Getting Things Done

How to Stop “Standing” Meetings from Clogging Up Your Time

December 19, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Monthly staff conferences, progress updates, weekly sales calls, and other regularly scheduled “standing” meetings, essential though they may be, tend to be wasteful, especially so when they’re convened per tradition and attended out of an obligation.

The beginning of the year is a great time to examine all the standing meetings that you’re invited to. Review your calendar and consider the RoI of each standing meeting. Make each one of those meetings defend the use of your time—and your employees’ time.

Ask how else you could accomplish the goals of each meeting efficiently. If you must hold a meeting, remind all its participants of the reasons for gathering, and check if the meeting—and the frequency—still serves that purpose. Rewrite the charter of these meetings if necessary. Look at ways to complete the meetings more efficiently—perhaps in half the time, half as frequently, or with half the people.

For instance, a design team may convene for twice-a-week status reports at the project launch while there may be many decisions to make. Once the early frenzy subsides, only a monthly meeting may be justified, complemented by frequent status updates shared via email.

Idea for Impact: Don’t keep going to every meeting just because you’re invited, or because you think you have to.

Yes, Money Can Buy Happiness

October 7, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

This HBR article considers why the pursuit of money isn’t bringing you joy.

Even though, as a society, we really have more time to spend than in previous societies as a result of convenience and mechanization, we tend to use free time to work yet more and expand our bank accounts, rather than invest that time in things that can provide us with more happiness—meaningful relationships, for example.

The article (and the related podcast) explains how to value your time over money, in particular by hiring help. Here is a précis:

You might not be able to change how many hours you work in a week, but you might be able to change how much of those non-work hours you’re spending on chores.

If you are having a really busy weekend and you have four or five hours of chores to do at home, that means you’re going to have four or five less hours to spend in any other way that could promote meaning and happiness.

When considering how we can use money to increase our happiness, most of us think of investing it in positive experiences like Hawaiian vacations. But it’s also important to think about how to eliminate negative experiences from our day. Take small actions—don’t do anything too drastic, but just sit down and think about whether there’s anything you can outsource that you really don’t like, that stresses you out a lot, that you can afford.

Idea for Impact: Use your hard-earned money to buy time, reduce stress, and increase happiness

If you feel increasingly strapped for time, consider (think opportunity costs) earmarking a fraction of your discretionary income to hire a personal assistant and buy get yourself some more of that most valuable of life’s supplies, free time.

Start by asking your friends for referrals for a reliable assistant. Outsource your housework, shopping, errands, and other tasks that you dislike. Use the salvaged time to seek activities that bring you joy—recreation, relationships, spiritual and intellectual nurturance, or even productive work.

However, farm out personal chores in moderation. There’s some evidence to suggest that people who outsource too much have the lowest levels of happiness, perhaps as a consequence of indolence.

Do You Have an Unhealthy Obsession with Excellence?

September 10, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Yes, you must develop the habit of excellence, even in little matters. However, the price of perfection can be prohibitive. A maniacal emphasis on excellence can lead to a blind obsession that can drain productivity.

If you’re a manager, insisting on perfection everywhere can hurt workplace morale, reduce employee engagement, and decrease opportunities for innovation and change.

Managers too often call for excellence in the small things because they’re unable to prioritize what matters most. These managers tend to be the ones who also struggle with delegation—given their exacting standards, it makes sense that they would have difficulty letting others do their job. And because monitoring people’s efforts is often time-consuming and difficult, perfectionist managers tend to just decide that it’s easier and quicker to do the job themselves.

Smart Managers Have the Self-Discipline to Turn Excellence On and Off

The smart managers I know of accomplish great things because they often have a “sixth sense” that reminds them that some activities matter more than others do and therefore merit more attention.

They give themselves permission to produce second-rate work on the road to doing a first-rate job.

They are very selective about when they push their teams to the max—only when the stakes are big enough and when it’s entirely justified.

Idea for Impact: Be Excellent Occasionally

Expecting excellence in every detail uses up a lot of bandwidth.

Get comfortable with a little bit of lower quality now and then. Less-than-excellent is a satisfactory outcome. As the British novelist W. Somerset Maugham once warned, “only a mediocre person is always at his best.”

Making a conscious decision about where excellence matters and where it doesn’t is particularly pertinent to managerial success.

In the real world of limited resources, perfection is hard to achieve. The quest for excellence sucks up time, energy, and money that could generate better results elsewhere.

