Getting Things Done

How to Keep Your Brain Fresh and Creative

April 22, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Keep Your Brain Fresh and Creative If you need to make much progress on a project, you may feel constrained to work on it in one sitting-down.

Don’t.

No one can concentrate on a single task all the time.

Break up your day—and your thought patterns—by regularly engaging in activities that aren’t intellectually taxing.

Plan your distraction. Have a little something to look forward to—a 15-minute break to watch the highlights of last night’s match, for example. Stretch, dance, or get a glass of water. Go for a short walk around your neighborhood.

According to neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry Rosen’s The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (2016,) regular breaks can lower mental fatigue, boost brain function, and keep you on-task for more extended periods. Creativity can flow when your mind wanders, allowing you to synthesize information uniquely.

When you sit back down to resume working, you’ll be emotionally regulated and have your mental resources replenished. This helps you be more creative and get more done.

Idea for Impact: Work in spurts. Set specific times to take recesses and stick to them. Your mind needs a break—a “state change,” in fact—at least every 30-45 minutes to work more effectively.

Deep Work Mode: How to Achieve Profound Focus

April 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Deep Work Mode: How to Achieve Profound Focus--- Venture capitalist Paul Graham’s influential essay “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” (2009) underscores the need for compartmentalizing time.

A specific frame of mind is required to excel in ‘making’ things versus ‘managing’ things. The constant context switching impedes what you’re focusing on.

Graham recommends dividing work into two timetables of time blocks: “Maker Time” necessitates large blocks of dedicated, interruption-free time to work intensely—developing ideas, writing code, generating leads, producing products, or accomplishing projects. “Manager Time” requires shifting from one interaction to another, allowing for many meetings and brief-to-the-point interactions to oversee, direct, or administer.

The contrast is significant because of the different operative mindsets needed. Those engaged in maker time shouldn’t be pulled into meetings at irregular hours; that’ll debase the time blocks they need to move themselves and their teams forward.

Graham’s emphasis on the inconveniences of switching modes is right on: “For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.”

Idea for Impact: Change the way you schedule your day and get uninterrupted stretches of time to get your most important work done. A bit of variety and change of pace can be good.

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?

Get Unstuck and Take Action Now 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?

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.

Begin With the Least Urgent Task 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

Focus on Achieving Your Highest Priorities 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

How to Overcome Procrastination

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

To be More Productive, Try Doing Less 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.

The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

January 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Even the more determined souls among us find that New Year’s resolutions aren’t effective.

Some of us don’t even bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore because we always break them. Mark Twain famously wrote in a letter to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in January 1863,

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual … New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.

The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

When we try to change everything at once, we set ourselves up for failure

We make bold resolutions to start exercising or losing weight, for example, without taking the steps needed to set ourselves up for success. Behavioral scientists who study habit formation argue that most people try to create healthy habits in the wrong way. Starting a new routine isn’t always easy.

Stanford University researcher B. J. Fogg, the author of Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019,) notes that jumping cold turkey into new beginnings upon the turn of the calendar demands a high level of motivation that can’t be sustained over time. He recommends starting with tiny habits to help make the new habit as easy and achievable as possible in the beginning.

Small Measures, Large Results

Small, specific goals are amazingly effective. Making a New Year’s resolution to “run a marathon this summer” is an imposing aspiration to get started on, but committing to “run two miles in 30 minutes thrice a week in January” is a first operating objective.

Break any big challenge into simple steps and just focus on getting to the first step. Taking a daily short stroll could be the beginning of an exercise habit. Then, regroup and think about step two.

The truth is, if you invest time and have even a little bit of success in any endeavor, you’re both more likely to believe the changes will last and commit more. Success builds momentum.

Idea for Impact: Good habits happen when we set ourselves up for achievable success.

Bold promises and vague goals don’t work well. Neither does beating up on yourself for lapses.

Make New Year’s resolutions by establishing long-term targets and making many small resolutions all year round. If you want to lose weight, resolve to pass up nacho-and-cheese and soda for a month.

Take one baby step at a time. Expect some setbacks. The willpower necessary will be small. And you’ll get better results that’ll actually stick.

The Mental Junkyard Hour

October 27, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Mental Junkyard Hour---Productivity Hour Before Bed If you can muster up the energy, use an hour or two at the end of your day to crank out all those “functional tasks” that don’t require a totally clear head.

Wrap up anything that you shouldn’t carry forward to the next day. Crack down on all those administrative and life-maintenance tasks—like catching up with email, tidying up your home, and reprioritizing to-do lists. If you’re a student, you can summarize class notes, re-do practice problems, and get the school bag ready.

Making the most of the “mental junkyard hour” lets you spend the time when your head is clearer to focus on those tougher, “conceptual” tasks that need deep focused work.

Getting Things Done

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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?

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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?

When we try to change everything at once, we set ourselves up for failure

Small Measures, Large Results

Idea for Impact: Good habits happen when we set ourselves up for achievable success.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?