The Jim Kroft Podcast

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Jim Kroft Podcast. So here's the thing. We all know we have to put our work into the world as creatives, as artists, small business owners, whatever shape your path takes, you can't just make anymore. You have to mark it. And that is where the real tension starts. So you've got people like Alex Hermosa spending millions a month on content teams, on ad spend, on a system designed to flood every feed, every single day. And then you've got Gary Vee banging the drum post, post post content, content, content. And sure, there's value in it. And I get it. And I'm not here to knock that world. But it's not our world because most of us were out here trying to make a living, trying to honor our craft, maybe raise a family, maybe keep a relationship afloat, maybe just get a walk in and somewhere in the middle of all of that, Figure out how to share our work in a way that doesn't destroy the very energy we need to do the work in the first place.

So that's the background to this week's episode, and I'm not coming in at this as a guru. I'm not even sure I'd call myself a guide, but I've had a breakthrough lately about how I structure my week, how I keep creative momentum without spiraling into burnout. And it's something I've been slowly building towards for a couple of years, I'd say now. And it's all clicked around this principle one clear purpose per day. Now, just for context, things have been going well. The podcast growing and my Substack just crossed 111 weeks without missing a single issue, which has put it into the top percent of newsletters for consistency. So I'm finding a groove. But like you, I've hit pain points. The overwhelm, the self-doubt, the fatigue of putting something out and wondering if anyone's damn well going to see it. So this episode is the behind the scenes. It's my thinking, it's my feeling, and it's the system I've been experimenting with for all this time. And it's helping me show up not just more often, but more fully.

So today is about diving into what I've discovered so far. But before we dive in, I just want to say for anyone listening who's really struggling with that, with, you know, he's tired or questioning everything or wondering whether to just walk away. I want you to know this. About four years ago, just after the pandemic, I came close to leaving all of it behind, and I thought seriously about giving up the digital world altogether. And I wanted something more analog, more rooted, more human. But the truth was, I still wanted to live a life in the arts. I still had something to say, and that decision became a threshold moment. This podcast is my take on what I've been learning since then. So if you're somewhere in that space, tired, disorientated but not quite ready to give it up, this episode is for you. As Ziad Abdel Noor puts it, life is like a camera. Focus on the good times, develop from the negatives and if things don't work out.

Take another shot. Let's dive in, guys. This is your host, Jim Kroft. And it's my absolute honor to have you here with me today. The other day, a friend asked me how I managed to keep momentum across so many creative disciplines, and I surprised myself with the speed of my answer. Without thinking, I said, I have one clear purpose per day. But later that night, I realized I'd been drifting. I was getting things done, but everything felt somehow off balance. Whatever pulled my attention seemed to pull Pulled everything else apart with it. Worse still, I wasn't particularly happy. So I paused, took a breath, sat down on a quiet Sunday, and looked honestly at my life. And what I saw was this. I was moving forward, but with that intention not flowing, just bludgeoning through tasks like a creature caught in the machinery of its own ambition. Here's the thing. Each life is its own ecosystem. And when the ecosystem is flooded by over commitment, overthinking, or over connection, it becomes impossible to feel rooted.

Now, in the age of abundance, we're drowning in our options overwhelm, burnout, that sense that everything overlaps, or that one part of your life hijacks the rest. And this isn't a personal flaw. It's a modern epidemic. So I gave myself a gift. I took a day to stop to order each part of my life to return to first principles. And today I want to share what I found. I also want to offer something deeper than all this I flavoured advice or generic productivity hacks. Call me old fashioned, but I've learned more in the mucky grind of reality than from any guru. And the first thing I've learned to throw out the idea that one fixed system can be superimposed on any life. What's emerging for me is something more alive. A daily system that burns and breathes with life's connections rather than being glued on top of them. So let's dive in. Part two. Life as an ecosystem. I sat down at a cafe in Berlin, Bonanza in Kreuzberg, and took a moment to take in the space.

