A few years ago, I was determined to start a meditation practice. I set a recurring morning reminder. I downloaded an app. But each time my calendar alert pinged at the designated time, I found myself silencing the alarm and resolving to do it later. I just couldn’t commit.

Beginning an exercise routine was a different experience. I likewise set myself up for success — booking appointments with my trainer, programming my coffee machine, and laying out my workout clothes the night before. The difference, however, was that breaking a sweat delivered immediate results in the form of mood-boosting endorphins. Once I started, I was hooked. Exercising became effortless (at least getting myself to the gym was effortless). With meditation, I knew there were benefits, but I couldn’t feel them right away. It just wasn’t clicking into my established routine.

Then, I discovered “habit stacking,” a strategy for building new habits in your life. Everything changed. Instead of swimming against the current, this approach is like grabbing your board and riding the wave. Whether trying to start a positive habit or eliminate one that drains your health, energy, or productivity, I highly recommend trying habit stacking. Here’s why.

Leveraging existing neural connections

Coined by Atomic Habits author James Clear, habit stacking means identifying a current habit you already do each day and then stacking a new behavior on top. As Clear explains, the newborn brain is like a blank canvas, filled with neurons that are ripe for connecting. As we age, a process called “synaptic pruning” occurs, whereby we build strong connections between certain neurons (which is how habits form) and prune away the rest — strengthening the existing connections, but also, losing a lot of those neurons. According to research, adults have about 41% fewer neurons than newborns. As it turns out, the saying “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is backed by neuroscience.

Habit stacking, however, leverages those existing connections and builds new behaviors into them. Rather than reinventing the wheel, you’re merely adding a new spoke to it.

The key is mapping out your current habits and identifying where you can seamlessly incorporate new ones.

Habit stacking in practice

Habit stacking begins with a cue. Like workflows, they’re driven by triggers. For example, when your alarm goes off, you get up and brush your teeth. The alarm is the cue. In this case, you could add “meditate for one minute” as soon as you finish brushing your teeth.

The more I read about habit stacking, the more it reminded me of the kind of workflows I already have in my workday. In short, workflows are a series of interconnected steps that lead to a given result. Be it a workflow for creating a marketing campaign or replying to customer service tickets, it all begins with a trigger.

For example, imagine you’re an HR specialist responsible for ensuring the company’s team leads submit performance reviews every three months. The trigger would be your calendar alert on the first days of March, June, September, and December. This would put in motion the subsequent workflow steps: send a reminder email to each team lead including a review form template; send a second reminder email; the team leads complete and submit the forms, etc.

Mapping out my workflows helps me to stay productive and keep my momentum because the process does some of the cognitive lifting for me. I’m never deciding whether to start or what to do next — I simply follow the mapped-out sequence. In the same vein, habit stacking works because it does the cognitive work for you. You’re not deliberating whether or not to [insert healthy habit]. The trigger goes off and you begin. But unlike workflows, habit stacking is divorced from dates and times; the trigger is a habit, not an alert.

It’s worth taking some time to map out your current habits, identify the triggers, and decide which new habits you can factor in where. As Clear notes, once you have mastered the basic structure (alarm > brush teeth > meditate), you can create larger stacks by chaining small habits together.

Discouraging negative habits

You can also use habit stacking to discourage negative habits. For example, if you tend to scroll social media as soon as you take your seat on the train during your commute, you can capitalize on this trigger/habit sequence to insert another behavior into the mix, like listening to a meditation app. As neuroscientist Andrew Huberman explains, this creates a sequence that links the bad habit to a good one.

“This temporal mismatch helps dismantle the neural circuits associated with the bad behavior and aids in recognizing when you’re moving towards that bad habit again.”

So when I sit on the train, I might be more conscious of my urge to take out my phone and scroll. I can still take out my phone, but instead of scrolling, I put in my earbuds, fire up a meditation app, close my eyes, and use that time to clear my mind.

Final thoughts

Being a creature of routine can be very positive. Routines take the mental gymnastics out of everyday decisions, decrease unnecessary cognitive fatigue, and leave us with more energy for tackling the big stuff — projects and tasks that energize and engage us. But as we age and routines crystallize, adding new behaviors to the mix can be surprisingly challenging.

Habit stacking is an efficient way to build new habits by tapping into our existing neural networks — without summoning all of our willpower.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book, Automate Your Busywork.

Originally published at https://www.jotform.com on November 5, 2024.

How I Use Habit Stacking to Build Better Habits Into My Workday was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Peter’s alarm went off at 6:30 a.m. He was already wide awake. He’d been staring at the ceiling for what felt like hours, his mouth dry and his stomach coiled with dread, watching his darkened room slowly fill with light. It was Wednesday.

There was nothing about this particular day that was different from the day before, or the one that would inevitably follow. That was precisely the problem. Peter was a mid-level executive at a firm whose mission was unimportant — both to this story and to Peter himself. He woke up, did his job, sometimes for up to 10 or 11 hours a day, ate dinner, and went to sleep. His routine had come to resemble running on a treadmill, and somewhere along the way, he’d lost track of how to get off.

