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 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

• A busy 83-year-old doctor who does triathlons shares his 'square method' for maintaining a work-life balance

• Think Smarter, Not Harder: How to Implement Lessons Learned For Business Growth According to Neuroscience

• My approach to multi-scale planning

• New Gmail Security Rules—You Have 14 Days To Comply, Google Says

• Free Webinar Replay: The Perfect Week Blueprint - Expires Sunday night

• Add this book to your reading 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

👉A busy 83-year-old doctor who does triathlons shares his 'square method' for maintaining a work-life balance

This is a very short article so if you hate clicking just to find out you’re in for a novel, this is for you. Here’s an excerpt that explains the method but the whole article is less than a min read.

So check it out here!

Dr. Maroon's square method for maintaining balance

First, he writes each of his four priorities — work, family and friends, exercise, and spirituality — at north, east, south, and west positions on a piece of paper.

Then, he draws a line for each priority to represent how much time he spends on each, as if each was the side of a quadrilateral. The aim is to draw a perfect square, with all four sides the same length.

But, chances are, the shape won't be a square. You might draw a flat line if you spend all your time working, or you might have a three-sided shape if you've never thought about building spirituality — whether religion or connecting to nature — into your life.

⚙️ Optimization

👉Think Smarter, Not Harder: How to Implement Lessons Learned For Business Growth According to Neuroscience

This new study explains why we might change the way we do business by listening to the vocal minority and gives some tips to see if we are suffering from noise in data or efficient learning.

Check out the full breakdown here.

BUT sometimes…more training isn’t always better: How noise in data can hinder learning

We probably all have had the experience of obsessing over every detail of an email before sending it out, ‘perfecting’ everything before a product launch, or testing an endless list of software before choosing what social media scheduler to use. We tend to take comfort in believing that more practice and trials lead to better results.

But this study says otherwise. There is a limit to how much practice, experience, and training is optimal for learning. The researchers found that they had to stop feeding training data to the neural network at some point or else additional training data just made its internal model’s predictions less accurate. (What statisticians call ‘overfitting data’.) In the same way, if we go overboard with practice, our brain will keep trying to find patterns and relationships, even when there aren’t any!  

For example, you spend so many hours perfecting your social media post and it so happens that you are getting better engagement. Because you have so many repeated experiences of this pattern, you might think there is a causal relationship between hours spent perfecting punctuation, grammar, and formatting and the amount of audience engagement. When in reality, it is your new content and not the new look and formatting that is drawing your audiences in.

 🚀FREE Webinar Replay: The Perfect Week Blueprint: Your Perfect Week...Done. Expires Sunday night.

Register free here

Ever worked EXTREMELY hard on your productivity, nail it, and then have it all fall apart? There’s a reason for that: our “perfect week” changes.

In this free webinar, you’ll select the right blueprint for you, and implement it.

That means no matter where you are in your productivity journey (from hot mess to peak productivity performer), you’ll get the blueprint for YOU, and experience:

🧘‍♀️ Less stress. No more “omg what did I forget?!”

🔍 More focus. Work on the right things at the right time.

💪 More control. YOU will be in the driver’s seat of your time and energy — not your clients, family, or friends.

The webinar replay is available until Sunday night!

⏲️ Time Management

👉My approach to multi-scale planning

If you’re pretty far along in your productivity journey or just looking for some extra optimization, this breakdown by the author is interesting and definitely has some good takeaways including how he uses which apps and how the think about their priorities.

Check it out here.

Supporting behaviours

The approach to multi-scale planning that I just described, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I’ve been able to follow it religiously enough, thanks to some other behaviours I practise. You may find these practices useful too.

1. Nothing sits in my head. Ever. Whether it’s a task that my colleagues want me to do, whether it’s a blog post idea I have for this website or whether it’s an errand I must run for my parents, I keep nothing in my head. It all goes into a task management system. I use an app called Nirvana for my ad hoc commitments, though there are better ones like Things, Todoist or OmniFocus. I put my choice of the app down to inertia. I have no good reason to change just yet. My project and team commitments usually sit on our team’s task boards, which we maintain in Trello. I organise my notes, snips, links, files and other personal knowledge resources in Notion. These systems help me avoid stress because I’m not anxious that I may have forgotten something. If it’s important and time-sensitive, each of these systems will give me an alert, at a time that I configure for it. 

💻 Tools & Technology

👉New Gmail Security Rules—You Have 14 Days To Comply, Google Says

This is a VERY easy way to ensure you aren’t hit with this email update. If you’ve been waiting until the last minute — it’s here. If you have a newsletter or send marketing blasts, please, please don’t get hit by this! Follow the directions and set your email sending up for success!

If, on the other hand, you’re looking forward to a spam-free inbox… Bad news — as with many well-intentioned protections, this one is already being circumvented by unscrupulous actors and may, instead, have a bigger impact on small business owners and freelancers just trying to reach their audience.

Get the full info here.

👀 Read, Watch, Listen

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

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (Mark Manson Collection Book 1) (Book)

In "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck," Mark Manson challenges the notion that positive thinking is the key to happiness. He argues that accepting life's challenges and limitations is essential for personal growth. Manson encourages readers to confront their fears and flaws, emphasizing that true fulfillment comes from focusing on what truly matters. With a blend of humor, profanity, and thought-provoking insights, the book aims to help readers lead more grounded and content lives by embracing life's difficulties and prioritizing their values. Manson's approach is a refreshing departure from the often sugar-coated self-help genre.

🎉 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!

• From a member having a hard time—YES!: I can be happy w/ what I did, given the circumstances.

• I feel more stable in my mind because of the confidence work.

• I managed to do a task most days. It was less overwhelming to be able to choose from a list each day. A lot of these are things I was procrastinating about, so I'm happy with my progress.

• I'm caught up with work. Yay! So no weekend work for me.

• Exercise is going great.

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

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

• Doers Mastermind FIRST Monday: Dors mastermind will be April 1 RSVP here

• Reminder: Wonky Week(s) continue: 9 am PT = 4pm London & 5PM Europe

• THIS MONDAY: 90-day Planning Formula Kicks off RSVP here

• Announcement: Book Club is Set RSVP here

• Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: 2️⃣ Process & Productivity RSVP here

• Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: 2️⃣ Process & Productivity RSVP here

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

• Accelerators: March 29 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.

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I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)