Category: Productivity

I used to be a “compulsive goal-setter.” You know the kind who set goals on the first of January. While other people stop right there, a “compulsive goal-setter” will continue all through the year.

I would set quarterly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, and of course, daily goals. No wonder when you set so many goals, you start losing track of them. This year I got so sick of goal-setting that I decided not to set any goals. Instead, inspired by James Altucher, I set a theme for the year. My theme for 2020 is – FOCUS. I am to stop spreading myself thin and focus on a few things at a time.

But like a compulsive gambler, I kept on setting myself goals. Setting goals very exhilarating but fulfilling them, especially that longer one which needs daily commitment, is hard.

That is when I found WOOP.

WOOP is not a gadget but is a science-based mental strategy that can be used to achieve goals.

Gabriele Oettingen, a German psychologist who has been studying how people think about the future, and its impact on cognition, emotion, and behavior, designed it based on her 20 years of research.

Gabriele Oettingen’s research noticed the typical goal-setting didn’t work nearly as well as we’re told. In goal setting, we are told, for goals to work, we need to think positively and rid off of harmful negative self-talk. But, her research showed that positive thinking didn’t work.

The more students positively envision themselves getting a job; the fewer job offers they received.

The more college students envision successfully starting a romantic relationship, the less likely they got together with their crush.

The more hip replacement surgery patients imagined themselves having a smooth recovery, the less they were able to move their new joint.

And the more positive overweight people’s fantasies about their success and losing weight was the fewer pounds they lost over 20 years.

Just dreaming about a positive outcome is not enough.

According to Gabriele Oettingen, we can perform better if we combine positive visioning of the desired future with additional steps.

Those additional steps are – acknowledging the obstacles and planning how to overcome them.

She designed a system to be able to do that and called it WOOP. It is an acronym of four words – Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan.

Wish – Choose a goal you would like to accomplish. It should be challenging, compelling, and realistic.

Outcome – What’s the best possible outcome that would result from accomplishing your goal? How would you feel? Visualize this outcome in your mind.

Obstacle – What are the personal obstacles that prevent you from achieving your goal? What’s standing in the way between you and your goal? Visualize this obstacle in your mind.

Plan – Make a plan for overcoming your obstacle. What action would help you when your obstacle shows up? Create an if/then plan and visualize it in your mind.

If / When _________ (obstacle), then I will __________ (action to overcome obstacle).

Identifying the obstacles forces you to do contingency planning. It is a great too for behavior modification too.

What is the science behind WOOP?

WOOP basically is the combination of two tools called mental contrasting and implementation intentions.

The “Wish”, “Outcome”, and “Obstacle” part of the technique comes from mental contrasting and the “Plan” part comes from implementation intentions.

WOOP = Mental Contrasting (WOO_) + Implementation Intentions (___P)

Both of these tools alone are already highly effective.

They’ve both been proven in many scientific studies to have a medium to large impact on actual behavior and significantly increase the likelihood of people achieving their goals.

I decided to test the system for my goals.

I downloaded its free app on my iPhone. Here are the two goals I am working on at the moment.

Here are the WOOP statements the app turned out for me.

WOOP website, WOOP MY LIFE claims that the women who tired WOOP ate more fruits and vegetables than those who didn’t use the system. Students who used this method got better grades.

I think the reason WOOP works is that by automating cognition, emotion, and behavior, it triggers you to become motivationally intelligent.

Having it on the mobile phone is handy.

You might want to give it a go.

Remember the reaction when the World Health Organisation declared the pandemic earlier this year? People started stockpiling things. Toilet paper disappeared from supermarket shelves. City after the city went into lockdown mode. Unable to function as normal, people glued to the news. The daily toll, the economic downturn, the difficulties in finding a vaccine, no end at sight. No wonder we were overwhelmed.

But the pandemic was not the first time when we felt overwhelmed. We all experience it from time to time. When we are under emotional stress, when we have too much to do, or when confronted with many challenges, overwhelm is what happens.

The tell-tale symptom of overwhelm is that we can’t think and act rationally.

We tend to freeze and unable to function normally. It’s a scary experience. We may not know which way is up or what way to swim. We feel stunned and unable to react. 

For writers, it happens when we undertake a new project—a project like writing a book. You know where I am coming from if you have read my previous post where I announced I would be publishing a book in 30 days. I panicked because I had so much to learn. Publishing, editing, cover design, formatting, marketing, launching, a whole load of things I knew nothing about.

