Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (99U)

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine” is an indispensable guide for anyone looking to optimize their daily productivity. The book offers practical insights and actionable strategies to build routines that foster creativity, balance, and focus. Drawing on the experiences of top creative professionals, it provides a clear roadmap for managing the chaos of everyday life while nurturing personal growth. The blend of inspirational advice and concrete steps makes it a must-read for anyone striving to achieve both professional success and personal well-being.

In a world with ever increasing demands and diversions it becomes more and more difficult for most of us to manage our time. Specifically, having the opportunity to dig into work and get things done can be the ultimate challenge. Emails, group schedules, and virtual meeting may be useful tools hatched from the information age, but they also present a new set of distractions that make bearing down and producing good work problematic. Add in android phone applications and social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Pinterest) there are even more balls to juggle.The idea with the book is to compile best practices from specialists that have the expertise and the collective abilities to explain how to get things done. The book is laid out through a series of brief but effective chapters with each of the book’s contributors presenting a short article or interview describing what they have found to be the best ways to manage work.To make it practicable, the Manage Your Day-To-Day is broken down into four sections each hold their own as separate pieces while flowing seamlessly from one to the next.The first such section, Building a Rock-Solid Routine, zooms in on practices that are imperative for having a system in place to get work done but also leave inspiration for creativity. An interview with marketing guru Seth Godin is a motivating piece entitled: Honing Your Creative Practice.The Finding Focus in a Distracted World section includes five best practice stories for dealing with workplace diversions. The best of the bunch is a question and answer piece with the behavioral economist Dan Ariely. Understanding Your Compulsions explains many of the traps that email creates for sidetracking our work day. Ariely also suggests viable solutions to such distractions.The section Taming Your Tools explains how to best blend and utilize the growing choices of internet and technology tools with the more traditional problems of workplace efficiency. The stand out here is Banishing Multitasking from Our Repertoire by psychologist Dr. Christian Jarrett.Sharpening Your Creative Mind makes up the book’s final section which emphasizes the need to enhance our creative work on a regular basis. Letting Go of Perfectionism by Elizabeth Grace Saunders is one of four standout pieces in this unit.I enjoyed this well-organized series of best practices for time and workplace management presented in Manage Your Day-To-Day. It’s a good change of pace and sometimes makes sense to have multiple expert recommendations instead of the standard, elongated, one author-single theory book.Manage Your Day-To-Day is one of several recent books that address the growing problem of workplace productivity. Several months ago I read the book The Four Hour Work Week, where author Timothy Ferris offers up his unique ways to eliminate work distractions and unique methods for working less and working when and where you really want to. According to Ferris, doing work that excites you is more important than that next conference call. The Four Hour Work Week set the business world on its ear when it was first released. Another book that comes to mind is Boring Meetings Suck which draws a line in the sand for the tired and outdated practice of “meetings, just to have meetings”.Manage Your Day-To-Day provides a logical follow up to both of these books. With a minimal amount of monetary and time investment, Manage Your Day-To-Day is a great choice to have close by for those times in the day when you wonder exactly what you are supposed to be doing.Bottom Line: In addition to being an interesting and enjoyable read, Manage Your Day-To-Day can serve as a reference guide or a go-to source for those times when your work week is careening off the tracks.

If "procrastinator" isn't my middle name, it's only because my parents didn't want to embarrass me. I am a strange hybrid--a creative person who is also a type A++ personality. I do not perform at my best without some sort of structure. When I left graduate school for the life of a freelance writer, I found myself drowning in "free" time with little sense of how to reach my ever-growing (because I never actually reached one and got to cross it off!) list of goals. It took me years to develop the discipline and solid work habits that came to me so naturally as a student.MANAGE YOUR DAY-TO-DAY isn't a long or exhaustive exploration of time management and life balance. It's a tiny, targeted little primer full of good advice on building a solid work routine, focusing creative energy, surviving constant connectivity, and generating new ideas. Each section includes short articles by working artists and contemporary thought leaders that get straight to the meat of the given topic such as Harnessing the Power of Frequency, Making Room for Solitude, Learning to Create Amid Chaos, and Using Social Media Mindfully. At the end of each section are specific "Key Takeaways"--action steps the reader can take NOW to improve his or her day-to-day.What's great about such a little dynamo of a book, is that I can revisit it whenever I feel my old habits (or lack thereof) sneaking up on me. The result is immediate and relatively painless course correction. The way I see it, the only people who won't profit from this book are the producers and stars of reality television. I know my viewing hours of popcorn television have gone down...and my writing output has gone way up!

This book is a collection of loosely related essays and interviews, by "leading creative minds", but good luck reading it. The information seems insightful and I'm not criticizing the content.My complaint is that it is very poorly designed. This is one of those really horrible book designs that are everywhere now. They look contemporary, small, and cute, but are terrible to read. This book should have been at least an inch or two larger in all directions. It seems the design goal was to save paper, without regard to readability or longstanding design principles.The worst part, the part that makes it really feel cheap and hard to read, are the stingy margins, especially the inside margins. You have to hold the book flat open like a pancake to read it. The tiny body copy font also goes nearly to the outside edge of the page. Are designers not taught about white space anymore? Do they not understand that physical books are not the same as phone apps?

Perfect for starting out.perfect for mid career.perfect for late career. For creatives keeping the creative practice alive growing and fulfilling.