186. Do You Need a Routine?

There's a myth that creativity stems from spontaneous bursts of inspiration or innate genius, but according to numerous creative professionals and productivity experts, creativity is actually the result of consistent, disciplined work habits.

Manage Your Day-to-Day is a collection of essays by some of today’s best-known creative minds, including Cal Newport (Deep Work), Steven Pressfield (The War of Art), and Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project and The Four Tendencies). Published by 99U, a resource platform and conference series that empowers creative professionals, the book offers strategies to optimize your productivity, focus, and creativity in today's fast-paced world, as well as practical tools to enhance your daily routine, overcome distractions, and unlock your creative potential.

Whether you're a creative professional, an entrepreneur, or anyone seeking to reclaim their creativity, Manage Your Day-to-Day is a resource to help inspire and guide you toward reaching your full creative potential.

In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg draws on extensive research to explore how habits develop into automatic behaviors that influence personal lives, businesses, and communities. He explains why unhealthy habits are notoriously difficult to break and provides a practical framework to help you understand and change any habit.

In this guide, we’ve restructured Duhigg’s key ideas to focus on how your habits form and what you can do to change them. We’ve also compared and contrasted each key concept with updated research on habit formation and expanded on Duhigg’s advice with actionable methods from other self-improvement authors and psychologists.

We feel constantly pressed for time. We try to do too much, yet when someone makes a request, we say yes without thinking. We feel we have to do it all. But because we’re going in so many directions, we make little progress in any of them. Yet most of these activities are trivial. As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism puts it, we’re majoring in minor activities.

The way out of this trap is to practice essentialism: “do less but better.” McKeown explains how you can distinguish the vital few from the trivial, then eliminate the nonessentials and make your optimum contribution in your life and work.

Is there something you’ve dreamed of doing, but never have? Are you waiting for the right motivation to move you toward your goal? If so, then you’re going about it all wrong. In The Motivation Myth, Jeff Haden argues that you shouldn’t wait for motivation to start you down the road to success. Instead, you make your own motivation by creating a plan, breaking it into achievable steps, celebrating every win, and persevering through disappointments. Motivation isn’t a push—it’s momentum that you generate yourself.

In this guide, we’ll explain Haden’s approach to kickstarting your path to success and creating a cycle of positive reinforcement that builds motivation as you go along. We’ll compare Haden’s suggestions with those of other productivity experts with practical tips on managing time, avoiding distraction, and maintaining mental focus. We’ll also explore what wellness experts say about chasing ambition versus finding contentment in everyday life.

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy offers simple tips on achieving success and living the life of your dreams. The idea is similar to compound interest in finance - small, everyday decisions add up to huge returns over time.

While the concept is simple, that doesn't mean it's easy. Hardy presents six strategies for successfully and carefully directing your choices to shape your destiny in a positive direction and offers a plan of action for improving your results.

We feel constantly pressed for time. We try to do too much, yet when someone makes a request, we say yes without thinking. We feel we have to do it all. But because we’re going in so many directions, we make little progress in any of them. Yet most of these activities are trivial. As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism puts it, we’re majoring in minor activities.

The way out of this trap is to practice essentialism: “do less but better.” McKeown explains how you can distinguish the vital few from the trivial, then eliminate the nonessentials and make your optimum contribution in your life and work.

At least 40% to 50% of the things you do and the decisions you make every day are driven by habit, according to experts like Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) and James Clear (Atomic Habits). Thus, even small improvements in your habits can have a big impact on your productivity and quality of life. But how do you change them?

In Shortform’s Master Guide to changing habits, we’ve collected the best answers to this question from five best-selling authors and experts on the subject. You’ll learn what habits are, why they’re so hard to break, and how to identify the triggers and behaviors that keep you stuck in the same self-defeating patterns. Then, we’ll share evidence-based strategies and advice for creating a personalized plan, whether you’re looking to cultivate good habits, break bad ones, overhaul your life, or simply tweak the habits that make up your daily routine.

Positive behavior change is one of the most persistent challenges of personal growth—and in How to Change, Katy Milkman draws from the latest research and presents a powerful strategy for creating lasting change. She argues that real behavior change comes from a deliberate, scientific understanding of how human nature gets in our way and how we can leverage it to our advantage.

Milkman, an economist and professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains how to tailor solutions to your specific challenges, subvert common human failings, and cement lasting change. In this guide, we’ll detail her evidence-based approach to behavioral change and discuss her “playbook” for overcoming human foibles ranging from a lack of self-confidence to forgetfulness and procrastination. In commentary, we’ll look at adjacent perspectives on behavioral change from books such as Atomic Habits, Nudge, Awaken the Giant Within, and Hooked.

In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg draws on extensive research to explore how habits develop into automatic behaviors that influence personal lives, businesses, and communities. He explains why unhealthy habits are notoriously difficult to break and provides a practical framework to help you understand and change any habit.

In this guide, we’ve restructured Duhigg’s key ideas to focus on how your habits form and what you can do to change them. We’ve also compared and contrasted each key concept with updated research on habit formation and expanded on Duhigg’s advice with actionable methods from other self-improvement authors and psychologists.