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Gaslight Your Fear of Being Seen, Gatekeep Your Inbox, Girlboss Your ADHD

The Portal: Issue 055

WELCOME TO THE PORTAL: a weekly dose of refreshing productivity strategies and unconventional ideas to help you finally feel in control of your time.

Subscribe now and join thousands of others discovering a world where productivity actually feels fun (instead of making us feel like sh*t).

Good morning to all the Barbies and Kens who went to bed in their makeup after the Halloween parties last night! If you dressed up your pets in costume, could you plz send pics? We want to highlight them in our IG stories pet parade today 👀

Anna’s son Bok Choy dressed as a terrifying bat

💭 ONE THING WE’RE THINKING ABOUT

It’s a tale as old as smartphones:

The alarm on your phone wakes you up in the morning, you turn it off, check your notifications, and suddenly you’re in your email. Sometimes this is a light touch, just making sure you’re not missing something critical, but often it can lead you down a mental rabbit hole of all the pressures on you today… and you’re still under the covers.

Email is one of the biggest culprits of the sense of manufactured urgency that most of us feel, well, all the time.

Think about it like an actual mailbox — would you walk outside and check your mail every 15 minutes? Nah bruv, that’s crazy, it’s a once per day type of thing.

While most of us probably can’t only check our email once per day, the stats show we’re checking it every 5-7 minutes… which is also not something most of us need to be doing.

It may be helpful to recalibrate what “urgent” actually looks like for you and your job. You may find that it might be sufficient for your inbox to get sorted during one focused hour at a time — maybe once per day, or maybe only 2-3x per week.

If you have an email-dominant job, the opposite idea may be helpful. If it feels like a lot of your job happens over email, but your non-email projects are suffering, try blocking off one hour (or more!) a day away from your inbox.

You deserve blocks of undivided focus on your work — that question from Kathy can wait 47 minutes.

Most people know when they send an email, the recipient may not even see it for 24 hours, so you can likely find somewhere to loosen your grip on how urgent your replies need to be.

Your email is meant to serve you, not the other way around.

This issue of The Portal is brought to you by

SaneBox is an AI inbox assistant that automatically sorts your incoming mail, allowing you to only read the important stuff and safely forget about the rest. It’s like having smart, trainable virtual assistant that keeps your inbox clutter-free, so you can spend more time on work that actually matters.

 📖 ONE THING WE’RE READING

This article is long and incredibly validating if you’re navigating an ADHD diagnosis later in life. Grab your comfort water bottle, weighted blanket, and channel some hyperfocus on this article if you can.

This says it all:

It’s likely been there all along, masquerading as low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, “she’s difficult,” “she’s an airhead,” “she’s unlucky,” “she’s lazy,” and other labels that tend to mark a girl as she moves through her life.

Carla Ciccone

🍿 ONE THING WE’RE WATCHING

What if we told you laziness can be an advantage?

One of our favorite newsletters (Ness Labs) recently put out a 6-minute video with a fantastic and informative perspective on laziness, explaining how it can make you more productive and creative.

👀 ONE THING WE’RE OBSESSED WITH

Save this one for later —

Our friend Rea delivers these incredibly beautiful meditative experiences, and this one contains some powerful messages to help you release your fear of being seen.

🤔 ONE QUESTION FOR YOU

It’s time to bring your President of Your Own Fan Club energy and hype yourself —

Why do your friends like you?

Reply to this email (or head over to our IG stories!) with the qualities that make you a great person to be friends with.

Anna’s answer: I make a great +1 to any event, and always have a random thing you can be my +1 to as well

MJ’s answer: sdfsad sdfdsf all the research for any trip is taken care of, yelp queen

⭐️ ONE LAST THING

Jeopardy! Icon Ken Jennings won 74 matches in a row (some of us will remember this legend behavior from childhood), and he’s now hosting celebrity jeopardy on Hulu! Time to put on your thinking caps 🧠

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