Unmistakable Creative Presents:

Optimizing Productivity & Creativity Do More Of What Matters, In Higher Quality & Less Time

Introduction

Everyone loves the idea of being creative. "Creative" - even the word is

filled with possibility and wonder. After all, who doesn’t want to

synthesize their thoughts, ideas, and emotions into something they

can share with the world? The truth is that high quality work comes

from volume. It takes practice and a large body of work. To do

unmistakable work, to tap into your highest potential, you need

productivity.

In this manual, you'll find my best ideas on being productive and doing

work you can be proud of. You'll find it all laid out in a

choose-your-own-adventure manner. I've kept it short so you can

spend less time consuming, and more time creating (something we'll

be touching on shortly).

Use it. Test things out. Come to your own conclusions. Share your

ideas. But most importantly, enjoy the journey.

Start Your Day With Your Most Important Work

The first hour of the day is precious and should be treated

accordingly. It’s when our minds are like sponges and we’re most

creative. The first hour can determine what your entire day will be like.

You can turn off your distractions and start it on a high note. Or you

can start it in an anxiety ridden, distraction driven frenzy. Every day,

the first hour will set the tone for the rest of your day. This means

figuring out what your highest value activities are.

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Filter High Value vs. Low Value Activities

Anything that falls into the category of deep work is a high-value

activity.

● As an author, the two highest value activities that I can spend

my time on each day are reading books and writing.

● If you’re a visual artist that could be mean you spend time in a

studio drawing, sketching or painting.

● If you’re a computer programmer or web designer, that could

mean writing code for the app or website you’re building.

High-value activities don’t just have to be work related.

Exercise is an incredibly high-value activity that has an impact on your

energy and creativity throughout the day. Some of my best writing

days have been the ones on which I’ve spent 4 hours surfing.

If you spend the first hour of your day on high-value activities,

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eventually you’ll find yourself wanting to spend the second, third, and

fourth hour of the day on such activities. You’ll get more done in less

time. And eventually, you’ll find yourself spending the entire day

exactly on your terms- doing high quality work, or out enjoying your

life.

Many entrepreneurs and writers start their companies and write their

books while working 9 to 5. It’s no surprise that waking up at 4 or 5 AM

is so common among them. Think about it- if you work from 5AM to

7AM on your most important work, you can create magic in the course

of a year- over 600 hours of deep focused work.

Another option is doing your work in the evening, after work

obligations. The problem with this is often, by the end of the day,

you’re tired- you lack the energy or focus to do your best work. This

will vary from person to person, but carve out 2-3 hours of

uninterrupted time. That’s when you focus on the one thing, and go

deep (covered later).

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Eliminate & Minimize Low Value Activities

Eliminate ALL Distractions. Ruthlessly.

If you’ve ever spent an entire day checking email and logging into

Facebook, you know that you get to the end of it and feel like shit.

You’re exhausted, your brain is fried, and you feel like you’ve done a

lot, but accomplished absolutely nothing.

It's like treading water- you're going to be exhausted, but you didn't

get any closer to where you're trying to swim. It's also a very effective

way to ensure you burn out and drown.

There was a day in 2014 when I checked email using my phone over

100 times, waiting for World War 3 to start. The world didn’t end. That

day I decided to delete email from my phone and realized that nobody

ever changed the world by checking email. I decided to take a ruthless

approach to minimizing my low value activities.

● no more mindless scrolling on the phone

● no more 3 hour long Costco shopping trips

● no more newspapers

● no more commuting

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These things sucked up massive amounts of precious time, so I went

about eliminating as much as I could. Some took longer to implement,

but I went for the low hanging fruit. From that simplicity came massive

leverage - precious time and clarity to focus on my most important

work.

“For success in life, turn things off.”

For the most part, we do the exact opposite. From the moment we

wake up, we turn things on.

We turn on the lights in our rooms, our bathrooms, and our houses.

We turn on our phones, launch some apps, and “check in”

We turn on our computers.

And the endless stream of notifications, dings, pops, and buzzes

begins. The sensory overload is turning our lives into the equivalent of

being in a Las Vegas Casino. If you’ve ever been in Vegas for more

than 2 nights, you’ve experienced the feeling of “I can’t wait to get the

hell out of here.”

We spend all day turning things on. But if we can get in the practice of

turning things off, we’ll see become more prolific, more productive

and more peaceful.

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So what can we turn off?

