Discipline

Give the Best Hours of The Day to Yourself

April 19, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

What part of the day do you feel your best?

Some feel most energized during the first few hours of the morning. For night owls, evenings are better.

Now, who gets those hours?

Do you fritter away your best hours catching up on work, mindlessly surfing the web, or doing chores around the house?

Try giving that time to yourself instead. Guard that time for sleeping adequately, eating healthy, working out, treating yourself to a favorite dessert, connecting with the people you treasure, engaging in hobbies, and engaging in personal reflection.

Focus on your values and priorities—personal and professional—rather than someone else’s. As the pressure mounts at work and home, self-care activities are often the first to be cut out.

Classify what you need to do, should do, and want to do. Focus on the few things that you must do. And, if you still have time, progress to work you’d like to do.

Idea for Impact: Being in touch with your own feelings and nourishing yourself in every way possible is the ultimate form of self-care. Give the best hours of your day to yourself.

A Hack to Resist Temptation: The 15-Minute Rule

March 23, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When you’re faced with a temptation, e.g., when you have a sugar craving, try this 15-Minute Rule: Commit to not giving in for 15 minutes. Take yourself away from the stimulus that led to the temptation.

With any luck, the enticement will wear off. At least it’ll become more manageable to control. If at all possible, wait another 15 minutes.

Increasing your awareness of your temptations and refusing to submit to them impulsively is the key to changing behavior.

Idea for Impact: Self-control in the face of urges and cravings is tricky. Even a simple distraction can break the trance.

Get Unstuck and Take Action Now

March 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

From Sharon Lebell’s interpretations of Epictetus in Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness (2007,)

Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer.

Put your principles into practice—now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren’t a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. The longer you wait, the more you’ll be vulnerable to mediocrity and feel filled with shame and regret, because you know you are capable of better.

From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do—now.

If you’re like most people who want more from life than what they’re getting, remember that cutting through the stupor of life often starts with gaining clarity.

What do you value? What matters most?

Does your life align with your proclaimed values and priorities? If not, now’s the perfect time to lean into small actions that could set you on the right path.

Progress is within reach, but you’ll need to find clarity and restructure how you think about goals.

Stop procrastinating now. Recognize that you can be better. Without hesitation, decide to be the person that only you can be.

Idea for Impact: What’s one brave decision you can make now to get unstuck and move in the direction of your goals?

The Ethics Test

February 26, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Since 1961, Texas Instruments has had a multi-step guideline that it wants employees to use to decide whether or not a contemplated decision is ethical. One version:

Is the action legal?

Does it comply with our values?

If you do it, will you feel bad?

How will it look in the newspaper?

If you know it’s wrong, don’t do it!

If you’re not sure, ask.

Keep asking until you get an answer.

Idea for Impact: Use such decision-making models for clear direction about ethical behavior when the temptation to behave unethically is strongest.

Begin With the Least Urgent Task

February 22, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Don’t wait until something becomes urgent to do it. Most of your urgent tasks—the ones that have the menacing power to distract you now—were non-urgent once.

Becoming more alert to time and staying aware of what genuinely deserves your attention at the moment is the key to time-effectiveness.

Idea for Impact: Complete your tasks before they become urgent. You’re thus putting yourself, not the incoming flow of attention demands, in the driving seat.

This discipline of getting things done early won’t help you eliminate real emergencies. Still, on the whole, your self-inflicted crises might drop significantly, and the stress that comes with them. Your efficiency will increase, and so will your predictability and reliability.

Checking Email in the Morning is an Excuse for Those Who Lack Direction

February 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

For most people, email is a window into what’s changed—what’s important and urgent. But if you open your swiftly-filling inbox first thing in the morning, you’ll find a hundred and one disruptions in the offing. It’ll be hard to settle your mind down and focus.

Don’t use email to source your morning to-do list. Responding to others’ needs and bouncing from task to task can derail you from what’s more important or more difficult—researching something, writing, planning, thinking, problem-solving, for example. Do those things first, when you’re freshest.

Productivity consultant Julie Morgenstern wrote a popular book about this theme: Never Check Email In The Morning (2005) prompts you to find a way to start checking mail less often. Morgenstern argues that email-free time in the morning will snowball into a productive day.

If you must check email first thing in the morning—say, when your job involves communicating with people—set a time limit and look for just those pieces of information that’ll help you forwards.

Idea for Impact: Put yourself in the driving seat; don’t let events drive you

Morgenstern addresses the underlying discipline you need for how you prepare—or fail to prepare—to address the daily influx of demands on our attention. Intentionally choose to do something that requires your single-minded attention, whether relaxing or productive.

