Motivation

Easy Ways to Boost Your Focus & Stop Multitasking

July 18, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you’re struggling to focus on getting work done, perhaps the following tips may help.

1. Simplify Your Environment. We, humans, are biologically programmed to pay attention to new stimuli. Disable notifications on your phone, close the unnecessary windows on your screen, and clear up unnecessary papers. Switch off to switch on. Find a quiet space in the office or retreat to the local library or a tearoom.

2. Make Your Mind Up to Focus. Set aside a block of time—even if it’s just ten minutes—to handle a mentally challenging task without interruptions. Quite often, seemingly difficult tasks get easier once you get working on them, even if you force yourself to go through the motions. Extend the time further—schedule ten, twenty, or thirty more minutes of work.

3. Embrace Your Struggles. Any task that takes mental effort, or involves critical thinking and creativity, is going to be a little daunting initially. When you hit a wall, don’t quit and breakout to something easier. Labor through and push onwards.

4. Take Adequate Breaks. Humans work in cycles; we can focus for a period but then need time to rest. Try the popular ‘Pomodoro Technique’: work for a concentrated 25 minutes, take a 5-minute time out, then dive back in for another Pomodoro. After four Pomodoros, take a long break. During each break, leave your desk or take a break from your screen. Go for a quick walk around the block, step away from your desk for a few minutes, or make a cup of tea. Realizing that you only have a set amount of time to complete a task before a break, the Pomodoro Technique tends to keep you on the task rather than drifting from one diversion to another.

By ditching multitasking and regaining focus, you can reduce distraction, lower stress levels, and put more of your energy into what’s important instead—one single task at a time.

Leaders Need to Be Strong and Avoid Instilling Fear

July 14, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Fear is many a leader’s dirty little secret. He can use it when he’s either unwilling or unable to persuade his team to work together to achieve a specific goal.

Sure, fear gets results. However, it does so at a great cost.

Fear can be enormously helpful for spurring change, particularly during periods of acute threat. But fear can backfire under certain circumstances, especially when creativity is necessary. Using fear and intimidation as a motivator only shuts down people’s brains.

People don’t always think and act rationally when they’re afraid. Fear and anxiety make it more difficult to have their energy and enthusiasm to keep going.

A leader needs to be strong without instilling fear. Often all a leader can do to motivate people is to foster a workplace wherein people feel safe bringing themselves to work.

People can contribute, be creative, and be motivated internally. There’s no need to watch them like a hawk, micromanage excessively, track every move they make, question every decision, or enact rules that make people feel constrained and under surveillance.

Idea for Impact: Steer clear of a tyrannical management style. Use feedback and coaching to be considerate and encouraging whenever you can be, and tough when you must be.

What Are You So Afraid Of? // Summary of Susan Jeffers’s ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’

June 1, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Title: Psychologist Susan Jeffers’s self-help classic, Feel the Fear … and Do It Anyway (1987, 2006.)

Idea for Impact: “You can drop an awful lot of excess baggage if you learn to play with life instead of fight it.”

Central Premise: You’re often held back by a “Grand Canyon” of fear. You’re wasting far too much time trying to perfect your mental state and seeking to feel happier, confident, and motivated.

Thought-Provoking Snippet: “It is reported that more than 90% of what we worry about never happens. That means that our negative worries have less than a 10% chance of being correct. If this is so, isn’t being positive more realistic than being negative? … If you think about it, the important issue is not which is more realistic, but rather, “Why be miserable when you can be happy?””

Mindset Change: Recognize the limited control you have over your emotions. Accept fear as a natural part of your mental development and learn how to live alongside your fears and self-doubts. Use positive affirmations—e.g., replace “It’s gonna be terrible!” with “I can handle it … it’ll be a learning experience!”

Caution: Don’t overdo affirmations. Cheery slogans such as “I Am Powerful and I Love it!” may lift your mood. But repeating them “at least twenty-five times each morning, noon, and night,” as Jeffers suggests, could make you feel worse by evoking the peevish internal counterargument that you’re not and you don’t.

Action Plan: Get on with the things you want to do. The momentum of positive emotions builds up as soon as you start taking action. “Every time you encounter something that forces you to “handle it,” your self-esteem is raised considerably. You learn to trust that you will survive, no matter what happens. And in this way your fears are diminished immeasurably.”

Why Read: An insightful prescription for why and how to get over your “urgh.”

