Time Management

Marie Kondo is No Cure for Our Wasteful and Over-consuming Culture

February 11, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

I recently watched Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019,) the popular Netflix series featuring the Japanese decluttering evangelist. The show is based on her bestselling manual, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011.)

In each episode, Kondo cheerfully proclaims, “I love mess!” With certain calm, she calls on various families and goes about clearing their tat-filled homes and bringing order to their chaos. Her trademark sense of minimalistic bliss is informed by Japanese aesthetic and a Zen-sense of orderliness.

Apparently, Marie Kondo isn’t attuned with Christianity.

Interestingly, Kondo has clients kneel on the floor and “ask” their dwelling for “permission” and “cooperation” before they get started. “I’d love for you to picture your vision for your home,” she pleads. “Communicate that to your home.” She encourages saying “thank you” to their piles of clothes as they sort and fold them. She daintily treats inanimate objects as living things and speaks to them. She encourages her show’s audiences to do the same.

That’s Buddhism/Shinto in force. Some flavors of native Japanese spirituality focus on inanimate objects’ sacredness. Several of Kondo’s critics in America have insisted that her methods aren’t compatible with Christianity. Kondo’s rituals of treating objects as if they have feelings, these critics have declared, is to be discouraged because her ways invoke animism, the religious notion that objects possess some sort of spiritual essence.

“Kondo-ing” Has Become a Verb.

With a translator in tow, Marie Kondo never treats her patrons as victims, and that’s exceptionally impressive.

By eschewing a victim mentality, Kondo encourages and empowers people in a way that actually brings about lasting change. Audiences particularly love her advice on organizing wardrobes and storage spaces and routinizing tasks into maintainable systems.

Kondo emphasizes prioritizing joy. She doggedly insists upon keeping only those objects that “spark joy” (she uses the Japanese intransitive verb “tokimeku,” roughly, “to flicker.”) Her “if in doubt, throw it out” commandment has helped millions of people ward off hoarding tendencies.

Kondo has become a cultural sensation, appealing to all sorts of homes bursting with cheap consumer goods. The “Marie Kondo Effect” is directly responsible for increasing donations to thrift stores and charity shops worldwide.

Keep what sparks joy. Own less stuff. Pursue what’s meaningful.

If you’d like to downsize or declutter without letting go of things you love, take the KonMari method to heart. But don’t go too far. Be careful about shedding items to which you have a deep sentimental connection. Put it into operation earnestly to get rid of clutter. Find joy, significance, and sacrament in simple everyday objects and tasks. Simplifying your priorities and refocus on things that you tend to overlook in the busyness of life.

Only Consume What You Need. Supplement the Konmari method of paring down your belongings with the ongoing strategy for minimizing additional purchases. Buy only those things that will “spark joy” and continue to do so for many years. Never mind that the economy depends upon endless undifferentiated consumption.
Reduce, but Don’t Refresh. If you have a bunch of empty space, be selective in how you fill it up. Cutting down your possessions isn’t an invitation to revert to a situation where decluttering again becomes necessary after a while. Restrain that impulse to acquire the new and the shiny—that’s what overwhelmed Kondo’s clients in the first place.

The real magic of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo is in shedding anxiety, living in the moment, and being your best self. Your happiest moments come when you’re lost to a conversation or an experience. You’ll avoid the helter-skelter of life has the power to deny and neglect what’s most important in your life.

Will the Marie Kondo Effect alleviate haywire consumerism?

The more profound significance of decluttering and minimalism is to help make better choices when making purchases in the future.

And beyond the individual convenience, it would be more productive to build up collective awareness and confront the modern consumption economy. It only presents overwhelming incentives to mass-produce and overconsume superficially appealing items.

Collectively, humanity needs to start questioning whether we should be pursuing growth at all. The economic system we have now can’t sustain forever. Our ecological systems can only sustain so much life. We’ve grown so much as a population, and we’ve started consuming so much that we’re straining the earth’s ability to support us. Hyperconsumerism needs to stop.

Idea for Impact: Negligent hyper-consumerism is shameful and embarrassing, even to this “card-carrying” capitalist.

Ironically, after making us get rid of everything, Marie Kondo has started peddling such things as therapeutic tuning fork and crystal ($75,) compost bin ($175,) and food storage container ($60) that are guaranteed to “spark joy.”

At any rate, I hope Marie Kondo and her ilk inspire a collective self-loathing at how much we consume. Utility should be the principal criterion for what we buy and keep.