Managers, step back and look at the whole picture. You don’t have enough resources to do everything, so commit them where they’ll bring the greatest overall improvement (use the lens of opportunity costs.)

Have exacting standards, but don’t demand excellence in every idea.

The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’

August 21, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of the great struggles of modern life is the intense complexity, chaos, and exhaustion of activity and reactivity. We have a tendency to take on too much, become accountable to too many people, and say ‘yes’ to too many demands on our time and our energy.

As I mentioned in my world’s shortest course on time management, the merits of ignoring the trivial many and focusing on the vital few is often overlooked. The need for essentialism—less responsibility, less fame, less money, fewer possessions, less mess—is something that’s easy to identify with, but requires abundant self-discipline to put into consistent action.

Business consultant Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (2014) is an excellent reminder that a rich, meaningful life entails the elimination of the non-essential:

Essentialism is more than a time-management strategy or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter.

McKeown’s wide-ranging discussion covers insightful get-a-hold-of-your-life principles—frugality, sufficiency, moderation, restraint, minimalism, and mindfulness—reframed in the essential-avoidable dichotomy. Here are prominent insights from Essentialism:

Get to grips with selectivity—whenever you can, judiciously select which priorities, tasks, meetings, customers, ideas or steps to undertake and which to let go. “The basic value proposition of Essentialism [is,] only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.”
Most top performers have one thing in common: they accept fewer tasks and then fixate on getting them right. “Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”
If you don’t arrange your life, someone else will. “When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices-or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose. That is the path of the Nonessentialist. … The Essentialist doesn’t just recognize the power of choice, he celebrates it. The Essentialist knows that when we surrender our right to choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit permission to choose for us.”
Pop out at least once a year to reflect and ask questions about what you’re doing and why. “The faster and busier things get, the more we need to build thinking time into our schedule. And the noisier things get, the more we need to build quiet reflection spaces in which we can truly focus.”
Pursue a well-lived, joyful, meaningful life. “The life of an Essentialist is a life lived without regret. If you have correctly identified what really matters, if you invest your time and energy in it, then it is difficult to regret the choices you make. You become proud of the life you have chosen to live.”

Recommendation: Speedread Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. It will remind you of the wisdom to think through—and act upon—what really matters. Essentialism is chockfull of useful instructions on how to say ‘no’ gracefully, exercise your freedom to set boundaries, discover the power of small wins, and harness the power of routines to evade the pull of nonessential distractions that can subsume you easily.

Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus

July 29, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Here’s a précis of psychologist Ron Friedman’s HBR article on how to spend the first ten minutes of your day:

Ask yourself this question the moment you sit at your desk: The day is over and I am leaving the office with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. What have I achieved?

This exercise is usually effective at helping people distinguish between tasks that simply feel urgent from those that are truly important. Use it to determine the activities you want to focus your energy on.

Then—and this is important—create a plan of attack by breaking down complex tasks into specific actions. Studies show that when it comes to goals, the more specific you are about what you’re trying to achieve, the better your chances of success.

Idea for Impact: Organize Yourself Good Concentration

Starting your day by mulling over proactively on “what should I have achieved” is a wonderful aid in keeping the mind headed in the right direction.

Planning is easier when your energy levels are highest, which, for most people, is first thing in the morning.

Knowing what your goals are before you launch your day can help you focus the mind and hold it steadily to one thing at a time and in the right order.

Transformational Leadership Lessons from Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Founding Father

June 24, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi 3 Comments

Almost all leaders take office with an ambitious vision for their country or their organization, but only a few ever succeed in transforming that vision into reality. Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015,) the architect of modern Singapore, was one of them.

Leadership Lessons from Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's Founding Father

Lee was one of the most competent leaders the world has ever seen. An incorruptible Cambridge-educated lawyer, he was an autocratic pragmatist—a strong-willed, visionary leader who “got it done.” Under his leadership, Singapore metamorphosed itself from a tropical backwater with few natural resources to a first-world metropolis in just one generation. Today, Singapore’s per-capita GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Parity is the third highest in the world.

There is also a darker side to the Singapore story, however. The island-nation’s prosperity came at the cost of a rather authoritarian style of government that sometimes infringed on civil liberties. In a 1986 National Day Rally, Lee defended,

I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters—who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.

Singapore is not quite a dictatorship, but neither is it a full democracy. Its political system is skewed to let Lee’s party dominate the country’s polity. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Lee asserted, “It is not the business of the government to enable the opposition party to overturn us.”