A quiet study in minimalism with polished steel rising like sentinels, offset by the sweeping organic forms of giant plants. A change of space and a strong coffee is never a bad place to start when you're taking stock of things. What struck me was I didn't even need to think to begin the diagnosis. Often the things that could help us most are the very ones we avoid because we don't want to meet the voice of Self-recrimination waiting in the space between us and the part of life we know we need to fix. But that's how the little lizards become dragons. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we leave them in the cave, they'll just go away. But they never do. Yes. Sometimes what? We're avoiding the big things, but more often they're very small. We just rather not look at them. So whatever their form, our goals must be faced. And it's always, always better to do it on your own terms and in your own time than to keep pushing them down the line. Before I'd even open my notebook, I knew what I'd drifted from.

I'd been exercising less, avoiding a financial tangle I didn't want to address, and more subtly, I'd let go of seeing life as an organic whole in favor of being pulled by whatever had the strongest pull on me that particular week. I think this is something many of us can relate to, how one particular aspect of life can emerge as something positive, only to become a black hole to everything else. A passion pulls us in until everything else bends around its gravity. There are, of course, seasons where we choose to zero in on one thing, but that wasn't what I was trying to do. What I'd lost was balance. The quiet sense of inner coordination between the different aspects of my life. And so I'm renewing my approach by looking at life holistically again as an ecosystem. Like any ecosystem depends on balance, interconnection and self-regulation to thrive. The paradox of modern productivity is that it anchors itself in the to do list. Yet it's a cultural paradigm that sometimes feels like a forced marriage. Our addiction to ticking boxes at times erodes our ability to see life as a whole.

We're so busy dividing everything up that we fail to see the system is slowly breaking down. And the older I get, the clearer I see. Modern time management seems more likely to lead people to burnout than to an aligned life. And it may seem paradoxical, but sometimes the more you do, the further you veer off course. And everywhere we see this peculiar modern phenomenon of human beings doing a million things but never quite feeling. They're quite moving their lives forward. And rarely do we stop to ask, where is all this doing actually taking us? There's almost no pause in this modern fixation with doing for doing, say, as if motion alone is proof of meaning. But what if it's not? What if this relentless pace is rooted in a deeper fear? The fear that here is never enough. And it makes me wonder. Where has the lunatic idea emerged that the only worthwhile life is ever to be found somewhere else? It reminds me of the story of the man who spends his whole life climbing a ladder rung by rung, driven and determined only to reach the top and realize it's been leaning against the wrong damn wall all along.

For whatever reason, we can't seem to anchor our future orientation in this moment now. And if we've lost the ability to be in this moment now, then what precisely is this goal orientated future predicated on? It feels to me we stack void onto void and then surprise ourselves that we've drifted so far from meaning. I think there's a different way, and it takes work and deliberation, and the heart of that work is always trying to find your way back to the centre when you drift, which you always will. But by returning to that centre, the future becomes slowly shaped by your own deliberation, rather than pulled along by the mania of what you should be doing. Personally, I'm always amazed by how much clarity arises the moment I step back. It makes sense if life is an ecosystem, then when one part falls out of sync, the whole system feels it. That's why I resist the idea that niching down is the only path to success. It implies, you must sacrifice the wholeness of your life in order to move forward.

And in the wake of that story. We've witnessed grind cultures rise unchecked capitalism and the suffocating narcissism of the influencer era. What's the consequence? The consequence is the death of balance. So as I sat sipping my coffee, watching the quiet choreography of the baristas, I find myself wondering, what is it? We're all really trying to do. It seems to me that we're always living inside a strange tension between the part of us that wants to live fully in the present, to love, to notice, to share, and to be a part and the aspirational part of us that hungers for more, that yearns to express its potential, to create something meaningful and to participate zealously in the grand drama of reality. That, I think, is the deeper function of a to do list, to build something from the inside out, to manifest the internal world in the realm of reality. But the danger of our obsession with forward motion is that we miss the life that's already happening, for the life we'd like to have.