I urge you to make strides towards more mindful consumption and consciously differentiate wants and needs.

Buy what you need. Buy the best quality stuff you can afford, and keep them for longer. Choose things that can be easily repaired—if possible, repurposed and recycled. Encourage businesses that peddle goods that are manufactured as responsibly and mindfully as possible.

Don’t Let Interruptions Hijack Your Day

February 8, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.

Start the Day with a Workout

January 7, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

People who exercise in the mornings rave about the positive benefits of morning exercise compared to working out later in the day.

Exercising improves blood flow to the brain. It gives you a more alert mind—helping you become more energized and more focused. The sense of accomplishment from a morning workout puts you in a better frame of mind, and you’ll feel mentally prepared to tackle the day’s challenges.
Exercise is shown to intensify the body’s metabolic rate for four to eight hours. If you work out in the morning, the resulting metabolism boost can last all through the most productive part of your day.
There’s some evidence that habits tend to establish more quickly if pursued in the mornings. The concentration of cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, is highest soon after you get up in the morning. Waking up earlier in the morning strengthens the body’s cortisol awakening response. One study proposed that cortisol blocks the prefrontal cortex in the brain, suggesting that consistent morning behavior is more likely to become habitual.
After slogging all day, your willpower to spend an hour at the gym peters out. Moreover, the more time you have to think, the more time you’ll have to come up with “justifications” for ducking out of a workout later in the day.
Waiting until later in the day to exercise also increases the likelihood that something will crop up and impede your plan. If you can be disciplined enough to go to bed sooner and wake up a little earlier, you can get a workout done before any distractions can emerge.

Idea for Impact: Could the benefits of a regular morning workout be worth sacrificing a few more minutes in a warm, cozy bed?

Plan Tomorrow, Plus Two

December 21, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

At the end of each day (or first thing in the morning,) plan tomorrow and the next two days.

Review your commitments and write out the full list of what you want to accomplish over the three days. Outline the first day more thoroughly than the other two.

This act of writing down what needs to get done helps you feel less anxious—tasks seem smaller on paper than in your head. According to the Zeigarnik Effect, just the simple act of recording a task in a plan relieves the mental stress attributable to unresolved and interrupted tasks.

Having a three-day horizon allows you to be flexible.

You’ll know where your “wiggle room” is, so interruptions don’t invade your day. You can move your priority tasks around should the circumstances change. You can set apart emergencies from non-emergencies that can be addressed later.
When you have a lot on your plate, or something is taking longer than you planned, you can defer what’s avoidable today and move tasks around.

At the end of each day, rewrite your three-day roadmap. Reconsider how each task aligns with the current priorities and spread them over the next three days.

Idea for Impact: Plan tomorrow, plus two. You’ll have a clearer insight of the immediate future—and you’ll be better prepared to attend to those inevitable unforeseen demands for your time.

When Work is Home and Home is Work

December 11, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

As much as you love lounging around all day in athleisure wear or plush robes, it’s easy to mix home- and work-life when working from home during the current pandemic.

Work is always available to you, and self-scheduling has caused work to spill over into non-work hours.

Have a designated workspace away from your personal life and personal tasks. That’ll create not only a physical barrier but a mental and social one as well.

When you practically live in your office, it’s hard for your brain to recognize when it’s okay to entirely shut down. Create some boundaries. Maintain regular office hours, switch off your computer and put it away, and disconnect completely.

Idea for Impact: Mindfully uphold boundaries from morning until evening. Follow a routine similar to the one you had before COVID-19 to accomplish your goals without losing your mind.

Do it Now // Summary of ‘The 5 Second Rule’ by Mel Robbins

November 23, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Mel Robbins’s The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage (2017) argues that much of what holds you back in life has roots in those few precious moments between when you have an idea and when your brain gets in the way of acting on that idea.

The 5-second rule is simple. If you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must physically move within 5 seconds or your brain will kill it. …. Hesitation is the kiss of death. You might hesitate for a just nanosecond, but that’s all it takes. That one small hesitation triggers a mental system that’s designed to stop you. And it happens in less than—you guessed it—five seconds.

Robbins asserts that you have five seconds to act on your ideas before you run the risk of subconsciously convincing yourself not to. Stay alert for those decisive moments. Each time, consider the benefits and liabilities of doing versus deferring.