A vast majority of Singaporeans today will overlook these civil-liberty concerns in the context of the country’s socio-political stability, public security, world-leading and affordable healthcare, free education, good housing for all, and high employment.

Singapore’s spectacular success is accepted as evidence, sometimes lamentably as justification, as with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, that a vibrant economy and sustained prosperity could blossom only under a totalitarian government. Singapore’s achievement is not likely replicable in its entirety elsewhere.

Over the last several months, I’ve read a few biographies and evaluations of Lee and his political leadership, including the memoirs The Singapore Story: From Third World to First (1998) and One Man’s View of the World (2013.) Here are a few key leadership lessons that Lee had to teach.

Vision, structure, and determination are paramount to efficacious leadership. Lee was a brilliant, clear-eyed, far-sighted statesman. Singapore’s political stability, rapid economic growth, and its raising affluence between 1959 and 1990 were not accidental, but the result of his dynamic leadership and disciplined social engineering. In The Singapore Story (1998,) he writes, “The task of the leaders must be to provide or create for them a strong framework within which they can learn, work hard, be productive and be rewarded accordingly. And this is not easy to achieve.”

Leadership entails tough, unpopular decisions. Lee was not afraid of being out of favor. “I have never been overconcerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls. I think a leader who is, is a weak leader. If you are concerned with whether your rating will go up or down, then you are not a leader. You are just catching the wind … you will go where the wind is blowing. And that’s not what I am in this for.” He famously forbade the sale of chewing gum to keep Singapore’s streets clean. He maintained capital punishment and caning. Singapore’s vandalism rules drew worldwide attention in 1994 when American teenager Michael Fay was caned for damaging cars and public property, in spite of appeals for clemency from the US media and government, including then-President Bill Clinton.

The litmus test of great leadership is results that matter. Many take issue with Lee’s methods, but few dispute the results he achieved. He was a pragmatist with devotion to no particular ideology. He once contemplated, “I was never a prisoner of any [socio-political] theory. What guided me were reason and reality. The acid test I applied to every theory or scheme was: Would it work?” and “The acid test is in performance, not promises.”

Nurture a meritocracy. Lee’s commitment to meritocracy is a hallmark of Singapore’s national identity—social mobility is rooted in hard work and contribution regardless of ethnic differences. He devoted resources to cultivate an excellent education and health system, and developed a high-quality teacher workforce—all to maximize people’s potential. According to Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998,) he wrote, “It is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person’s contribution to that society. In other words, society should make it worth people’s while to give their best to the country. This is the way to progress.” In recent years, though, the debate over rising social inequality has led to some reproach of Singapore’s meritocracy.

Attract and retain superior talent; pay them well. A key contributor to the wealth, stability, efficiency, and cleanliness of Singapore is its civil service—it’s one of the most proficient and least corrupt bureaucracies in the world. The government’s transparent policies have been a powerful enticement for people, businesses, and investments. Singapore has some of the highest paid civil servants in the world. The country is not content to let its top graduates all go straight to the private sector, so it pays what it takes to get them. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, Lee’s immediate successor, told Singapore’s parliament on 3-Dec-1993, “If we do not pay ministers adequately, we will get inadequate ministers. If you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys for your ministers. The people will suffer, not the monkeys.”

One’s accomplishments become one’s legacy. Having a broad picture of the effect you want to have on the world will help you pinpoint the actions necessary to achieve it. Explaining his legacy, Lee wrote in Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going (2011,) “I have spent my life, so much of it, building up this country. There’s nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.”

To judge leaders by their methods alone is to underrate their successes. While considering Lee’s legacy, one needs to acknowledge his achievements while refusing to close one’s eyes to certain lapses. Lee’s many critics considered him authoritarian—he imposed media restrictions and used detention without trial and defamation suits to quash critics of his government. Discussing a political opponent in Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998,) Lee justified, “If you are a troublemaker, it’s our job to politically destroy you. … Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac. That’s the way I had to survive in the past.” Lee was unapologetic about his heavy-handed style of governing, seeing it as necessitous to get Singapore to where it got.

Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’

June 18, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Most intentions for change seek a transformative change—something significant to be achieved once and for all, in a short period. “Big, bold steps” is the mantra of many a self-help book or motivational guru du jour.

Real change, however, takes time and is difficult. You become overwhelmed with the magnitude of the effort and persistence required to lose twenty pounds, save up for retirement, change jobs, or stabilize a sinking relationship.

