring your attention to some quality of the present moment. 

This could be sounds. In the chaotic and wild environments of modern life – train stations, shopping malls, and busy street corners – sounds can become a captivating object of your attention. Listen to this orchestra of sound. Turn sound into your street meditation.

Your object of attention could also be the sensations in your body.  Scan through your body and notice the predominant sensations (either pleasurable or uncomfortable). Then watch as these sensations twist, twirl, and change with each passing moment.

Your object of attention could even be the visual field. See the bus stop, the dry cleaners, or the fabric store as though you were gazing at the ocean or taking in the view from the top of a mountain. See the rushed and messy world in panoramic awareness.

This practice of street meditation has two amazing benefits. The first is that it helps us integrate more moments of mindfulness into the chaos that is modern life. The second is that it interrupts the momentum of distraction. It creates a space where we have the freedom to turn our attention from all those podcasts, TikTok posts, newsfeeds, and text messages to what’s happening right here, right now.

⚙️ Optimization

Our Brains Are “Programmed” To Learn More From People We Like

Like many things about our brains, the unconscious “hacks” serve us well in a variety of human circumstances but the modern world doesn’t always match up well. In this article, they talk about why this ‘programming’ is the case and when we use it on a regular basis (and how it assists us and saves us lots of brain energy). It also explores how we might be retaining information we don’t necessarily want to and losing information we want to retain. This is really important for us as business owners because we need to make decisions quickly and put together information accurately. The article is a quick read and we recommend it so you can keep an eye out for this programming in your life and business.

Below is a quick excerpt from the article to give you an idea of how this mechanism works in a positive way — check the article for how it might be pulling you in one direction or another without your being aware of it.

Inês Bramão, associate professor of psychology at Lund University, provides an example of memory integration: Say you're walking in a park. You see a man with a dog. A few hours later, you see the dog in the city with a woman. Your brain quickly makes the connection that the man and woman are a couple even though you have never seen them together.

“Making such inferences is adaptive and helpful. But of course, there's a risk that our brain draws incorrect conclusions or remembers selectively”, says Inês Bramão.

⏲️ Time Management

📅 FREE Live Webinar: The Perfect Week Blueprint: Your Perfect Week...Done.

Register free here

We are so excited to present this brand new free webinar by Evidence-Based Productivity & Systems Strategist Jenae Spry.

In 1-hour you will discover how to":

✅ Create time without losing joy...or sleep

✅ Select YOUR Perfect Week Blueprint

✅ Finally have FULL CONTROL over your time

How “Vacation Mode” Unlocks Your Prioritization Ninja (Hint: it’s not about self-care)

Ever notice that when you are going on vacation your brain kicks into automatic “to be done before vacation” vs “to be done after vacation” triaging mode? It turns out you can use this automation at any time if you follow the steps in the article.

Testing this method will also help you get comfortable taking an extra long vacation (or for some of you, a vacation at all!). Below is an excerpt of step 1. 

First, you need a fake vacation.

Your fake vacation can be simply ending work at 6 pm or it can be the weekend as a few examples. If you are someone who tends to allow work to bleed into every aspect of your life going to dinner with friends and returning home to keep working, then you may have to kickstart this with a REAL vacation.

Your real vacation can even be a staycation, but it sometimes helps people for it to be irregular to create a mental pattern interrupt (after all, 6 pm comes daily and weekends come like clockwork every week). So, you might need to take a Monday and Tuesday off or Monday and Wednesday, etc. 

💻 Tools & Technology

Reclaim.ai

This week we’re hoping straight to a tool that we use every day and couldn’t live without. Here is a list (disclaimer: made by reclaim) comparing it to its biggest rival, Motion.

We signed up for both motion and reclaim to test them and reclaim ran away with the trophy. There were some seemingly minor advantages that proved themselves absolutely crucial. One of those was “travel time”. This might seem minor but it adds travel time for things like airport trips vs local trips. If you are someone who works from home so your trips aren’t frequent, it is easy to miscalculate the travel time when you do need to travel and likewise if you are someone who frequently is off to this location and that one, this feature can automate a lot of your day so you’re never late.

There are plenty of other advantages but Reclaim offers a free trial so you can test it out and see if it works for your workflow. We also integrate it with ClickUp and Google Calendar meaning tasks are sent from ClickUp through reclaim which chooses a specific time for the task based on AI and rules you set up. Hit reply and let us know what you think!

👀 Read, Watch, Listen

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

Acquired (Podcast)

Normally we recommend a specific podcast episode but if you’re a small business owner, freelancer or founder, you’ve got to check this whole podcast out. It’s long-form style but they do deep dives into all kinds of businesses and truly help you understand that entire industry even if you have no knowledge of it at all. Full disclosure, we got into it listening to the “business of Taylor Swift” episode but particularly relevant now is an episode they put out in 2022 discussing the chip manufacturer NVIDIA, which now that AI has proven itself, is truly off to the races.

🎉 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!

• Managed to do my MVP morning gym every morning

• Moved things forward in my personal sphere without interfering too much with work slots

• Progress on MIG

• I had a huge Aha moment during Office Hours.

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

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

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

• Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: Theme: 5️⃣ Finances RSVP here

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

• Wednesday: Book Club RSVP here

• Accelerators: March 1 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 :)

Issue No. 57L: