Late in the nineteenth century, Frederick Taylor grabbed a stopwatch, stood next to a worker, and instructed him to pick a chunk of iron and move it using a specific set of movements. He then timed him. 

He did this repeatedly until he had the perfect combination of movements for moving the chunk of iron efficiently.

Taylor then taught those prescribed moments to other workers in the yard of Bethlehem Steel. As a result, the productivity of the plant quadrupled.

This was the birth of “time management.”

The concept swept through the industrial world, and productivity became the aim of each industry. 

Before Taylor’s stopwatch measurement of performing a task, no one thought of the time that way. 

Most people worked on farms. They were decided what to do and when to do it based upon the movement of the sun rather than the movement of hands on a dial. Their schedules were determined by the sun, moon, and seasons rather than the watches and calendars. 

The truth was most people didn’t even know what day or time it was.

Taylor’s big contribution to productivity was that he thought of time as a “production unit.” 

Add more time, get more output.

Do more work within that time, get more output.

Today we still think of time as a “production unit,” this attitude is so ingrained in our culture that we are hardly aware of it.

For more than a century, “time management” has dominated our psyche. 

We wake up to alarms. As we drive to work, our navigation system calculates exactly how long it will take. We work from nine to five. We estimate project cost based on how much time it is going to take to finish it. 

We diligently fill our timesheets so our employers can bill clients for our time. 

As you opened this article to read, you probably checked the time it would take you to read it.

Everything around us is set up with the assumption that time is precious. 

Whatever is your goal, if you reached it in less time, that’s a good thing. 

Time is money. That is the mantra.

But there was a major problem with this concept.

The time as a production unit has its limits. 

Even Taylor observed that if he tried to fill all of his worker’s time with efficient movements, he didn’t get what he expected. After a while, the worker gets tired and does less and less. 

This concept in economics is known as the “point of diminishing returns.” That is when each additional production unit doesn’t get you the same output as the previous production unit.

If Taylor wanted to get a full day’s work out of a worker, Taylor needed not only to prescribe movements to that worker; he also needed to prescribe rest to that worker.

The “point of diminishing returns” is more evident in knowledge workers.

In today’s world, where creative thinking is the key to being productive, you can’t get more output simply by optimizing time.

Yet this is what we try to do all the time. We cram our schedule, multitask, and always in a hurry. Any opportunity we can find to do things faster, we take it without realizing time is not the only factor we need to take into consideration.

There is another factor in play — energy.

While time is precise, our energy level is not the same throughout the day.

Time management works well if every hour were identical in terms of energy. 

But our energy levels go up and down all through the day. So we recharge them either by taking breaks, naps or taking a walk, or watching mindless TV. 

The way to work with your energy is to make sure you know when your energy levels are at the peak and use them well. 

I divide my energy levels into three categories:

• Peak Energy Level. It is when I am well-rested, emotionally sound, and at peace with myself. This peak energy is the creative energy, when I conceive new ideas, can go deep into a topic, and learn new things. Usually, for me, it is mornings. This is when I do most of my fresh writing.
• Medium Energy Level. This is when I am a bit tired and not in a mood to tackle heavy thinking work. But I am still quite alert. My afternoons and evenings are like that. I use this time for researching, editing, sketching, and painting.
• Low Energy Level. Each day I reach a point of exhaustion when I can’t do work that involves thinking or concentrating. At these times, I don’t push myself to write or do anything that involves heavy thinking. But surprisingly, I am still good to read a book or watch a Masterclass video. This is the best time to wind down watching TV, surfing the net, or checking social media. 

Now that I am aware of my energy levels, I am well equipped to manage them.

I am very vigilant of my peak energy periods and don’t waste them doing tasks that I can do with medium or low energy levels. That is why doing research or checking social media in the mornings is a big no-no. 

Sometimes both “time” and “energy” are not enough to be productive. 

I have been trying to write an ebook for a long time now. In fact, I have several in draft mode. But, unfortunately, every time I make time to work on those, and I have selected peak energy hours, I hardly make any progress. 

It is not the lack of time or energy that stops me from writing those books (it is not even the skill level). It is the mindset. 

