NO DAYS OFF: 5 Tips to Supercharge Your Career

NO DAYS OFF: 5 Tips to Supercharge Your Career

IN THIS EDITION:

1. Accelerate Your Learning Superpower

2. Tap Into Your Covert Energy Superpower

3. Leave Your “Whole Self” at Home and Instead Bring Your Best Self to Work

4. Leverage AI to Feed Time-Famine to Obsolescence

5. Exterminate Your Sleep Famine:  Focus On Sleep, Not All-Nighters

Plus one BONUS TIP

Do you feel like your days are one massive run of chaotic servitude to time and a lack of adequate resources? You are not alone.  In our post-COVID era of mind-numbing intrusive technologies, Work-From-Home bleeding into Work-All-The-Time, and media consumption transforming into 24/7 media stream binging, we are suffering from extreme time-famine and mild strains of attention deficit disorder as our minds and bodies have been stretched beyond the brink.

1) ACCELERATE YOUR LEARNING SUPERPOWER

HOW IT WORKS:

Feed your time-famine and instantly RETURN TIME TO YOUR SCHEDULE

It took me into my adult life to understand that I am a visual learner.  Sometimes I struggled in school because our education system is geared toward more objective and verbal learning.  I needed to SEE things more than HEAR things to learn.  Audible learners learn better by hearing and visual learners learn better by seeing.

We all fit somewhere on a broad learning spectrum from being a visual learner to a verbal learner.  You need to zone in on where you stand.

“...teachers lawyers writers politicians administrators a lot of my enemies fall into those categories so that's what an object visualizer isn't and an object visualizer is a kind of visual thinker and there are two main types of visual thinkers first is the spatial pattern visualizer who sees in patterns and abstractions” - Van Neistat

I recently learned from one of my favorite YouTube influencers, Van Neistat, that there is a subcategory of visual learning called "objective visualization".  Object Visualizers think in pictures.

You can learn more about Objective Visualizers here:  “Visual Thinking The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions” by Temple Grandin or watch Van Neistat’s YouTube video here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_lg6b0Osfo&t=30s

"Reading a book in your chosen field for one hour a day translates to 1 book per week. 1 book per week translates to about 50 books per year" — Brian Tracy

Here is one more learning hack from blogger Hallel K. on using the “1-Hour-Rule” to “catapult yourself into the top 1% of income earners” to take one hour every day to read/learn about a particular topic.

You can read Hallel’s blog on the “1-Hour-Rule” here:  https://medium.com/practice-in-public/use-the-1-hour-rule-to-catapult-yourself-into-the-top-1-of-income-earners-1a7209dc03d6

2) TAP INTO YOUR COVERT ENERGY SUPERPOWER

Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

It is widely known that the difference between introverts and extroverts is how each cohort gets their energy.  Introverts get their energy from having alone time enabling them to recharge through meditation and thinking.  They are easily exhausted by back-to-back meetings and busy social schedules.  On the other hand, extroverts love social interaction so much that they derive their greatest energy from being around people.  Back-to-back meetings and heavy social schedules are a boon to their existence and keep them energized.

HOW IT WORKS:

The key is understanding where you stand on the introvert and extrovert spectrum.  If you are unsure there are some excellent resources like taking a Meyers-Briggs personality test to confirm where you stand.  

3) LEAVE YOUR “WHOLE SELF” AT HOME AND INSTEAD BRING YOUR “BEST SELF” TO WORK

In recent years we've been reconditioned and told by multiple sources to “bring our whole selves to work”.  Companies have facilitated this by encouraging employees to resist the need to manage two separate identities between work and home.  

The potential pitfall here is that “bringing our whole selves to work” is an oversimplification of what employers really want.

I have seen working peers ruin their careers trying to bring their whole selves to work to the detriment of their careers.

This creates issues given the sometimes ill-defined and nebulous spectrum and range of openness and transparency in corporate culture can create challenges in actually bringing our “whole selves” to work due to stigmatization and discrimination.

