It’s been said that how you start your day sets the tone for how productive it will be. I don’t take that to be an absolute law, but I put a lot of stock in it. I’ve lived enough days in my 37 years to be able to compare days based on how they began. I believe that starting the day right is important.

To that end, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years fiddling with how I start my days. Some morning routines have been very regimented, demanding, and intricate. Others were very loose, or absent. Some were just indulgent. …

For many of us, the first week of the new year holds the promise of being the first week of a new direction, a turning point — the marker of when we began seriously working on our big goals. But 9 out of 10 times, come February or March, what do we have to show for it? Usually, fatigue and disappointment — and not much else.

But don’t fret, it’s not entirely your fault! It’s the fault of that tired old convention of the new year’s resolution.

It’s high time we try something new in its place. It’s time we understand why they so often fail, and a few tweaks we can make that just might save our resolutions this year. …

I’ve known about the importance of time management for a long time. I’ve understood that you need to schedule time to do the work that you know needs to get done. But what I didn’t fully realize until recently is that effective time management means more than just blocking out time to get tasks done. It requires scheduling time to do 3 entirely different — but entirely necessary — kinds of things each week over and above simply getting things checked off your to-do list.

To effectively use the time you have, you need to block out 3 key types of time. In their book The 12 Week Year, Brian Moran and Michael Lennington spell out 3 basic types of time blocks you need to schedule during your week in order to make the most of it: buffer blocks, strategic blocks, and breakout blocks. …

There’s been a boom in recent years around meditation. People have realized that it’s an excellent practice for mental and physical health. Apps like Calm, Headspace, and 10% Happier have become wildly popular in the past 5 years, all due to the positive buzz around meditation. It’s been a vindication of the idea that sitting and doing nothing for some period of time is highly beneficial.

But there’s one huge problem: meditation is difficult and frustrating.

The trouble most people have with meditation is that the mind is so hard to calm down and sit with. For most of us, it’s always churning — always thinking of something else. There’s worry, anxiety, planning, fantasizing — it’s all there in waves that seem to wait for us to sit down and try not to think. …

Every once in a while, I trip over an interesting reframing opportunity. A few years ago was a great example of that. I moved from a more tactical role in my day job to a strategic sales role. But I wasn’t given a pre-packaged training plan, and had to hit the ground running in adjusting to the new job.

I ended up going to a 1-day off-site training session on sales management. It was eye-opening — mostly due to one phrase that I heard there: it’s all about relationships. …

To-do lists are great…in theory. We record the things we need to do, and we cross them off as we do them. Nothing could be simpler.

But so many times, in practice, one of two things happens. We do a bunch of things on the list, but still feel like we’re not getting anywhere. Or, we end up procrastinating, or doing things other than what’s on the list, and again, feel like we’re not getting anywhere. Neither one of those is being productive. And we feel this, so we’re uneasy.

So what’s wrong? Why do these things happen? Why do we feel unproductive when we get the items done? Or alternatively, why do we procrastinate or get distracted so easily? …

In 1972, Martin Seligman published a paper in which introduced a troubling psychological phenomenon. It explains why a lot of well-meaning people get stuck in bad situations. It’s the reason why we find ourselves feeling unable to change our circumstances. It’s what keeps us from making changes, getting creative, and innovating.

The phenomenon is called learned helplessness.

Seligman demonstrated it with a simple experiment. He set up a room in which dogs were given shocks, but as soon as they crossed a designated barrier, the shocks would stop. Those dogs quickly learned why the shocks were happening, and learned that they could prevent them. …

I received an e-mail the other day from a salesperson. It began with two introductory sentences, then a third which read “I’ll keep this brief.”

What followed was two dense paragraphs rich with detail, names, and data. A third paragraph following them was one sentence with a vague “it’d be great to connect” wedged in there. No call to action, no specific request of how and when we might connect. Just an inkling that it would be “nice” to “connect”.

I don’t plan to respond the e-mail.

Why? I have no idea what the objective is. I lost it somewhere between the author’s initial promise to “keep it brief,” him smashing that promise to pieces in the 2 dense paragraphs following that, and the concluding sentence which seemed like the equivalent of wishful navel-gazing. …