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them. — Constantin Brancusi

I have no problem writing an article a day now. Just a few weeks ago, that was an unthinkable proposition. So when I announced my intention to write 100 Articles in 100 Days, I was in the right mindset to take the challenge. 

Nothing changed between that day and one week before other than my mindset.

I am sure one day I will be in the right frame of mind to tackle the ebook. 

Sometimes our mind is better suited to think creatively. Other times it’s better suited to think analytically. Sometimes we’re in a mood to do some research. Other times, we’re better off taking care of little details.

Manage your creative energy so that instead of going through a to-do list in order of priority, tackle it in order of mood priority. Ask yourself, What work am I in the mood to do right now?

In Summary

Time Management is an outdated concept. It only takes “time” as the production unit and assumes your energy levels are the same at all times during the day.

But we have all fallen into energy black holes.

Rather than managing time, manage your energy.

Do the tasks that require thinking and a high level of concentration when your energy levels are at the peak. 

Make sure you don’t waste them; otherwise, you will feel crappy, and it will create a doom loop of lower energy.

Mindset is the third factor of productivity. Our mood dictates what is the optimum thing to do at a given time. So rather than fighting it, how about we listen to it. After all things, we do wholeheartedly turn out to be our best creation.

Photo by Katie Harp on Unsplash

Two years ago, when I started my creative life, I wanted to do so much. I wanted to start a blog, write for online magazines, write short stories, finish my memoir and write the first draft of a novel.

I also wanted to sketch, paint, and make rock mandalas. And I was committed to starting an online business. 

So I embarked on all those projects straight away. I made plans. I bought courses after courses. I scheduled my day so that I can allocate time for each project. 

I had worked as a project manager during my working life so I knew how important all that planning was. But I was missing one big thing. 

I was the only resource. 

There was no way I could do all that I was allocating myself to do in a day. 

Damn.

I was in a deep sh*t and had no idea what to do.

One day I was listening to a YouTube video by a young artist by the name of Struthless (real name Campbell Walker) who went through the same agony as me.

In his early days, he was into many things, songwriting, poetry, drawing, animation, video making, etc., etc. Like me, he wanted to pursue them all. 

He had a mentor Marc Schattner. Marc and his wife Gillie make dog and rabbit face human sculptures, paintings, and sketches. 

That is all they make. 

Struth was in awe of their work and constantly whined to Marc. I want to be as good as you. When will I be able to get to your level?

Then one day, when Struth’s complaining got to an all-time high, Marc sat him down and gave him some tough love.

You know what your problem is Struth, one day you write a song, the next day you write a poem, and the third day you do a drawing and none of it adds up to anything. All you are doing is laying a single brink of million different houses and hoping one day it will magically become a mansion. It’s not going to happen.

Marc’s advice hit Struth like a ton of bricks. Marc had identified correctly. Struth was scattered. 

So was I. 

I was doing several things and making zero progress with anyone of them. 

We live in a world where there is too much to entice us. Spoiled as we have become, we think we can do everything. But the reality is that we have only a limited amount of time.

I am a multi-passion creator. I get excited easily. A soon as I hear something interesting I want to do it. But how can I choose which interest to pursue and which one to park for the time being?

It is not an easy decision. At least not for me.

So I came up with three questions to ask myself to help me make a decision.

Will it enhance me, or will it diminish me?

You got to have a guiding principle in your life. Mine is growth. So this is the first question I ask myself. This thing I am going to commit to, will it just make me happy or will it make me grow. 

Oliver Burkeman, a journalist and writer framed it perfectly:

We are terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. 

— Oliver Burkeman

That doesn’t mean I don’t do anything for pleasure. In fact, all the things I do are for pleasure. But the pleasure I get from doing the things I enjoy is much deep-seated. 

What it means is that I don’t choose anything that doesn’t give me pleasure. The activities we enjoy are also the activities that make us grow.

Still, there are so many things that I enjoy and most of them can lead to self-growth. That leads to the second question.

Do I have time for it?

We have somehow led ourselves to believe that we can fit everything we want to do in a day.

