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Issue No. 92: The Zone of Genius: The tool that helps CEOs unlock success and happiness

5 proven ways to rewire your subconscious to be your best self

Productivity Express

Issue No. 92

The Best in Evidenced-Based Productivity

for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders

Helping You Work Smarter and Live More

The Rundown

  • Night owl behavior could hurt mental health, sleep study finds

  • 5 proven ways to rewire your subconscious to be your best self

  • The Zone of Genius: The tool that helps CEOs unlock success and happiness

  • Google AI Overviews showing less often, with less Reddit, data shows

  • Anthropic claims its latest model is best-in-class

  • Add this book to your reading list

🔥Quote/Prompt

❝

Light tomorrow with today.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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)

Small decisions lead up to big things. Sometimes those things are what we want...and sometimes they aren't.

Sometimes we might tell ourselves that not making a decision today is a lack of action.

It's not though. It's still an action, just an unintentional one. Just one that leads us down a path we don't control. 

So this week, what one thing, even tiny thing, can you do, to light tomorrow in the way you want to see it lit?

Maybe it's just getting in front of your desk at a specific time. Maybe it's just brainstorming for that email you're scared to send. Maybe it's not opening your email for an hour or two so you can focus on your most important task today first.

Did someone forward this to you?

📌 Productivity Quick Tip

📈 Performance

If you’re a night owl like me, this isn’t all bad news! When I first read this heading, I didn’t want to read the article but I sucked it up and I’m glad I did because the cutoff is 1 am!

While I know that for some of you, that still means effort to be asleep by then, but I was worried they were going to tell me a 9pm bedtime was required so I, at least, was pleasantly surprised.

Still, as with any of the science we share, it’s important to take things in but also make sure you’re listening to your own brain and body and what works best for you! Excerpt below.

It’s all about timing

When the researchers analyzed the data, they were surprised to find that aligning with one’s chronotype was not the best choice for everyone’s mental health. It was better, in fact, for night owls to lead a misaligned life.

“I thought, ‘Let’s try to disprove it, because this doesn’t make any sense,’” Zeitzer recalled. “We spent six months trying to disprove it, and we couldn’t.”

The results were clear — both morning types and evening types who went to sleep late had higher rates of mental health disorders, including depression and anxiety.

“The worst-case scenario is definitely the late-night people staying up late,” Zeitzer said. Night owls being true to their chronotype were 20% to 40% more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, compared with night owls following an early or intermediate sleep schedule.

Evening types who followed an earlier schedule fared better. Morning types who followed a later schedule suffered, but not too much.

Morning larks who rose with the sun tended to have the best mental health of all, to no one’s surprise.

The researchers found that sleep duration and consistency of sleep timing could not account for these differences in mental health.

They also tested the possibility that it was poor mental health causing people to stay up late, not the other way around. They tracked a subset of participants who had no previous diagnosis of a mental disorder for the next eight years. During that time, night owls who slept late were the most likely to develop a mental health disorder.

⚙️ Optimization

I’ll just start with this — read and bookmark this article. If you ever feel things like “everyone is succeeding except for me.” Or feel like you tend to go negative or even if you’re like me and your default is to go negative but you call it “realistic” 🙃 (hey, at least I know!) then this article is for you.

I’ve chosen No. 1 as the excerpt but frankly, this is more of a 5-step guide and less of 5 different ways so all the steps are important.

1. YOUR BRAIN HAS A NEGATIVITY BIAS

Negative emotions elicit a much larger response in the brain than positive ones, meaning that we tend to pay more attention to bad things and overlook the good ones, probably as a result of evolution. This means that sometimes, we tend to dwell on the negative and fail to see our accomplishments.

These negative biases can show up as stories we tell ourselves, like, It won’t work out for me. I’m fat and ugly. I am not unique. I am not smart enough. Or, they can show up as a behavior, for example, you always come home to recount the malevolent and unfortunate events of the day in a melodramatic and embellishing tone, making it sound as if your day was worse than what it was.

