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Getting Things Done

Compartmentalize and Get More Done

September 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One way you can achieve “living in the moment” is by putting your emotional issues into “compartments” within your head and your heart. You can deal with those feelings on your own when you need to.

Compartmentalize and Get More Done Many aspects of life can get you sidetracked and distraught. Finding a place to retreat within yourself can be challenging. By compartmentalizing, you can put your feelings where they belong, and you can earmark one challenge to tackle another challenge.

You can focus on the one task at hand and deal with the rest when appropriate.

Mental compartmentalization has a darker side, however. Psychologists identify extreme compartmentalization as a major defense mechanism by which some evade the acute anxiety that can spring from the clash of contradictory values or conflicting emotions. (A very pious scientist, for instance, could hold opposing beliefs about the Judeo-Christian and scientific notions of life’s origins. Compartmentalizing, she may live different value sets depending on whether she’s at church or her laboratory.) Some individuals also fall back on compartmentalization to cope with the lingering trauma of childhood abuse, neglect, and other emotional conflicts.

The day-to-day compartmentalization I’m talking about isn’t denial or avoidance. It isn’t evading conflicts and sidestepping problems—instead, it’s putting things out of the way for the moment and not letting them impede the rest of your life.

You can’t just ignore your issues and expect them to go away, but obsessing on them won’t help either.

Idea for Impact: Compartmentalize and get more done. Putting away the things that hurt or upset you, even if just for a short time, can also help you gain valuable perspective on dealing with them.

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Filed Under: Health and Well-being, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Decision-Making, Getting Things Done, Mindfulness, Problem Solving, Psychology, Task Management, Time Management

This Question Can Change Your Life

August 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

This Question Can Change Your Life The one question you should ask yourself continuously is, “What should I be doing right now that’d be the most effective use of this moment?”

The ability to know what’s essential and what’s not is the key to successful time management.

Throughout your day, ask, “What’s my priority?” This question takes many forms, but its premise is simple enough:

  • What action can you take now? What question can you ask? What opportunity or problem shall you engage in?
  • What is the one activity that could drive you the most significant results? What decision could have the most significant impact on your priorities?
  • Should you do this task, delegate it, or say ‘no’? What is the most expeditious way to do this task? Is this time-effective?

Ask these questions—and answer them honestly. Adjust your actions and seek better outcomes. Don’t get bogged down by activities that don’t contribute to your values and priorities.

Idea for Impact: Envision a better now. Be conscious about time. It’s your most valuable commodity. Don’t get unduly busy at trivial things while there are essential things you should be working on.

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  4. Stop Putting Off Your Toughest Tasks
  5. Keep Your Eyes on the Prize [Two-Minute Mentor #9]

Filed Under: Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Discipline, Getting Things Done, Persuasion, Procrastination, Simple Living, Task Management, Time Management

Half-Size Your Goals

July 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

At the start of the year, if you’re like most people, you selected a bunch of lofty, impossible goals. Now, halfway through the year, you feel disappointed and let down with yourself. In fact, the longer your goals list, the more overwhelmed and off-track you’ve got.

Simplify Your Goals - Set a Less Difficult Version As part of your mid-year review, reflect on the first six months of the year and adjust your goals for the rest of the year. Revisit your goals, assess your progress, evaluate your approach, and change your timeline. Break big ambitious goals down into more manageable decisions and improve the odds of achieving the type of outcome you desire.

Try half-sized goals. If you’re struggling to attain a goal that seems to be too challenging, set a less difficult version of the goal.

If you’re not getting good results, then you go back and tweak what you’re doing. Don’t feel the need to change everything in your life at once.

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Filed Under: Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Balance, Change Management, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Goals, Procrastination, Targets

Stop Putting Off Your Toughest Tasks

June 21, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Stop Putting Off Your Toughest Tasks Do those dreaded tasks first—the ones you don’t want to complete. Those are the ones that are truly core to who you are and what your ambitions are.

To be time-effective, you’ll need to use your will-power, a limited resource that it is, in the most effective way possible. Not only does this give the most time to react and correct problems that emerge from the difficult tasks, making progress on the challenging tasks is an incredible morale boost.

You procrastinate when there’s too much to do, or you dislike a task or don’t know where to start. If you figure out which of these blocks you, you can determine the next steps and get it over with.

Idea for Impact: Tasks you enjoy doing are, in fact, often hard not to do. If you tackle them first, you’ll get to the end of the day and find you’ve not achieved anything meaningful at all—just a bunch of ‘stuff’ which, however gratifying, won’t make much difference.

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Filed Under: Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Discipline, Getting Things Done, Procrastination, Tardiness, Task Management, Time Management

How to Embrace Multitasking

May 27, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Multitasking imposes cognitive limitations. Incessantly jumping between tasks leads to subpar performance. Not only that, when you’re skittering on the surface of yourself in many places at once, you’re denying true experience.

Evolutionary biologists have argued that the brain wasn’t designed for heavy-duty multitasking. Think of your brain as having multiple processing channels—visual, linguistic, tactile, and so on. Some channels can do only one thing at a time. Therefore, when you’re multitasking and moving attention back and forth between tasks that use different channels, there’s a cognitive penalty to reset and refocus.

