productivity – Page 2 – NEERA MAHAJAN

Below are ten things I find worth sharing this week.

This week I wrote about how you can be creative on demand based on William S. Burroughs’s cut-up technique. It seems the cut-up technique has been useful not only for poets and novelists but also for songwriters like David Bowie and Kurt Cobain.
My Monday post talked about the Four stages of creative process proposed by Graham Wallas in his book The Art of Thought. The book was published in 1927 and is out of print, but an excerpt from it beautifully explains how the brain can be in one or all of these four stages at a time.
Want to be more creative? Go for a walk. This TED talk showcases a study conducted on a number of people walking indoors or outdoors.
My post on Why Cal Newport is right about productive meditation accentuates the same principle.
I found a post on How to find and make time for your passion even when you’re busy where Sara Woehler of Career Contessa talks about finding what makes you tick. Her quote, “Self-actualization doesn’t come from people-pleasing, it comes from being you, which sometimes requires finding you.” is spot on.
In how to do nothing Jenny Odell, a writer and artist makes the case for doing nothing.

Decades before the advent of social media as we know it, Gilles Deleuze observed it was “a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.” Nothing has become more precious, in today’s economy of attention, than nothing. In this talk, Jenny covers various instances of nothing from art history and contemporary projects, arguing that the cultivation of nothing has new salience in the age of everything.

From 30 Readers a Day to Profitable in Less Than 2 Years About two years ago, after a career in Air Traffic Control and dealing with health issues, Michele Robson started a blog about luxury travel on a budget called Turning Left for Less. Her blog started out slowly but has now reached a point where she earns a liveable income. In this week’s podcast, Michele shares 2 breakthroughs that helped her do it.
Looking for quick meals, I found Ten Quick and Nourishing Meals to Make on a Sick Day. Recipes not only look good but also taste good.
The book I am reading is Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk, the guy who revolutionized his family business wine shop into the internet phenomenon. He was one of the early ones to harness the power of online marketing. His book is outdated, watch his YouTube video instead.
And last but not least is 15 Time Management Lessons I learned in the First Year of Blogging, the post every new blogger needs to read.

I am reading Cal Newport’s new book called Deep Work. It starts with a story about Carl Jung, and I was straightaway hooked.

I couldn’t resist sharing the story with you. It starts like this…

In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat. He began with a basic two-story stone house he called the Tower. After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office. “In my retiring room I am by myself,” Jung said of the space. “I keep the key with me all the time; no one else is allowed in there except with my permission.”

How many of us wouldn’t give anything to have a place like that ourselves where we could work uninterrupted for as long as we want to and need to?

The story goes on:

In his book Daily Rituals, journalist Mason Currey sorted through various sources on Jung to re-create the psychiatrist’s work habits in the Tower. Jung would rise at seven a.m., Currey reports, and after a big breakfast he would spend two hours of undistracted writing time in his private office. His afternoons would often comprise mediation or long walks in the surrounding countryside. There was no electricity at the Tower, so as day gave way to night, light came from oil lamps and heat from the fireplace. Jung would retire to bed by ten p.m. “The feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this tower was intense from the start,” he said.

Though it is tempting to think of Bollingen Tower as a vacation home, if we put it into the context of Jung’s career at this point, it’s clear that the lakeside retreat was not built as an escape from work. In 1922, when Jung bought the property, he could not afford to take a vacation. Only one year earlier, 1921, he had published Psychological Types, a seminal book that solidified many differences that had been long developing between Jung’s thinking and the ideas of his onetime friend and mentor, Sigmund Freud. To back up his book, Jung needed to stay sharp and produce a stream of smart articles and books, further supporting and establishing analytical psychology, the eventual name for his new school of thought.

Jung’s lectures and counselling practice kept him busy in Zurich – this is clear. But he wasn’t satisfied with the busyness alone. He wanted to change the way we understood the unconscious, and this goal required deeper, more careful thought than he could manage amid his hectic city lifestyle. Jung retreated to Bollingen, not to escape his professional life, but instead to advance it.

Carl Jung went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

In the next post, I will share some insights from the book on how to work deeply.

Tag: productivity

A place of one’s own