Time Management

How to … Incorporate Exercise into Your Daily Life

December 23, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

An “exercise snack” is a short little bite of physical activity you can do anywhere, anytime. You don’t even need to change your clothes. Try 10 push-ups, stair climbing, or a brisk walk or jog around the block.

Exercise snacking increases the amount of activity in your day, and breaks up sedentary time, which is increasingly being linked to chronic health risks.

It may not seem like much, but several scientific studies show that interleaving brief fitness routines a few times into your day not only encourages your body to feel better, but also contributes to meaningful gains in fitness and overall health. It improves your mood, stimulates creativity, and enhances focus, making it an all-around win for your health and productivity. Best of all, exercise snacking removes the pressure of committing to a long, once-a-day sweaty session.

How to … Quit Something You Love But Isn’t Working

December 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Quitting something you no longer care about is more straightforward than something you’re spirited about but isn’t working.

To avoid quitting a passion too soon or too late, a basic rule of thumb is to give up when the outcomes aren’t improving, even after ample effort to turn things around.

That is to say, when things get difficult in school, business, relationships, or a project, increase your efforts and get help to improve it. If the results are still unacceptable after an adequate interval of much effort, maybe it’s time to throw in the towel on that course of action or rightsize your expectations, if not abandon the pursuit altogether.

Is It Worth It to Quit Social Media?

December 19, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Yet another study on the benefits of deactivating Facebook:

Quitting Facebook could free up 60 minutes per day.
“Deactivating Facebook caused small but significant improvements in subjective well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety.”
“As the [time-away-from-Facebook] experiment ended, participants reported planning to use Facebook much less in the future.”
“Deactivation significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news.”

I’ve written previously about the ills of social media: they’re time-sucks at work and home, they undermine flesh-and-blood social bonding, they influence your thinking through gate-keeping the newsfeeds you’re exposed to, and they unduly sway your buying decisions through advertisements. Mindlessly scrolling through the airbrushed pictures of others’ lives could remind you of the life you don’t have—potentially instigating feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and self-loathing.

Social media have become a necessity that people have become reluctant to do without. Facebook’s spectacular growth is testimony to the fact that social media offer a core human need that was always wanted. For the moment, we’ll have to rely on individual choices to use social media sparingly and intelligently. Balance is everything—not all or none.

At the End of Every Meeting, Grade It

November 18, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

After steering a consensus at the end of every meeting, allow two minutes to grade it.

Have the meeting’s chairperson go around the table and ask every attendee to give the session a letter grade. If someone doesn’t characterize it as an A, ask them to pinpoint what would have made it an A.

Through this initiative, your team can recognize the factors that influence the success of your meetings. The attendees are responsible for making future meetings an A and cutting barriers to achieving your organization’s objectives.

Few managers do this, but it’s a game changer. Close every meeting on a tone of achievement.

You Shouldn’t Force Yourself to Be a Morning Person

October 10, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Since the dawn of time, the world has venerated early birds and propagated the notion that getting up with the lark makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise. The internet is full of references to the early-to-rise habits of Tim Cook, Michelle Obama, or some celebrity du jour. Those who struggle with mornings are slandered as slothful.

Even the wiser productivity gurus often fail to acknowledge that “4 a.m. is the most productive hour” not because of some configuration of the planets or some scientific phenomenon but simply because there are fewer distractions at that hour.

Night owls, no need to force yourself into a mold that doesn’t work for you. No need to completely adjust your life and feel weary and less productive throughout the day.

Overhauling your sleep times may not have much effect. Ultimately, productivity isn’t about the time you wake up. It’s accommodating your most challenging tasks when your brain is working at its peak.

Idea for Impact: All of us are born predisposed to function better at certain times of the day. The more you understand your chronotype and adapt your work around your naturally preferred times, the more productive you’ll be. Experiment with your sleep schedule, but don’t push too far out of your natural preference. Stick with what works.

Self-Care Isn’t Self-Indulgence, but Self-Preservation

September 15, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The notion of self-care has received some well-deserved backlash lately. The wellness and beauty industry has expropriated it. Self-care has also turned into a way of justifying indulgence for those lucky enough to afford it. (A last-minute holiday in Tahiti? “That’s self-care!”)

But self-care is determining who you are and your limits are—sometimes at the expense of others’ needs. Self-care means noticing when you’re doing more than you’re used to handling and assessing what you can do to slow down. Self-care is figuring out what enriches and soothes your body and mind and attempting to integrate it into your day or your week.

Self-care isn’t frivolous, selfish, or indulgent. It’s self-preservation. It’s merely doing what helps you put your physical, mental, and emotional health back in check.

Idea for Impact: You deserve self-care. You need it. Be kind to yourself and take those deliberate steps to make yourself feel better. Self-care might seem selfish, but putting your needs first actually allows you to interact with others more healthily.

How to … Overcome the Tyranny of Your To-Do List

September 5, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Long before management consultants made the humble 2×2 matrix their stock-in-trade, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the format to create one of the most powerful productivity tools of the 20th century: take your itemized to-do list, and dichotomize all the items on their importance and urgency. Then, classify these on a 2×2 with urgency on the x-axis and importance on the y-axis. The items in each bucket warrant a different kind of response.