For better or worse, many of us derive meaning from our careers. Research conducted by McKinsey in 2022 found that 70% of employees say their sense of purpose is defined by their work. Increasingly, studies show that we value purpose even more highly than we value pay.

More and more, people are leaping off of the treadmill — they’re becoming freelancers, independent consultants, and of course, entrepreneurs. Working for someone else used to be the expected course in life. The rise of digital connectivity has made it easier than ever to go into business for yourself. What’s more, those who have done it have no regrets — according to one statistic, 96 percent of those who work for themselves have no desire to return to a “regular job.”

Working independently isn’t for everyone. But if you decide to go it alone, the rewards can be significant.

The pros and cons of freedom

One of the biggest perks of being your own boss? There’s no one else telling you what to do. If you’re starting a business, that means you have the freedom to ideate your vision and then, if all goes well, bring it to life.

For a certain type of person, such freedom is a dream. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t work. If you’re someone who prefers to put in eight hours and call it a day, entrepreneurship is probably not the path for you. You’re going to go to bed thinking about your business, and it’s going to be one of the first things you think about when you wake up. There’s a good chance it will even seep into your dreams.

For some people, that’s a dealbreaker, and I get it. Freedom brings with it a fair amount of stress. But I’d also argue that building a business doesn’t have to be a jarring transition you make in a day. I held on to my day job for years after I started Jotform, preferring to chip away at it in the early mornings and evenings after I’d left the office for the day. When I did finally quit my full-time job, it was both because I was confident my business could stand on its own, but it was also because the lifestyle of being a founder appealed to me — I knew I wanted to be my own boss.

My suggestion? Go slowly. Test the waters. Do you have the drive to build something in your free time, on top of your other responsibilities? Or do you find that without the pressure of someone telling you what to do, you simply…don’t do it? It’s important to be honest with yourself about who you are before you take the leap.

Creative control

As much as I value being in control of my own time, that’s not actually my favorite part of running my own company. The best part, to me, is having control over my business and its objectives.

I’m a big proponent of bootstrapping for exactly this reason. Taking VC money typically means being forced to let go of the reins in a way that can potentially sink your business. One example horror story comes from ButcherBox founder and CEO Mike Salguero, who raised $30 million of capital for his first company. However, as is often the case, the venture capitalists had a completely different idea about how Salguero’s company should move forward, insisting on sticking to the strategy they signed up for rather than allowing Salguero and his team to pivot. Salguero found himself lashed to the mast of a doomed ship, unable to change its course.

“In that process, I lost the culture, I lost my place of work, I lost the ability to create the direction of where the company should go,” he recalls on an episode of HBR IdeaCast.

Suffice it to say, Salguero opted to bootstrap his next company, ButcherBox, which has been plenty successful.

I don’t deny that taking outside investments can pay off, and there are plenty of thriving businesses out there to prove it. But if part of your goal as a founder is to exercise agency over your company, bootstrapping is the way to go.

More and more people are becoming entrepreneurs and with good reason. Your time is your own, and you can forge your path forward in whatever manner you please. That said, it takes drive and discipline, and it’s certainly not always fun. But if you can make it work, the rewards will be well worth it.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book, Automate Your Busywork.

Originally published at https://www.jotform.com on October 7, 2024.

Why Freedom Is The Biggest Perk of Entrepreneurship was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What does it mean to “own” something? Merriam-Webster puts it like this: “Belonging to oneself or itself,” or “to have power or mastery over.” These definitions conjure a powerful image of control and responsibility — if you own a car, it’s yours to do with what you please, but it’s also yours to care for. You, and you alone, determine whether your car is regularly washed and maintained, or whether it becomes a busted-up beater, rusty and clinging to life.

Founders often don’t like to think of themselves as “owners.” Cars have owners, to return to the example above. Small corner stores have owners. Pets have owners. The term “owner” can feel minimized, too inconsequential for what a founder wants to achieve.

And yet, the concept of ownership is key to our sense of satisfaction and wellbeing. Here’s why.

The power of ownership

The effects of ownership have been a philosophical point of discussion for hundreds of years. According to Aristotle, so powerful is the motivation to own things that he even attributed it to the making of rational, productive members of society. As he argued back in the 4th century BC:

“[W]hen everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business.”

It may seem like the impulse toward ownership implies greediness or possessiveness, but actually, research shows the opposite is true. Feelings of ownership are associated with higher self-esteem, which drives prosocial behavior. Moreover, our buy-in increases when we’ve put effort into something. You may have heard of the IKEA effect, which holds that people are more likely to value an object if they make (or, in the case of the Swedish retailer, assemble) it themselves.

In other words, we value things we own, but we value them even more if we’ve expended effort to create them.

The benefits of sole ownership

Given the above, I think founders’ distaste for thinking of themselves as “owners” is misplaced. For solo bootstrappers like me, there’s nothing more motivating than knowing that my success is the direct result of my own hard work. If I’d taken outside funding or worked with a co-founder, I doubt I’d feel as proud of Jotform’s achievements, or as driven to work as hard every day to take it to the next level.