A mentor of mine Sean D’Souza has a theory. He calls it Chaos Theory. It works on the basis that sh*t happens in life on a daily basis. Praying that sh*t doesn’t happen, doesn’t work. 

Instead, you need to make time for sh*t. 

I have started following the Chaos Theory. I now leave enough time in my day to deal with day-to-day happenings. 

So the second question I ask myself is, Will adding this new thing will leave me enough time to handle the daily sh*t?

If the answer is no, then I ask the third question.

What will I give up in order to take it on?

When my children were young they wanted to do all those after-school activities their friends were doing — swimming, basketball, piano, dance lessons, chess, netball, the lot. 

But I didn’t have time to drive them around to everything. Both my husband and I worked.

So I made a rule.

They can join two activities at a time, and when they have made their decision, they will have to stick with them for six months. They can’t just pick and let go of activity as soon as they decide they don’t like it. The rule worked beautifully for all through the school years of both my daughters.

Now I apply the same rule to myself. 

I work only on two projects at a time. 

The next one can only start if one finished or six months have passed and I have no intention of pursuing it. 

Applying 3 question strategy has worked well for me. Earlier this year I submitted the first draft of my novel for workshopping. 

Now I am writing an article a day and drawing a sketch a day.

I am getting faster and better at both. 

In six months’ time, I will evaluate whether to replace them with a new project or continue with them.

Action Summary

• Focused energy moves mountains. You have to say no to a lot of random things to be able to say yes and focus your energy on things that matter.
• You only have enough time to concentrate on one or two things at a time. So just pick two.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Recently I read an article where the author stressed quality over quantity. Although, in principle, I agree with him, I am in the “quantity” camp. However, I can say from experience that quality comes with quantity.

Before I go any further, let me reiterate the story that illustrated the importance of quantity over quality for those who haven’t encountered it yet.

A ceramics teacher announced on the opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. “All those on the left side of the studio,” he said, “would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.”

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class, he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. 

Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seemed that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. — David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear

This is what I have found with my own work. Since I have started concentrating on quantity, writing an ‘X’ number of articles in a week rather than a ‘Y’ number of excellent articles in a month, I am getting better and better.

It is a different matter that you don’t want to “practice in public” and only want to publish your best article, but believe me, that will be a limiting strategy.

Recently I have started sponsoring to another view.

Initially, we can’t become good, even if we want to.

When we start writing, we are like toddlers learning to walk. A toddler can’t walk fast even if he wants to. So he concentrates on putting one foot over another. Once he learns that, he starts to run. He doesn’t worry about getting his feet on the ground properly; he just dashes ahead, even at the cost of falling on his bum.

Like a toddler, my goal is to get faster at something before I get better. 

It used to take me seven to eight hours to write an article. Now I can write the same article in three to four hours. My goal is to get it down to one hour.

Once I can write an article in one hour, I can concentrate on how to balance it. How to introduce humor in it. How to end it properly. How to write compelling headlines. 

Before getting faster, I concentrated on getting consistent. 

I used to write a diary, just on the weekend. Then, a few years ago, I started writing a page a day. It was a big commitment initially. I would miss days, sometimes weeks, particularly when I was traveling. So now, whenever I am traveling, I take my diary with me. Each morning that is the first thing I do. Write a page in my A5 diary. It has become such a habit that even if I want to break it, I can’t.

Following that, I started a 100 days challenge. I started writing a short article on social media. I did it for 100 days consecutively. I missed two days in the whole period, but I was euphoric. I can do it. 

It took an hour and a half initially. Soon I was able to reduce the whole thing to just ten to fifteen minutes. It included writing and posting on three platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram). Now I can do it in less than ten minutes. 

I am posting manually on each platform. I intentionally don’t use any software to schedule posting. Because posting manually allows me to check other people’s posts, leave them comments, and respond to comments on my own posts. 

Once I got consistent in writing and posting daily, I set my eyes on bigger goals.

Following the success of posting small articles, I set myself a challenge to write 100 Articles in 100 Days. 

Previous to that, I was writing one to two articles a week. On average, it was taking me seven to eight hours over different days to write one article. I am on day 22 today, and already I’m taking less than three hours. 