The one pulsing beneath the surface of the plan. Because the reality is, who you are right now matters. And when your ecosystem gets out of balance, the first thing that happens is that you separate from the pulse of life and happiness. That elusive myth we are forever chasing isn't about outcomes alone. It's an expression of alignment, connection, and integration. And for me, my little healing began in something small. Just stepping back. Watching the baristas move with soft, attentive focus, letting myself witness my own life instead of pushing through it, and from that place asking how I might play a better hand at the game. So before I outline the shift that I've made since then, a gentle reminder. Life is walking a path not yet mapped. As such, it's in the nature of this journey to get lost. And when you do so, adjusting your approach is how you get back the knowledge that it's all too easy to lose sight of. That every day is its own miracle, and safeguarding your understanding of that is half the battle.

So here's my question to you. What part of your life's ecosystem have you been starving lately? Often you don't need to think too long to find the answer. Start there. Nourish that area, then see how you can work that into next week. Because almost without fail, the ship begins to write itself. And maybe that's the work of each day not to do everything, but to tend to that one thing that matters most in that moment. Part three the danger of digital dilution. Modern life is complex. On top of how damn expensive everything has become. Each of us is earning a living in an economy that feels like it's sprinting ahead of us. We're nurturing friendships stretched across cities and continents, navigating the quiet complexities of family, juggling bills, raising children, showing up and holding it all together. And somewhere in the midst of it all, trying to keep alive a creative dream, a personal project, a business, some small fire that feels like it's ours. It's a delicate, relentless choreography.

Equal parts Devotion, exhaustion and hope. And within it all we can suddenly feel diluted by the constituent parts of our own life. Grateful somewhere for all of it, yet somehow dispersed by its disparate threads. I think this was why so many people discovered something new in the pandemic. For the first time, we had to undergo an enforced simplification. For me personally, it helped me to return to my center and to orientate my life again around what matters most. But like many, when things booted up again, I find myself trying to rebuild around this new center only to be whisked away by its unexpected acceleration. Just before the pandemic hit, I was in a great place musically. I'd been on tour promoting my album love in the Face of Fear, and it felt like I'd finally found a home with the label radicalism. But like so many musicians, I merged into a changed world. Radical is folded in Germany. And so I set out once again as an independent musician. Launching The Isolation Diaries, my next tour in a market that had completely shifted, and the focus of culture, where audiences pre-book shows have been completely decimated.

People were tired. Tired of venues canceling, tired of bands rescheduling, tired of living in a permanent state of refund requests and dashed expectations. And at some point, the audience simply stopped booking ahead, and suddenly the simple act of putting on a gig became a gamble, and it left me with a clear choice. Either I set my musical life aside, or I figure out a new way to be an artist in the world. Having rejected outright the online ification of things during the pandemic, I now faced a stark reckoning I could either begin to reconcile with aspects of modern culture that had sat uneasily with me for over a decade, or except that my creative life would need to shrink into something smaller, something more like a hobby. And that was the moment I made my U-turn. After months in the wilderness, during the isolation diaries. Turning in woods. Logging off. Searching for the deeper connection I had somehow drifted from along the way. I decided to throw myself into the digital space, not in denial of what I'd learn, but because I finally understood.

If you want to bring what you've discovered back into the world, you have to engage with the language the world speaks. Culture had moved, but I hadn't. It set me off on this journey of trying to figure out the modern world and new ways. A journey I'm still on and which continues to energize me sometimes out of rejection of everything. You arrive at the most defiant kind of affirmation, or it brings you to the door of what you're most avoided and says this. This, after all, was your challenge. Yes, the one you had most avoided. Part four A society of small bets out of a period of relative quiescence, I arrived at a clear insight about my future. I would recommit to a life in the arts, but this time I needed to surrender myself to the path and allow it to reshape me. I'd faced a similar turning point before, when I pivoted hard into film and photography after losing my deal with EMI in 2013. Now it turned out to be the right bet at the right time.

nternet speeds were ramping up globally. Video was beginning to its kind of long takeover of online life, and every company suddenly needed a trailer. I had strong contacts in the music world, and things moved far faster than I could have imagined. All of this allowed me to reposition myself musically, too, and music became an indomitable partner in my life rather than its centerpiece. Freelance film work became the engine that kept my musical life alive. This was the basis of my life, as I kickstarted a new embrace of the online world after the pandemic. And it started with this newsletter and this podcast, which itself was born out of developing a writing habit during the pandemic. I found during that time that writing became not just an anchor, but a sun, a gravitational center around which the rest of my life began to orientate itself. Starting this newsletter was a first step forward, building a deeper, more intentional participation in online life. As the internet grew into ubiquity, I found myself grappling with a familiar pain point Primarily short form content often felt shallow to me.