On top of that, I had writing to do.

After a few days of panic attacks, I came to the realization that there is an antidote to the “overwhelm virus.”

It is called – “planning.”

It came as first-hand insight from observing the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The countries that “planned” well manage to control the infection and avoided the fatalities.

People who seem to get things done despite a lot of work on their plate have just one ace up their sleeve, and it is called “planning.”

When faced with writing a book or a blog post, you can’t just sit down and churn it out. Without a plan, you would soon be floundering. Time and time again, the people who are overwhelmed almost always have no plan.

Once you get to the root of overwhelm, you will always find a lack of planning.

It is a bit like being on the road. You may have a plan to get to your destination, but things may have changed since you got into your car. There might be too much traffic or an accident up ahead, or every lousy driver decided to show up on the road at the exact time you started on your journey.

When we get started on any project, we got to have a plan to make it happen. That plan may not stay the same all the way through, as I am discovering with my book project. The plan may change as things change. But there are still three basic ingredients that would stay the same.

1. Time
2. Focus
3. Route

Allocate time to work on the project.

If you have not put aside daily time to work on the project and hope that you will be able to fit it in with your daily routine, you’re setting yourself for failure. “Hope” is never as good as a strategy.

One of the best ways to set a time is for a project is to tag it along with the tasks you do on a repetitive basis. For example, I listen to online courses while cooking dinner. Dinner gets cooked, learning happens.

For my book project, I have given it two hours in the morning when the interruptions are minimal because distractions and interruptions are two other demons leading to failure.

Minimize distractions.

Nir Eyal writes in his book Indistractable,” In future, there will be two kinds of people, those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves ‘indistractable.'”

We all get distracted by the volume of information at hand. There is so much demanding our attention all the time. The more we consume the more we crave. It is not possible to eliminate distractions completely from our lives but it is possible to delay them.

I forbid myself from checking emails or any social media platform, read articles, or a book for the whole hour in the morning while I am working on my book. It doesn’t work all the time, but it works many times. I am hoping, with time, I will be able to solidify this habit.

That takes us to the third ingredient of a plan.

Plan the route.

It is like going to the airport. If you are in a new city and hire a car, the first thing you will do is set up the GPS. Without that, you will be circling the unknown streets. But in your own city, you know the route to the airport by heart, having driven there several times.

I am applying this analogy to learn the route to writing and publishing a book. This book is going to be an experiment. An experiment to learn all there is about publishing in 30 days.

I am going to find shortcuts too. Only when you know the landscape well you can find the shortcuts. The people who are overwhelmed think there is only one route to the destination, the longer route.

There you go. My antidote to “overwhelm virus.”

Nothing beats a plan.

First, put a plan in place, then turn it into a routine. Routine is what gets things done on autopilot.

Planning also stops you from going over the top. When your energy is drained, you are reaching the state of “overwhelm.”

Anyone can do whatever they want to do without feeling overwhelmed with a bit of planning.

Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash

In the early 1980s, the carrot business was stagnant and wasteful. Growing seasons were long, and more than half of what farmers grew was ugly and unfit for grocery shelves. But then in 1986, a carrot farmer Yurosek, itching to find a way to make use of all the misshapen carrots, tried something new. Instead of tossing them out, he carved them into something more palatable.

At first, Yurosek used a potato peeler, which didn’t quite work because the process was too laborious. But then he bought an industrial green-bean cutter. The machine cut the carrots into uniform 2-inch pieces consistently, the standard baby carrot size persists today.

Yurosek had figured out a system for baby carrot production. To be able to write consistently, writers need a system too.

Most newbie writers struggle to write every day.

I know I did, for many many years. To me, the idea of writing every day was not only incomprehensible but fanciful. And yet the daily practice is a must for every writer. Read about any successful writer and you will find how religious she is about her daily writing.

But getting to that stage is not easy. We know from personal experiences, that building any habit is hard, let alone writing, for which resistance comes in many forms. Procrastination, self-doubt, lack of ideas, getting stuck, limited vocabulary, imposter’s syndrome – all are waiting to bounce on us unsuspecting well-meaning writers making us give up our dreams of becoming a writer.

That is when a system comes to rescue.

A system is a set of procedures to do something efficiently and consistently.