A lot of it is planning; I select images in one sitting, do the footer for many articles in advance, and spend five minutes to outline as soon as an idea comes to me. 

When it comes to writing, I write in 15 minutes sprints with an actual timer. 

Earlier I used to edit as I wrote, not anymore. I’m now writing in a flow state, leaving the editing for another day. Usually, on the day I’m going to publish. That gives me time to rest the article and let new ideas germinate to make that article even more interesting. 

I see myself as a two-year-old.

I only started blogging two years ago, so I can consider myself a two-year-old in the blogging world where some writers have been writing for seven to ten years. 

It doesn’t matter how much I want; I cannot be as good as a seven-year-old or a ten-year-old writer. But if I can write faster, I can write more articles in a week and a month (and eventually in a year). Then there is a good chance of catching up. 

That is why in this 100-day challenge, I’m not aiming to publish in big publications. Instead, my aim is not to break the streak and get faster and faster. 

I publish daily on my profile and then submit them to a publication that accepts pre-published articles. When I have reduced my article writing time to under one hour, I will concentrate on getting good. 

Already I’m writing two articles a day, one for the same day and one for next week. So if there is something unexpected happens, I have to travel, or visitors drop in unannounced, I have an article scheduled for that day. Scheduling is a great way to ensure consistency. 

I have not reached Tim Denning’s stage to write five articles a day, but I’m sure if I continue following this strategy, in not so distant future, I will be able to replicate his method of writing. Tim writes a week’s worth of articles in two days. That is a big ask. 

To Sum Up

Whatever skill you are learning, try to get fast at it before getting good. 

I have been doing the same with my paintings and sketching and receiving similar results. 

Finishing a thing earlier means you have more time for yourself. And who doesn’t need more time these days?

Twenty-twenty was a great year for online learning. So, with no travel plans to disrupt, I went on a big spree to buy online courses. I am sure many people did the same, as content writers, coaches, and nonfiction-writers all show a big spike in their earnings since the pandemic hit last year. 

There were many reasons for me to go on this spree. First, I was new to online learning. Second, I wanted to gobble up everything and level up with the established writers as quickly as possible.

I also fell prey to online selling, which has a “buy-now-or-you-will-miss-out” business model. 

The result — I have several courses that I haven’t gone through beyond the first few lessons. 

With the internet, we have access to thousands of courses, webinars, summits, reports, books at meager prices. Yet, most of us find it hard to gain skills. Often it is not for want of application. Some of us may be easily distracted, but others are dedicated.

Here is what I learned from my course buying spree.

Not all courses are created equal.

Most courses are seminar-style, where the presenter provides the information and doesn’t teach any skill. 

Other ones are summit kind where several well-meaning presenters give their views (often contradicting) on the same topic. Of course, not all of the information is relevant to your scenario, but you don’t know that until you listen to it. 

Generally, I rate workshops above the seminars and summit. This is because, at workshops, you are putting into practice whatever you are learning immediately. In my mind, it is the best way to learn.

We are all time-poor. And we are bombarded with information. Unless we put the new knowledge into practice straight away, it will be forgotten or, worse still, replaced by thousand other things demanding our attention.

A big price tag doesn’t mean it will be a better course.

I have bought less than $100, and I have bought courses that cost much more than $1000. What I have discovered that ten times more fee doesn’t mean ten times more value. 

Many times we pay for the brand name.

Some presenters have built themselves a big following that they can charge whatever they like for the courses. Add to that scarcity factor and spot- specials, and you have a winning formula.

Many Udemy courses have the same information at a fraction of a price. Also, many platforms come with free courses. I was pleasantly surprised when I joined Convertkit. It has a well-structured course and an excellent program to teach all you need to know about online marketing and newsletter building.

Buying a course doesn’t mean you will acquire the skill.

Writing articles, building an audience, marketing on social media are all skills. When we buy a course, we think we are acquiring these skills. Instead, what we get is a load of information. 

