Tag: productivity

The information diet

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

I have had a blog post in the drafts section for some time now, it is titled ‘rethinking our digital lives’. I will publish it some day soon but what actually got me thinking about writing that post was the fact that all of us spend a lot of our time on the internet. It may be for work or pleasure, doesn’t matter. The fact is that the ease of opening a new browser window or tab means that distractions are only a click away. That’s been a bit a of a problem for me and I suspect for many others. Something needs to be done about that and so I’ve decided to go on an information diet.

Here’s what I am going to do:

  1. Check email only three times a day.
  2. Check facebook and twitter once a day for not more than 30 minutes in total.
  3. Check my blog only when I decide to publish something.
  4. Any article which I deem worth reading, I will send to my Kindle. Thus, I can get to it when I have the time.
  5. 30 minutes of video everyday including YouTube.

Being able to restrict social media won’t be that hard but to deal with email I am going to need some help because I essentially use it as my to-do list. I’ve installed Boomerang for Gmail which will help me schedule replies, bring emails to my inbox when they need to be dealt with, etc. For reading articles I’ve been using SENDtoREADER which simply re-formats the article like Readability and sends it to my Kindle.

Just like food, there is some information that is good for you and some that is bad. Being able to focus on the good in this world of distractions is a hard thing and that’s why I think there is much value in choosing to do this. My experience with dieting is only a recent one but along with my polyphasic sleep experiment it has give me enough confidence in my ability to discipline myself that I think I can take on this task.

Finally, unlike the slow-carb diet experiment, this will not be a four-week experiment. I want to make this information diet a habit so that the extra time I get are put in meaningful work.

The art of finishing

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

Even before starting to follow Seth Godin, I believed in the value of finishing what I started.

May be this habit stems from a childhood experience. My parents did not allow me to leave the dining table till I had finished everything on my plate. If I had to over eat then so be it, next time I will learn to put no more food on my plate than was needed.

The habit then extended into other things. I am not satisfied till I’ve finished the book that I started. I cannot leave a cinema midway even if the first half isn’t exactly great. I won’t leave a conversation in the middle (if I had the choice too), I will wait for it to come to a conclusion or bring it to one.

This habit of finishing what I started helps quite a lot. I am able to derive maximum value from an activity that I can. Most importantly, it provides me with enough motivation to keep going. Most activities have a great start, a boring middle and superb end. Many people start something because it looks interesting but give up in the middle because the initial charm has disappeared. Many times if an activity is continued till the end, there is something in store that no one expects. If for nothing else, it is worth finishing something just to get to this unexpected outcome.

There is also a good selfish reason for finishing what you start. An activity when completed can go down on the list of things that you have ‘done’. That list is a self-confidence builder. When you look back, you know that you had the ability to not only start but also finish so many things. It allows you to start something new knowing what all you are already capable of doing. That can be a great motivation to start a new activity that is more challenging than anything you have done before or even motivation to finish something you haven started knowing that you have done something more difficult than this before.

Although finishing is a great habit, it has it’s downsides too. For example, when I am reading an article on the web or even a research paper I would like to read every word of text even though that may be unnecessary.

I think what it boils down to is our ability to judge the value of an activity. And to be able to accurately judge the value of an activity is a hard thing to do. Mostly because of lack of experience, in my case at least. It is then when I decided that if I am not sure what the value of a certain activity might be then I will finish it and evaluate the value at the end of it. In this way I can improve my value judgement for such activities in the future and thus improve my capacity to take the decision to quit or to keep going.

I am proud of many things that I have finished and I am sure to have many more in the future if I can keep going.

Finding sources of motivation

Akshat Rathi11 Comments

Motivation to do something acts as that driving force which helps us through every phase of an activity. It gives us the energy to initiate the task, then to continue through its ups and downs, and finally also to bring it to an end.

Without the right amount of motivation, doing anything feels like dragging yourself down a road that you don’t want to walk. I am sure you can all relate to this feeling especially when as teenagers you were asked to do certain things by your parents without a good reason, for example cleaning your own room 😉

Additional motivation always help us to do something better or faster. Or at least that is what you feel happens when you feel that wee bit more motivated.

I don’t think I have to give you more reasons to convince you that motivation is an important factor in our everyday lives. I have spent quite some time in trying to understand this mysterious force with a wish to know how can I harness it better.

After speaking to many people about their source of motivation, I can conclude that almost always people have multiple sources of motivation. And it is not surprising that there are many common sources of motivation. We are all human after all. I’ll enlist a few:

Some positive sources: the desire to constantly improve (to be a better person, a better scientist, a better father or a better son), to achieve higher pleasures of life (happiness derived from completing a massive project, from helping someone or achieving a big goal)

Some negative sources: peer pressure (if she can do it, why not me? admittedly it can be a positive force sometimes), fear of failure (almost always bad and which causes so much anxiety).

Some of these sources may have struck a chord with you (like the one in the picture). And may be that after reading this short list you may not be surprised because they are very commonly the sources of motivation that many people use.

But my exploration has helped me find an additional source of motivation. One that I have used many a times unknowingly. That source of motivation comes from my constant quest to find a new source of motivation. It’s as if I treat my motivation to do something as drawing from a motivation bank. And because I treat it as a bank, I tend to look for sources that can replenish this bank.

And I don’t think I am alone in that quest, people seek new sources of motivation all the time. See for example what Alex says:

A friend told me that she had a three-tiered approach to motivation: First is motivation from the cause itself, but this is simply not enough to sustain motivation indefinitely in all situations, so the second layer was motivation from fun: the work itself should be enjoyable, but it’s just not possible to always make work fun, so the third tier was friendship: that you would work through tough times buoyed by friendship with colleagues and co-workers.

Have you got any sources of motivation that you could share with us?