I recognize its potential, especially for artists offering a direct line to fans, but I remain skeptical about its ability to carry ideas or artworks that genuinely impact people in a lasting way. This newsletter and podcast helped me reframe that view, rather than seeing short form content as an end in itself. I began to see it as one part of a larger ecosystem. Short form platforms were for discovery. Longer form platforms were for relationships. The places where someone drawn in by a fleeting idea or a piece of music could go in deeper. Understanding that connection helped me see how the online world could be engaged with in a more meaningful way. Put simply, it meant grounding participation in one's own center, in one's own thoughts and values, and building outward from there with intention. Because I'd seen the other side to how the TikTok ification of culture had fragmented attention, eroded focus, and diluted the possibility of real engagement not just online, but with life itself. You can't be here if you're never really here. I had to ask myself, who am I? Who do I want to be? And what does it mean to become present in a world designed to keep us permanently elsewhere? I felt splintered between two extremes.

Either acquiesce to the momentum of society and watch part of myself dissolve into the daily vanishing mirage of temporary content, or reject it all and try to live an analog life outside the bandwidth of modern culture. Starting a Substack bridged those two extremes. I don't mean it as a solution to what is ultimately a challenge of consciousness, how we want to live in an age that constantly pulls us away from presence, from depth, from our center. But it was a decisive step, and, crucially, one I made on my own terms. Over two years later, I can say this it helped resolve the twin pain points that had been unraveling my creative life. First, my life is rooted again in what I create, not in what I consume. And that's a profound shift. In a world where many feel their attention and sense of self slipping away, this rebooting matters. Our capacity to think, feel, and imagine has been steadily infiltrated by algorithms, systems not built from the core of our own being, but designed by those companies whose primary aim is to monetize our attention.

And these aren't neutral tools. They shape how we see what we value and even what we believe. You can frame it however you like. But that's the trade. Many of us have made our consciousness in exchange for convenient entertainment distraction. And for me, starting the Substack marked the beginning of taking that trade back. What I didn't realize was that it came with its own danger too. Part five how the path pulled more than I planned to give. The problem with modern life is that there's always the allure of more. Or rather, we often feel we should or could be doing more. I'd set out with my Substack to use it as a foundational core, not just as a centerpiece for my future work, but as a weekly discipline, a way to clarify my thoughts, ideas, and relationship to the world. and it worked well for me. And soon I realized I could do more with it. By committing to one long form essay at the start of the week, I wasn't just choosing one clear idea to explore.

I was laying a foundation stone. Or rather, I began to see it as the heart of my creative system, a content hub that pumped energy through every artery and capillary of my work. And that realization was thrilling, not just because it brought coherence, but because it solved a challenge many artists face. How do you turn meaningful, long form work into short form content without losing its depth? Suddenly, I didn't just have bite sized pieces. I had clarity of purpose. Each snippet wasn't mere clickbait. It was an invitation for readers to dive deeper into the very ideas that were fueling me And I could see immediately that I already had the skills to take this further, whether in audio, video or the written word. And the truth is, everyone connects differently with different types of media. Some love audio and lean towards podcasts. Others prefer the visual rhythm of YouTube, while many still orientate towards the written word itself. So I had a simple idea. Turn my weekly newsletter into a podcast and a video, and in doing so, increase the surface area for potential connection.