Acquiring skills needs work on our part. It needs commitment, time, and patience. And it needs practice. When buying a course, you need to make sure you have the time and commitment to practice what the course teaches. Otherwise, you will be buying something that will sit on your computer, and after a few months, you will even forget you bought it.

Don’t get lured by the “special price.” Online course presenters need to sell their courses. So they will be coming with specials all the time. Take your time to buy the course — which is when you are ready to implement it.

Online courses can never replace the face to face courses.

This weekend I attended the first face-to-face workshop since the pandemic hit last year, and boy did I find the difference. 

First of all, I got to get out of the home. Getting out of the home meant I got out of the hassles associated with it. I didn’t have to run a load of washing while I was listening to the audios. Neither did I have to worry about cooking lunch or getting the dinner underway. No vacuuming to fit in between breaks and no answering the doorbell or phone calls. 

I had the luxury to immerse myself in learning. I could fully engage with the tutor. I could ask questions, and got direct feedback instantly while doing the exercises. 

Of course, I could have learned the same thing on YouTube from the convenience of my home. I would have saved the driving time and course fee, but I wouldn’t have learned the skill either. Not as quickly as I did in the workshop. And with much less frustration.

Not to mention learning from the other participants. Each one of us interpreted the instructions differently. Learning from them provided another layer of understanding.

I am not discounting online courses completely. They have their merits, and I envision myself buying many more in the future. But I think both online and live courses are needed.

What I am raising here is our tendency to buy courses as if we are buying commodities. However, just buying courses doesn’t mean we can buy the skill they are promising to teach.

My strategy to go through previous courses (and the future ones).

I have decided not to buy any more online courses this year. 

I am going to go through all the previous courses for the remainder of the year. 

Some of them are sitting there because I was not ready for the skills they were teaching me when I bought them. Others were too long. One course had 80 hours of videos. Even if I watch for two hours a day, every day, it will take me 40 days to finish it. 

But I am going to finish it. 

How? 

Rather than watching it slowly and taking notes, I will go through them in one go. It is the same strategy I use while reading a book that I want to consume to gain information. Even quick listening helps absorb many facts.

Once I have gone through the course, I will have a good idea, what modules I want to watch again. Now will be the time to make notes. I will also be marking the modules that I should watch again, say in six months. 

Going over a course in several iterations has the added benefit of repetition. We don’t learn much the first time we encounter anything. It is by repetition we cement the lessons we learn. Every time we listen to the same information, it presents a different meaning. 

To finish my rant

This is my plan to finish the courses I have already bought. 

I would like to know what is yours. 

Photo by Le Wagon on Unsplash

Violinist Hilary Hahn started a 100 Days of Practice project. She posted a video of her practicing violin on Instagram for 100 days with #100daysofpractice and invited others to join her. That started a movement.

Austin Kleon (the writer of How To Steal Like an Artist) came up with a grid to log his progress for 100 days. He calls it PRACTICE to SUCK LESS grid. 

To get good, you first have to be willing to be bad. Don’t practice to get good, practice to suck less. — Austin Kleon.

I thought it was a brilliant idea. You can use it to improve your handwriting, sketching, writing, stamina, singing, or playing an instrument. I used it to get better at social media. 

I sucked at social media. My friends complained that I never posted anything or left comments on their posts. I used to think social media was for boring people who had nothing better to do with their time until I discovered its power to build your profile. 

At the start of 2021, I set myself a goal to publish on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. for 100 days consecutively. It was an extremely successful experiment. Not only, I built my profile and learned heaps about the platforms, but my follower number swelled as well. 

Today is the Day 96 of the experiment. Here is the scorecard.

I missed only two days. Those were busy days, but if I had planned, I would have been able to publish on those days as well.

So pleased I am with the growth that consistency brought that I decided to use it with writing articles.

I have wanted to write every day on Medium for some time now but wasn’t successful. The closest I have come to publishing 4 articles in a row.

My rational is, if I can do it on social media, I can do it on Medium too.

Each article doesn’t have to be 1000–1500 words long; it could be 300 words. All stories don’t have to be non-fiction, it could be fiction too.

“Lower your standards for what counts as progress and you will be less paralyzed by perfectionism.” — Adam Grant

What is the aim?

