Month: December 2021

Stop Obsessing With Productivity

Neera

We are obsessed with productivity. I am not talking about companies; I am talking about individuals, although companies are the ones who have ingrained in us the notion that we should be efficient at all times.

Everywhere I look (myself included), I find people trying to milk more out of their day.

We have forgotten how to relax. We feel guilty about having a day off. We work during our holidays. We dread going on holiday. Going on holiday means getting behind with your schedule. You do a sh*t load of work before you go and then another sh*t load to catch up when you get back.

Why are we working so hard?

Three reasons, I believe.

We associate our value with what we produce.

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, once we fulfill our basic physiological, safety, and love & belonging needs, we get on to meet our need for self-worth, accomplishment, and respect.

As more and more of us have fulfilled our bottom three levels of hierarchical needs, we have embarked on satisfying our self-esteem needs. We are on to make a name for ourselves, and in today’s world, it is by creating. The creator’s economy not only demands that we produce. We comply because our self-worth is associated with it.

Image Source: Simply Psychology

Image Source: Simply Psychology

We focus too much on the future.

Another reason is that we constantly focus on the future. We have been trained to think that the key to success and happiness lies in securing our future. Work more now so that you can retire early. Build a better future by being productive now to enjoy life later on. This false belief leads us to forego happiness in the present and spend the bulk of our days hunched over our computers, grinding our teeth, reassuring ourselves that the eventual payoff will be worth it.

That eventual payoff never comes. When the time comes to retire and put our feet up, we don’t know what to do with our time. So many retirees go back to work after a few months—many who don’t wither away because of a lack of purpose in their lives.

Productivity is an addiction.

Believe it or not, productivity is an addiction, and more people are getting hooked on it. As soon as you start measuring your output and know you can accomplish a certain amount of work in a certain amount of time, you raise the bar. Unfortunately, it is not just your boss at work who does it to you; your inner boss does it too.

When you are not producing, you get withdrawal symptoms just like a heroin junkie does. So you set yourself new targets. Bigger goals, tighter deadlines. Harsher punishments if you fail to meet those.

What is the solution?

The truth is that constant focus on being productive doesn’t lead to the success and satisfaction we crave. Instead, we’re stressed, tired, and perpetually unhappy, aware there’s always something more to be done.

I am retired. I have no financial need to keep on working. I have a healthy circle of friends. I have a big family. Yet I spend most of my time on the computer.

The solution is simpler than you think; instead of scheduling every minute of our calendars to accomplish something, we should slot in some rest, and doing nothing, and make peace with our limitations that we cannot achieve everything.

REST

Constant efficiency could be counter-productive. For being efficient, the focus is on accomplishing rather than enjoying. Creativity suffers because our brain doesn’t get time to make random connections.

Focused, sequential work is different from the “randomness of thought that occurs during rest,” says Andreasen Nancy C. Andreasen, chair of psychiatry at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Creativity relies on rest and free association. Andreasen coined the term REST (random episodic silent thought) to describe the high neural activity marking states of relaxation and free association.

You are not wasting time when you are engaged in leisure activities. Instead, you are rejuvenating your body and your brain and exposing it to new ideas, and letting it make new connections.

Do Nothing

Jenny Odell, an artist and writer of the book “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” argues that the fixation with productivity has warped our sense of fulfillment and growth.

“The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive,” she writes, “but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.”

Productivity is more like maintenance than creation. Practices based on solitude and observation — such as birdwatching (which Odell recommends), look like inaction but hones attention. And paying attention to things is more rewarding and fulfilling than chasing our tails while being productive.

That might seem like a “self-indulgent luxury” for people with time on their hands, Odell acknowledges, but “just because this right is denied to many people,” she writes, “doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important.”

Accept your limitations

Oliver Burkeman, in his recent book Four Thousand Weeks, sums it up correctly — you will never be able to accomplish everything you set up for yourself, so accept your limitation and make peace with it.

I agree with him on just going with the flow, doing what feels right at each moment. Unless there is some urgency and we are forced to act, we are always doing whatever feels right in every moment, in any case. Even the most obsessive planners (including me) are still deciding, moment by moment, what to do. It’s just that the specific decision they’re making, for now, is to keep on following the plan.

What is your take on productivity?

Have you been able to plan your days, weeks, months, life?