Nature is full of systems. Think of the solar system, ecosystem, cellular system, digestive system, circulatory system, photosynthesis.

Learning from nature, we humans have built ourselves numerous systems. There are systems to building software, systems to transport, systems to govern a country, and believe it or not, a system to do your daily cooking, cleaning, and any other household chores. You follow the system when you go to the gym, do yoga, or play basketball.

Anything hard to do has been converted into a system.

Building a habit is hard but following a system is easy.

The reason I struggled to write daily because I lacked a system. A system not only helps get the work done but also helps build habits.

When I took to writing, I thought I would sit down with a pen in hand, and beautiful prose will flow out of it on the paper. It didn’t happen.

I tried getting up early (because this is what serious writers do), make myself a cup of tea, and waited for the words to come. They didn’t.

I tried morning pages, filled out diaries and journals, participated in the November Novel Writing Month challenge. But I remained sporadic and irregular.

I was disheartened and frustrated and was on the verge of giving up when I discovered the three-bucket system of writing.

The three-bucket system did to my writing what competing in MasterChef does to cooking enthusiasts.

hose new to cooking think of it as a one-step process. Ask any chef, and he will tell you that preparing a meal is a three-step process — shopping, preparation, and cooking.

If you want to cook dinner, you will not first go to the shops, buy the ingredient, come home, do all the preparation( cutting, chopping, soaking, marinating), put the dish together, and then place it in the oven to cook.

Chances are you already have done the shopping. You might have started some preparation too (soaked the lentils a night before, marinated the meat, or have chopped the veggies during the day). So when the time came to cook, you put all the ingredients together and put them in the oven.

Writing is like cooking too. It is made up of three distinct activities:

1. coming up with ideas
2. turning those ideas into drafts
3. editing and publishing

You can’t do them all in one step. You got to separate them, and you got to do each activity every single day. If you can do that, you have a system.

A system doesn’t have to be complicated or confusing. It just has to work. Three-bucket-system is repeatable and straightforward.

What is the three-bucket system?

I first learned about it from Jeff Goings. Three-bucket-system is exactly what the name suggests. Three buckets. Each with a label on it — IDEAS, DRAFTS, and EDITS.

Your job is to add something to each bucket every day.

It doesn’t matter how much. You can add just one idea into the IDEAS bucket and only one paragraph in the DRAFTS bucket and EDIT something small, but you mustn’t miss any of the buckets. Soon you have a system going. You will never run out of ideas. You will have plenty of drafts ready to edit.

Ideas can come anytime.

Our job is to capture them whenever they come. Otherwise, they will disappear and never come back. I have a notebook dedicated to ideas. Even if I capture them on the back of an envelope or a serviette, they go in the notebook at the end of the day. So when I sit down to write, I have a whole list to choose from.

You can record them on the phone or in Evernote. The tools don’t matter, as long as you are capturing them.

Set a specific time for first drafts

For me, it is the mornings when my mind is fresh. I don’t set up any alarms to wake up at insane hours. But between waking up and having breakfast, I get my writing done. It’s insanely easy because I have a collection of ideas to choose from, and I know I am just writing the first draft, which means it doesn’t have to be perfect. I will be editing it later at least two or three times.

Afternoons are perfect for editing.

This is when I pick up something I have written the previous day or before and polish it. I do it for just half an hour. No more.

There it is, the three-bucket system of writing.

Just like baby carrots transformed the way people think about carrots, the three-bucket system has changed how I feel about writing.

Try it. You will surely benefit fit from it. Just like I did.

Just like baby carrots transformed the way people think about carrots, the Three-bucket system has transformed the way I think about writing.

Try it, you will surely bend fit from it just like I did.

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

An average adult reads between 200 to 300 words per minute, and you get to that level by the eighth grade. For success in college, you should be able to read 350 to 450 words per minute. If your work involves reading a lot of material on a daily bases, like that of a writer, you are expected to read at least 500 words per minute.

Yet I averaged about 83 words a minute. Every time I sat with a book that I was dying to read, I couldn’t manage more than ten pages in half an hour.

What was surprising that I wasn’t always like this. I used to be able to finish a book within three days. What was hindering my progress?

It was only recently that I realized that very quality that should make me a better reader was stopping me from finishing the book.

There are two ways of getting things done.

The first is to be slow and methodical. The second is to beat the clock.