To get better. 

To bring the article writing time down from 5–6 hours to 1–2 hours.

To build a system to publish every day. 

Writing an article a week is harder than writing an article a day. 

Initially, I will not worry about whether my headlines are good enough or not, whether I need more research more or my article is plain right boring. Initially, I am going to aim at publishing every day.

I agree with Tim Denning when he wrote:

It frustrates me because so much time is spent agonizing over tiny grammar mistakes, whether a headline is clickbait, and the attributes of viral writing. All of it misses the point: who cares?

Write what you want to write. You do you.

Being yourself is the most profitable business idea I can think of when it comes to any form of online content creation.

I think the reason we don’t get out and achieve because we try to do what other people are doing. We forget to be us. To do what we do.

So I am going to write what I want to write, and in the process going to learn what works for me.

My strategy to succeed.

Build a system and hone it over next three months.

Desire is what gets you started; system is what makes you deliver.

Most of my articles come to me when I am reading other people’s articles. A single line might trigger a thought which becomes a full-blown article. I might agree with them or disagree with them.

I stop reading at that point and start jotting down my thoughts. If I am on the computer, I create a new draft on Medium; if not, I do it on the phone, notebook, or back of an envelope.

I write nonstop until I have penned down everything that comes to me without worrying about structuring them or even rationalizing them. Before leaving it, I make a note if I need to do any research for anything.

Each morning, after breakfast, I pick one of the drafts and start the research. While researching the angle and structure of the article start taking shape.

I work in several 15 minutes spurts, taking breaks to do housework in between. By lunchtime, my article is done. I leave it for two hours and cook lunch.

When I come back to it, I read it slowly, make final edits and publish it between four and five pm.

I write at least ten articles ideas a day in my Idea Journal; hence I am never short of ideas. My goal is to get to the point when I can write an article on any topic with little or no research.

I intent to publish at least one fictional story and one travel article each week giving enough variety to my readers.

I also intend to have a few articles as a backup for days when I can get to the computer (a lesson learned from publishing on social media).

And lastly I will do many things in bulk such as inserting the images, footer and sketches etc.

Where to publish?

My biggest challenge is how to get published the same day. Many publications take one to three weeks to publish stories.

The Ascent takes more than a week. World Travelers Blog takes 4–5 days. Data Driven Investor takes 1–2 days. Illumination has been the best so far. Dr Mehmet Yildiz has been publishing my stories within few hours of submission. 

While researching for it I found a brilliant article by Michael ‘Myk Eff’ Filimowicz, PhD. Michael suggests four ways to get your stories into Medium publications:

The Front Door: The Front Door is when a publication has a big sign hanging on their site basically saying, ‘Open for Business!’ it’s the easiest, most direct, clearest, and obvious method.

The Back Door: The Back Door is Smedian. Smedian is a publication created by Casey Botticello, a top Medium writer to demystify writing on Medium. It has a list of all Medium publications with the ‘Request to Contribute’ link. You can look for publications by using its search tool.

The Side Entrance: Believe it or not, some publications, particularly Medium’s own publication, do not a SUBMIT tab on its front end or a ‘Request to Contribute’ button on its Smedian back end. Literally Literary publication is like that. To submit to publications like it, you have to do a web search, and the submission guidelines will appear in one of their many past online stories. This might be irrelevant now as E V William has disbanded Medium publication. 

VIP Lane: This is when a publication owner invites you to submit your story to their publication. You receive a notification like this, “Hey, we love this story; we’d like to publish it.”

This is my favourite kind of publishing strategy. 

I am going to publish some of the stories on my profile and then wait for an invitation from the publications.

It gives you become-so-good-that-they-come-to-you kind of feeling.

In the end

Wish me luck and join the challenge if you wish.

“Humans are the new low-attention span goldfishes, thanks to smartphones.” wrote Tim Denning in one of his articles.

The advertisement industry figured it out long ago. That is why the TV ads are less than eleven seconds.

Now the publishing industry is finding that thicker books don’t sell. A four hundred-page novel is considered as long as War and Peace. I, too, put books back on the shelf if they are too thick, thinking I don’t have time to finish it.