Do you achieve whatever you have set out to achieve?

What is your conclusion?

Share with me in the comments section.

Ten Lessons Learned From Publishing My Second Book

Neera

1) You can’t write a book without a deadline.

This is primarily true with all projects, but with books, it is gospel. A book tends to get out of your hands and become a monster. Expect your brain to rebel too. It would want to do everything else but work on the book. The only way to finish a book is to hire an editor who has pre-charged you for editing and has blocked his time. The late you get with delivering your book, the less time he has to edit it, which means poor quality editing. And in case you don’t finish in time, you lose your money and your editor too. Most professional editors want to work with professional authors. So if you expect professionalism from them, you got to be professional too.

2) You are bound to struggle with your first few books.

I wrote my first book like I had my first baby. I didn’t know what to expect and just went with the flow. I made several mistakes, but it didn’t matter. But with the second one, I learned many pitfalls and still fell into them. Despite making several lists, I still wasted time and effort. Now, taking a step back, I am more accepting that I will struggle with my first few books, which is fine. Just two years ago, I struggled with writing a 1000 word article. Today I am writing a 20,000-word book a month. If I can come that far in two years, I will get better in the next two.

3) Building a backlist is of utmost importance.

Nothing sells your book like your next book. So, early in your career, you will be spending time building a backlist and learning the ins and outs of the industry. Even if nobody buys your earlier books, having a backlist establishes you as an author in the industry and prepares the ground for the sale of your future work.

4) Amazon Ads could be your friend.

When you are relatively new in the industry and don’t have a mailing list, Amazon advertisements could bring much-needed visibility to your books. Without the promotions, no one knows about your book.

You don’t have to abandon your earlier books after putting all the work into writing, editing, formatting, publishing, and launching them. Set up Amazon ads and get the visibility your book deserves. Although Amazon ads don’t chew up your advertising dollars as Facebook or Google does, they do chew up your time. There is a lot to learn in this area.

5) Book-A-Month could be a real strategy.

What writing an ‘article-a-day’ is for Medium writers; writing a ‘book-a-month’ is for Amazon writers. The rapid-releases strategy not only gives momentum to your writing practice but to the marketing of your book as well. ‘Nothing sells a book better than the next book’ is the industry cliché.

It might come as a surprise to some but it is easier to write an article a day than it is to write an article once a week. The same is true for writing books. Speed brings focus and fluency.

6) Block out a week a month to write the book.

There are only four weeks in a month. So if you want to write a book in a month, you need to block out at least a week. You need to write 3000 words a day for a 21,000 words book. You will then need another week to edit it.

I wrote my first book in one week. I decided to take the weekend off with the second one and wrote it in 10 days instead. It turned out to be a better strategy as I didn’t have to postpone any weekend plans. I wrote 2000 words a day (a more manageable target) and edited the previous day’s work as I went.

7) You got to love the process.

A career as an author is not for those who want to succeed quickly. Even with rapid releases and advertising, building a backlist and readership takes a long time. You got to love the process (and writing) enough to be able to sustain for that long. Most authors who are doing well today have been writing for decades. They can do that because they love writing and the process of generating books.

8) Initially, you might have to concentrate all your energy on the task at hand.

When I got serious about writing on Medium, I stopped everything else and wrote 100 articles in 100 days to get into the rhythm of writing for the platform. I did the same for writing books. For two months, I entirely concentrated on books. I didn’t check social media, and I didn’t write on Medium. Once I established the system, and I began to get a bit more time, I started going back to the platforms I used to be active before.

9) Treat everything as an experiment.

Writing 100 articles in 100 days was an experiment. So was publishing something on three social media platforms for 100 consecutive days was an experiment. My first book was an experiment too. An experiment to see if I could write a book in a week. Writing a book a month is an experiment too, if I succeed, well and good. If I fail, no big deal. I will learn a lot during the process.

Speaking of failure, I could pull through 90 Days of Focus on Fiction back in August, neither could I keep the promise I made last week to write an article a day for December. They were just experiments. Some I was able to pull through, others I couldn’t.

Both these goals have gone to my future To-Do lists, and hopefully, I will do justice to them one day.

10) Writing a book is just one-third of the battle.

