Growing up, I spent countless hours recording Good Eats episodes for my mom to use in her high school cooking classes. Beyond the science and humor, one concept from the show profoundly influenced my approach to work: mise en place, which is the practice of getting everything in place before you begin.
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In my life, air travel has been a pretty rare occurrence, one or two flights a decade, maybe. That is until my son was old enough to travel; since then, we have visited Disney World twice and multiple US national parks. However, the stress and magnitude of air travel felt by an infrequent traveler have stuck with me.
You might be able to guess what tools I reached for to mitigate travel stress and repeatedly ensure successful trips.
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One of my biggest pet peeves of traveling is the night I get home, and I have to plug in my phone and watch on my nightstand. The cables are in my suitcase somewhere, and now I have to go hunting for them, and I just want to get to sleep,
That is, until a few months ago.
I finally had enough and purchased all the cables, chargers, and accessories I would need to travel. No more worrying about packing what I need or cannibalizing my nightstand before the trip. It has had an outsized impact on my travel experience, and I regret not doing it sooner.
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I trick my son (and myself) into putting away laundry by asking him to just put away his socks. Then we will come back in a minute and do his shirts. We repeat this cycle until all of his laundry is put away.
I find the same trick works on me. I want to make a new YouTube video, but that amorphous daunting task is challenging to start. I made this automation to help break up making a video into smaller tasks. This reduces the friction and makes producing videos much easier!
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Meetings are a massive part of knowledge work. So much so that being good at meetings can change the trajectory of your career. Worst case, it saves you time and reduces the number of meetings you need to attend. Best case, your preparedness and follow-through brings you higher quality opportunities and career growth. The only cost is the time you need to spend to prepare.
I made a video about a shortcut I use to automate my meeting preparation, reducing my time investment to seconds while also improving the quality of my work. Let me show you what I did.
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