HOW IT WORKS

A better option is to bring your “best self” to work, with the best being the optimal you who is ready and able to do the work at hand versus trying to integrate your personal and professional lives in a “whole self” sumo wrestling match.

You can learn more about bringing your “best self” to work in this blog highlighting the work on the subject from Kem-Laurin Lubin, Ph. D-C, here: https://blog.medium.com/the-problem-with-bringing-your-whole-self-to-work-0e116385393b

4) LEVERAGE AI TO FEED TIME-FAMINE TO OBSOLESCENCE 

There is a great deal of talk about AI both good and bad.

EXAMPLE #1

Recently I found online a great healthy aging smoothie recipe.  The problem is it included a number of hard to find ingredients so I turned to Gemini’s free AI version and copied and pasted the smoothie recipe into Gemini and prompted it to create a list where I could find each ingredient and its cost and a final total.  Gemini returned it would have cost me over $200 to buy all the necessary ingredients so I opted for a homemade $5 strawberry mango smoothie instead.

EXAMPLE #2

I recently bought a used production-grade mini-DV player/recorder to digitize my old-school family videos.  Fortunately, mini-DV tapes only hold 60 minutes worth of video.  I used Gemini Pro 1.5 to upload a video and prompted it to search and share time stamps when my dog appeared in the video thus saving time in making a video honoring my recently deceased 15-year-old dog.

HOW IT WORKS

Pick an AI Large Language Model (LLM) that works for you whether it's Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there are a plethora of excellent choices.  I personally like Microsoft Co-Pilot because it is built on ChatGPT 4 and you can download it as an app to your phone providing added convenience and time savings.

Once you have landed on an LLM that works for you…USE IT as a time-saver by asking it to do some of the heavy lifting of simple tasks from the two examples above to answering complex questions that keep you up at night.

5) EXTERMINATE YOUR SLEEP-FAMINE:  FOCUS ON SLEEP, NOT ALL-NIGHTERS

Sleep is the natural superpower for refueling and recharging your body.

Sleep plays a significant role in the learning process, not just by providing rest but by actively engaging in the consolidation and integration of new information.

Sleep also recharges our brains and “hypnopedia” or sleep learning is a thing.  I write and get about a quarter of my ideas in my sleep.  Many of my ideas come alive in my sleep and I wake up in the middle of the night to jot down notes and ideas that eventually develop into bigger ideas.

Impact on Learning and Memory: Over the last two decades, sleep research has indicated that sleep does more than just provide energy for studying and test-taking. It actively assists in learning, memorizing, retaining, recalling, and utilizing new knowledge to generate creative solutions(1).

Sleep and Academic Performance: Various resources, including those from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and MIT News, highlight the importance of sleep in academic performance, suggesting that sleep contributes to learning, memorization, retention, recall, and the ability to apply new knowledge creatively(2).

HOW IT WORKS:

For those of us who are not clinically classified insomniacs:  focus less on doing all-nighters and more on getting ample sleep.

Keep a note-pad or tablet computer near your bed, so you can make notes of your dreams and ideas that may pop up in the middle of the night, and don't let that descend into an all-nighter.

We can all use a little boost in our lives.  Hopefully, you’ve found these tips useful and can use at least some to supercharge your work, career, and life.  If you enjoyed reading this latest edition, please subscribe to receive more interesting tips and knowledge involving the world of Consumer Packaged Goods, Digital Media, and AI.

BONUS TIP

Here is one final BONUS TIP:  I use Google Workspace’s effortless and seamless integration of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Drive space to help me organize my working life and you can too.   As a thank you for your continued support, here is a 10% off coupon code for the first year on either the Google Workspace Business Starter plan or the Google Workspace Business Standard plan.  

(1) Sleep Resources | University Health Center. https://health.unl.edu/sleep-resources.

(2) Studies of Learning during Sleep: Problems, Progress, and ... - Springer. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11055-020-00895-1.