Still, this is not the advice you tend to hear from the startup gurus of the world, who relentlessly preach the importance of having a co-founder. Starting a business on your own is too hard, too lonely, too much for one person. A co-founder can bring expertise you lack, offer valuable perspective, and serve as a source of strength when things get tough.

At least, that’s the idea.

The reality is often not so rosy. I have a friend, let’s call him Isaac, who had a co-founder we’ll call Greg. Isaac was struggling: Greg was not pulling his weight. Isaac did the majority of the work, and any success the business achieved was the result of Isaac’s efforts, while Greg sat back and reaped the benefits.

The business became more and more successful, which should have made Isaac feel good. But it didn’t. It made him resentful, and also fearful — as long as Greg owned 50 percent of the company, he’d still collect 50 percent of the profits. As a result, Isaac felt his motivation flagging.

Ultimately, Isaac chose to end the partnership and continue on his own, despite the near-ubiquitous advice that being a solo founder is untenable. But Isaac had the opposite experience. Free of having to carry Greg’s load, he found his interest in his business reinvigorated, and his drive to succeed stronger than ever. As scary as it might have been for Isaac, the empowerment of full ownership far outweighed the risks.

Building ownership within the organization

It’s one thing for a founder to feel ownership over their company — they are, after all, the ones who built it. But equally important is making sure employees feel ownership over their work, too.

I mentioned the impact that psychological ownership has on performance. But how can you make your team feel “bought-in” to an organization when they don’t technically own it?

One way is to allow them to work on projects that feel challenging and rewarding. Remember the IKEA effect? It doesn’t just apply to objects. The same philosophy can be applied to the workplace. As Dan Cable writes for Harvard Business Review, no one wants to spend their day performing pre-programmed tasks over and over.

“Employees want to be valued for the unique skills and perspectives they bring to the table, and the more you can reinforce this, and remind them of their role in the company at large, the better.”

This doesn’t require a large-scale reimagining of anyone’s job description, either — some businesses, Cable explains, simply let their employees create their own titles. Such a maneuver costs the company nothing, but can have a powerful effect on an employee’s sense of ownership over their role and the work they perform within it. At Jotform, our cross-functional teams are given tons of flexibility and independence to work in the way that’s most effective for them. That freedom fosters their creativity and, in turn, helps them produce their best work. But an important aspect of that freedom is the sense of ownership they feel over their work. They’re contributing to the company’s overall goals, yes, but they are also working on projects they can be proud of.

Feeling ownership is a fundamental drive in human nature. Whether founders like to think of themselves as “owners” or not, we’re motivated by the fact that what we build is ours; that its success or failure is our responsibility. As Brené Brown aptly put it: “If you own this story, you get to write the ending.”

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book, Automate Your Busywork.

Originally published at https://www.jotform.com on September 3, 2024.

Why Ownership Is One of the Most Motivating Forces There Is was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Back in his Y Combinator days, Sam Altman wrote a blog post about what he called “the post YC slump.” At the end of the accelerator’s three-month program, Altman estimated that around 25% of the participating startups would be on the trajectory to build a multi-billion dollar company. But only a few of them actually did.

“These companies have a beautifully exponential growth curve during YC, and then a few months after YC is over, it essentially flatlines,” he wrote.

Why? Altman attributes the slump to a misplaced focus on what he calls “fake work,” like raising money and doing press, at the expense of what really matters: building products and growing. The root of the problem, essentially, is that the founders lose momentum.

“Momentum is everything in a startup. If you have momentum, you can survive most other problems. If you do not have momentum, nothing except getting momentum will solve your problems,” Altman said. He cites “never let the company lose momentum” as one of his few startup commandments.

Building a company requires sustained, concerted effort over a long time, generating enough power to keep it going despite the obstacles. Here’s how to start — and keep it up — no matter what.

Why momentum?

In physics, momentum is the product of an object’s mass and velocity. A train traveling at a high speed has momentum. So does a fastball thrown by a pitcher. In business, perhaps the best example of momentum is that of the “flywheel effect,” a term coined by Good to Great author Jim Collins.

“No matter how dramatic the end result, good-to-great transformations never happen in one fell swoop. In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment,” Collins writes. “Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.” Jeff Bezos, who learned about Collins’s flywheel effect at a corporate retreat in 2001, credits it as “the secret sauce” behind Amazon’s long-term success.

Even startups that grow into successful businesses fail because they lose momentum. “When the momentum is lost, it’s as if the props have been knocked out from under their corporate strategy,” write Matthew S. Olson, Derek van Bever, and Seth Verry for Harvard Business Review. Think again, about the train: With enormous mass and a high velocity, there’s not much that can stop it. But even the highest-speed train will eventually slow to a stop if there’s nothing keeping it going.

Just get started

You can’t gain momentum without movement. The key is to make those movements intentional.