Two-third is marketing. According to The State of Indie Authorship in 2021, 79% of independent authors list marketing as the most challenging part of the publishing process. Writing the book came in second at 14%. I am finding the same. It could be that marketing is taking me away from my passion, i.e. writing, or that my marketing channels are not set as my writing process has. I will be spending more time on it in the next year.

If you like my work, you can subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer.

Use ‘Defamiliarization’ To Find Creative Inspiration

Neera

Sister Corita Kent (1918– 1986) was a major 20th-century American artist and a charismatic teacher at Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood, California. She believed that everyone was capable of great creativity. 

Sister Corita was inspired by the bits and pieces of life around her, from billboards and newspaper headlines to international folk art. She changed the potentially stuffy classroom atmosphere into a cauldron of queries and assignments, encouraging students to question most of what they thought they knew about art and many other things.

One of Corita’s favorite teaching tools was a finder, a scrap of cardboard with a window in the middle through which students discovered design elements in unexpected places such as a supermarket, a gas station, cracks in the sidewalk. She immersed students inflow (the creative practice of observing and working with single-minded concentration ) and overflow (doing lots of it). 

Learning art Corita-style meant serious observing and serious play.

‘Defamiliarization’ is based on the same theory.

In a recent article, David Epstein, the author of the bestseller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World talked about ‘defamiliarization’ a technique championed by Russian writers. 

It is about describing usual things in unusual ways and thus providing a different perspective on experiences we normally take for granted. 

The idea is to “reawaken our senses by making the familiar ‘unfamiliar.’

Most of us look right past familiar items, something Tony Fadell talks about in His TED Talk — “The First Secret Of Design Is…Noticing.” Tony Fadell is known for Apple’s iPod, but he is even more proud of his second act — making the household thermostat more efficient and less of an eyesore.https://neeramahajan.com/media/5ac8095d0ea48613fbf38eea39873180Source: TED Talks

After leaving Apple, Fadell traveled the world for a year and a half before settling on his next product idea. 

“I had to pull back and get out of Silicon Valley to gain perspective and see the world in a different way to then re-enter it to be able to do Nest.” —  Tony Fadell

How to practice ‘defamiliarization?’

Make a cardboard viewer

I took Sister Corita’s advice and made my own cardboard viewer went to my backyard to experiment. As I looked through the hole, the very first thing I noticed was a single rose amidst the daffodil foliage. I have several rose bushes in my backyard, but none where this one was growing. Surprised I went closer and found that this solitary bloom was coming straight from the ground and the stem has no leaves whatsoever.

Image by the author

That solitary rose gave me an idea for a story. Without the cardboard viewer, I would have completely missed it. 

Find a child

Sister Corita’s second suggestion is to find a child. A child can help you see things from a completely different perspective. If there is no child in your household she suggests borrowing one and letting him give you beginning lessons in looking.

It will take just a few minutes. Ask a child to walk from the front door of your house to the back door and closely observe his small journey. It will be full of pauses, circling, touching, and picking up in order to smell, shake, taste, rub, and scrape. His eyes won’t leave the ground, and every piece of paper, every scrap, every object along the path will be a new discovery. 

A dog does the same thing. I neither have a child nor a dog in my house. But last week, while visiting a friend of ours in Melbourne, we went for a walk with their dog. The dog stopped every few steps sniffing, exploring, looking. At first, it was annoying but then I started noticing the things he was noticing and was truly intrigued by his finds.

Change the language

Writing in a language that is not your mother tongue helps you say things in new ways. English is not my first language. After migrating to Australia, for a long time, I was still thinking in my mother tongue (Punjabi) and then translating in English. I used to think of it as a limitation but it was in fact an asset. As I didn’t know the slang and cliche, I was saying things (rather translating) in a completely different (hence fresh) way.

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami writes his first draft in English and then translates it back into his native Japanese. Novelist Jhumpa Lahiri went a step further and abandoned her native language (English) entirely, went to Italy to learn Italian, and wrote her next novel in Italian in order to gain a new perspective.

Read backward

David Epstein narrates his experience as a fact-checker earlier in his career. He would go back through an article he was checking, ticking off each fact as he went. Invariably when he went his usual way he would unconsciously just glance over and miss some of them. 

Many times I read articles from back to front, forcing my mind to concentrate more. 

