Category: Productivity

Two Lists

Neera

Make a list of all your excuses and then put them on your pin-board.

Then make a list of all the reasons why you want to be creative and put it next to your Excuses List.

Whenever you feel disheartened read the Excuses List first. If the reason for your dismay is something new, add it to the list.

If it is something already on the list, read the Reasons for Being Creative List and get back to work.

The lists could look something like this.

Excuses List

  • I am not good enough.
  • I will never be good enough.
  • I don’t get time; housework and family take up all my time.
  • Holidays break my routine.
  • It is so hard to get back to routine.
  • There is so much to learn. I will never be able to learn it all.
  • Until I know a substantial amount I can’t become an authority on it.
  • Unless I am an authority I can’t share/publish/write.
  • Other people know so much more and are better writers.
  • No one will ever want to pay for what I write.
  • I am good for nothing.
  • I can’t keep up a simple routine.
  • My work is not original. So many others have already written about it.
  • My body is not the same. My eyes get tired looking at the computer. I am getting old.

Reasons for Being Creative List

  • My creativity gives me a purpose in life.
  • It is the reason I live.
  • I am happy when I am creating.
  • I write for myself. I am writing a book I want to read.
  • My creative projects are better than mindless TV, endless cleaning and unnecessary shopping.
  • I know I am getting better each day.
  • I can see that, over time, I have written so much and some of it is really good.
  • I am learning new things every day.
  • Creativity keeps my mind active.
  • I am meeting like-minded people through my creative pursuits. They are the kind of people I want to be friends with. They are the best assets I have.
  • Creativity is my second nature. It is god-given and I have it as much as any celebrated artist does. All I need is to practice more.
  • I could write, I could draw and I could paint like a child. I can do them all as well as an adult.
  • With my creativity, I am bringing the best out of me and the best out of others.

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Finding it difficult to make a choice?

Neera

You are not alone.

We, humans, are strange. We like to say we want as many options as possible, but when we get them, we get confused and can’t decide.

Ever heard of Hick’s law?

It is as prevalent as Murphy’s Law and Puerto’s principle and is widely used in the design world.

Image Source

I must admit I hadn’t heard of it until Krisztina Szerovay introduced it to me through the above sketch in her Sketching for UX Designers course on Udemy.

Hick’s Law states, “The time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has. Increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically.”

We are bombarded with choices. Studies show that on an average day, we make at least 70 choices. When there are too many things to choose from, we either procrastinate or stick with a narrow range.

Think of your remote control. Do you know what each of the buttons does? How many buttons do you actually use?

There is a very interesting TED Talk on the topic by Sheena Iyengar.

Hicks Law applies to time management too. With too much to do and too many attractive options demanding our attention, we spread ourselves thin and do not concentrate on what is important or what we really want to do.

Remedy? Have lesser choices.

Choose only a select few books and make sure you read them.

Have lesser hobbies, but make sure you give them time regularly.

Use only one source of getting news – TV or newspaper or computer.

Top Image Source: Krisztina Szerovay at Sketching for UX Designers.

Six-hour working day

Neera

We are overworked, stressed, and not living the lives we are meant to live.

Mere four hundred years ago, there were no jobs. People did what they wanted to do and earned their living by creating value in their unique way.

Then came the industrial age. Big factories came into existence, which started employing people to do particular tasks. The payout was good, so more and more people went that path.

Since then, people have traded time for money. Creativity went out of the window. People lost their unique value. More than that, they had no control over their time and hence their lives.

With all the technology, machines, and computers, we are still laboring away in our lives.

Do we need to work eight hours a day?

Why do we keep on accepting this slave labor model of the industrial age?

Swedish culture has taken a step by making a move towards a six-hour working day.

In many organizations and companies that have made the change, they’ve noticed that their staff are happier, more productive, and more creative, which proves that if the employees feel better, they’ll do better work. So it’s a win-win situation.

Where the day has gone?

Neera

You are hoping for a solid day’s work.

Brainstorming and writing in the morning, editing and polishing in the afternoon, and reading at night.

Not too much to ask for, especially when you have the whole day to yourself.

Your day starts well. You mind-map three articles and write three pages before I take the first break to have breakfast.

But things start going downhill from there.

The kitchen needs your urgent attention. Ironing is sitting in one corner staring at you. There is no milk in the fridge. If that is not enough to derail you, the sheer guilt of skipping the gym for five days in a row does it. That is it, you decide, I am going to the gym today.

By the time you come back from the gym and do all the above, it is two pm.

You settle down in front of the computer thinking, I will not get up until I finish this morning’s writing and editing and polishing.

But as soon as you open your computer, you couldn’t stop the urge to check your emails. There are a few urgent ones; it will not take me long to respond to them, you think while you frantically punch keys.

Then, quite innocently, wooed by the tempting title, you open the email from another blogger and before you know it you are devouring her writing.

Without realizing you are on the net, surfing to find a fix for an annoying technical issue with your blog.

Before you know it, the day has gone.

Now compare this to a day in screenwriter and director Woody Allen’s life.

He wakes up in the morning, opens his German Olympia SM3 manual typewriter, starts punching its keys, and doesn’t stop until he has finished all he had planned for. He then leisurely walks to his fridge, gets himself a drink and something to eat, stares out from the window for a while to gather his thoughts, and then stations himself back in front of his typewriter and type till the next break.