Notifications

I have nearly all notifications turned off with the exception of those

from my personal facebook feed. Since I don’t have any social apps on

my phone, I don’t get those notifications. Anytime a new app gives me

the option to receive notifications I choose the “don’t allow option.”

Joel Gascoigne has even talked about turning off notifications and he

runs Buffer. So if the guy who is the CEO of a platform designed to

help manage social media turns off notifications, it’s a pretty safe bet

to say most of us could manage with notifications turned off.

Every notification provides you with a surge of dopamine. Because

dopamine is incredibly addictive, this keeps you “checking in” to all

sorts of things all day long.

If you turn off notifications, you’ll find that your use of social media is

more deliberate, more proactive, and less reactive.

Email

With few exceptions, most people don’t need to be able to respond to

emails the moment they are received. But many people act as if they

do. It’s unlikely the fate of the free world is dependent on your

response to someone else’s email.

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-James Clear doesn’t check email before 11am.

-Cal Newport is intentionally hard to reach.

Both of them have built significant bodies of work. I’m finding that I

can usually get away with checking email about twice a day. On the

days that check it more than that, my productivity plummets. So try

turning it off for a few hours each day and see what happens.

Phones

One of the best ways to optimize your life for deep work is to dumb

down your phone in the way that Jake Knapp suggests.

Delete all the social media apps.

Disable safari and the ability to browse.

Don’t answer calls from unrecognized numbers.

Make your home screen minimal (get rid of all the distracting stuff

from your home screen).

Put the phone in do not disturb mode for most of the day.

At minimum, just turn off the phone for a few hours.

Laptops

It might seem far-fetched that we can do anything without our

laptops. But there’s tremendous power to doing things analog in an

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increasingly digital world.

I start almost all of my writing in a Moleskine notebook.

Ryan Holiday’s note card system which he uses to research and write

books is all analog.

According to Brian Scudamore, successful people spend about 10

hours a week just thinking.

Some of the best industrial designers (i.e. people at Apple) in the

world work for days on end without turning on a computer. The

people who design computers work without turning on a

computer. Food for thought.

By starting our days with our laptops off and turning off our laptops in

the middle of the day, we increase the activation energy required to

give into sources of distraction. Thus, we’re more likely to do

something like read a book, or write in a journal.

Turning Off Noise/Other People

Sometimes we have to turn off the world around us:

Coworkers

Customers at Starbucks

Roommates

Talking Heads on TV

One of the best investments I have made in my productivity this last

year was a pair of beats headphones and a subscription to focus@will.

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Both have been instrumental in my ability to tune out the world

around me and focus.And as an added bonus the headphones have

somehow caused me to workout on a regular basis.

Filtering people is often also filtering negativity. Negativity is draining,

taxing, and incredibly insidious. Just as positive people help bring you

up to new heights, the negative and perpetually unhappy will drag you

down with them.

By turning things off, you’ll find flow, do more deep work, and be

more prolific, more productive, and happier.

Think this is unreasonable? Let me ask you this- do you consistently

finish something awesome by noon?

Each day, do you get the hard, most pressing things done first? Often

these are the things we want to avoid, the things we resist the most.

If not, you're sabotaging yourself. Being productive & doing great work

makes you remarkable. And being remarkable comes at the cost of

being perpetually distracted. Without a speck of doubt though, it’s a

very small price to pay.

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Whatever You're Working On, GO DEEP.

“Human beings, it seems are at their best when immersed deeply in

something challenging”- Cal Newport

It’s no secret that I’m a massive fan of Cal Newport. He’s the guy who

is hard to get a hold of on purpose. No one can get in touch. He never

has his phone on him. It’s no coincidence that he’s been so prolific in

his academic and writing career. The more I spend my time immersed

in deep work, the more I’m realizing why it’s so fulfilling.

Deep Work Leads to Tangible Results

“If you’re one of the few to cultivate a deep work ability, which

means training yourself to do it, and building schedules that protects

and makes time for it, you’re going to thrive. You’re really going to

thrive in our current economy. You’re going to be very successful.

Your life is going to be much more meaningful. You’re going to enjoy

your work much more.”— Cal Newport

If you look at people who have cultivated a deep work habit, you’ll

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notice that they have a combination of high volume and high-value

output.

● Cal Newport wrote a manuscript and 5 peer-reviewed journals in

a year because of his deep work habits.

● Adam Grant wrote 2 books and has become the youngest

tenured professor at Wharton because of his deep work skills.

● Ryan Holiday has written 3 books in 3 years because of his deep

work skills.

● I completed a 45,000-word manuscript in 6 months, and only

missed one deadline, which I attribute entirely to deep work.