Of course, pursuing this in reality came with challenges. There's a good reason the prevailing advice for online growth is to focus on one platform at a time. Fragmentation by chasing too many rabbits is its own danger. But there's also something to be said for responding to the potential of your own skillset. And through my years of music, I develop useful audio instincts, and through my video work, I'd honed streamlined filming and editing workflows. Even so, I wasn't sure I could pull it all off while still running a freelancer career and keeping my musical life alive. I was aware that I might be walking straight back into the very danger I'd once resisted busying myself into oblivion. But at some point along the artistic path, you have to shake things up and try new things. Sometimes all you have is trying new things. Experimentation becomes the sharp blade by which you forge a new future, even if you're unsure where you're actually going. And so I went for it, launching the podcast and then becoming more active on YouTube too.

And this Trinity, the newsletter, the podcast and YouTube sharpened my skills and brought a lot of joy as I've learnt new skills, platforms as well as meeting lots of new people and it also pushed me. It tests my discipline and it asked me to keep evolving both internally, but also in terms of having to get smarter about workflows. What I quickly learn is that each platform has its own language. You can't just paste one onto another. Sure, you could read your newsletter verbatim on YouTube, and some do it brilliantly, but the real power of video lies in bringing ideas to life visually. That's my aim on YouTube, not merely to explain the concepts I'm exploring, but to demonstrate how I put them into practice in the real world. It means that core ideas and the newsletter carry through, but that the viewer can witness how they work and sometimes don't work too in the real realm of life itself. So if you want to see how this all works. You can check out my main YouTube channel, Jim Croft.

So that approach just works much more powerfully for a visual form, because the ideas come to life rather than just being spoken. But it did start stretching me. I'd committed to the path, but the path had started devouring me. I needed a way to stay in motion without losing my center. That's when I returned to a principle I'd always known but had never needed more than now. A few months ago, I realized I was asking too much of myself again. Something needed to change. Either I would have to put one platform aside altogether, or I'd need to revolutionize how I approach my week. So I sat down with a question and soon saw that the easiest solution simply cutting out one thing to buy back time felt like a step backwards. Not only do I enjoy each platform, but each one holds a growing opportunity. It didn't feel like the right call yet, and I wanted to spin the wheel one more time. So I guess more importantly, I felt energized by the idea of solving my own pain point.

It felt there was something to be learned by leaning into trying to figure this puzzle out, and an opportunity there, too. And if it didn't work out, I could always pivot or change later. And after all, the act of pulling any dream down from the sky and attempting to ground it, in reality it's meant to challenge you. So in the final part of this piece, I'll walk through a few simple tweaks that have helped me solve both sides of this complex equation, namely, how to avoid feeling maxed out while still building real forward momentum. Not by doing more, but by creating more space within the week itself. Part six why my system broke and what I did next. The reason I'd hit a wall was that I drifted into a familiar pattern, one many creatives know too well. I wasn't living with intention. I was either reacting to what the day demanded, or getting pulled so deeply into one project that it broke the rhythm of my wider ecosystem. So in a nutshell, I had to choose between being reactive or being intentional.

And the reason so many of us struggle to build consistency isn't a lack of willpower. It's that we don't account for how every other part of life will challenge our plans. For me, the breakthrough began with the reverse engineering of my week. And that meant building my week towards the goal. So, for example, my content trilogy of the newsletter, the podcasts and the YouTube video. Completely crumbled when freelance work meant that I was writing the newsletter last minute on Fridays. That delay meant the podcast became irregular, which in turn disrupted the organic growth it was starting to build. Why? Because the first thing an audience wants is to know when something will land. That's the unwritten language of trust between creator and audience. And most of us working in this space will sure fail at times, but the journey is about building a system that allows you to show up consistently without burning out and on schedule. So I went back to first principles. I decided I had to start the week by writing the first draft of the newsletter on Monday religiously, and that way I'd have enough time to record the podcast and film the YouTube video, no matter how hectic the week became.

Except that didn't quite work either. It turns out reality is a difficult beast to tame. But I felt close. You know that feeling when you've wrestled with something for so long that you're on the cusp of a breakthrough, yet can't quite somehow push through that threshold? The past month gave me the chance to try something new, though with a natural hiatus in my freelance work. I finally had some space to experiment and to test the system that this whole piece has been building towards. And so I began testing small shifts, different arrangements, subtle tweaks to how I structured the week. And what I found surprised me. The solution wasn't about doing more, but about being clearer. And in the end, it came down to one simple principle. One that's been sitting there the whole time. Part seven. One clear purpose per day. The problem with reacting to everything in real time is that you quickly become governed by whatever aspect of life is demanding your attention. It is your life, but not ever quite controlled by you.

