Picture this: Your 3-hour Zoom workshop just started, and your computer freezes! 😬 What do you do? The show must go on! In last week's Magnetic Messages Masterclass, my computer froze precisely at 10:01 am. (My suspicion, for other event hosts, is: I was sharing a Zoom whiteboard in a browser window, and annotating with [...]
New ideas are only found in surprise. Before Thomas Edison demonstrated the electric lamp on 31 December 1879, he was a laughingstock in the press. "I have not failed," he famously said, "I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." To innovate something new, Edison had to leave behind what he already knew. New ideas [...]
I keep a set of juggling balls in my desk (and in my backpack), so I can take a play break whenever I need one. If I have a really intense day, building marketing campaigns for clients, and I know I will have to spend multiple hours in focused work, I make sure to designate [...]
People feel life is meaningless when they don’t have goals, rules, and feedback. (These are the 3 attributes of games, according to Dr Jason Fox, that I describe in-depth in my short ebook Gamify Your Work.) Playing the game of life, and doing work that supports your lifestyle, is only made meaningful if we have goals to [...]
This week, my friend Charlie Gilkey is launching a new book, Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results. I was a big fan of his first book, Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done. (See my video review here.) Charlie has once again proven his ability to navigate the complex world of productivity, but [...]
In the game of life, how well you play determines your success. Every day is another round, every year is another level, and at the end of the game, it doesn’t matter if you won the high score - all that matters is that you played the game well.  There are lots of ways [...]
I was in the middle of mighty-tasking when I had a brilliant idea. This idea had nothing to do with the project I was working on. If I had stopped to tend to this idea properly, it would derail the state of flow I had achieved. I did not want to sacrifice my current project for a [...]
I'm just gonna say it: Candyland is a boring game. Candyland art by Midjourney  I’ve played this game dozens - maybe hundreds - of times with my own children. We don’t play it anymore, because now that they are older, they agree that it is boring to play. But when they were [...]
Ever since I ran away and joined the circus (true story!) I’ve always seen my work as a form of play. The harder the work, the harder I have to play to get through it. I learned this from the Seven Dwarves. They worked all day in the mines, and they didn’t grumble and [...]
The first three hours of my day are rigidly scripted. I find that having a choreographed morning routine removes my ability to make bad decisions about how my day starts. (My morning routine changes as my life and circumstances change, so what I do today is not the same as what I did ten years ago.) [...]