How to Improve Your Career Prospects During the COVID-19 Crisis

May 7, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has plunged the world into despondency and uncertainty, it’s easy to worry about your career prospects, feel risk-averse, and become inert.

However, if you could look beyond the short-term challenges, now’s a good time to take on new skills, tend to your network, and accelerate your long-term career prospects.

Here’s how to take a bit of initiative and think creatively about your career during the current lockdown.

Reflect upon your goals for your life and career. Think clearly through the steps you must take to realize your aspirations.
State clearly your aims. If you want to earn more or get a better responsibility, speak to your boss about what it’ll take to secure a promotion.
Seek specific feedback, but don’t just reflect on the past. Asking for feedback puts you—not your boss—in the driver’s seat. Ask lots of questions and decide what you could do to make a positive change.
Redefine your goals at work. Identify worthwhile measures of success. Agree on targets that stretch but don’t strain.
Work with your boss to find gaps in your experience. Find projects where you could develop and use those skills.
Don’t try to do everything. Prioritize. Ask yourself, “Where do my strengths lie?” Focusing on one or two areas could help you isolate and sharpen the necessary skills to move up.
Seek out new opportunities. Be alert to points of diminishing returns on learning new skills.
Take the lead on a project that others don’t find particularly interesting (see Theo Epstein’s 20 Percent Rule.) You could not only learn by way of broader experiences and gain confidence but also become more visible to management and situate yourself for a promotion.
Offer to share responsibility. Take an interest in your colleagues’ work. You could win over grateful allies and open up new opportunities within your company.
Reevaluate what’s essential. To the extent possible, divest yourself of the boring, time-wasting, frivolous, and worthless—anything that doesn’t “move the ball down the field.”
Pursue side projects. Cultivating knowledge and trying out new skills during your free time is a definite path to career reinvention.
Seek out mentors. Make the right contacts. Bear in mind, those who influence decisions may not necessarily be the ones at the top.
Begin actively networking. It’s never late to put together a range of experts whose knowledge and experience you could tap into.

Idea for Impact: Mulling over how to improve yourself and enhance your career is a great shelter-in-place project. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once declared, “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

How to Kick That Bad Habit

April 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s The Book of Jewish Values (2011) cites advice from a 12th-century rabbinic text:

Set aside a sum of money that you will give away if you allow yourself to be angered. Be sure that the amount you designate is sufficient to force you to think twice before you lose your temper.

One way to kick a bad habit is to pledge to give money to a cause that you hate should you fail in your goal.

For instance, entrust a trusted friend (or the website StickK) with $200 and ask her to keep an eye on your goal to eat mindfully and lose weight. If you’re a lifelong Democrat, pledge to have your friend give away your $200 to the “Trump for President 2020” campaign should you fail to meet your predetermined criteria.

Idea for Impact: Try this negative reinforcement technique to inculcate some self-discipline. Make it motivating—designate to give away an amount that hurts or to a cause that you loathe!

Endnote: The text above is an extract from Rabbi Avrohom Chaim Feuer Reishit’s Ramban: A Letter for the Ages (1989,) an anthology of the works of Ramban (c.1194–1270,) fully Moses ben Nahman or Naḥmanides, a Spanish religious leader and rabbi.

Why You’ll Work Better with Plenty of Breaks during This COVID-19 Lockdown

April 27, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Mix it Up; or, How to Beat Vigilance Decrement

In the mid-1940s, the British psychologist Norman Mackworth set about to investigate why, during World War II, the Royal Air Force’s radar and sonar operators would miss weak signals that could suggest submerged enemy vessels.

Mackworth was particularly interested in why this observed phenomenon was likely to happen more towards the end of the operators’ shifts.

The “Mackworth Clock” study established that after 30 minutes in an intense task, there was a deterioration of 10–15% in the accuracy of signal detection. Fatigue ensued, and blood flow to the brain decreased. This deterioration continued as the time on task increased. Mackworth also found that short breaks restored performance.

The Way Attention Works

Research on “vigilance” (that’s psychology-speak for attention) has demonstrated that attention is a limited resource. Most of us find it challenging to sustain constant attention to a single task for long periods, especially if the task were demanding, tedious, and boring. Students, for example, can’t concentrate and follow lectures for more a few minutes at a time. This notion of limited and waning attention is called “vigilance decrement.”

