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weekly-realizations

The freedom of routines

During the last week, I was working a lot on creating better systems for myself. It is a really interesting time for me, as I want ...

Hey lovely friends,

During the last week, I was working a lot on creating better systems for myself. It is a really interesting time for me, as I want to expand my efforts into more knowledge areas and different topics. However, when it came to routines I got conflicted.

Do routines actually give us more freedom?

Last few years, I tried all different ways to stay productive and do the things that I love. And sometimes it was really hard to stay on track. There were times when I would avoid creating routines for myself as I thought it didn’t help my creativity to grow.

I was wrong as I’ve realized that the easiest way to fostering my creativity is through routines.

Let me explain, when I’m involved in different teams with lots of things to work on it, is kind of easy to clash ideas or lose track of our progress. But once you have routines in place about what to do and when, the time that you are into one specific task might become your freedom-time with some practice.

What I mean is that, after I allowed myself every day for 1 hour to express my creativity as part of my routine, I could get used to generate ideas in that time. I knew that that time was reserved for my mind to review my thoughts and combine them with others. Related to one of the principles of Personal knowledge management.

But not only that, with many systems in place with daily activities that I have to repeat, I don’t have to keep my activities in my memory and thus, I can use my creativity in my free time as there are fewer things that I keep in my head. Over time, this became another habit where I would just create any idea about business/videos/articles or so, and instead of keeping them in my mind (and probably later forget them), I would use my preferred note-taking app and save that idea to review later.

As Ali Abdaal mentioned in his video about Creating a Second Brain: our brain is to create ideas, not to store them. And I cannot agree more with that statement.

So, if you believe that setting routines or habits for yourself might reduce your creativity, I invite you to give it a try to switching to this mindset to use habits as ways to free your mind from tasks/ideas/things to decide and instead use your free time for creating whatever you want. Like art, writing, music, or simply reflections.

Hope you have a wonderful week,

John

Weekly realizations

Rejections - In this tweet from @StoneAtWine, he reflects over been rejected by YC. It made me think about the feeling we get when experiencing the rejection of an opportunity we consider valuable. Sometimes we might think that when we are rejected is because our idea/project is not good enough overall but I believe that there are many other factors that have an important role here. From being good at pitching our ideas to having the right timing. In the end, this should allow us to reflect on what could be the reason for the rejection and don’t take it personally.

Improving over time - When we create content of any type, I think is easy not to value our progress. I feel that we lose track of our growth as we are constantly trying things to improve the outcomes. However, if we stop ourselves for a day to think about what we did right, it might help us to understand what we actually improved and how we can change what we haven’t.

Highlight of the week

There are some cool projects upcoming but this week I want to focus on a new tool I found to replace Goodreads. It is called Readng and you can create your account here: https://beta.readng.co/