Hey all, since all I ever do here is repost my Substack, I'm going to shut this Skool group down to focus on that Substack directly. I would love it if you all subscribed at https://finisherblog.substack.com/ or also feel free to visit me online at thefinisher.org. I wish you all the very best with your various projects!

To continue my thoughts from yesterday, where I talked about being a little selfish, another emotional burden with productivity is fear and the various ways in which that shows up. Impostor syndrome…procrastination…perfectionism…hating to be on camera…staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page…there are so many things that fear can do to block our productivity and keep us from finishing projects. The number one tip I have for dealing with fear is awareness. Whenever I notice a particular feeling of stress, like feeling my shoulders creeping up toward my ears or tenseness in my legs like I want to run, I try to take a deep breath and ask myself what I might be afraid of. Sometimes I try to think of the most exaggerated fear I could have in the moment—an earthquake is going to strike and I’ll be crushed by my precarious monitor setup on my desk, so that’s why I don’t want to type up a blog post! As a pretty unemotional person, it’s work for me to connect with my emotions, but it’s usually valuable to realize I might be feeling some way about a thing and that might be what’s holding me back from a true effort. This is another topic that’s ripe for a video exploration…I’m racking them up! How are you connecting with your fears? Please let me know in the comments below.

From Leo Babauta at Zen Habits comes today’s tip on Focus Sessions. Leo suggests developing a habit around a daily 15-minute focus session, targeted at working on the day’s most important task. You block out the time on the calendar at a regular point in your day, and for those 15 minutes you focus only on your most important task. No task switching. If you feel stuck on your task you sit there and feel stuck. When 15 minutes are over, you stop. He suggests pairing with an accountability partner and reporting to that person when you’ve completed your focus session every day. Some other key elements Leo suggests are to do this first thing in the morning as you sit down to work, and to identify your most important task first thing in the morning as well (more about that in future posts). He also suggests that, once one focus session a day feels easy, add in a second. After about sixty days, add in a third, then a fourth for a full focus hour. He advises that doing this incrementally builds the habit and leads to a more enduring outcome. What will your first focus session involve? Let us know below!

Something that helps with getting things done is making your work visible. This is at the heart of things like the brain dump. Pouring out your internal world into the external, particularly through some sort of kinetic activity like writing or typing, makes what you need to do more easily seen and thus more real. This morning, I made myself a to-do list with 15 items on it on the whiteboard next to my desk. At ten pm tonight, I’ve done all but five of them. The trick here is to not feel like a failure due to those five items. I knew I wouldn’t get to everything, and that things would come up—I decided it was more important to go to the neighborhood bar with Mr. Starter for a nice glass of wine before dinner, for example. The list, and the process of getting what I needed to do out of my head and into the real world, helped me focus and prioritize. How did you make your work visible today? Let us know below!

Good to be here and connect @Sam Hines !!