The urgent-and-important tasks in the ‘Do’ quadrant need doing now (e.g., call the fire brigade if your house is burning down.)
The urgent-but-not-important tasks in the ‘Delegate or Automate’ quadrant are best delegated where possible (think booking a hotel or clearing low-priority emails.)
The important-but-not-urgent tasks (strategic planning, training) in the ‘Schedule’ quadrant should take up most of your time. Eisenhower noted that truly vital yet immediate tasks are few and far between: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” That means committing to doing the tasks you schedule. Being effective can’t happen if you keep kicking the can down the road.
The neither-important nor-urgent tasks in the ‘Eliminate’ quadrant are usually time-wasting activities and must be eliminated forthwith. They don’t move you towards achieving your goals.

De-prioritize Stuff You Shouldn’t Be Doing in the First Place

The Eisenhower Priority Matrix isn’t entirely ground-breaking. Still, it can help you recognize you can deliver yourself by knowing it’s okay not to complete them all, so long as you get the most vital ones done. The challenge lies in being able to determine what’s essential and what isn’t, as expounded tediously in Steven Covey’s First Things First (1994):

Urgent matters are those that require immediate action. These are the visible issues that pop up and demand your attention now. Often, urgent matters come with clear consequences for not completing these tasks. Urgent tasks are unavoidadable, but spending too much time putting out fires can produce a great deal of stress and could result in burnout.

Important matters, on the other hand, are those that contribute to long-term goals and life values. These items require planning and thoughtful action. When you focus on important matters you manage your time, energy, and attention rather than mindlessly expending these resources. What is important is subjective and depends on your own values and personal goals. No one else can define what is important for you.

The key to productivity is to be very selective in what you pick and execute your most important priorities. Be ready to delegate and be quick and not-to-perfection on as many things as possible. You really don’t need to give 110% on everything.

Idea for Impact: Use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to Triage Your To-Do List

The Eisenhower method can be an indispensable weapon in your efficiency arsenal. Your life will never be the same when you internalize clarity of habits. Once you’ve been using the matrix for a while, you can realize a pattern of your own behavior. With some discipline, you can change your behaviors to ensure you’re spending more time on the ‘Schedule’ and ‘Do’ quadrants, improving your ability to plan your work.

Try taking a few minutes each day and analyze your task list. Are there things on there that you can delegate or eliminate? Are you genuinely focusing on the right tasks? It’s incredible how much more productive you can be with a bit of planning and forethought.

How to … Make a Dreaded Chore More Fun

July 7, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If everyday chores feel like a drag and you don’t have the motivation to do anything but be on your phone and laze around, consider the following actions that have most benefited my clients:

Find a friend you can talk to long-distance while you both tackle household chores. You can keep each other accountable.
Challenge yourself to beat the clock. Set a time to complete the task, and see how much ahead you can get it done.
Do “three-minute tidy” routines throughout the day. Choose a room or clutter magnet and go at it for three minutes. Sprucing up as-you-go throughout the day is more agreeable than a long list of must-dos that must be tackled at once.
Begin a dreaded chore in the morning or at the earliest you can. So the rest of the day is free for having some fun. The sooner you check off your to-do list, the more motivated you tend to feel.
Embrace the mess. It’s okay is good enough. Tolerate some clutter from time to time and excuse yourself for not getting all the chores done or having a perfect home. Think about it as a form of prioritization.

The Best Advice Tony Blair Ever Got: Finding the Time to Think Strategically

June 28, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reminisced, at a 2012 event at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, how easy it is to get so absorbed by the pressures of doing that you rarely ever disentangle yourself from the chock-full of activities and the clutter that can choke strategic thinking.

As the leader of the Opposition, when I went to see him in 1996 at the White House, he explained that one of the hardest things when you get into the government is finding the time to think strategically. It’s being able to create the space so that you’re focused on what you really know counts because otherwise, he said, the system will take you over. You’ll be in meetings from 8:00 in the morning till 10:00 at night, and you think you’re immensely busy, but the tactics and the strategy have all got mixed.

What happens in leadership is that things come at you the whole time. If you’re not careful, you’ll spend your time dealing with one situation after another. You lose your strategic grip on what’ll determine if you’re a successful government. Many of these crises are real, and you must deal with them. But when you judge your government in history, no one will remember any of them. You’ve got to create the space to be thinking strategically all the time to change the world.

Idea for Impact: It’s your strategic thinking, more than any other single activity, that can influence what you’ll achieve as a leader. Find ways to create more “head time” amid the busyness.

How to … Nap at Work without Sleeping

June 27, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Make nap time the new coffee break. A quick snooze boosts productivity and improves memory and problem-solving.

Bill Anthony’s The Art of Napping at Work (1999) states that a shot of shut-eye was an indispensable afternoon pick-me-up for some of history’s greatest achievers, viz., Aristotle, Eleanor Roosevelt, John D Rockefeller, Leonardo da Vinci, Lyndon B Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Napoleon, Salvador Dalí, Thomas Edison, and Winston Churchill.

According to the University of California-Irvine sleep researcher Sara Mednick, you don’t want to get into a deep sleep because you need to be alert. Her Take a Nap! Change Your Life (2006) uses the term “sleep inertia” to describe the inability to shrug sleep off after a nap. This impaired state worsens as you go deeper and deeper into sleep. So the trick is to avoid getting deep sleep.

If you nap about twenty minutes, you’ll be in light sleep, which is easy to get out of. In other words, twenty minutes is long enough to reach Stage 2 sleep but short enough to ward you off from waking up groggy.

Idea for Impact: Go ahead and snooze for 20 minutes, ideally sometime between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Step into bright light or splash your face with water if you need help regaining alertness after the alarm goes off. The post-nap energy spike can last for several hours.

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Time Management

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De-prioritize Stuff You Shouldn’t Be Doing in the First Place

Idea for Impact: Use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to Triage Your To-Do List

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