Consider this, in the forty-four-year period between 1969 and 2013, he has written and directed forty-four films that received twenty-three Academy Award nominations—an absurd rate of artistic productivity.

Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist who performs his work in such disconnected isolation, joins Allen in his rejection of computers that the journalists couldn’t find him after it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize.

J.K. Rowling uses a computer but was famously absent from social media during the writing of her Harry Potter novels—even though this period coincided with the rise of technology and its popularity among media figures.

What the network tools seem to be doing is chipping away at our capacity for concentration and contemplation.

The idea that the network tools are pushing our work from the deep towards the shallow is not new.

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr was just the first in the series of recent books to examine the internet’s effect on our brain and work habits.

William Powers’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail, and Alex Soojung-Kin Pang’s The Distraction Addiction – all of which agree, more or less, that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Cal Newport in his book The Deep Work hypothesizes that the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time. It is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.

As a result, the few who cultivate this skill and then make it the core of their working life will thrive.

To do deep and meaningful work, we need to organize our lives in such a way that we can get long, consecutive, uninterrupted time chunks.

For me, it could mean locking myself up in a room with no computer, just books, a notebook, a pen, a pencil, and a highlighter.

How to read a complex and lengthy book and retain most of it

Neera

I am a long-time fan of Tony Buzan, the inventor of the Mindmapping technique.

In his book Use Your Head he suggests an Organic Study Method that could be applied to reading complex and lengthy material for maximum retention with minimum time investment.

The usual way to study text or non-fiction is to start the book from page one and read, reread incomprehensible areas, take a break, force yourself to go back to where you left off, and continue reading, rereading, and taking breaks until the book is finished. Then going back and revising it, sometimes multiple times, for retention and still not succeeding.

It is like starting the jigsaw puzzle from the bottom left-hand corner and insisting to build the entire picture step by step from that corner only.

The normal steps we take to solve a jigsaw puzzle are:

  • Find edges and boundary pieces.
  • Sort out color areas.
  • Fit ‘obvious’ bits and pieces together.
  • Continue to fill in.
  • Leave ‘difficult’ pieces to end (for reasons that as the overall picture becomes more clear, and the number of pieces used increases, so does the probability increase that the difficult pieces will fit in much more easily when there is a greater context into which they can fit).
  • Continue the process until completion.

Tony Buzan proposes that the jigsaw analogy can be applied directly to study.

Similar steps in reading a book would be:

For a book, it would be

1. Overview—Review the book for all the material other than the actual text such as a table of contents, illustrations, photographs, chapter headings, graphs, footnotes, summaries, and so forth Use a pen or a pencil to provide a visual aid to the eye. This stage is equivalent to finding the edges and boundary pieces.

2. Preview—Cover all the materials not covered in the overview. In other words, the paragraphs, and language content of the book. This is likened to organizing the color areas of the puzzle. During the preview, concentration should be directed to the beginnings and ends of paragraphs, sections, chapters, and even whole text, because information tends to be concentrated at the beginnings and ends of written material.

3. Inview — This involves filling in those areas still left, and can be compared with the filling-in process of the jigsaw puzzle once the boundary and color areas have been established. Major reading is not necessary as in some cases most of the important material will have been covered in previous stages. Jump over the difficult sections, leaving them for the next stage.

4. Review—This stage is to concentrate on the difficult areas. It is aided by making notes on the book itself or separately in a notebook, including making mind maps. Notes such as the following can be made in the book itself.

  • Underlining
  • Personal thoughts generated by the text
  • Critical comments
  • Marginal straight lines for important and noteworthy material.
  • Curved or wavy marginal lines show an unclear or difficult material.
  • Question marks for areas that you wish to question or that you find questionable.
  • Exclamation marks for outstanding items.
  • Your own symbol code for items and areas that relate to your own specific and general objective.

5. Continued reviewing—Apart from immediate review, a continuous review program is essential. It is seen that memory didn’t decline immediately after a learning session, but actually rose before leveling off and then plummeting. Reviewing just at the point where memory starts to fall leads to the longest retention.

Have a linear goal…

Neera

I was going through one of my old journals when I found one of my favorite quotes:

“Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere.

But the work of building a path was a living sum so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow.

A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there’s nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.

The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make?

It is not proper for man’s life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him–man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”

– Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged (Emphasis and line-breaks are mine.)

We all need linear goals in our lives to rise above the monotony of circular lives. That is the only way we have to show something at the end of the day.

Twenty years ago, I chose to write as my linear goal. It has not only kept me sane through the madness of the daily grind but also has given me a purpose in life.

Initially, I had little goals such as writing childhood memories, remembering those sounds, smells, and scenes from the past, and learning to describe them. Soon I started attending courses. The first one was a Life Story Writing course. An offshoot of that was a writing group that still has been meeting in my home for the past fifteen years.

I joined another writing group and practiced reading my writing to others.

Encouraged, in 2014, I joined a novel-writing course A Year of Novel at ACT Writer’s Centre. Five of the writers from there continued to meet after the course to continue working on our novels. We are still meeting and critiquing each other’s work.

In between, I won NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) twice, wrote several short stories, and started two blogs.

With writing as my linear goal, I am achieving little milestones just like Ayn Rand said in the below quote:

“[A] man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”