Procrastination

How to Keep Your Brain Fresh and Creative

April 22, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data

January 18, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Yesterday’s New York Times article highlights the complex tradeoff leaders must often make between indecision and acting on insufficient information:

The Omicron variant is pushing the CDC into issuing recommendations based on what once would have been considered insufficient evidence, amid growing public concern about how these guidelines affect the economy and education. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has been commended for short-circuiting a laborious process and taking a pragmatic approach to manage a national emergency, saying she was right to move ahead even when the data was unclear and agency researchers remained unsure. The challenge now for Dr. Walensky is figuring out how to convey this message to the public: “The science is incomplete, and this is our best advice for now.”

The smartest people I know are the ones who understand that they don’t know—can’t know—everything. Yet, they’re ready to act on imperfect information, especially when being slow will be costly.

Idea for Impact: Being able to analyze information is insufficient if you can’t reach decisions.

Knowing you’ll never know everything shouldn’t prevent you from acting. The ability to reason and reconsider your position on something is an integral part of rational thought.

A Key to Changing Your Perfectionist Mindset

January 14, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

It’s okay to have some clutter and untidiness occasionally.

Sometimes, look away when the kids scatter crumbs or toys are strewn all over the house. Instead of spending an afternoon swiffering, vacuuming, scrubbing, and polishing, just play with your kids.

Let yourself off for not getting all the chores done or keeping a flawlessly curated, Instagramable home. If you have guests coming over, stop agonizing and embrace a tidy-enough household. No need to live for your dinner guests—your home doesn’t always have to look the way you want.

Idea for Impact: Train yourself to care less. Yeah, really.

Perfectionism is a wicked way to live life. Look for ways to reach your goals without being perfect.

Setting unrealistic expectations only makes you vulnerable to emotional difficulties. That’s what perfectionism does. Perfection is holding yourself to a paradigm wherein anything less than “perfect” is, in one way or another, failure.

Think about how much more productive you could be if you stop carrying the weight of excessive expectations on your shoulders.

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Procrastination

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Idea for Impact: Being able to analyze information is insufficient if you can’t reach decisions.

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Idea for Impact: Train yourself to care less. Yeah, really.

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