Breaktime Reflections #7: The 2024 Marathon
Welcome back and Happy New Year! Let’s dive right in:?
Productivity
I’m going to kick off the first newsletter of the year with just a light note on productivity. After all, this is my first day back after a nearly three-week vacation, so I’m only just starting to think about productivity again.
That being said, over the holidays, I’ve experimented with a couple of tools that I really enjoyed:
One of them is Microsoft Designer, which appears to be free currently and feels to me like an AI-powered version of Canva. Essentially, you can write down what you want it to create, and it will create the design for you.
Where this stands out compared to similar tools is through its ability to include grammatically correct text in the designs it generates. Everything else I've tried seems to struggle with text in images.
This one works excellently, and here’s an image I generated below (text included) as proof:
Another thing I’ve done more of during my vacation is writing for a personal project. For many years, I’ve been using a free tool, hemingwayapp.com to check how difficult or easy my writing is to read.
This really helped me develop a more reader-friendly way of writing over time and I highly recommend it as it is.
But recently, with the addition of AI, it’s gotten even better. Not only will it tell me which of my sentences are a bit difficult to read, but at the click of a button, I can now ask AI to rephrase for me.
This keeps my content and ideas the same but saves me the time of thinking about how to rephrase to simplify them.
If you’re writing a lot of content, say for a novel, it can save you massive amounts of time. The AI feature isn’t free but it’s free to test.
Creativity
There’s a show on Netflix called School of Chocolate. On it, an Instagram-popular pastry chef teaches a group of contestants how to make really incredible-looking things out of chocolate.
I’m not much of a baker myself, but one of the cool takeaways for me from the show was how its host, chef Amaury Guichon, used what he learned from other crafts to take his chocolate show pieces to new creative heights.
For example, he uses a process that is similar to how you would mold glass, in order to mold a sugar and water blend to make it look like glass.
He uses tools used by woodworkers and other crafters to create highly symmetrical shapes that you don’t often see done with chocolate.
The point is that he’s not necessarily inventing something new, per se. But by taking existing practices from one industry and applying them to another, he’s able to create something that you’ve perhaps never seen before, or would never even think of doing with chocolate. And that same principle can be used in all kinds of creative industries.
Mindset
January is all about resolutions for a lot of people. I don’t have resolutions but I do set objectives for myself at the start of each year. Here’s why:
If you go to the gym as a habit up until December, you’ll start to recognize the regulars (it’s mostly just the regulars that still show up during December). Then in January, what tends to happen is that the number of people showing up at the gym explodes.
Everyone who’s resolved to lose weight or get fit is there, rested from vacation and packed with the motivation to start a healthy new habit and really stick with it this time.
Then in February, everything kind of goes back to normal and that big boost dissipates. According to research, 80% of resolutions are forgotten by February and less then half of adults still stick to any of them longer than 6 months.
And here’s the thing:
Reaching your objectives is not like running a sprint. It’s like running a marathon. You have to pace yourself in order to make it. It’s great that you feel motivated at the start of the year, but you shouldn't wear yourself out before February.
If you really want to build a habit, pace yourself and ensure you give yourself time to rest. You may not need it as much now, but you will later. So as far as I’m concerned, I’m looking to set a rhythm that I can realistically hope to maintain throughout the year.
P.S. Do you have feedback about this newsletter or how I could make it better? I’d love to hear it! Feel free to message me on LinkedIn or email to tell me more.
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Kind regards,
Cata