In Defense of Multitasking: How to Do It the Right Way

How to Embrace Multitasking Never double up on tasks that use different channels. Writing two reports simultaneously with a stock market ticker running along the top edge of your screen won’t work. But there’s no harm in surfing Instagram while watching yet another rerun of Seinfeld—you can afford to lose focus on either subject.

If you’re listening to music to improve your focus, avoid songs with lyrics because they’ll engage your brain’s language channel, creating a new distraction.

If something needs your full concentration, give it. Don’t listen to an audiobook when you’re trying to land an airliner in high crosswinds.

Never Multitask Under a Tight Deadline

Pair high-cortical involvement tasks (those that involve judgment) with routine, physical tasks that the cerebellum, the brain’s autopilot, can handle. Chitty-chatty on the phone with your mom is okay while folding laundry. But get off the phone when you’re behind the wheel in bumper-to-bumper city-center traffic.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Shun Multitasking. Put it to Work for Your Life Instead.

Life is a juggling act. In the complex, fast-response world we live in, focusing on one task to exclude others isn’t always an option anymore. Often, you have to address immediately whatever shouts most at you.

Some activities are so dull (driving cross-country through miles and miles of mildly interesting scenery) and aversive that if it weren’t for multitasking, they would never get done at all.

Know when and how to multitask. And when not to. Carve out time for deep thinking and doing the essential things. Learn to protect your “intense focus” times.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Get Unstuck and Take Action Now
  3. A Guaranteed Formula for Success: Identify Your #1 Priority and Finish It First
  4. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  5. Easy Ways to Boost Your Focus & Break That Awful Multitasking Habit

Filed Under: Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Discipline, Getting Things Done, Mindfulness, Motivation, Procrastination, Simple Living, Time Management

More from Less // Book Summary of Richard Koch’s ’80/20 Principle’

May 10, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Vilfredo Pareto, Italian Sociologist - The 80-20 Principle The Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) recorded a “maldistribution” between causes and effects in economic statistics. It’s an observable fact that a minority of reasons—nominally around 20%—tends to produce a majority—80%—of the results.

Most Effects Come from Relatively Few Causes

More than a century later, the Romanian-American quality control pioneer Joseph Juran (1904–2008) embraced Pareto’s notion and demonstrated that 80% of all manufacturing quality defects are caused by 20% of reasons. Juran urged managers to identify and address the “vital few” or the “critical few “—the small fraction of elements that account for this disproportionally large fraction of the effect.

This Pareto Law, 80/20 Rule of Thumb, Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort, Juran’s Law of the Vital Few, 80-20 Thinking—call it what you want—permeates every aspect of business and life. Now that you know about it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

80/20 Principle - More from Less A fifth of your customers accounts for four-fifths of your sales. 20% of your employees are responsible for the majority of your firm’s productivity. 20% of your stocks will be responsible for 80% of your future gains. You tend to favor 20% of your clothes and wear them 80% of the time. You spend 80% of your socializing time with 20% of your friends. 20% of the decisions you’ve made during your life have shaped 80% of your current life. 80 percent of the wealth tends to be concentrated with 20 percent of the families.

The Pareto principle is a state of nature (the way things happen) and a process (a way of thinking about problems.) The 20% are the sources of the most significant potential impact.

The Remarkable Variance of Contributors and Effects

'The 80-20 Principle' by Richard Koch (ISBN 0385491743) Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less (1999) elaborates on using this seminal prioritization principle. “The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually leads to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards. … The winners in any field have … found ways to make 20% of effort yield 80% of results.”

Koch explains ad nauseam that most of us work much too hard and produce much less in relation to what could be produced. If trying harder hasn’t worked, perhaps it’s time to try less.

  • Invest your time and effort more wisely. Don’t address the less significant elements. “Most things always appear more important than the few things that are actually more important.” Examine what you do of low value. In other words, eliminate or reduce the 80% of efforts that produce less-significant results.
  • Know when to stop. Once you’ve solved the 20% of the issue to deliver 80% of the impact, any further effort can only achieve diminishing returns.

Idea for Impact: In most areas of human activity, just 20% of things will be worthwhile.

Recommendation: Speed-read Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle. It’s an excellent reminder that not all effort is equal, so it pays to focus on what matters most.

Embrace the “80-20” frame of mind in everything you do—at work and home. Unless you want to spend every waking hour working, it’s essential to learn how to focus your efforts on the most promising, impactful aspects of what needs to be done.

  • Realize that few things really matter in life, but they count a tremendous amount. These vital things may be challenging to discover and realize, but once you find these things that really matter, they give you immense power—the power that gives you more from less. Spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy making sure these decisions are made well, and you put yourself in the best position you can in the process.
  • If you want to improve your effectiveness at anything, focus only on what matters most. Be extraordinarily selective—spend time resourcefully on the few essentials that matter the most and little or no time on the massive trivia that engulfs most of your time.