When you internalize a do-it-now mindset, you’ll be dragging your feet less: “There’s one thing that is guaranteed to increase your feelings of control over your life: a bias toward action.”

There’s some wisdom here: don’t wait for motivation, high energy, or a sense of focus before taking action. Create motivation by taking action. Once initiated, action tends to gather momentum—tasks become increasingly easy to sustain.

Recommendation: Skip Mel Robbins’s The 5 Second Rule. You don’t need 240 pages of testimonials and cheery page-fillers on not thinking your way out of problems. Watch her TED talk instead.

Idea for Impact: When you catch yourself thinking you’ll do something later, take it as a nudge to do it now. Take action before procrastination sets in. Action motivates.

Micro-Meetings Can Be Very Effective

November 16, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Discussions expand to fill the time allotted (per Parkinson’s Law,) especially when people haven’t prepared for them well.

If your meetings tend to run long and aren’t producing tangible results, consider micro-meetings.

Focus on discussing and deciding on a single problem within, say, 15 minutes. Ask people to do their homework and come thoroughly prepared.

Let the critical decision-makers pre-wire one another before the meeting—they can discuss one-on-one the main points and settle any differences of opinion.

Clarify the meeting’s purpose before starting the session. Even if you think everyone knows it, it helps restate the meeting’s objective and sharpen the group’s focus.
Allow people brief statements about their positions and clarifying questions. Take full-fledged discussions offline.
Not every exchange of ideas needs to happen in a meeting. Use shared documents that can be revised and tracked by several people in real-time.
Keep everyone standing. The discomfort of standing for long, especially before lunchtime or at the end of the day, can keep the meetings short and to-the-point.
End well. Conclude the meeting with an action plan and an exact timeframe. State the decisions the group has made and who owns what.

Yes, micro-meetings will seem brusque and hasty. But setting a focused agenda and staying on-topic will keep people paying attention and steer meetings to conclusive decisions.

Many teams use micro-meetings for daily huddles, check-ins, or “scrum meetings.” There’s no good reason why this type of meeting should be availed exclusively for such occurrences.

Make a Habit of Stepping Back from Work

November 10, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

“Busyness” often initiates as a lack of focus. Our culture has been seduced into thinking that we can achieve anything if we try harder and work longer.

Besides, good jobs are overwhelming. Many company cultures count on employees to compartmentalize their lives and prioritize work over all else. Managers expect that employees become what sociologists have identified as “ideal workers”: folks who are entirely dedicated to their jobs and are always on call, sometimes at great expense to their personal life. Such dedication is detrimental not just to employee wellbeing but also to the bottom line.

Being productive requires acknowledging that you can’t work for extended periods and maintain a high-performance level.

Make a habit of stepping back. Taking your mind off work can help you overcome mental blocks. Being productive requires creative thinking more than perseverance.

You’re more likely to find breakthrough ideas when you temporarily remove yourself from the grind. The best solutions uncover themselves when you step into the shower, go for a run, have lunch away from your desk, or set off on holiday.

Up the Good Stuff. To feel less burned-out, do a little more of the things you love and a smidgen less drudge work.
Seek Breathing Room. That’s a metaphor for space to catch up with yourself, regroup, think over whatever’s happening, and know how you feel and what to do next.
Thwart Decision Fatigue. You have a limited capacity for concentrating over extended periods. You can restore your executive function and overcome mental fatigue through interventions—short rest, engaging in creative purists, and increasing the body’s glucose levels.

Idea for Impact: If you want to get more done, start taking breaks. Busyness is very different from effectiveness.

Eat That Frog! // Summary of Brian Tracy’s Time Management Bestseller

October 19, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Self-help megastar Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog! (2001) focuses on how to put you—not the incessant flow of attention-demands that inundate you—in the driver’s seat. The most effective time management is staying aware of what genuinely deserves your attention.

Tracy’s central premise is that to be more time-effective, you must discover the one momentous task—the most dreaded task or the “frog”—that you need to do. Take steps to do this task right away with the utmost urgency and attention, even if you don’t feel like doing it. “If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.”

Suppose you start your day by “eating a live frog” (a memorable Mark Twain metaphor, but has an even more extended history.) In that case, you know that the most unpleasant part of the day is behind you.