Holly Liu, co-founder of the mobile gaming company Kabam, advises setting a clear and measurable goal that answers the question “how will we know when we succeed?” A specific goal can bring focus, which can lead to execution, which can lead to achievement. She suggests timeboxing, or allocating a predetermined amount of time, to achieve the goal in order to avoid heading toward a dead end (and therefore losing momentum).

“No matter how big or small, late stage or early stage, the most important thing you can do is pick a direction and then move,” Liu writes. Picking a direction at a later stage is more costly, and therefore takes more time. “However, if you are early, velocity is your exact advantage because you can pick a direction and move and repeat that over and over until you get growth and then momentum.”

If you’re struggling to build momentum even at an early stage, Forbes contributor Nell Derick Debevoise suggests flipping the script. Instead of starting with a goal or plan and identifying what it would take to get one step closer, consider what it would look like to start with action.

“Do something that you know or can imagine will advance the progress you want to make. Then explain why you did it — to yourself, to ‘make meaning,’ and publicly to employees and customers and any other stakeholders,” Debevoise advises. Then, you can connect the dots between the action, why you did it, and the bigger picture.

Embrace the 50/50 rule

A founder I mentor would often arrive at our scheduled meetings brimming with enthusiasm about the new customers he’d netted. While it was great to see him on such a high, his excitement would visibly fizzle when I asked about his long-term paying customers, or followed up on previous clients. He admitted that none of them stuck around — they all had a different reason for leaving, or worse, they’d simply disappear.

It was clear this founder was more than capable of selling his product. But when it came to keeping them for the long haul, he struggled. I advised him to focus on improving the product itself. But despite his efforts, he couldn’t figure out how to make it indispensable.

This is a common problem for entrepreneurs. Finding the right product can take some trial and error, and lots of bootstrapped founders lose enthusiasm when they don’t see growth in their business. However, growth requires two things: 1) Continually improving your product and 2) bringing in people to use it.

I believe 50% of a founder’s time should be spent on product improvement, and 50% should be spent on generating users. I call this the 50/50 rule, and it’s crucial for maintaining momentum. My mentee was able to do the latter, but not the former, and his overemphasis on marketing and sales was causing him to stall. Split your time between them, and you’re much less likely to run out of steam.

Building momentum is critical to success. It requires motion to get started, and can be maintained by spending your time equally between developing your product and growing your customer base. The goal should be a company that operates like a high-speed train — once it gets going, it’s hard to stop.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book, Automate Your Busywork.

Originally published at https://www.jotform.com on July 3, 2024.

How to Build and Maintain Momentum Like Your Business Depends on It was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’ve had the chance to travel to Paris, you likely paid a visit to the Louvre Museum, home to Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic painting, the Mona Lisa. Consult the museum’s Yelp page and you might be surprised to learn that many reviewers call the painting overrated. One even called it “a painting of status and nothing more.”

I’m no art critic, but learning more about what goes into an artwork helps me appreciate it. According to historian and author Walter Isaacson, Da Vinci spent 16 years painting the tiny brushstrokes to perfect the optics of the lips so they flicker the right way.

With all of the work that went into Mona Lisa’s smile, it’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that Da Vinci was simultaneously working on a multitude of projects. After all, in addition to being a painter, he was an engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect — the ultimate polymath.

As CEO of Jotform, a role that requires wearing many hats, I’ve found it helpful to understand the habits of prolific Renaissance thinkers like Da Vinci and Michelangelo. The latter spent four years hand-painting the Sistine Ceiling. Johann Goethe once said about the famed Vatican City masterpiece, “Until you have seen the Sistine Ceiling, you have no idea what human kind is capable of accomplishing.”

Studying their daily routines has informed my habits — for not doing more, but for producing more meaningful work that can move the needle for my career and my business. Taking a page from Renaissance thinkers, here are some helpful tips.

Journal religiously and clarify your goals

Da Vinci once wrote, “It is useful to constantly observe, note, and consider.” He was a religious journaler — today, we have more than 7,200 pages of his notebooks, the pages crammed with notes, sketches, and fascinating to-do lists.

Writing for NPR, Robert Krulwich offered a translated version of one of Da Vinci’s to-do lists (with Krulwich’s amendments for clarity in brackets). The list has at least 15 items, with diverse things like:

• [Calculate] the measurement of Milan and Suburbs
• Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.
• Ask Benedetto Potinari (A Florentine Merchant) by what means they go on ice in Flanders
• Draw Milan
• [Examine] the Crossbow of Mastro Giannetto
• Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner

You’ll notice that there’s no clear timeline or adherence to any one subject. Da Vinci seemed to list everything he was curious about, no limitations, and every question he wanted to explore. It’s conducive to the spirit of curiosity that today’s entrepreneurs urgently need, and as it happens, many of us lose as we continue down the funnel of our businesses and careers.

Daily journaling is a great way to continue to cultivate that spirit of curiosity. I’ve written before about morning pages, a term that Julia Cameron first coined in her classic book, The Artist’s Way. My routine entails opening up a Google document as soon as I sit at my desk every day, turning off all of my device notifications, and free-writing for 15 minutes or so. This practice has helped me significantly in my founder journey, to explore whatever ideas are rattling around in my head and to clarify my larger goals. As I wrote in my book, to minimize busywork and make as much time and mental space as possible for the big stuff, it’s critical to continually reassess your goals. For me, journaling has been key to accomplishing that.