Many of us like the idea of perfection, toiling away at our work, in order to reach a seemingly impossible goal. 

Will your work be any better if you take twice as much time.

If you consider yourself to be a perfectionist, chances are, you wear it as a badge of honour. You think you should be producing your best work at all times.

Perfectionism is the enemy of getting things done.

Have you ever tried to write a book in one month?

The idea was absurd and close to impossible when Chris Baty and his friends thought of it in 1999. But they went ahead and did it anyway. Six out of twenty participants completed the challenge including Chris Baty.

They succeeded because they were not out there to write world’s best book or even their own best book. They succeeded because they went out to beat the clock. They wrote 50,000 words in one month. Each day they raced the time, writing 1667 words.

Next year they launched the project on the internet. 140 people participated, 29 won the challenge. Last year (2019), more than half a million people participated, over 60,000 won the challenge.

How come?

Because they put the perfection aside and went on to beat the clock.

Speed beats perfection every time.

Being a typical perfectionist, I was turning the simple act of reading into a much harder exercise.

Rather than enjoying the book, I was analyzing every sentence trying to figure out how the writer has transitioned from one idea to another, how she has managed to move the story while giving minimum details.

To my perfectionist mind, what was the point of reading a book if I couldn’t learn from it?

By striving to learn more I was jeopardizing the learning that comes from simple reading.

Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best. Perfection is not about healthy achievement and growth.

Brené Brown, a writer and research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work

I started reading with a timer, finishing 30 pages in 30 minutes. The eighth-grade reading speed can help me read three books in a month.

You’re probably trying to shake your perfectionism but finding it too hard.

It is understandable.

It is hard to break any habit.

The mistake we make is that we want to make a massive jump.

The key to breaking out of your comfort zone, you stretch yourself ever so slightly.

That massive jump may not be possible. Instead, take a smaller one—just a slight stretch goal. Set yourself the time in which you’ll complete the job.

Your work may not be as perfect as you hoped, but it gives you a chance to finish it and improve it later.

If you follow this simple formula you’ll find yourself less exhausted and with more energy. However, the biggest benefit of all is you’ll become far better and far quicker at what you’re doing.

Photo by Tai’s Captures on Unsplash

[mc4wp_form id=”138″]

The year was 1998, the month was February. I have been out of the workforce for seven years and desperate to get back to work. The only problem was there was no more work in my chosen field. Research money had dried up and technical jobs in the field of Biochemistry didn’t exist.

Flipping through the job section of the newspapers I realized I was in the wrong field. There were plenty of jobs in Information Technology and all I needed was get another piece of paper that said I understand the subject and can be employed.

But the only problem was the enrolment date had passed. I met the course coordinator, and she told me that I had missed the lectures which she had conducted all through February to familiarize new students to programming. She suggested I should try next year.

But I was not prepared to wait for another year.

“Guess, this is what I will do,” she said “Take this book and see if you can go through the first six chapters in the next five days. If you really understand them, on your own, I will allow you to join the course.”

Those six chapters amounted to 200 pages. I needed to finish one and quarter a chapter a day. I made a rough estimate, if I can spend five minutes per page, I could go through them. That is when I discovered that my kitchen timer had other uses too.

Timer gives you an arbitrary deadline.

Parkinson’s law says that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. No matter how much we detest deadlines, deadlines get the work done.

Clock ticks away relentlessly, getting you tired by the minute. It’s not just time that’s being drained away, but also energy.

The more time you spend, the more tired you get. The more tired you get, the more inferior the work is.

By the time you get to the editing and formatting stage, you’re so exhausted that writing seems like a chore to avoid. And eventually, you decide it’s too much of misery and doesn’t want to write anymore.

This painful experience can be minimized if you learn to write with a timer.

A timer forces efficiency. And it forces you to stop. It gets your continually editing mania under control. It allows you to divide writing into small tasks, and finish them one at a time. When the buzzer goes off, it’s time to finish the piece.

How long you think it should take you to write a 200-page novel?

In 1996, the Wall Street Journal reported that Brazilian novelist Ryoki Inoue has just written his 1,039th book since he took up the craft ten years ago. He wrote his novel in less than eight hours, right in front of the Wall Street reporter. Inoue started the book around 10 p.m., and by 5:30 a.m. had put the finishing touches on a 195-page story of drug traffickers and corrupt cops.

