The gist: things that have been helping me work, rest, and play brighter lately.
Today, I thought I’d share a bit of a peek behind-the-scenes at things that have been helping me work, rest, and play brighter lately.
A “hat tip” goes to Kendra Adachi of The Lazy Genius podcast, who has an ongoing series called “What’s Saving My Life Right Now,” where she shares some of her current favorite things and what’s currently working for “lazy geniusing” her life.
I always love them, and when I was thinking about ways to share more of my own productivity and self-care experiments, they immediately came to mind. So I started brainstorming ideas for something I could do with a similar format and theme, and here we are!
Every quarter, I’m going to share a few things (tactics, activities, routines, tools, products, etc.) that are helping me work more productively, rest more intentionally, play more playfully, and keep everything as balanced as possible in the process.
Note: Some of these links are affiliate links. So if you decide to buy anything, I'll receive a commission. Most creators say something like "100% of this goes back into the business," but I'm not most creators. Some months it goes into the business, others it will be used to buy inappropriate amounts of chocolate. Remember, working brighter is about balance!
Things helping me work brighter
Improving my visual thinking
Words have always been my strong suit. Visuals…not so much.
It’s not just that I’m not artistic, it’s that it felt like I didn’t understand images as well as words. IKEA’s illustrated instructions are an absolute nightmare for me (thank you to all the DIY bloggers who’ve made the written tutorials I find instead 🙃).
But I know that being able to simplify ideas down to a simple visual is an important skill to have for the kind of work I do, creating content and communicating ideas.
So I’ve been learning about visual thinking from YouTube channels like Verbal to Visual and Zsolt Viczián and trying to practice visual thinking more in my day-to-day work, whether that’s creating an infographic or diagram instead of a list during my daily brainstorming practice, adding visuals to process documentation, or creating more infographics for blog posts and social media.
Using Pomodoros to build up my focus
Right now, I can’t focus for more than an hour at a time. 😬
Like clockwork, about 1 hour into any task I ended up getting distracted, either by my phone or web browser or just a random thought. Eventually I might “catch myself” and get back to the task I started, but I still end up losing a lot of time this way.
I know a big part of the problem is pacing — I focus until I’m completely out of focused energy, instead of taking breaks to recharge before I’m completely spent.
So I’ve been trying to work in modified Pomodoro sessions more often (lately I’ve been doing 30 minutes of work, then a 10-minute break) to try and increase how long I can work before getting distracted.
To help me with this, I’m using the app Session. While I’m still using Sunsama for daily planning like I talked about in the last edition of this series, but I don’t love their Pomodoro timer feature. And since Session is included in my SetApp subscription, I could get their Pro plan for free.
Custom GPTs for frequent workflows
Finally, something helping me be productive lately is experimenting with custom GPTs in ChatGPT. I don’t find public GPTs to be that helpful with the ways I personally use AI, which is a lot of reformatting and cleaning up data. But building custom GPTs has been another story.
For example, I upload my morning journaling to a Notion database, even though I write it by hand. Until recently, I’d been using regular ChatGPT for transcribing all handwritten notes and journal entries that I need to digitize (it’s way better at reading handwriting than any OCR tool).
But now, instead of just a chat conversation that transcribes the journal entries for me to manually add to Notion, I have a custom GPT that connects to the Notion API and automatically adds the transcribed text to my morning pages database as a new entry following the appropriate template.
Things helping me rest brighter
Our balcony chaise
Last summer, we replaced a hammock on our balcony (since I kept getting stuck in it 🤣) with a chaise-type couch.
Not only can I sit down on and get up from it myself lol, it’s way more comfortable and has way more seating space while taking up less actual floorspace, so I can spread out more easily when I’m relaxing out there solo, or Alex and I can both fit if we’re hanging out together.
It’s not new, but we didn’t finish putting it together until the hotter/more miserable part of the summer last year, so this is the first time I’m experiencing the good parts of summer from it. I’ve been doing my morning routine, reading, and some iPad video gaming from out there.
A new bedroom AC
I have officially learned the lesson of how important room temperature is to sleep hygiene. Our previous bedroom AC unit had been slowly dying and cooling less effectively for awhile, and we finally replaced it last month.
And wouldn’t ya know, like 75% of my sleep problems immediately disappeared!
Like, my main problem was that I kept waking up a lot in the middle of the night, so I wasn’t staying asleep long enough to reach deep sleep. That problem is completely gone. So is waking a full hour before my alarm, even when I really need the sleep.
Insomnia feels like a never-ending problem, so I still have some issues to deal with, but on average I feel way more rested than I did 2 months ago.
Setting a lunch alarm
So, I said I was going to start doing this every day and I definitely don’t, but when I remember to do it, it does help.
Aside from breakfast, I’m not great at remembering to eat the rest of the day. At least, not before I’m already so hungry it ruins my energy for the rest of the day. One of my overall intentions for the year was to get better at eating before I’m full-out hangry, so I’ve been trying to eat lunch at a regular time regardless of whether I’m noticeably hungry yet.
Right now I just make sure to eat anything, even a quick snack, when the alarm goes off. And if I’m working, I don’t necessarily take a break. But it’s something, and hopefully it can evolve into a real lunch break that helps with the focus and pacing I mentioned earlier.
Things helping me play brighter
Exploring the indie web
I’ve mostly been “off social media” for personal use for a few years now. Long enough that I’m starting to feel the loneliness and isolation of not being as connected and online as I have been for most of my life.
But when I’ve tried to go back to “big social” sites like Instagram or Bluesky, they just don’t have the same pull of the earlier popular social networks. I find I can’t even get “addicted” to them even when I kinda want to, because the content just doesn’t pull me in.
Something that feels a lot more interesting and aligned for me right now is the indie web movement. There seems to be a resurgence of personal websites and personal blogging with maximalist design that just takes me back to my early days of being Extremely Online, customizing my Livejournal theme and MySpace page and making dollz for my Neopets guild page. 🤣
I’ve spent countless hours browsing people’s personal sites and blogs lately, and am excited to rebuild a personal website and blog for myself to express my creativity instead of getting re-obsessed with social media.
iPad game controller
I’ve been playing video games on my iPad almost daily for years now, but have always just used the touch screen or Apple Pencil. But a few months ago, I saw a Reddit thread of people talking about how Disney Dreamlight Valley is so much harder on iPad/without a controller, and my inability to complete certain challenges and quests began to make more sense lol.
So I decided to order a cheap Bluetooth game controller that works with iPad OS (I think it’s originally for Xbox?) and in a single gaming session finished literally every Dreamlight Valley quest I’d been stuck on. 🥰 And it turns out a bunch of other iPad games I play are easier with a controller too.
Learning web development
I’ve known basic HTML tags for 2/3 of my life at this point (Livejournal and MySpace, remember?). The thing is, I rarely learned more than basic HTML tags, because I never really needed to.
But I’ve always loved coding and would go through one or two phases a year where I logged into Codecademy daily for a few weeks until I got stuck on something or lost interest for the moment. This year I decided to finally take it seriously and work on my skills long-term instead of for a few weeks at a time.
Hopefully this will eventually fall under “work,” but right now I’m not really good enough to build anything useful or related to work lol. The things I’m working on are so simple and impractical that it feels more like playing and tinkering around (I built a rock-paper-scissors bot 🤓) that it felt better in this section.
Are you ready to start working brighter?
Productivity isn't black and white, it's personal as hell. And there's no single lifehack or framework to solve your problems.
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