Embrace your interdisciplinary interests

When I think back to my college years, it’s hard to believe the variety of courses I took. Some mornings were spent learning to code. Others, I was parsing apart the structure of a sonnet. As we progress on our career tracks, we often become siloed in our field. Exploring interests unrelated to our day-to-day job starts to seem indulgent; the kind of thing we can only do once we finish our real work.

Great Renaissance thinkers didn’t keep their interests in separate lanes. As Isaacson, the Da Vinci biographer, explains, Da Vinci may have painted more masterpieces if he wasn’t studying anatomy or trying to square the circle.

“[B]ut he would not have painted ‘The Last Supper’ or the ‘Mona Lisa’ had he not been deeply interested in all of the patterns across all of the arts and humanities and sciences and engineering..”

Studying anatomy actually made Da Vinci a better painter.

Likewise, Michelangelo’s historian, William Wallace, found tangible proof that the painter allowed his interests to mingle. Wallace describes discovering a piece of paper from when Michelangelo was designing and building sections of San Lorenzo church in Florence. On it, there were drawings of moldings and columns, but also poems. It seems that Michelangelo was at one moment, designing a major building (with a roomful of workers, no less) and the next, composing poetry.

The takeaway? Exploring your interests may seem superfluous, but it can enrich your work and your thinking in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. At the very least, carving out time for hobbies will leave you refreshed for when you return to work and maybe even creatively inspired.

Surround yourself with diverse thinkers

One of the salient aspects of Da Vinci’s life in Florence was his very active social life. Isaacson explained that he loved socializing with people across disciplines.

“Leonardo loved to be around such enlivening and stimulating diversity.”

Surrounding yourself with diverse thinkers forces you to think more critically and can lead to better, more innovative ideas. Experts chalk it up to cognitive elaboration, which is essentially the way that people share, challenge, and expand each other’s thinking by compelling each other to think more deeply about their reasoning and interrogate facts more objectively

Not only that: companies that embrace diversity of thought perform better financially, just another reason to cultivate a rich social circle, both inside and outside of the office.

We have an endless number of productivity technologies and tools at our fingertips, and yet, it seems more challenging than ever to focus on work and get things done. Examining the habits of the great minds of the 15th century can provide surprisingly fresh insight into managing your time, staying curious about the world around you, and keeping your thinking razor-sharp.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book, Automate Your Busywork.

Originally published at https://www.jotform.com on June 11, 2024.

What Mona Lisa’s Smile Says About History’s Most Prolific Creators was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On a recent trip overseas, my wife and I found ourselves with three small children and no in-flight entertainment. We were more stressed than the kids. In fact, by the time the plane hit cruising altitude, they had already invented their own game. They were explorers jetting off to an unknown land. Their mission: to not get captured by the evil robots (aka, the food carts). By the time the in-flight movies were restored, they had forgotten about them. It was their imaginary world and we were traveling in it.

The flight experience got me thinking about childhood play. When we’re kids, we’re naturally curious. We invent games for the sole sake of playing. We innovate and collaborate with no promise of reward. We see a toy, we want to understand how to use it. As parents, we’re responsible for nurturing our kids’ curiosity and giving them the mental space to explore. It dawned on me that business leaders could take a page from parents and cultivate a stronger sense of curiosity in the workplace. After all, research shows that leaders tend to do the opposite. Harvard Business School researchers surveyed more than 3,000 employees from a wide range of industries, and only 24% said they felt regularly curious in their jobs. 70% said they faced barriers to asking more questions at work.

If adulthood and work routines tend to dampen curiosity, games can help to restore it. Here, the benefits of incorporating some play into the office, and some strategies that have worked for me and my team at Jotform.

Gather for game time

It’s safe to say that gaming is no longer on the fringe. The gaming industry continues to boom, and according to PwC’s Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2022–26, it will be worth $321 billion by 2026. Once viewed as antisocial, the pandemic showed that games, especially the multiplayer variety, were a means of social connection. As the World Economic Forum reports, some players even think that gaming helps their mental health.

Research has found benefits relevant to entrepreneurs, like boosted productivity and critical thinking skills. Researchers from Brigham Young University discovered that teams who engaged in team video gaming were 20 percent more productive than teams who participated in traditional team-building activities. (I was never a fan of trust falls anyway.) Multiplayer video games get people quickly collaborating, taking on challenges, and, of course, having fun. People feel refreshed and motivated once they return to work tasks.

You’ve probably heard of Civilization, the strategy game where players begin with a covered wagon and advance to build entire empires. One study found that business students who scored high playing Civilization had stronger problem-solving, organizing, and planning skills than students with lower scores. It’s unclear if the link is causation or correlation, but it’s safe to assume that building an imaginary empire primes the brain for problem-solving.

If you’re brainstorming activities to bring your team together, it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Gather your teams for a video game night and you might be surprised at how it impacts their next-day motivation.