Today we are taking in much more information than when there were no computers or smartphones.

Emails, blog posts, social media, articles, newsletters, and ebooks have turned us into binge readers. We jump from one thing to another all day long, hardly leaving us any time to read quality books for an extended length of time.

The same goes with our To-Do Lists. The sheer number of tasks we have on our To-Dp Lists means that while we are doing one thing, we are also worrying about ten other things.

Add to that the interruptions by social media. No wonder our attention spans are decreasing dramatically.

Short Attention Span is not just limited to some.

The ability to focusing on tasks for any length of time without being distracted is much more widespread.

And the main cause for it is the kind of society we live in. Here are some statistics:

In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986 — the equivalent of 174 newspapers.

Even during our leisure time, each of us processes 34 gigabytes, or 100,000 words, every day.

The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of five hours of television daily, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images.

That’s not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every hour.

And computer gaming consumes more bytes than all other media put together, including DVDs, TV, books, magazines, and the Internet.

Source: Why It’s So Hard To Pay Attention, Explained By Science

The situation is not going to change.

The data around us will continue to grow. We will continue to be bombarded by thousands of stimuli each day. The distractions we face every day while working are not going to go away. Instead, they are going to increase while we are doing one thing.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

Our brains are equipped to process the information, and it does so by separating the trivial from the important, but it happens at a cost. It makes us tired.

Tiredness leads to a shorter attention span.

So, what to do?

We need strategies to learn to survive.

Here is what you can do.

You don’t have to eat everything offered in the buffet.

We are living in times of excess. Unlimited food, unlimited clothes, unlimited books, unlimited movies, unlimited TV.

But you don’t have to consume everything.

Choose wisely.

Choose the books you want to read, clothes you want to wear, movies you want to watch and limit their consumption.

Limit your consumption by time.

Allocate 15 to 20 minutes to social media a day and don’t go over that. You will have to train yourself for that, but it is possible. The best way is to tag it to another activity that is limited.

I only check social media while having breakfast. When breakfast ends, so does my time to check social media apps. You might want to use your commute time or washroom time to check social media.

Set small goals

Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier, using a simple strategy. He knew he could run a 400-meters race in under a minute. He just trained himself to run four 400-meters races consecutively.

You may not be able to focus on a task for twenty minutes straight. Start with five minutes of total concentration several times a day. Set a timer for 5 minutes, get a part of the task done, and take a break. Do another 5 minutes, Do another 5 minutes and build it to twenty minutes.

If you can’t find time to read books, read only ten pages a day. It takes only 10 minutes to read ten pages at average speed. If you can read for 10 minutes twice a day, you can finish a 300-page book in a fortnight.

Take a 30-day challenge.

When you do a task for 30 days in a row, your ability to do that task increases many folds.

Bodybuilders used this technique all the time. They do a small set of exercises every day to build specific muscles.

You, too, can develop your writing muscles by writing every day for a short period. That period could be as small as five minutes. Do it for 30 days in a row, and you will discover you can write much more in five minutes compared to when you started.

Meditate

The reason for a low attention span is distractions and a lack of practice to control our minds.

Meditation is the single most beneficial exercise to enhance concentration. Even a five-minute session is enough to calm the mind. Start and end your day with five minutes of guided or self-directed meditation, and watch your attention span improves tremendously.

Summary

Our attention span is decreasing due to the amount of information we are getting bombarded with. Unfortunately, the situation is not going to get better. Rather it will get worse.

Our brains can process only a limited amount of information before it gets tired. Since information overload is not going to decrease, we have to develop our own strategies to function at the optimum level. Some of the strategies are:

1. You don’t have to take everything in. Choose what you want to consume and choose wisely.
2. Put time restrictions on information consumption such as social media. Tie it with some other activity such as commuting or having breakfast.
3. Build concentration in small steps. Start with five minutes and build it to twenty minutes.
4. Increase your skills and productivity by doing a task every day for 30 days.
5. Learn to control and focus your mind through meditation. Start with five-minute sessions.

Photo by Cici Hung on Unsplash