Sustained Vigilance Requires Hard Mental Work

Vigilance decrement also increases error rates and slows down reaction times, especially in tasks that need sustained attention—security personnel, surveillance-camera monitors, pilots and vehicle drivers, medical diagnostic screeners, students, and so on—even engineers who train self-driving cars.

As with Mackworth’s study, vigilance decrement is most pronounced when monitoring screens and displays, often over periods as short as 10 or 15 minutes.

TSA screeners in America, for instance, continually rotate positions throughout their shift to avoid making mistakes and missing details—especially small but important details. They even rotate among different stations. Every TSA officer is trained in all the tasks on the floor, including x-ray screening, searching bags, validating tickets and passports, and conducting pat-down searches. TSA agents take frequent breaks, sometimes resting for 30 minutes every two or three hours.

Idea for Impact: To Beat Vigilance Decrement, Take Truly Restful Breaks

Rest well before undertaking a task that requires sustained attention. The airline industry has specific guidelines for duty, rest, and sleep requirements to combat the risks of fatigue in aircrews.
Hand over surveillance tasks as frequently as possible.
Mix ’em up. Try interleaving—instead of focusing on a single task, frequently switch between different ones.

During the current COVID-19 lockdown, you’ll work better with breaks. Mix up how you sequence your work. Avoid doing the same tasks in the same order each day.

Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’

March 23, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s best-selling The Power of Full Engagement (2003) is a persuasive reminder that matching your energy to a task is the key to excelling.

Personal energy, like willpower, is a “reservoir” that not only becomes depleted during a day but also can be filled up. “Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.”

Your Most Valuable Resource is Energy, Not Time

Even if you’re effective at time- and task-management, you may often find yourself with the available time to do something, but not the energy, focus, or passion needed. You can achieve so much with better time-management, but at some point, you can’t put in more hours because time is a finite resource. You can then pivot to another realm of self-management—your personal energy.

Identify the kinds of activities that drain and sustain you. If you know yourself well enough, you can make conscious, proactive choices that will help you feel more energetic throughout the day.
Understand your working pattern. Match your tasks to your energy levels throughout the day. If you are at your best first thing in the morning, work on something challenging at that time and defer the mundane and the routine until later in the day.
Start your day with a brief planning session to force yourself to be proactive. Planning is easier when your energy levels are highest, which, for most people, is first thing in the morning.

Manage Four Types of Personal Energy

The Power of Full Engagement characterizes four distinct but related sources of energy—physical, emotional, mental (ability to focus,) and spiritual (values and beliefs.) For peak performance, you must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.

Energy levels vary from person to person, and people are each energized or exhausted by different things.
If you feel wiped out, think about which of these four “reservoirs” of energy is depleted. Stimulate yourself by doing something else that can draw stamina from another reservoir of energy.

Create Positive Energy Rituals

The authors’ study of the performance of top-rated athletes revealed that they rely on rhythmic patterns of focused performance and convalescence. In other words, peak performers push themselves intensely for a time, recuperate, and then return to another round of focused performance. The higher the performance demand, the greater the need for recovery and energy renewal.

Human beings operate in rhythms. Every 90 to 120 minutes, we transit from a high state of arousal slowly down into a lull. Our physiological constitution is designed to balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal to help sustain energy throughout the day.

Intersperse periods of intense work with rejuvenating breaks. Build a rhythm throughout the day so that when you’re working, you’re truly engaged. After a period of intense activity, take a break to renew your energy levels.
Develop intentional routines and rituals—habits that can become automatic over time. Habits are so much more potent because they can reduce the need to rely on your limited conscious will and your discipline to take action.

Idea for Impact: Energy, Like Time, is a Resource You Must Learn to Manage

The Power of Full Engagement (2003) is an essential read—it can help you operate “rhythmically between stress and recovery” and pace your day better.

For sustainable high performance, you need to find systematic ways to expend your energy positively and balance it with regular energy renewal.

Seek periods of good energy and favor them. Reconsider periods of reduced energy and manage them better.

The Poolguard Effect: A Little Power, A Big Ego!

February 24, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Even Petty Power Corrupts: Authority Can Warp Behavior

The Poolguard Effect: A Little Power, A Big Ego! Ever wonder why some folks with a little authority, but not much real status, tend to throw their weight around? They often become overconfident, controlling, and bossy. This phenomenon, known as “hubris syndrome,” can lead to micromanaging, unnecessary rules, and a real disconnect from the people around them.