Encourage tinkering

Before I launched my business, I was a software developer for a New York media company. Regularly tasked with coding web forms (like payment or contact forms), I was inspired to find a way to automate the process. During my free time, on late nights and the weekends (this was before we had kids), I developed a tool to create online forms. The rest, as they say, is history.

Sometimes, the best ideas are inspired by our day jobs but come to life outside of them. Harvard Business Review tells a similar tale. In the 1930s, an employee of Italy’s first typewriter factory, Olivetti, was caught taking home company machinery. The employee told the CEO he was working on a new machine over the weekend. Rather than firing him, the CEO gave the employee more time to work on the new machine, which would ultimately be the world’s first electronic calculator.

It’s a great lesson in seeing employees as multi-dimensional people with personal hobbies and interests. Giving employees the space to tinker with tools and ideas is one way to nurture their natural curiosity. Sometimes, it leads to world-changing inventions. At the very least, it leads to a spirit of exploration and innovation.

You can even regularly incorporate tinkering into your workplace routines. At Jotform, Fridays are Demo Days, where our employees gather to chat about their latest ideas and whatever they’ve worked on over the past week. Colleagues offer each other respectful feedback. They fuel each other’s momentum. This unstructured teamwork has inspired some of our best new features.

Final thoughts

Gaming sometimes gets a bad rap as an anti-social activity. But it continues to skyrocket in popularity and a growing body of research is casting new light on its benefits. Of course, too much of a good thing can start to have negative consequences, for your physical and mental health. But occasional group video game sessions and unstructured “tinkering” can replenish your team’s creative fuel and lead to innovations.

Games promote curiosity, which in turn, boosts creativity. Games open portals to new worlds wherever you are, be it in the office or in an airplane. The gamer or the tinkerer has free rein to imagine what that world looks like — and how to make it even better.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book, Automate Your Busywork.

Originally published at https://www.jotform.com on April 8, 2024.

The Productivity of Play: How Childlike Curiosity Fuels Innovation was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s time to challenge the notion that daydreaming is inherently unproductive.

The American artist Edward Hopper painted many windows. In one of his paintings, which gained renewed notoriety during the pandemic, a woman sits on a bed in a near-empty room, peering out a window that looks out on the New York City skyline dotted with water towers. There’s a timeless quality to the painting — like the subject has no sense of urgency.

As it turns out, Hopper was not only fascinated by windows, he had a habit of gazing out of them himself. The late artist’s wife, Josephine Nivison, also a painter, was once asked what was the most difficult aspect of being married to Hopper. She replied, “It took me a long time to realize that when he is looking out the window, he is working.”

Nivison isn’t talking about work in the traditional sense. She’s referring to the productive daydreaming that was requisite to the artist’s creative process.

Daydreaming often gets a bad rap. Adults spend almost half of their waking hours daydreaming, and it often makes them unhappy. But there’s a caveat: people engage in different kinds of daydreaming and some forms can be highly beneficial for business (not to mention, your wellbeing). I keep this in mind during downtime at our Jotform offices and during my daily commute. Here’s a closer look at a more productive approach to daydreaming, counterintuitive as that sounds.

When the mind wanders constructively

We’ve all been subject to a mind that wanders to less-than-happy places.

What if I don’t pass the exam?

What if a competitor overtakes the market?

What if I can’t come up with another useful product?

Left to our own devices, our daydreaming tends toward negative or neutral territory. And afterward, we’re left feeling just that — negative or neutral.

But another type of mind-wandering, which is more intentional, can leave us feeling more creative, better problem solvers, better planners, and more likely to achieve our goals. Experts call it “positive constructive daydreaming.” Fortunately, we can guide our minds toward this type of free-association thinking. In one study, some participants were prompted to imagine something positive, such as a fantasy of having superpowers or the memory of their first kiss. These people were 50 percent more likely to feel positive after the session.

But the reality is, it’s harder to engage in positive constructive daydreaming. Letting the mind ruminate and obsess over what could go wrong is almost effortless. According to Erin Westgate, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, positive daydreaming is a “heavier cognitive lift.” It’s more mentally taxing on our already overburdened, information-flooded brains.

Our minds may be as rebellious as my youngest son at a candy store, but luckily, there are strategies for taming them. A little effort can go a long way. Here are some tips for taking the reins of your daydreaming.

How to positively, constructively daydream

The first step toward more intentional daydreaming is to carve out time for it, either by penciling it directly into your calendar (or entering it into your e-calendar) or committing to go device-free during in-between times — those idle minutes while you ride the train or wait at the post office. Consider it part of your process. No one would blink if a musician wrote a song while sitting on the beach, or if an author came up with a great turn of phrase while walking in the park. But for entrepreneurs and knowledge workers, there’s an inordinate pressure to be productive and tick items off your to-do list during every second of the workday. Everyone needs space to let ideas marinate.

That’s why Dr. Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, tells his graduate students to dedicate an hour each week to daydreaming. He told Bloomberg that he encourages them to sit alone, with no stimuli, and to look inward — to inspect their minds.