“Set the table.” People fail because they aren’t clear about their goals. Decide exactly what it is that you must achieve. Write down goals and objectives. Plan every day in advance. Every minute spent in planning can save 5-10 minutes in execution.
Embrace the Pareto Principle. 20% of activities account for 80% of the results. Always concentrate efforts on those top 20%. Pick the hardest, but most important and meaningful tasks first. “Successful people are those who are willing to delay gratification and make sacrifices in the short term so that they can enjoy far greater rewards in the long-term.”
Adopt the ABCDE method. Prioritize tasks from A (most significant) to E (least significant) and work on the As. Focus on key result areas. Delegate the D tasks and get rid of the E tasks.
Obey the “Law of Forced Efficiency.” Lack of clarity can be a killer because it impairs action, and action is the secret to success. “There is never enough time for everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important things. What are they?”
Identify your key constraints. Your most significant limitation is an anchor that keeps you from sailing on with your strengths. “Determine the bottlenecks or choke points, internally or externally, that set the speed at which you achieve your most important goals and focus on alleviating them.”
Let deadlines motivate you. “Imagine that you have to leave town for a month and work as if you had to get all your major tasks completed before you left.” Develop a sense of urgency: Make a habit of moving fast on your critical tasks.
Manage for personal energy and attention. “Identify the periods of highest mental and physical energy and structure the most important and demanding tasks around those times.” Also, “Organize your days around large blocks of time where you can concentrate for extended periods on your most important tasks.”
Motivate yourself into action. Focus on the solution rather than the problem. Always be optimistic and constructive. “Most of your emotions, positive or negative, are determined by how you talk to yourself on a minute-to-minute basis. It is not what happens to you but the way you interpret the things that are happening to you that determines how you feel. Your version of events largely determines whether these events motivate or de-motivate you, whether they were energized or de-energize you.”
Single-handle every task. “The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success.”
Success requires self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-control. These are the building blocks of character and high performance.

Recommendation: Speed-read Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. This bestselling tome offers practical steps for overcoming procrastination with focused determination. Yes, much of the book is trite, and Tracy is excessively repetitive. However, Eat That Frog! is a useful synthesis of such simple disciplines as determining priorities, delegating and eliminating some tasks, knowing what’s okay to procrastinate about, and getting it all done.

Learn to Cope When You’re Stressed

September 14, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Stress is a normal part of life. On the whole, there’re two major forms of negative stress (“distress”): the stress concerned with loss (divorce, death of a loved one, failure) and the stress involved with threats to your sense of self, status, wellbeing, or security.

The actual physical symptoms—including faster heartbeat, elevated blood pressure, quickened breathing, upset stomach, muscle tension, chest pain, and increased perspiration—may be identical, regardless of the external stress factor. However, stress does manifest itself differently with everyone. If untreated, stress also brings on or worsens more than a few other symptoms or diseases.

Stress doesn’t just get better on its own. Here’re four things to do to gain control of your life’s stress before it can start controlling you.

Proactively reduce stress-causing events. Reduce exposure to people, situations, and triggers that initiate unjustifiable stress. Create rituals that can help you cope. Learn to confront those situations in manageable amounts—schedule your day, simplify your schedule, get more organized, and learn to say no to added commitments. Cut back on your obligations.
Improve your resiliency. Maintain good health and stamina. Eat a healthy diet, get adequate sleep, and exercise regularly. Take regular breaks and schedule vacations where you can totally disconnect. Sometimes, just being idle—even wasting time—can help you not only feel good but also recharge your mind and body.
Manage your reaction to stressful events. Learn how to relax, such as deep-breathing techniques, progressive muscle relaxation, meditation, and massage. Schedule time for calming exercises such as yoga, tai chi, and music or art therapy. Engage in a relaxing hobby or offer to volunteer in your community.
Reach out. Stress feeds on feelings and fears that we keep to ourselves. Stress causes you to lose objectivity about your situation. Often just talking to a trusted friend or relative—even a counselor—could help you look at things from a distance and work out coping mechanisms.

Idea for Impact: Integrate daily stress prevention.

You may not control all your stressors, but you can control how you react to those stressors. If your current stress management efforts aren’t effective enough, try something new.

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Time Management

Apparently, Marie Kondo isn’t attuned with Christianity.

“Kondo-ing” Has Become a Verb.

Keep what sparks joy. Own less stuff. Pursue what’s meaningful.

Will the Marie Kondo Effect alleviate haywire consumerism?

Idea for Impact: Negligent hyper-consumerism is shameful and embarrassing, even to this “card-carrying” capitalist.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Integrate daily stress prevention.

Wondering what to read next?