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Use one emoji to completely change your relationship with your digital calendar

8/18/2022

 
Feeling in control of your calendar, like it’s yours, is awesome.

Feeling like your calendar is controlling you, like it belongs to someone else, is depressing. After a long day of meetings and work, you look back at it and think, I guess those things happened, because they’re grayed out and in the past. This is supremely unsatisfying. To feel in control, give yourself clear visual credit because you did what you set out to do! 

Enter the checkmark emoji ✅

As you complete them, check off your events, deadlines, and work sprints by renaming them with a ✅ at the beginning, and you will immediately feel better, more accomplished, and more in control of your time.

Benefit #1: You get credit for meetings and appointments
You attended in person. You were focused and on task the entire time. You contributed ideas, took notes, and made a list of next actions. So go back and rename the scheduled event “Department meeting” to “✅ Department meeting.”

You clocked in extra hours on weekends. You solicited input. You wrote three drafts, incorporated all suggested revisions, and turned in an impeccable final version on time. So rename the all-day event “Quarterly report due” to “✅ Quarterly report due.”

In other words, use ✅ to take ownership of — and pride in — your obligations to other people.

Benefit #2: You’re more likely to achieve your own goals
The ✅ also motivates you to honor your obligations to yourself. Knowing the satisfaction of a ✅ is just around the corner makes you more likely to 1) add important personal commitments to your calendar and 2) follow through on them. To put this to use:
  1. Schedule events at certain times for working out, practicing an instrument, reading for your book club, and so on.
  2. Make all-day events for smaller habits like meditating, flossing, or tidying up.
  3. ✅ these off as you do them!

Now, when you look back at previous days, weeks, months, and years, you’ll behold a sea of checkmarks: indisputable proof that you’re serving others and caring for yourself. What better way to spend your precious time on this planet?

The most straightforward way to become a better musician

8/10/2022

 
Your choice of music to play in public determines your rate of improvement.

Each summer, as I select music to perform over the next year, I deliberately pick at least one piece that instantly gives me heart palpitations. One year it was Chopin’s Ballade No. 4. Another time, Brahms’s Handel Variations. Last year, it was Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

The reason: committing to performing a difficult piece in public is the most effective way to guarantee rapid musical improvement.

Deadline + social pressure = results
This recipe works because of two critical ingredients:

1. Deadline
A deadline forces focus and effort. Within the next year is reasonable: it’s not so short as to cause failure-inducing panic, but it’s not so long as to be vague and ungraspable. It motivates you to rise to the challenge and start practicing now.

2. Social pressure 
If I’m playing only for myself, I’m tempted to get complacent. But promising to play for other people — a certain piece in a certain place at a certain time — causes me to work harder and bring the music to a higher level. I don’t want to disappoint my audience.

You’ll automatically level up your practice
Tackling a challenging piece like this benefits you in both the short term and the long term:

In the short term, you’ll open your mind to new strategies. Because the piece poses new hurdles, you can’t simply fall back on what you’ve been doing thus far. You’ll become more creative, experiment with new methods, and think of ideas you wouldn’t have considered before.

In the long term, your practice systems will be in better shape. Some of those new ideas will work — and they’ll stick with you. Over time, easy pieces will become easier, and difficult pieces won’t seem quite so daunting.

So pick a piece that excites you, and is perhaps 10% harder than anything you’ve ever played. Set a date and venue. Power through that initial stress and keep the end result in mind, because it’s very much worth it.

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