Companies like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn have caught on to the benefits of giving employees time for unstructured exploring, offering different versions of “20 percent time,” during which employees can daydream, experiment, and explore their interests without worrying about results. This mandated daydreaming has led to some of the companies’ most innovative products. I can attest that our Demo Days, when Jotform employees share their latest ideas, no matter how far-fetched, and offer each other feedback has led to some of our most successful tools as well.

Another interesting caveat of the power of daydreaming: researchers have found that mind wandering has more significant benefits for people who identify with their profession and care about what they do. Specifically, when people were engaged with their work, and found it enjoyable and fulfilling, their daydreams sparked imaginative thoughts about the job’s tasks and problems.

I think the takeaway is extremely important: leaders must do what they can to ensure that employees’ jobs are personally meaningful. At Jotform, I try to do that by promoting an automation-first mindset — encouraging employees to automate as much of their busywork as possible to leave time for more meaningful stuff, including examining their minds and any bubbling ideas.

I also regularly signal to employees that their downtime is important. In a world where social media constantly reminds us of how hard everyone else seems to be hustling, it’s essential to offer a counter narrative; a different way to succeed. Because for many creators, some of the most valuable work that we do is barely perceivable. It takes place while we’re lying on a bench or gazing out a window. The results aren’t instantly quantifiable. The gratification is not immediate. But now more than ever, with the rise of AI, it’s exactly the kind of work that only humans can do, that we should think about protecting.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book, Automate Your Busywork.

Originally published at https://www.jotform.com on March 6, 2024.

How Controlled Daydreaming Can Be a Powerful Tool for Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Strategic… was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer, Franz Kafka once wrote, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”

One of Kafka’s strategies for “wriggling through” — balancing a full-time day job with his writing aspirations — was sticking to a consistent, albeit unhealthy, schedule. He would start writing around 11 pm and continue until one, two, three, or even six in the morning. He’d sleep for a few hours, work, have lunch, take another nap, and get to writing again. In Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, author Mason Currey explores Kafka’s and various other prolific thinkers’ routines. Taken together, these rituals show that productive creatives don’t wait around for inspiration to strike. They take a proactive approach to planning and fiercely protect their hours for creativity.

After 17-plus years as CEO of Jotform, I’ve learned to become obsessive about my schedule. I regularly audit my busywork and try to automate as many tasks as possible. I’m convinced that making time for planning, aka meta-scheduling, has been highly beneficial, both for my business and my well-being.

The benefits of meta-scheduling

Certain parts of my schedule have become second nature. Every morning, I exercise, have a quick breakfast, and head to the office. The first thing I do is write my morning pages — thirty or so minutes during which I jot down anything in my head in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Afterward, I take around 15 minutes to map out the rest of my day.

I love visualizing my schedule. Mapping out my time helps me to plan important creative work during my peak hours — when I’m most alert, energized, and focused. That way, I ensure that I’m not just ticking off items on my to-do list. I’m making headway on projects that will move the needle for my company. I feel a sense of achievement vis-a-vis personally meaningful things.

Author Cal Newport, another serial planner, swears by carving out time for planning. Using a method called “time blocking,” Newport dedicates ten to twenty minutes per evening to build his schedule for the next day. He explained:

“Sometimes people ask why I bother with such a detailed level of planning. My answer is simple: it generates a massive amount of productivity. A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.”

Importantly, Newport notes that his goal is to make progress on the right things.

With meta-scheduling, your progress doesn’t get derailed by the paradox of choice — when too many possibilities leave you frustrated and unable to make a decision. The more you prioritize time for planning, the less you find yourself paused during the day and wondering what to do next. In my book, I dedicated an entire chapter to mapping out workflows — series of interconnected steps that produce a given result. Understanding your daily workflows and which steps to eliminate or automate not only frees up time, it also minimizes the number of choices you have to make, i.e., eliminates the paradox of choice.

If you’re on board with meta-scheduling, here are some strategies for getting started.

How to plan your planning

According to Harvard Business Review, one of the most important skills for successful time management is awareness — thinking realistically about your time by understanding it’s a limited resource. It’s also one of the areas where people struggle the most.

Becoming more aware of your time requires regularly auditing your schedule and being relentlessly selective about how you spend your time. For a couple of days, take careful notes about how much time you spend on tasks throughout the day. You might be surprised about what’s eating up your time. The most potent drains are often hiding in plain sight — repetitive, manual tasks we tacitly accept as part of our workday. Once you audit your schedule, consider which tasks you’d like to spend more time on. Which things make the biggest impact? Which tasks leave you motivated and engaged? Carve out time for those things (preferably during your peak hours), and try to automate, delegate, or eliminate as many of the remaining tasks as possible.

As Harvard Business Review suggests, treat your time like it’s money. It’s a limited resource so you want to make smart investments.

Finally, make a regular appointment with yourself to plan your day. Whether you do it in the morning, like me, or in the evening, like Newport, build this time right into your schedule. Pretty soon, you’ll see the benefits of metascheduling. It will feel like second nature, like brushing your teeth or having your morning coffee.