Ryoki Inoue holds The Guinness World Records, as the world’s most prolific writer having published 1075 books.

How do you think he has pulled it off?

“The important thing is to abandon inertia — even if it means walking sideways like a crab,” Mr. Inoue writes.

Inertia is something we all struggle with.

Over 20 years ago, Time Timer inventor Jan Rogers’ youngest child struggled to make transitions from one daily routine to another. Whether it was time to get ready for school, or for homework, practice, or bed, her young daughter often felt frustrated and anxious because of her inability to grasp the concept of elapsed time.

To solve this problem, Jan created the Time Timer — an innovative, simple time management timer designed to “show” the passage of time through the use of a red disk. As time elapses, the red disk disappears giving an idea of how much time has passed and how much is remaining.

I discovered timers again while doing the cartooning course. Speedy sketching a skill every cartoonist has to master. We were to sketch within 15 minutes, no matter what. Soon I discovered that my sketches were better when I did them with a timer and pathetic when I took as long as I wanted.

The timer doesn’t compromise the quality of your work rather it enhances it.

“George of the Jungle” started out as a Saturday-morning cartoon. One day, as the show was being developed, two professional songwriters got a call from the Walt Disney Pictures. “We need theme songs for ‘George of the Jungle’ and two other cartoons,” they were told. “And we need them fast.”

“How fast?”

“Four hours from now.”

The songwriters went to work. The clock ticked. Four hours later they had banged out all three songs.

And guess what? The studio not only liked them and used them, but the song for “George of the Jungle” turned out to be one of the most memorable and successful things they ever wrote.

So get away from your assumptions about how long a task is supposed to take. Get it done much more quickly.

What if you don’t finish within time?

Have you ever missed a work deadline?

Your boss asks for a report within twenty-four hours, how do you accomplish that? You might spend little extra time at work the thing that really gets the report done is your concentration level.

That comes with the timer.

I was able to read all 200 pages within five days. Some pages took a bit longer but others even less than two minutes giving me time to revise the previous pages and take some notes. But timer kept me on time with finishing the task. Needless to say, I was accepted in the course and was offered three jobs even before I finished my degree.

Next time you sit down to do a task, turn on the timer.

Time flies, so can you.

Photo by Bonneval Sebastien on Unsplash

[mc4wp_form id=”138″]

In the US and Canada, according to a tradition, on February 2nd, when the groundhog emerges from hibernation, if it sees its shadow, it returns to its burrow for six weeks as a sunny day indicates a late spring, while a cloudy day would mean an early spring.

Groundhog day is the same day over and over again.

The term was made famous by the 1993 movie of the same name (Groundhog Day) starring Bill Murray.

In the movie, Bill Murray is a weatherman who gets stuck in a time loop and wakes up every morning on February 2nd – Groundhog Day. He tries everything but he can’t make out of the town or get on to the next day.

No matter what he does, he still wakes up in the same bed every morning to face the same day.

In a moment of despair, he turns to a couple of drunks at a bowling alley bar and askes them, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

Is that how you feel about your days?

You wake up each morning and do the same things over and over again. Nothing seems to progress and you feel like getting stuck in a time loop like the weatherman.

You want to find a way to get out of this loop.

You want to make your day count. You want to be productive. You want your work to matter.

Surprisingly your problem is your answer.

Productive people don’t have a magic wand, they have a routine they strictly follow. Their days are groundhog days. But they use the monotony to accomplish whatever they have set for themselves.

Going to work gives you a routine, that is the reason you are able to achieve more when you get out of your house and go to the workplace where you deliver output.

Working from home takes away that structure.

You need to bring that structure while working from home to be productive. You need to develop a daily routine.

Productive people have a repeatable way of working that insulates them from success, failure, and the chaos of the outside world. They have all identified what they want to spend their time on and they work for it no matter what. Whether their latest thing is universally rejected, ignored, or acclaimed, they know they’ll still get up tomorrow and do their work.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard

We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it.

It might seem like a stretch but the best thing we can do is to make our own version of Groundhog day.

We have no control over tomorrow and yesterday is gone, but today is in our grasp. We can do what we want to do, today.

Richmond Walker wrote in his daily meditation book Twenty-Four Hours a Day, “Any man can fight the battles of just one day… Let us, therefore, do our best to live but one day at a time.”

Photo by Abigail Lynn on Unsplash