Neuroscience studies support that we tend to give more weight and attention to negative experiences and emotions and also that the brain registers negative stimuli more easily than positive events. The good news is that we can change this. Neuroplasticity is the ability of your brain to reorganize itself, create new pathways, and dismantle habits and behaviors that are no longer serving you. Rewire equips you with the tools to ditch the negative.

⏲️ Time Management

This week I am sharing a LinkedIn carrousel post because it’s simple, illustrated, and important for all of us small business owners, freelancers and founders. And the key here — just because you’re good at it…doesn’t mean you should be doing it! Let’s get into it:

💻 Tools & Technology

Anyone else tired of getting reddit results every time you google something? Good news for us! Although, to be honest, I’ve started using Bing (yes, Bing! Worth a shot if you’re doing research and don’t want a first page of nothing but forums and AI. Anyway, check the article for the full stats but here’s the most important snippet:

More findings. Here are other interesting findings from SEOClarity’s analysis:

  • AI Overviews appeared for 44% of Your Money Your Life (YMYL) keywords.

  • Local keywords don’t trigger AI Overviews (this seems consistent with recent BrightEdge findings).

  • AI Overviews are most often present in Home Warranty (25.22%), Technology (20.09%), and Social Media (23.96%) industries.

Why we care. Despite the early hiccups in these early days of AI Overviews, Google continues to evolve in the direction of AI Overviews. Google wants to become an answer engine rather than a search engine. As this shift from Classic Search to AI Search continues, some brands and businesses may be forced to adapt to a new reality with less organic traffic.

🤖 AI

If you’re sleeping on Claude.ai it might be time for a wakeup call. I’m using this tool probably close to every day at this point. And I use ChatGPT almost exclusively for very basic things and for tasks requiring accessing the internet. And now, Claude’s makers have released a new version. Excerpts of what you need to know below.

“What matters to [businesses] is whether or not AI is helping them meet their business needs, not whether or not AI is competitive on a benchmark,” Gerstenhaber told TechCrunch. “And from that perspective, I believe Claude 3.5 Sonnet is going to be a step function ahead of anything else that we have available — and also ahead of anything else in the industry.”

[…]

So what’s the significance of Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the broader context of Anthropic — and the AI ecosystem, for that matter?

Claude 3.5 Sonnet shows that incremental progress is the extent of what we can expect right now on the model front, barring a major research breakthrough. The past few months have seen flagship releases from Google (Gemini 1.5 Pro) and OpenAI (GPT-4o) that move the needle marginally in terms of benchmark and qualitative performance. But there hasn’t been a leap of matching the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4 in quite some time, owing to the rigidity of today’s model architectures and the immense compute they require to train.

👀 Read, Watch, Listen

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

Daniel H. Pink's "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing" explores the science behind timing decisions. Drawing from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink uncovers patterns that can help optimize schedules, improve student performance, and make fresh starts. He also investigates the best times for hospital visits, group singing, job changes, and marriage. Pink synthesizes cutting-edge research into a compelling narrative filled with practical insights to help readers make better timing decisions and live more fulfilling lives.

🎉 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!

  • Posted 3x on LI + some website work in the first half of the week

  • Did a big part of the bookkeeping project

  • Listened to the marketing book a bit. added new affirmations

  • I have been working out pretty consistently

  • By forcing myself to do 2 things per day, I got 6 things done, even though there were 2 days where I didn't do anything on this list.

  • I went to Berlin to attend [a conference] which was amazing!!! I lost some of my imposter syndrome (nobody has figured it out) and made many connections in the industry community.

  • As an introvert, networking in a conference setting was exhausting, but I managed to talk to at least 3 new people during every networking break.

  • Good start to the week. Finally sleeping a reasonable amount.

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

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

  • Announcement: North Star Challenge is happening now — Info here

  • Announcement: Bash Spring is happening now! Participate here 

  • Announcement: Book Club is Set RSVP here

  • Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: 4️⃣ Client Fulfillment RSVP here

  • Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: 4️⃣ Client Fulfillment RSVP here

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

  • Accelerators: July 5 is your Office Hours RSVP here

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I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)

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