Focus on Achieving Your Highest Priorities

February 17, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Wriggle yourself out of the mindset that you have to “get through” the day. Adopt the attitude that the coming hours are filled with open-ended potential to do the best work of your life and take action that can change your life forever.

This attitude shift can help you see things differently and focus on making life better. Ruthless prioritization means working on the very best of the ideas—not just the very good ideas, but also the ones that constitute the most important thing you could be doing.

Make a list of people, activities, and things that rate the highest level of importance in your life. Think about what you value most and rank them in order of importance. Then, spend as many waking moments as possible using your best skills on causes you deeply care about.

That’s indeed the best way to live life.

Idea for Impact: The key to performing at your best is freeing up your mind to do your most productive and creative work. Decide your highest priorities and have the discipline to say no to other things.

When it’s time to reflect on the week, day, or hour ahead, ask, “Which of my activities drive the biggest results?”

Refocus and make progress, not react.

Just Start

February 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Procrastination is a chronic habit. Many of us procrastinate to give ourselves fleeting comfort from our dread of starting a task.

One way to overcome inertia and overcome procrastination: whether it’s studying, exercising, writing, or whatever, just start. Cut out the distractions. Divide your workload down into manageable, bite-sized fragments. Just start.

When you find yourself procrastinating, tell yourself to “just start”—over and over if needed—until you convince yourself to work on the task. No more fumbling around.

Often, just beginning the task can positively shift your motivation. The thing with procrastinating is that you think a task is harder than it is, so you avoid starting it. The task isn’t really that hard most of the time, but you just think it is.

Even minimal progress toward a goal lets you feel more optimistic about the objective and ourselves. Typically, once you commit to a task and build momentum, you’ll discover it’s not as “hard” as you’d anticipated. From there, your disposition snowballs, and one task leads to another, which leads to another. Indeed, objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

Idea for Impact: Don’t wait to start that daunting task. Remember, you don’t have to like it to do it. Take one small step now to get the ball rolling down the hill toward completion.

To be More Productive, Try Doing Less

January 27, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The top performers in every field tend to have one thing in common: they accept fewer tasks and obsess over getting them right.

If you’re struggling with time- and task-management, the solution is not to try to be even more productive by somehow “finding” time to do more things.

Time management advice tends to want you to believe that you aren’t doing enough with all that “extra time” you can unearth by squeezing out more from your time. You don’t need to commoditize every minute of your life and devote it to productive work.

You can’t—and shouldn’t—do it all

More time is not the answer to your time management problems.

You can’t manage time. You cannot control time. What you can control are your actions. You can control how you spend your time on what activities. You are in complete control of what you do and when you do it.

Jog through your list of things to do. For each task, ask,

Why is this task necessary?
What would happen a month from now if it isn’t done?
What would happen if this never gets done
Who wants this task done, and who is the right person to do it?
Do fewer things that create more value, rather than more things that are mostly empty.

Effective time management is about knowing what’s essential and what’s not. Don’t get disproportionately involved with small things while monumental things are to be done.

Idea for Impact: No point in doing something that doesn’t need doing.

The best way to get lots of things done is to not do them at all.

To get more done, you need to do less. Trying to do it all doesn’t work. In other words, do only those things that really matter. Focus on those activities that drive the most significant results.

Stop Dieting, Start Savoring

January 24, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Research suggests that excluding entire food groups, banning your favorite foods, forcing yourself to count calories, and measuring success by a number on a scale may actually make you want to eat more. Restrictive dieting can slow your metabolism down, making it even harder to lose weight over the long term.

You’re more likely to be successful at keeping weight off if you lose weight gradually and steadily. Be more mindful of what you eat and how you eat.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your favorite foods and indulging in your cravings for cookies, potato chips, or ice cream. All you have to do is cut back. Practice awareness by slowing down and thinking about what you’re eating and why you’re eating it.

Don’t gulp your food; you’ll overeat before you realize that you’re full. Instead, rest between bites. Take time to chew your food thoroughly. You really don’t need as much food as you think you do.

When you eat out, keep your food-mindfulness on the right track. Keep hunger under control beforehand. Don’t skip meals. Control portion size. Share your meal or take half of it home.

Idea for Impact: Eating should be a pleasurable activity. No food is inherently good or bad, and there’s no need to build an adversarial relationship with food.

« Previous Page

Discipline

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Put yourself in the driving seat; don’t let events drive you

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

You can’t—and shouldn’t—do it all

Idea for Impact: No point in doing something that doesn’t need doing.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?