That was in addition to producing more than 100 episodes of the

Unmistakable Creative, writing dozens of articles on Medium,

and a few other creative projects.

It’s hard to argue with the fact that deep work produces tangible

results in our lives.

Deep Work isn’t Dopamine-Driven

“Texting, e-mail and the number of likes we collect, the ding, the

buzz, and or the flash of our phones that tell us “You’ve got mail,”

feels amazing. As it should. We have associated the dopamine

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releasing feel of “ooh something for me” with getting a text or email

or the like.” — Simon Sinek

For every website, you visit that has notifications built into it, you’re

getting surges of dopamine. Every like, every message, every page

view, every email and every comment causes a surge in dopamine.

According to Simon Sinek’s research, the fulfillment from dopamine is

highly addictive, but doesn’t last.

This is why we start with eliminating all distractions - RUTHLESSLY.

Dopamine is addictive. Our brains train themselves to check

notifications on the phone every 12 minutes. Our attention spans are

down from 20 seconds to 9- that of a goldfish. Whatever you’re

working on, expect it to NOT be rewarding all the time. Just put the

time in and it will become rewarding. Don’t despair though- there is

good news.

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Deep Work Creates a Lasting Sense of Fulfillment

Deep work, on the other hand, isn’t dopamine-driven at all. Sure, deep

work can suck when you start. What’s amazing though, is when you

spend your time immersed in deep work, you hit flow, increase your

momentum, and you end up being incredibly prolific and productive.

If you have ever gotten so lost in your work that you’ve lost track of

time, you know how good that feels. You get to the end of the day and

feel like the king or queen of the world.

Deep Work Makes You More Valuable

According to Cal Newport, because our personal and professional lives

are increasingly driven by sources of distraction, the skill of doing

deep work is becoming rare, and as a result much more valuable.

The time I spend immersed in deep work is the 20% of my activity that

creates 80% of the value in my life and my business.

As with anything in life, cultivating depth in one area brings massive

ROI and satisfaction as opposed to skitting from one thing to another.

Deep work is how you do it- daily, focused periods of uninterrupted

work. It’s the work others aren’t willing to put in. This is the skill that

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makes allows average men to accomplish extraordinary things.

Make Room For Creativity

Creativity is often treated like a superpower, but in reality, there’s a

simple formula to it. There are reasons why you suck at stuff in the

beginning. Let’s take a look at the four stages of competence.

1. Unconscious Incompetence

"I don't know that I don't know how to do this." This is the stage of

blissful ignorance before learning begins. There’s little room for

creativity here- this is where you set your habits and show up every

day.

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2. Conscious Incompetence

"I know that I don't know how to do this, yet." This is the most difficult

stage, where learning begins, and where the most judgments against

self are formed. This is also the stage that most people give up. No

one enjoys sucking, but stick with it and breakthroughs happen. Super

nerd and all-round badass Josh Kaufman says if you set your goals

with enough clarity and specificity, you can get past the these first two

stages in around 20 hours of practice. That’s quite heartening.

3. Conscious Competence

"I know that I know how to do this." This stage of learning is much

easier than the second stage, but it is still a bit uncomfortable and

self-conscious. At this point, you can write, draw, apply a skillset, but

you’re not pushing it.

4. Unconscious Competence

"What, you say I did something well?" The final stage of learning a skill

is when it has become a natural part of us; we don't have to think

about it. This is where real creativity is found. In writing, dance,

marketing, sales- any skill- once you’re able to do the basics without

thinking, you have room to play with all the variables and create work

with your own unique signature.

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“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks,

breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun” ― Mary Lou Cook

The one thing that guarantees you WON’T be creative or productive is

to sit around and wait for inspiration to strike.

To Recap:

The world needs your voice. Whatever it is that you wish to put out in

the world, don’t wait.

● Eliminate distractions.

● Guard your state of mind- get rid of the bad influences.

● Figure out what matters most to you.

● Dedicate the first hours of your day to this cause, & then add

hours.

● Continue to carve out more time to work on the things that

matter to you.

Soon you’ll find that all you need is a few hours a day to create and

accomplish more than you thought you ever could.

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How Can We Make You More Successful?

Creating the habits that allow for consistent productivity and creativity

isn’t easy, and we want you to succeed.

What was the most valuable thing you learned from this ebook?

Let us know by filling out this short survey and we’ll respond.

If you loved this ebook, don’t forget to subscribe to The Unmistakable

Creative Podcast!

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