I decided to implement a hard stop. What if I tried to break down multitasking altogether? I mean, multitasking, not just in miniature. Doing this for half an hour and then that for half an hour, but rather by assigning one clear purpose to each day. Now, this isn't about carving out a full day. You just need to designate one task or goal as your single focus, whether it's ten minutes, an hour, or even the whole day. The key is treating that one clear purpose as its own standalone priority. There will always be days when life demands your attention in multiple areas, but when it comes to your creative work, your project, your calling, your business, try streamlining your attention to one aspect of it per day. It doesn't matter whether you have 20 minutes or 20 hours. The important thing is going like hell after one facet of it during that time, particularly a big project. Now, for me, it's really helped in three ways. First, it challenges the cognitive tax you pay every time you switch between two tasks.

In my experience as someone constantly juggling between disciplines in the arts, this energy drain is completely underestimated. I feel like I'm buying back a day of my week through this approach. Second, it gives you the gift of throwing out the nagging feeling that there is something else you should be doing. Part of doing anything is about allowing yourself to be here now. And the most cancerous aspect of our divided, modern attention is that we are constantly pulled towards our phones without ever knowing what it is we're looking for. Give yourself the gift of this. This I am doing. Now it's okay to damn well do it. Third, it activates the possibility of reaching a flow state because you're inviting yourself to go into a state of deep work. Earlier, I mentioned how I'd been feeling out of kilter with myself, as if something fell off. One thing I diagnosed was that I had lost my habit of deep work. In a working sense, this is where it all kind of happens for me, not just in terms of doing the heavy lifting on any given project, but also in the enormous peace it brings me afterwards.

Take this newsletter as an example. When I sat down this morning, I had the idea, but it took me a while to start. After gritting through a few paragraphs, I felt that familiar temptation to pivot, to check something, tweak something, to do anything else. And that right there is the way the tech companies have splintered your mind. The question is, what are you going to actively do to challenge it? In my case this morning, by committing to what I'm doing and resisting any distraction at all. I've written for four hours straight and hit peak flow. It would have been just as easy for me to pivot after two hours. And honestly, I did feel like it. But I recognized something. The other things calling me one time sensitive. They didn't need to be done right here now. If I stop writing this, this article would have spilled into another day dragging a cognitively demanding task across the rest of my week. And that doesn't just cost time. It burns through creative energy, too.

And that's energy you could be using for other things. Getting on with one other aspect of what you're trying to fire towards. So if you're juggling client work, parenting or day jobs, that becomes an unsustainable tax. So what I found is this it doesn't matter whether you have one hour or a whole day for your own work. It's not about time. It's about approach. The goal of having one clear purpose per day isn't just about working towards an outcome, though. It's about the quality of experience you're having with your work. One of the struggles I was having recently was that I felt I was living on the surface. I was surfacing, I couldn't activate that extra gear, the one that opens the door to your best work. And as soon as I made the shift, choosing one clear purpose each day, I started accessing a deeper part of myself again. This doesn't mean ignoring all the stuff that makes life, well, life. It simply means that at some point in your day, you carve out the space for the expression of what you really want to drive forward.

That, for me, is about making a sacred space in the day. Can you make a vow to what you hold most dear in life? If society is diluting that gift in you, can you stem the tide and determined to go in a different direction? It's not easy to do. Everyone struggles with it, but the precursor is to be serious about your own intention. Where are you focusing your energy? What is the most important thing to you? Can you sacrifice something shallow in the purpose of a deeper commitment? These are the questions that get my blood going. The ones that pull me out of the shallows and back into the deep waters of my spirit. Beyond that, it's its own form of devotion. A modern type of prayer. And when I fall out of it, I feel my connection to life weaken. It's not just about having one clear purpose a day. It's about saying, how can I bring the fullness of myself to something here? Now. Today. Part eight. My weekly creative production flow.