Final thoughts

If you struggle with creating a daily schedule, don’t dwell on it. Experts say that our brain’s neurochemistry may be to blame. Either you’re born with it or not. Either your back-left brain dominates, making linear planning easy, or another part of your brain takes charge and your brain requires a lot more energy to make plans and stick with them.

But we can all develop the skills to become better at mapping out our days to optimize productivity on things that matter. Hopefully, the above tips will help you to figure out the daily rituals that work best for you.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book, Automate Your Busywork.

Originally published at https://www.jotform.com on January 3, 2024.

The Art of Meta-Scheduling: Why Planning Your Planning Is the Future was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Imagine you’re a doctor performing critical surgery on a patient who’s just been in a terrible car accident. There’s internal bleeding, which could potentially be fatal and will require intensive surgery. The patient also has a broken toe, which can be quickly treated. Which procedure do you tackle first?

Here, the answer is obvious: the toe can wait. But in real life, outside of the emergency room, humans have the irrational tendency to opt for urgent tasks over important ones, even when the latter offers an objectively bigger payoff. Experts call it the urgency effect, and it may be impacting your progress on meaningful work. For example, when you choose to reply to an email demanding an answer ASAP, rather than focusing on a long-term project that could move the needle for your career.

As CEO of Jotform for 17 years and counting, I’ve discovered the invaluable benefit of continually clarifying my priorities. It’s how I handle day-to-day business while also making time for meaningful work, aka “the big stuff,” like writing my first book. One strategy I use is combining the time-tested Eisenhower Matrix with the principles of automation.

Entering tasks into the Matrix

In light of our less-than-rational human tendencies, the Eisenhower Matrix can be incredibly useful. Named after the 34th President, who once said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent,” the Eisenhower Matrix, developed by author Stephen Covey, categorizes tasks into one of four quadrants:

1. Urgent and important

2. Important, but not urgent

3. Urgent, but not important

4. Neither urgent, nor important

While Quadrants 1 and 2 are your priorities, Quadrants 3 and 4 are tasks for delegating, automating, or eliminating. Today, digital tools can complement the matrix. In fact, by applying the principles of automation, you can virtually eliminate two of the quadrants.

Identifying important work

One habit I stick to religiously, and I recommend to everyone on my team, is to regularly identify your priorities. Silence your notifications, grab a pen (or ask Siri, Alexa, or a digital assistant to take notes for you) and consider the following questions:

What do you enjoy doing the most?

What would you like to save your brain to do more of?

What delivers the most impact?

At Jotform, for example, my central priorities are hiring great people, designing and communicating our vision and strategy, and equipping our users to work more productively. Anything that does not pertain to these three priorities falls into Quadrants 3 or 4 (more on that later).

Your important work will fall into Quadrants 1 and 2. The first quadrant is for tasks that you must do immediately (and can finish quickly). The remaining important tasks are for Quadrant 2. I highly recommend scheduling these activities in your calendar, to protect your time and attention, and ensure they’re not bumped by busywork. What’s more, important work is often the stuff that we put off. It’s the toughest to begin because it challenges our ability to focus, problem-solve, and create. Automation (in this case, using a calendar tool or app to carve out time) takes your willpower out of the equation. When the designated hour arrives, you’re not deliberating. You just begin.

Making space for meaningful work means being relentlessly selective about where you focus your time. If you identify and stick to your priorities, you’ll be more productive in ways that matter.

Pinpointing unimportant work

The last two quadrants are home to tasks that aren’t important — at least, not important for you to complete. Quadrant 3 tasks might entail crucial work — like invoicing or receiving updates on the status of a project — but maybe there’s a better, more efficient way to complete the task (and save your brain energy), or maybe there’s another person on your team who’s better suited to the task. Take customer service. As I was growing my company, attention to our users was central to our mission. But at a certain point, I knew that my role centered around other priorities, and I had to hire professionals to whom I could delegate our customer service. Today, we also have access to a range of automated tools, like ChatBot that can field FAQs and free up employees for more complex questions.

The last quadrant is for tasks that should be eliminated. Many of these tasks may go unnoticed but they’re secretly stealing your time and energy. To spot these nonessential tasks, I recommend mapping out your workflows — every step in a given task from start to finish. Examine your processes and where you unnecessarily expend time and energy. Are you double-checking work, rendering your editor redundant? Are you falling down a social media rabbit hole? Scheduling meetings when asnychronous communication on a platform like Slack would accomplish the same in less time? Try to eliminate these Quadrant 4 candidates to the extent possible.

Final thoughts

As a business owner, I’m a realist. I understand that employing time management tools may seem like just another thing on your to-do list. But I’ve also seen for myself how investing a little bit upfront, and being more mindful of where we dedicate our time and attention, is one of the smartest investments I’ve made.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book, Automate Your Busywork.

Originally published at https://www.jotform.com on December 5, 2023.

How to Eliminate Half of the Tasks from Your To-Do List Using a Revamped Eisenhower Matrix was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.