As with most New Year resolutions, you’ll meet with success temporarily, only to find yourself slipping back into our old ways as soon as the initial burst of enthusiasm fades out.

Gradual Improvement, Not Radical Change

UCLA clinical psychologist Dr. Robert Maurer’s One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way (2004) conceives transformative change as an endless, continuous process of gradual improvements.

By breaking daunting tasks into absurdly little steps, you feel little resistance to change.

To initiate a worthwhile exercise regimen, for example, Maurer suggests that you start exercising by marching in front of the television for one minute for a day or two. Then, little by little, ask, “How could I incorporate a few more minutes of exercise into my daily routine?” Such modest questions help you seek the next proverbial baby step and “allow the brain to focus on problem-solving and action.”

To tidy up your home, pick an area of your home, set a timer for five minutes, and tidy up. Stop when the timer goes off. [This is similar to my ’10-Minute Dash’ technique to overcome procrastination.]

One small step leads to the next, which leads to one more, and so on—finally leading you to your goal of transformative change.

“Little Steps Add Up to Brilliant Acceleration”

Maurer relates this approach to Kaizen, the famed Japanese system of obsessive tinkering and continuous, incremental improvement. This idea is actually American in origin—it was brought over by American efficiency and quality experts such as W. Edwards Deming who were helping Japan rebuild its industrial strength after World War II.

Kaizen involves making continual, small adjustments to production techniques to not only improve speed and quality, but also save resources. That is to say, it is a relentless pursuit of perfection by breaking it down into incremental improvements.

At companies that have embraced Kaizen and other Total Quality Management (TQM) approaches, employees come to work every day determined to become a little better at whatever it is they are doing than they were the day before. Katsuaki Watanabe of Toyota, the poster-boy of TQM, has acknowledged,

There is no genius in our company. We just do whatever we believe is right, trying every day to improve every little bit and piece. But when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution.

Small Kaizen questions help you determine the next baby step and allow the brain to focus on problem-solving and action

“Little and often” empowers you to “tiptoe past fear”—your brain stops putting up resistance because it is tricked into thinking that you’re embarking only on something minuscule.

All changes are scary, even positive ones. Attempts to reach goals through radical or revolutionary means often fail because they heighten fear. But the small steps of Kaizen disarm the brain’s fear response, stimulating rational thought and creative play.

You can thus triumph over fear and the subsequent inaction that fear causes.

Small steps rewire your nervous system, create new connections between neurons so that the brain enthusiastically takes over the process of change and you progress rapidly toward your goal.

Minimalist, steady, incremental change helps your brain overcome the fear that impedes success and creativity

To avoid failure at keeping your resolutions despite your best intentions, don’t push yourself to somehow become different rapidly. Instead, pledge to achieve positive, enduring life changes one powerful baby step at a time.

Other prominent insights in Maurer’s One Small Step Can Change Your Life:

“Small actions satisfy your brain’s need to do something and soothe its distress.”
“If you are trying to reach a specific goal, ask yourself every day: What is one small step I could take toward reaching my goal?”
“Small actions are at the heart of Kaizen. By taking steps so tiny that they seem trivial or even laughable, you’ll sail calmly past obstacles that have defeated you before. Slowly—but painlessly!—you’ll cultivate an appetite for continued success and lay down a permanent new route to change.”
If you hit a wall of resistance, “don’t give up! Instead, try scaling back the size of your steps. Remember that your goal is to bypass fear—and to make the steps so small that you can barely notice an effort.”
When we face crises, “the only concrete steps available are small ones. When our lives are in great distress, even while we are feeling out of control or in emotional pain we can try to locate the smaller problems within the larger disaster … to help move us slowly in the direction of a solution. But if we are blind to the small, manageable problems, we are more likely to slip into despair.”

Recommendation: Speed-read One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. It will help if you or a loved one is stuck in the rut of goal failure.

Take really small steps towards every significant change you want to make. The cumulative benefits of small improvements do have the power to produce large, transformative change. Let Kaizen be a routine that is never done.

The Three Dreadful Stumbling Blocks to Time Management

September 25, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Ineffective time management is characterized by folks having too many things they need to do (and just a few they must do,) but not enough time for everything they want to do. The key to time management, therefore, is to identify your needs and wants in terms of their importance and match them with the time and resources available.

If your time-management efforts are not getting you the results you envision, you need to pay attention to three hurdles that can get you derailed easily.