As soon as I hit upon the idea, I realized I wasn't just recovering something I'd lost. I was unlocking an access point to something new. Unwittingly, I'd set off a chain reaction. So I've started building it out. Not just one day with a clear purpose, but an entire week shaped around that idea. As ever, I'm conducting the experiment on myself. What would happen if I sign one clear purpose to each day? As I mulled it over, I realized I didn't just want to reverse engineer the outcomes I was aiming for. I also wanted deeper clarity on how each component of my week could support the whole. And so I returned to an idea I've played with many times over the years systematizing my week. Now, I know for many creative people, the word system can trigger immediate resistance. And I get it. It's it's a bit naff and it reeks of productivity speak. But here's the paradox. What I'm aiming for isn't about squeezing more in. It's about doing less and doing it better.

Because one of the biggest challenges creatives and freelancers face is something I call the disillusion dip. That part of the day when meaning hasn't yet arrived and direction still feels somehow out of reach. Most of us don't wake up automatically connected to our purpose. And that's really what resistance is. Not just avoiding the thing you love, but wondering why you're avoiding it even though you love it. If that's true, then the question becomes, how do we shape a life that helps us minimize time in this disillusionment and build momentum instead? That's why I've renewed my approach and built a weekly creative production workflow in notion put it simply, I want to know what I'm doing when I'm doing it and why I'm doing it. The what is about the specific piece I'm working on at any given time? The when is the intentional time that I'm carving out to do it? And the why is both the deeper motivation and the weekly outcome I'm moving towards. And all of this is helping me trade in moments of doubt for a growing sense of direction, because at the last we are the ones authoring our lives, and if we're going to be our own bosses, we have to actually be our own bosses.

Part nine conclusion. The North star of a single mission. Assigning one clear purpose per day isn't about breaking yourself on the wheel of productivity. It's about the opposite. If you're in operations mode working on a big project, it helps you cut through the clutter. It guards against that modern phenomenon of working on a million things, yet somehow getting nothing done. On the other hand, if you're in easy mode but want to keep life ticking over, one clear purpose stops you from being dragged into the tide of half formed form tasks that can hijack a day. Originally meant for rest, friends, or creative play. In that sense, it can be about assigning a mission to your day, or simply being gently decisive with a small window of time. For me, it helps in both. When I'm in deep work mode, I find it grounding to say this one thing gets done today. No matter the resistance, the tiredness or the self-doubt. It's a simple way to coax myself into motion. Especially on days I don't feel like it.

And when I'm on easy mode, it helps me to. Okay, I only have an hour. What do I actually want to do with it? One thing it's protected is my reading time. For instance, instead of losing an hour to forgettable scrolling, I return to the page because this isn't about chasing productivity for its own sake. It's about restoring rhythm to the ecosystem of your life. It's about creating. Instead of consuming. Reclaiming your attention. Rebalancing your internal world. And it's also helped me with what I don't do too. After years of working on Sundays, the decision to make them sacred, to do nothing has become its own little revolution. And last weekend, for instance, when I was completely hung over my one clear purpose do absolutely nothing. And today, my one clear purpose. Right. And edit this newsletter. Repurpose it then for the podcast. Job done. Part ten. Just a few things about what to try this week if you want to try this. Pick one clear purpose for each day something that matters to you.

It could be a creative task, an overdue priority, or even resting with intention. Block space for it, whether it's an hour or the whole day. And this isn't so much about the time that you have. It's about how you show up for it. Go all in. Let that one purpose be the anchor of your day, and resist the pull to split your focus, or check in on everything else. And notice the shift not just in what you accomplish, but in how you feel. Do you hit your flow faster? Does your day feel more grounded? Is your energy cleaner? Your mind quieter? This isn't a system to do more. It's a rhythm to feel more connected to what you're doing and to reclaim authorship over your week. Try it for a few days. Let it breathe. Adjust as you go and see if something deeper begins to move. That's what I'm doing and I hope some of these ideas help you too. Guys, take care and I'll see you next time.