Even in lower-level jobs, you can see these power trips in action. For instance, rub a TSA agent the wrong way, and you might get flagged for extra screening. Summer pool guards can be overly strict with kids and parents who don’t show them the proper respect. In bureaucratic offices, clerks and supervisors frequently impose petty rules just to flex their authority.

These power trippers rely on control to boost their fragile egos. Power tends to amplify self-importance, making people more likely to act in a domineering way—something we often sum up with, “power corrupts” or the “authority bias.

Power Increases People’s Sense of Entitlement

This anecdotal observation is backed by a study titled “The Destructive Nature of Power Without Status.” The researchers argue that neither power nor low status alone leads people to mistreat others; it’s the combination of the two that increases the likelihood of abuse.

We predicted that when people have a role that gives them power but lacks status—and the respect that comes with that status—then it can lead to demeaning behaviors. Put simply, it feels bad to be in a low-status position and the power that goes with that role gives them a way to take action on those negative feelings.

One way to prevent these toxic power dynamics is to ensure that everyone feels respected and valued, regardless of their role. According to the study, “respect assuages negative feelings about low-status roles and encourages positive interactions with others.” In other words, courtesy pays off!

Notes

Some people despise anyone they suspect is trying to pull the strings or exert power over them.
Consider the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where a group of students was assigned roles as either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison. Despite knowing they were part of an experiment, the “guards” subjected the “prisoners” to humiliating treatment. According to the researchers, this behavior stemmed from the guards’ desire for respect and admiration, which they felt was lacking in their interactions with others. This controversial experiment was later depicted in a 2015 docudrama.
This concept can be compared to the Napoleon Complex, where shorter men may overcompensate for their height through social aggressiveness, despite the fact that Napoleon himself was not actually short.
Cf. The “Waiter Rule” states that how you treat seemingly insignificant people says a lot about your personality and priorities.

Great Leaders Focus on the WHY and the WHAT—Not the How

January 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

The most effective leaders provide their employees with a heartfelt portrayal of the WHY, a precise description of the WHAT, and freedom on the HOW.

The WHY encompasses a vision in a way that matters to people. As Howard Schultz, the Starbucks tycoon once said, “People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re really proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, that they trust.”

The British-American organizational consultant Simon Sinek‘s passable Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009; a good summary) identifies the difference between “giving direction and giving directions.” Great leaders, he explains, motivate with the WHY, a deep-rooted purpose, before defining the WHAT, the product or service, or the HOW, the process.

The latter, the HOW, is to be deprioritized—effective leaders leave it to their employees to figure out.

In contrast, ineffective leaders provide specificity around HOW to complete a task but fail to share the big picture, the WHY.

Don’t live in the weeds. Have faith in the ingenuity of your employees. Give much latitude in how they do things.

Idea for Impact: Define the job. Explain the responsibility. Equip your people with the tools and skills they’ll need. Establish expectations. Identify the standards. That’s the essence of delegation.

Inspirational Mess, Creative Clutter

January 27, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Biographer Roland Penrose (1900–84) writes in Picasso: His Life and Work (1958,)

Disorder was to Picasso a happier breeding ground for ideas than the perfection of a tidy room in which nothing upset the equilibrium by being out of place.

Once when visiting Picasso at his flat in the rue la Boétie, I noticed that a large Renoir hanging over the fireplace was crooked. “It’s better like that,” he said. “If you want to kill a picture, all you have to do is to hang it beautifully on a nail and soon you will see nothing of it but the frame. When it’s out of place you see it better.”

Studies suggest that, for some people, messiness can boost creativity by spurring inspiration flow and helping them explore different avenues. One researcher explained, “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights.”

But don’t use this concept as a crutch to defend your clutter.

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Motivation

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Mix it Up; or, How to Beat Vigilance Decrement

The Way Attention Works

Sustained Vigilance Requires Hard Mental Work

Idea for Impact: To Beat Vigilance Decrement, Take Truly Restful Breaks

Wondering what to read next?

Your Most Valuable Resource is Energy, Not Time

Manage Four Types of Personal Energy

Create Positive Energy Rituals

Idea for Impact: Energy, Like Time, is a Resource You Must Learn to Manage

Wondering what to read next?

Even Petty Power Corrupts: Authority Can Warp Behavior

Power Increases People’s Sense of Entitlement

Notes

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