David Epstein also has a little couch in his office that faces the opposite direction of his desk chair. He flops onto that when I need a shift of perspective.

Draw rather than write

Drawing a sketch is a great way to get a point across. It is also a great way to get a different perspective. These days, when I’m stuck with my article, rather than banging my head against the same wall, I start sketching.

Write by hand

Another thing I do to get out of my temporary block is to write on a notepad rather than on the computer. Switching from computer to notepad is a great way to change perspective. I am much more fluent on notepad than on the computer.

Give advice to others

This is a cheeky one. We are much better at giving advice to others than to ourselves. So whenever you’re in need of good advice, find someone else to give advice to, and you’ll end up having a fresh perspective on your problem.

That is why it is a good idea to write inspirational and self-help articles. 🙂

Takeaways

Practice ‘defamiliarization’ for creative inspiration. Some of the ways to do that are:

  • Make a cardboard viewer
  • Find a child.
  • Change the language.
  • Read backward.
  • Draw rather than write.
  • Write by hand.
  • Give advice to others.

 — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 

Are thinking of writing a book but don’t seem to get time. You don’t need to block out months to write your book. You can do that in one week. That is what I did and since then have been writing my books within a week or at the most ten days.

Find out how you can do it too. For a short time, I am offering my book for free. Click here to download it.

Just An Hour A Day To Learn Something New

Neera

Why is it so hard to learn a new skill in the beginning?

When I started blogging three years ago, I struggled a lot. It was taking me 7 to 8 hours to write a post. I would get frustrated, write sentences repeatedly, try to make the paragraphs flow, and work late at night so that I could publish the damn thing.

When I started sketching, it was even worse. My skeches were terrible, and I would feel horrible posting them on Instagram.

When we try something new, we are usually terrible at it, and we know it. We get disturbed at the prospect of being horrible at something, so much so that we quit to escape from the feeling of angst.

The early times of trying something new are always challenging, but a little persistence can result in huge increases in skill. The human brain is optimized to pick up new skills extremely quickly. If we could persist and practice systematically, we can experience dramatic improvements in a very short time.

I recently started writing books. For years I was convinced that it takes at least a year to write a book. Until one fine morning, I woke up and decided to write a book. That too in one week. And I did that.

I treated the book as an experiment to learn the process of writing a book. Taking the same approach as writing blog posts, I broke the book into smaller chunks and concentrated on one chunk at a time.

In the beginning, I struggled. I was all over the place. I was writing and rewriting and had no idea what I would cover in each chapter, but as the days passed, I was beginning to develop a routine for myself.

There were times I was trying not to throw my computer across the room when I got overwhelmed but then pushing through the early frustration, I developed simple techniques to meet my daily quota of writing.

First, I figured out I only have 4 -5 productive hours a day, so I made sure I didn’t waste them. Second, I learned that if I cover the core concepts first, I can fill in the blanks with research later. Third, I realized I concentrate on the smaller chunks at a time I can go through more in the given time.

As a result, I finished my book in time to publish it within a week.

So successful was this approach that I am now using it to write a book a month.

It didn’t take me 10,000 hours to master the skill of writing and publishing my first book.

Malcolm Gladwell was the first to make Dr. K. Anders Ericsson’s 10,000 rule famous through his book Outliers. Through several examples, Gladwell found that it takes around 10 years or 10,000 hours of practice to reach the top of ultracompetitive, easily ranked performance fields, such as professional golf, music performance, or chess. In those fields, the more time you’ve spent in deliberate practice, the better you perform compared to people who have practiced fewer hours.

But there is a caveat.

Most of the time, we are not seeking to become world-class golfers or chess players. I didn’t write a New York Times bestseller in one week. I just wrote a book. My focus was on solving a problem (mine as well as my readers) and hence I wrote a useful book.

In the process, I learned a skill in one week.

To learn a new skill, you need to figure out what is the focus. In my case, the focus was on solving a problem.

If you are learning career skills, your focus may be on performing well enough to produce a result that’s meaningful to you and useful to your employer.

If you are learning personal skills such as a hobby, your focus should be on enjoying the process and having fun.

Rather than Malcolm Gladwell’s (aka Dr. K. Anders Ericsson’s) 10,000 rule, I subscribe to Josh Kaufman’s “20-Hours rule”.