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Filed Under: Effective Communication, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Decision-Making, Getting Things Done, Goals, Negotiation, Perfectionism, Targets, Time Management

Make Time To Do It

April 8, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The essence of time management is to prioritize Think about how these two declarations sound:

  • “Let me make time to do it.”
  • “Let me find time to do it.”

If you asked someone to do something, which response seems more convincing and persuasive?

When someone says they’ll make time to do something, you sense they’ll give the matter a feeling of priority. It implies that they’ll prioritize.

On the other hand, if someone says they’ll find time, it appears like they’ll hope to find a gap where they may fit you in—if they can remember what it is you asked them to do.

Often language—particularly self-talk—can have a way of revealing truths about values and priorities. The expression “I’ll make time” shows how the idea of time management only matters to how important the stuff is that’s competing for your time.

Idea for Impact: You know something is important when one makes time for it.

Think carefully about what you make time to do versus what you find time to do. The essence of time management is to prioritize.

Wondering what to read next?

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Filed Under: Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Conversations, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Mindfulness, Motivation, Resilience, Stress, Task Management, Time Management

Five Ways … You Could Stop Procrastinating

March 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

  1. Five Ways Don’t rely on motivation. Motivation is fleeting—it comes and goes. While it is advantageous to be motivated, the folks who get things done are those who find a way to work at whatever they are interested in, even when they don’t really feel like doing it.
  2. Banish your inner perfectionist. Remember that many things in your life need not be done perfectly—they’re to be just done … taken to a little bit better shape than before at each baby step. Whatever you need to work on just needs to be an outline, first attempt, rough copy, version 0. It needn’t be perfect.
  3. Picture the future self when you’ve achieved your goals. Figure out the finish line you are aiming at. Visualize what “done” looks like—a sense of achievement? Fame? Getting your co-worker off your back?
  4. Confront your fears. Figure out the underlying cause for procrastination. If it’s fear or if you’re failing overwhelmed, challenge the worst-case scenario by asking yourself, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Perhaps you may discover that you’re procrastinating over something that isn’t that important.
  5. Trick yourself into getting started. Say, “I’m not really going to work on this now. I’ll just open the report and make some notes for two minutes.” Beginning a task builds momentum, and seemingly-difficult tasks tend to get easier once you get working on them.

Bonus: Stop trying too hard to overpower yourself into action. Sometimes, getting those other, less-important tasks done first could motivate you.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Just Start
  3. 5 Minutes to Greater Productivity [Two-Minute Mentor #11]
  4. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  5. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Discipline, Getting Things Done, Lifehacks, Motivation, Perfectionism, Procrastination, Time Management

Don’t Let Interruptions Hijack Your Day

February 8, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Don't Let Interruptions Hijack Your Day Most people spend a good part of their day responding to ad hoc requests, drop-ins, questions, and emergencies. During the short periods when they aren’t being interrupted, they find it hard to get back to their big projects, knowing that they’d soon be interrupted again.

Here’s a tried-and-tested tactic to prevent interruptions from invading your day.

  • Plan your day the night before (or first thing in the morning)—even if it’s merely preparing a list of what you want to accomplish that day. A plan will give you a definite starting place.
  • Once you’re done preparing that to-do list, don’t allow yourself to add any more to the same day’s task list. If someone asks you for something, say, “Okay, I’ve got it on my calendar for tomorrow!”

Make disruptions the exception rather than the norm. If your job allows it, don’t add on work for the same day. In many professions, there aren’t a lot of “emergencies” that really threaten a life or a business if not addressed within an hour or two.

Idea for Impact: Unscheduled tasks can add up to a dreadful drag on your productivity. Stick to a plan and stay focused. You’ll manage your day better and protect the most important, deep thinking work that’ll drive your goals forward.

Wondering what to read next?

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  5. Warren Buffett’s Advice on How to Focus on Priorities and Subdue Distractions

Filed Under: Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Decision-Making, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Procrastination, Task Management, Time Management

How to Banish Your Inner Perfectionist

January 21, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Banish Your Inner Perfectionist

You have an enemy: a feisty, malign force working against you. It’s the internalized perfectionist. It’s the stream of subversive self-talk urging indecision, doubt, and fear.

The #1 hack to overcoming you perfectionist tendency is to accept that whatever you need to work on just needs to be an outline, first attempt, rough copy, version 0. It needn’t be perfect. You just need to get it to a little bit better shape than before. You can then consider the next baby step.

Idea for Impact: Many things in your life need not be done perfectly. They’re to be done … just done … done to spur more done … not to dwell to perfection.

Your goal now is not to be like a Picasso, Mozart, Steven King, Lebron James, Warren Buffett, or some superstar. All you have to do now is create, edit, fix, or process and get whatever it is you’re working on to the next milestone. Make this a rule.

Wondering what to read next?

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  3. What Are You So Afraid Of? // Summary of Susan Jeffers’s ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’
  4. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’
  5. The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Decision-Making, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Lifehacks, Mindfulness, Motivation, Perfectionism, Procrastination

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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