Really Bright Lines

I was able to make a chain this week. And what helped me do that - really bright lines. Let me explain. It is easy to do something 100% of the time than 90%.  It shortcuts a decision loop - the brain doesn't have to work to decide whether to do something or not. The answer is always clear. This added clarity saves a lot of energy and time - and more than that, it makes it very easy to follow through. 

And this is how I was able to make the chain. Simple rule - No internet before 5 PM. No exclusions and no exceptions. Though I made this decision lot times, I always let some loop holes in - like watching news for five minutes was OK. It was OK if I'm not working etc. And this left a really simple path to get hijacked as the dopamine inducing articles would suck me in and leaving me totally emaciated to do any worthwhile work. This time I didn't leave any such loophole.

And so there I was - feeling the passing of time, feeling like a luxurious person - I had a lot of time in my day. Things were happening peacefully - nothing was feeling rushed. Things were taking as much time as they needed. And that helped me to finally make a chain. As I always have the energy to do the things I should do and any distracting thought has to wait till 5 PM to become real! 

So this is my advice to anyone who is struggling to follow through a decision they made - make whatever you decided really bright - no gray lines. Do something 100% of the time. Make the decision automatic. Decide when you're at your peak state and then resolve that what you have decided is done. Make starting the thing you want to do so easy that it should be easier to start it than to decide to not to do it and get away from it. The less energy you want to spend starting it the more successful  you will be. 

Slow and Steady

Everyone might have heard the story of the hare and tortoise. The story goes like this - A hare and a tortoise have a race. Hare starts fast initially and after going a certain distance, looks back and sees tortoise way behind. So it decides to take a break and rest. Meanwhile the tortoise starts slowly and steadily walks to the finish line. By the time the hare wakes up the tortoise is almost at the finish line and you can expect that tortoise wins the race while hare tries to catch up.

There is a profound truth here. It is not the fast one who wins but the person who is more steady who has the momentum. So what is your goal and how are you going to make sure you are making steady progress towards it ? These are some ways that I found helpful.

1. Make time: The best way to make steady progress is to schedule specific time for the work. Daily is better but if doesn't work any recurring time is best.
2. Make a chain: Make a big X mark on the date you've really done the work. And don't allow the chain to break.
3. Never miss twice: Inevitably in life, some time will come when you haven broken the chain. Don't despair and don't let that stop you. The trick is to start as soon as possible and at the next scheduled date. The rule should be that you never miss it twice. During my childhood, my guru told me this in telugu - ద్వితీయ విఘ్నము పనికిరాదు . i.e Second interruption is not good. I didn't realize the importance of that then - I was thinking what if we miss the second time, we could start it on the third day. But it has now been abundantly clear that the activation energy to start it on the third day is much higher and it is easier to just quit but restarting it on the second day is so much easier. So mind the second interruptions.
4. Make your environment. Design your environment to support the task you're working on. Minimize the interruptions to the work and make sure it is easier to do the task than doing something else. So turn off notifications and if possible break the internet and just focus on the task at hand.
5. Enjoy the work. This is something I've noticed recently. When there is a rush to complete a task, it can look like a chore instead of something that I enjoy. So instead of making a mad dash on every task, I try to go slow and really try to appreciate why I'm doing it and giving myself a chance to do a great job on it. This will also help in continuing the chain as I'm getting pleasure out of the job and the brain will get addicted to it.

Wish you a happy, productive and guilt free new year 2018. May you reach all your goals slowly and steadily. I've enjoyed writing this blog post and will continue my slow and steady progress by making a X every monday on this blog!

Blogs I follow and enjoy

Just wanted to quickly point you to some blogs I read and enjoy which you might like too...


Recently I discovered the blog of Cal Newport, who is extremely productive, completed his Phd, wrote three books, maintains a popular blog at calnewport.com and eagerly shares his productivity tips.

A must read:
http://calnewport.com/blog/

After these there are other blogs I read and have thought provoking posts.. you can sample them to see if you like..

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

https://signalvnoise.com/

http://alearningaday.com/

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/blog/

How I overcame by Attention Deficit ?

The Problem:

That is my iGoogle page, i.e my personalized homepage. See how many tabs I have. I follow some 40 blogs and assuming that each one updates atleast one post I read 40 posts. And blogs like techcrunch and techmeme post more than one post per day. So even though I was working on some other thing, I would alt-tab to this read one blog post and continue working. Now a  days there is twitter too. Somebody tweets a link and I will read it. That way I used to read read and read. If I am reading something, then I will not comeback to my work till that article is done. Sometimes, there would be more links in the main article and it would some serious time lost before I come back to my work again.  Now imagine my productivity. I used to do just fine before when my work was a little less and when I had no time constraints. Now a days due to some reasons I have to work with 8:30 -4:30 and this distractions were killing my productivity. Now as you know humans cannot multi-task well and guys are even bad at it. So I decided to do something about it.

Working For a Solution:
So I decided to see how much time I was working and how I was getting distracted. I observed that looking at twitter or igoogle was the main reason I was getting distracted. But I simply couldn't stop myself from doing that whenever I have to wait for a build or deployment. I saw my results in rescuetime and saw that my productivity was very very low.

So I was to somehow overcome the addiction to news, opinion and breaking news But the problem was I liked it. So what should I do? 

Solution: 

I tried to tackle it in two different ways. First, I have to read but I should not read every breaking news. But I shouldn't read during the time I am working simply because it is a big loss to my productivity. I have read in may time management solutions, that if there is something we want to do at a later time, our mind tries to remember it by recalling it again and again for the fear that it will forget it. And the easy solution to it is to write it down somewhere. So I decided that if I come across a good article sometime during the day, I will use the ReadLater bookmarklet to bookmark it. Also, there is a better chance of avoiding it if the environment is clear of it. So I have decided that I will not open chrome browser during working hours. Because of its ease of use, though I open it for some work related search, I tend to open igoogle and get stuck. So I would use IE and then because of the unfriendly interface, I will close it after the official work. And then I scheduled some time in the evening to read all the articles I have scheduled to read later. This way I was able to concentrate well on what I was doing. Basically, I made it less exciting to get distracted then (unfriendly browser) then postponed it as a reward for getting it done (Read Later)

The second way in which I tackled was getting more clarity in what I was doing. I would get a deluge of requests and I would handle them as they come. Hence as a request comes, I would stop the current one, go and look at the new one, reply to it and then come back to the old one, which took a lot of time in context-switching and lost me a lot of time. So I stopped doing that. I would write down all my tasks in the outlook

This helped me keep perspective and be mindful of what I am doing and hence helped me do my work more productively and writing down the tasks helped to eliminate the mind chatter. There was also an option of setting reminders which helped in following up on the tasks. Here I  put everything into tasks and worked on them sequentially. Ofcourse, I had to prioritize but mostly I stuck to what I decided.  

So this helped me to increase my productivity to a different level. I am sharing this becuase in this information and social media age, there will surely something which will catch our attention and we can get easily distracted. But it feels good to use technology to beat the ill effects of technology. Hope it helps you.