How do you ensure that every day is a day that creates a sense of accomplishment? This simple 8 point checklist is a daily dose of awesome to unlock your potential as a creative thinker. This could be for content writers, programmers, vloggers and bloggers, or anything at all where you are creating something from an idea or a thought. This is why being able to unlock creative accomplishment is not just for artists and writers either. You have many daily activities you may not even realize are surprisingly related to creative work and creative thinking.
What about knowledge workers, marketers, retail teams, and other various roles and careers? These same 8 daily accomplishments will help you to make the most of every day both mentally and through creating something that lights up the mind and satisfies the soul.
How do You Build Positive Habits to Unlock Creative Accomplishment?
There are many studies that have shown the need for us to have a sense of accomplishment to feel good about our place in the world. After being in many different careers and environments over the years, I’ve learned to distill this down to 8 specific verbs that help me to unlock a good day and a better tomorrow.
These don’t mean that every day is a “great” day, but you can still get a positive result from a challenging day. The day I found out that I lost my Mother to a long battle with cancer I remember looking at my daily checklist. As rough as I felt, I knew I had to follow the method that I knew had worked for me so well. Even that difficult day had me feeling accomplished at the end because I followed these very simple, achievable steps along the way throughout the day.
Think in Verbs = Think in Creative Action
The reason we write verbs is to show them as action. These aren’t things that you want to do, or that you could do, but things you “will” do. It’s a nuanced way to write and that nuance is actually important in the way it helps you think and act. These 8 things use important actions that help mentally, physically, and emotionally.
By writing that you will do something and making it simple, tangible, and achievable, you are unlocking a real internal neurophysical response. Completing the checklist is satisfying, and it also ensures you stay on track with creating positive habits.
8 Daily Actions to Unlock Creative Accomplishment
The 8 daily actions are simple, and achievable. That’s why this method is easy to adopt and easy to find success with. This daily action list also helps you figure out where you find the most enjoyment. You’ll quickly realize there are areas you may struggle with and can focus on. The simple, achievable accomplishments become helpful to trigger positive neurological patterns. This also results in better productivity and overall feeling of well being.
Clean
Organizing and tidying things can be a very enjoyable and cathartic feeling. Even the simplest things like making your bed, putting away the dishes, organizing your desk, or small tidying and organizing, has a profound effect on your sense of accomplishment in the day. Make your bed in the morning, put away the dishes from the dishwasher or dryer, and you’ll find yourself getting a nice little positive dopamine response.
The secondary effect is that you have a tidy working or living area. Think of it as a way to organize your surroundings which also helps your mind become self-organized because you see order and cleanliness in your physical world.
Plan
Are you a list maker? Maybe you like to put sticky notes on your desk with things to do. You don’t need to be a full out Kanban guru to be able to plan your day. Just a simple list of a few things you need to accomplish and some things you just want to accomplish will help.
Creating a list or set of achievable tasks and a narrative for the day helps set the stage. This is also helpful as you get to the end of the day and reflect back on how it went. The common trap we fall into is creating unending todo lists and not focusing and prioritizing the 1-3 key tasks that need to be accomplished. This takes practice but the planning and checking how you did at the end of the day helps you get better for future days too. You’ll begin to learn your limits and capabilities so that even if you miss a couple of todo items, you aren’t left feeling like the day was a failure.
Learn
Do something that takes in new or additional information. This can be watching a video, listening to a podcast or audiobook, or reading an article or something that helps you take in something visually or audibly. The act of creating new learning opportunities daily also lets you detach from your list of things you need to create.
The combination that creates a positive result is spending some time learning and also separating from your own work for a bit. Even a 15 minute learning break will help you create a positive feeling and you’ll make a great daily habit. Do this in a concentrated way as well. Don’t get tempted to try to watch a video while writing an email. You should just pause your work and take some time to just focus on a new learning opportunity.
Create
Creating new content or any kind of knowledge output has an incredible positive result on your feeling of accomplishment. It’s important to create something to completion. This may mean you have a big project to work on but can treat the creation process as a subset of the overall with a fixed, tangible result. If you’re writing a blog, you know at about 1200 words that it’s done. Then press publish. The completion and pressing that magical publish button will actually generate a positive dopamine response.
Narrow down to the simplest thing that is achievable. It could be a small article, a whitepaper, a video, or even just an email to a friend or co-worker. Make your plan include creating something so you get to check off the checklist item and you add something to the world, even in a small way.
On a side note, if you’re keen on becoming a technical content creator then you can also head over to our freelance content engineer page to join us for some really fun creative work. We also do a lot about education and nurturing a positive content engineer community so that you can become better for you, every day.
Move
We sit too much. You don’t need to be out doing a triathlon to achieve a “move” task. It can be as simple as a walk around the house, around the block, or maybe as much as a full workout or run. Whatever your version of a move task is, make a point of planning it, and doing it.
After years of thinking that I could just get more done if I skip a workout or stay at my desk, I learned that working more has a diminishing returns effect.
Connect
Humans are designed to be connected to other humans. It can be social media, text, email, phone chats, or in person connection. Make a point of connecting to someone. I’ve learned to add this because it’s very easy to isolate yourself with our world of remote work. Sometimes a random phone call is all it takes to remind you how important connecting with others is for our own feeling of belonging. It may also help who you connect with as well.
Even a quick chat about non-work stuff with a work colleague is an invigorating feeling. Reminds us we are all in need of reflecting on relationships and celebrating connection.
Reflect
Take note every day of something. It can be a retrospective of your morning plan that you set out to accomplish. I like to do a specific post about 3 things that I am grateful for. I also like to do a written paragraph to help me formulate my sense of how I felt the day went and where it could have been improved.
This is also your chance to celebrate when it didn’t go well. Wait, celebrate difficulty?? Yes! Don’t think of failed tasks as a limitation. Take the time to reflect on why there was difficulty and how you can mitigate that in future. A very helpful trait to retrain failure and difficulty as a learning opportunity.
Share
Celebrate with others. This doesn’t need to be a grand social media post or anything public even. Just tell someone you know in the house or on your team or over text to a friend. Let them know something good happened and ask about their day. It solves both the connection and the reflection in one bonus step.
Here’s a nice easy downloadable and printable version which you can use. Make your daily checklist somewhere in the app or notebook you use. Keep a log of your 8 daily actions and see how you feel after doing this for a couple of days, a week, and a month. You will find that these are adaptable actions to your work and personal world. Hopefully you find this helpful and if you have any questions then drop a comment below and I can share my insights and hopefully help you to have a better way, in some small way, every day.
