keeping a physical talisman visible to signal to your brain it's time to focus

Keep it in your pocket and bring it out when you're in deep focus mode at work! This idea came via my friend Peiting Li, a calligrapher. She originally got the idea from the poet Rick Tibbetts: "he always takes something portable as a little signal to bring him into a state of work or flow, a little touchstone." For a while Peiting used small stones and then she found this jewelry mold. "It’s a mixture of dots and lines, which are the constituent elements of calligraphy," she told me for my newsletter, Making Sense. "It has a certain heft and weight and seeing it helps me focus."