The foremost obstacle to time management is a lack of practical awareness of your job duties, as well as the extent of your authority and responsibility. Your efficiency could be acutely hindered by doing the wrong tasks—those that are relatively unimportant or not even part of your job description. You could also not be using the skills or time of others, perhaps not recognizing that you have the authority to do so.
An associated obstacle to effective time management is your failure to prioritize tasks. You may not be able to prioritize because either you’re unaware of your job duties, or you don’t know how to set priorities. As stated by the Pareto Principle, you could be spending 80% of your time on tasks that account for a mere 20% of the total job results. As a result, you could be working on the trivial and the routine, but not the important. In other words, you could be working on the “can do” and not the “must do.”
Equally important, your time management-plans often go off the rails because of “time thieves”—meetings, impromptu visitors, avoidable reports, telephone calls, delays, canceled engagements, redundant rules and regulations, and other claptrap.

Idea for Impact: Develop a high level of awareness in the areas discussed above. Use my three-part technique (time logging, time analyzing, and time budgeting) to control time, conserve time, and make time. Additionally, learn to farm more work out—delegating not only frees up precious time, but also helps develop your employees’ abilities, as well as your own. Try not to say ‘yes’ to too many things and avoid taking on too much.

Think in Terms of Habits & Systems Rather Than Goals

September 18, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Most folks fail to understand how goals work: goals don’t stipulate behaviors.

Goals relate only to the outcomes and results of specific behaviors—they are not about the actions and behaviors that can bring about those results.

In other words, goals can only provide direction and can even impel you onward in the short-term, but ultimately, a well-designed system—when put into habitual practice—will always prevail.

Developing a system is what matters to discipline and self-control. Committing to the process is what makes the difference. As New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg wrote in his bestselling The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (2012,) only a systematic approach works:

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

An example of a goal: “I want to lose 10 pounds before my sister’s wedding.” A habit/system would be, “What dieting and exercising changes can I make with the aim of looking better at my sister’s wedding?”

Another example of a goal: “How do I amass $1 million before I turn 35?” A habit/system would be, “How do I develop financial disciplines and investment methods to get richer over time and achieve a net worth of $1 million by the time I’m 35?”

Idea for Impact: Only by creating habits and systems to achieve goals can you live more of the life you aspire to. As a creature of habit, when you are doing something that is routine, you don’t need to be deliberately engaged in the task in the same way as if you were doing something that is not habitual.

Death to Bureaucracy

September 6, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Bureaucracy can suck the life out of any organization by rewarding complacency and inertia.

Efficient managers are annoyed with the speed of bureaucracy. Internal rules and policies for making and approving decisions slow down managerial undertakings. In a world where fast, disruptive innovation has become foremost, any company can ill afford the time or expense of operating with bureaucratic mindsets.

Management pioneer Peter Drucker’s enduring condemnation of bureaucracy, formalities, and rules and regulations hit the peak with his ground-breaking editorial called “Sell the Mailroom,” first published in the Wall Street Journal in 1989 and then republished in 2005.

At a time when the great majority of businesses were engaged in making an effort to improve the efficiency of support staff, Drucker brashly advocated that bureaucratic support should be eliminated by outsourcing their work to outside contractors. Drucker observed,

In-house service and support activities are de facto monopolies. They have little incentive to improve their productivity. There is, after all, no competition. In fact, they have considerable disincentive to improve their productivity. In the typical organization, business or government, the standard and prestige of an activity is judged by its size and budget—particularly in the case of activities that, like clerical, maintenance, and support work, do not make a direct and measurable contribution to the bottom line. To improve the productivity of such an activity is thus hardly the way to advancement and success. When in-house support staff are criticized for doing a poor job, their managers are likely to respond by hiring more people. An outside contractor knows that he will be tossed out and replaced by a better-performing competitor unless he improves quality and cuts costs.

Idea for Impact: Drop unnecessary work.

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Getting Things Done

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Idea for Impact: Use your hard-earned money to buy time, reduce stress, and increase happiness

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Smart Managers Have the Self-Discipline to Turn Excellence On and Off

Idea for Impact: Be Excellent Occasionally

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Idea for Impact: Organize Yourself Good Concentration

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Gradual Improvement, Not Radical Change

“Little Steps Add Up to Brilliant Acceleration”

Small Kaizen questions help you determine the next baby step and allow the brain to focus on problem-solving and action

Minimalist, steady, incremental change helps your brain overcome the fear that impedes success and creativity

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