Josh Kaufman, the author of The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast states that it takes you just 20 hours of deliberate practice to learn a new skill.

The concept of the “10,000-hour rule” is very intimidating. It can serve as a barrier to learning anything. If you believe it takes that long to see results, you’re less likely to start in the first place.

And the idea of “mastery” is also a deterrent. We don’t have to “mastery” every skill we ever learn. Developing new skills in a way that allows us to perform “well enough for our own purposes.” This approach is by far the most practical approach for skill acquisition.

According to Josh Kaufman, you can learn just about anything if you commit to “deliberately practice” for 20 hours.

About 40 minutes to one hour a day is all you need to get the results you’re looking for. It is not to attain mastery or for competitive performance but to get good enough.

Jeff Kaufman suggests 10 Principles of Rapid Skill Acquisition in his book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast!,

  • 1. Lovable project — It’s important to pay attention to what you’re personally most interested in learning. Even if you think you “should” focus on learning something else, when you’re naturally interested in a particular skill, you’ll learn extremely quickly. So follow your interests where they lead, and avoid forcing yourself to grind through abilities you’re not interested in exploring.
  • 2. One skill at a time — Don’t choose multiple skills at the same time. Concentrate on one skill at a time and give it your full attention.
  • 3. Target performance level — Decide what you want to be able to do. It is called a “target performance level.” If you have a clear idea of how good you want to become, it’s much easier to find specific practice methods that will help you get there as quickly as possible.
  • 4. Deconstruction — Most skills are really just bundles of smaller subskills you use at the same time. Break the skill down into smaller parts. By breaking down the skill into manageable parts, you eliminate the early feelings of overwhelm and make it easier to get started.
  • 5. Critical subskills — Practice the most important subskills first. A few subskills will always be more important than others, so it makes sense to begin by practicing the things that will give you a significant increase in performance. By focusing your early practice on the most critical parts of the skill, you’ll see a dramatic increase in your performance after a few hours of practice.
  • 6. Barriers to practice — When learning a skill, there will always be barriers that interfere with the learning process. These barriers could be internal such as fear or self-doubt, or external such as distractions (a ringing phone, knock at the door, TV). Eliminate any hindrances for one hour.
  • 7. Make time — The exact amount of time it takes to acquire a new skill depends on your desired performance level — if you don’t make things harder than they really need to be, it’s not at all uncommon to reach your initial objective in a few hours.
  • 8. Fast feedback loops — Find a way to get fast feedback on your progress so that you can correct yourself quickly and stay on the path of speedy learning. You can hire a coach or take time to reflect on your mistakes and correct them.
  • 9. Short bursts — Numerous studies in the fields of motor and cognitive skill acquisition have established that the first few hours of practicing a new skill always generate the most dramatic performance improvements.
  • 10. Quantity and speed — Practice quickly and often and do not focus on achieving perfection. It’s better to recognize that you’re likely a beginner, and you shouldn’t expect yourself to be an expert from the start. By prioritizing quantity and speed, you’re less likely to get frustrated and subsequently demotivated during the initial stages of practice.

Kaufman field-tested the “First 20 Hours” on a wide variety of skills in several contexts — fine and gross motor movements, cognitive processing, personal hobbies, and professional skills.

The general pattern looks like this – when you start, you’re horrible. But you improve quickly as you learn the essential parts of the skill. After reaching a certain level of skill quickly, your rate of improvement declines, and subsequent improvement becomes much slower.

This phenomenon is called the “power law of practice,” and it’s one of the most consistent findings in skill acquisition research. According to Kaufman, this effect has been known since at least 1926, and it’s been replicated many times in studies of both physical and mental skills.

Even when you have learned a new skill, you will lose it over time if you don’t continue to practice it.

Skills deteriorate over time is a given, but it is also easy to re-acquire a skill after you’ve learned it. It usually doesn’t take much practice to bring your skills back up to past levels once you know what you’re doing. An hour or two every few months is usually sufficient to maintain your current level of performance. You’re just reconnecting parts of your brain that haven’t been connected in a while. The neural wiring is still there; it’s just a bit rusty.

Is there any skill you would like to learn?

Would you be game enough to test Josh Kaufman’s “First 20 Hours”?

I would like to hear about it here.

You can write your first book in one week. I did it. So can you. Want to know how? Just download the book and get going.