5 Best Practices For Staying Productive In Your Professional And Personal Life

One of the toughest career journeys is the life of a skilled broadcaster. It requires professionally juggling writing, producing, editing, reporting while simultaneously delivering a strong on air presence without showing a single ruffled feather—all with aplomb and pinpoint accuracy. If you are somehow not familiar with Jessica Yellin, the Emmy, Gracie and Peabody award-winning journalist who spent 17 years in TV news, reporting for CNN as Chief White House Correspondent during the Obama administration, ABC and MSNBC, Elle Magazine described Yellin as “one of the most powerful women in Washington” during this powerful inflection in her career trajectory.

Known as a rule-breaker, Yellin recently pivoted her career focus by breaking all of mainstream TV media’s rules by delivering her bold new News Not Noise platform with its bold mission to change the inherently negative, ratings-driven way mainstream broadcast/cable news.Yellin recognized “that this approach left a huge audience out of the conversation — women.” As a result, Yellin now believes “in a better, new way to give the news — offering calm, clear information, not crisis — and decided to do it on her own by launching #NewsNotNoise.

Turning to Instagram as her new medium, which has become a growing go-to source for people to get their news, Yellin is changing the paradigm by breaking down complicated political issues via on-camera segments, interviews with experts (like Dr. Fauci) and posts from news sources where she adds clean text with smart, succinct commentary and context. The result is by drawing upon her credibility, instincts, and experience, Yellin is distinguishing the news that matters from the noise listeners can ignore as a news broadcast genre. 

It turns out that Yellin is on to something. News Not Noise’s approach is experiencing significant growth with 480,000 followers (including famous faces like Jennifer Aniston, Eva Longoria, Kristin Bell, Zoe Saldana, Natalie Portnman, Rosario Dawson and Jennifer Garner), over 350,000+ impressions in 2020, and 72,000 average views per video including 97% of the respondents in a recent study acknowledging they want “their news without fiery fights and partisan opinions.”

According to Yellin, the underlying reason for News Not Noise’s success is “Recognizing the difference between news and noise can empower listeners to ignore clutter and distractions, decrease anxiety, and focus on what’s important.” With this mindset shift in place, Yellin shares the top five ways to be more present, purposeful and productive in our personal and professional lives to tune out the noise.

1. Listen To Your Inner Voice. It’s important to discern the difference between doing hard things and listening to your inner voice. Sometimes a thing is hard because you have to pay your dues. And sometimes it’s hard because it’s wrong for you. Only you can know the difference. Yellin advises “learn how to hear what your gut says and practice acting on it.”
2. Ask For What You Want. To reach a goal, it’s enormously helpful to let other people know that’s where you want to end up. It helps your managers understand your ambitions, and it helps hold yourself accountable to getting there. When Yellin started in network news she did exactly that by telling her bosses, “ I want to end up at the White House”—even when she was doing overnights in New Jersey.
3. Do What’s Asked Of You, With Gusto, As Long As It Aligns With Your Integrity. This is a corollary to asking for what you want — then you have to do what they ask of you. It’s essential to achieving your goals. Yellin explained how she encounters “lots of aspiring journalists who tell her they want to be news anchors but they don’t want to report. Well, good luck! I didn’t start as White House Correspondent. I covered floods and tabloid scandals — to prove myself and earn my way there.” Yellin reiterated, “be clear about your goal, share it with others, then do what’s required of you (provided it’s not unethical.”)
4. Block Out Noise. This is very literal but important advice. Yellin often reports from non-traditional spaces — like an airport, a political rally or even a public park. To be productive under stress, Yellin has to block out noise (literally and figuratively) with earplugs or headphones as life savers and never travels without them. It’s a tactic that can be applied in your work or personal life to increse your productivity or enjoy much needed downtime as well as boost creativity. When things are becomign overwheling, find your own personal tactic to block out the noise tehn make it an ongoing habit.
5. Draw Boundaries And Take Real Breaks. For Yellin, “News has always been a 24/7 job. Without boundaries, I would work around the clock and to the point of exhaustion. Getting time away from the laptop allows me to process what I’m working on and get perspective. The key is to make it a real break: get out of your workspace, take a walk, look at leaves or trees. Then you come back with a perspective shift. That’s invaluable in work and your personal life.” It also oftern leads to creative break throughs that produce real results.

Yellin’s universally applicable advice underlines many of the tenets that have helped propel her career forward including focusing on the most important tasks first, her innate drive to cultivate a deep, lasting work ethic, drawing boundries by keeping a distraction list (which is the technique of immediately writing down distracting thoughts) that signals our minds that those distractions are acknowledged and will be taken care of if necessary (but put temporarily put to the side) to stay focused, and finally, getting better at saying “no” to maintain important boundries. It’s the perfect way to turn down all the noise and raise your productivity.