Lockdown Growth 🌱

This has been a “different” year and has brought upon itself a bunch of new challenges. Being a part of a team where I have not met almost 75% of my team in person is definitely a new experience for me. It took some time in getting adjusted to this new normal way of working and it did affect me in some ways.

I used to go to the office at around 8 AM and would come back around 4:30 PM. I would generally finish up some work by 6 PM and would hit the gym. Dinner usually involved meeting my friends and the day would end with an episode from a Sitcom.

A few months into the pandemic, I started finding 24 hours in a day not enough for everything I wanted to do. Even when the commute shortened from 90 minutes to 90 seconds a day, I still was not able to do everything I would do on a normal working day.

The procrastinator in me told me that “Aal Iz Well” and I kept going with the flow. After sitting in front of my laptop all day, when I found myself struggling to finish a task after an all-nighter, I realised that something was not right.

I quickly went to the platform I would goto to find all the answers, Youtube 📺. I was bombarded with folks who were ready to tell me how I could follow the 7 habits of highly effective people or how I could do stuff worth 26 hours in a day. I plunged into the plethora of time management videos and realised I was better off with a sensible book. I read (listened to 🎧 ) a bunch of books before I stumbled across

Getting Things Done, by David Allen

I felt that I had been running on Autopilot. I was passing my days reacting to what was happening around me instead of being mindful of my actions. The most important lesson I learned was that my mind was not able to comprehend what I was doing as I had turned into an infinitely scrolling to-do list with no easy way to prioritise tasks. The obvious solution was to dump my brain onto storage and take away the mindless task of remembering what I needed to do throughout the day.

Journaling. There are several ways of doing that and there is definitely no “One Size Fits All” strategy here. One could use a standard pencil or pen and a class notebook or use a Swiss Pen along with an Italian Journal or use the notes app on their phones or laptop or go as far as using apps like Notion to create a sophisticated mind map.

I started by planning my day onto a notebook using the fundamentals of Bullet Journaling. A simple bullet journal would have the following components:

• A task
• An important task
• A completed task
• A migrated task
• A note

and this could be customised further as well. I had 2 issues with using a notebook:

1. I made a lot of errors and I am not good friends with a whitener :no:
2. I tend to lose my notebooks so often that I have probably not reached the end of a notebook since 10th grade. L🅞S𝙀R

I found my solution in the amalgamation of the two, an iPad with a Pencil.

I started by borrowing my wife’s iPad from time to time till I finally convinced myself to buy one for myself. I recommend the app GoodNotes.

A digital notepad gives me the satisfaction of writing and takes away my fear of making mistakes or losing my notes ever.

But, I quickly realised that bullet journaling was not enough. Even with tasks listed cleanly in my daily journal, I found myself migrating some tasks almost every day. It was clear that simply mapping your day was not enough, hyper-focusing on the task at hand holds the second key to this productivity locker.

An average person maintains a laser focus for about 50 seconds before losing it to some stimulus in the environment. Quoting the book “Make Time”,

There are two things that keep us from focusing well:

The Busy Bandwagons

The Infinity Pools

• Busy Bandwagons are the activities we do throughout our day which make us feel busy and productive but are not contributing to our daily goals in any way.
• Infinity Pools are generally the apps or activities that provide our brain with an infinite amount of content to dive into.

Starting from our laptop, we get constant slack notifications, email notifications.

On our phones, there are several apps that keep fighting for our attention and eventually succeed in drowning us in the pool of content they offer.

If that was not enough, our watch keeps reminding us to stand or drink water by vibrating on our wrists.

There are again several ways to curb these distractions depending on how much they affect someone and their importance in daily functioning.

Personally, I started by diligently using Clockwise and honouring my focus time. Even with no notifications, I found myself opening the task switcher way too often to see if there was a number on the Slack icon inviting me. I stopped (trying to) using the Task Switcher altogether and started using Cmd + Space to go to the app I really wanted to go to.

I carefully browsed my phone and recalibrated the notifications from different apps. I even scheduled the DND setting to switch on during my work hours. The simplest, yet most effective change was flipping my phone before keeping it on my desk.

Batching is another great technique to preserve focus. A simple example would be creating a Read-Later list. We come across several articles, blogs, confluence docs each day, and instead of reading them as they arrive, we can simply dump them in a single Read Later list or use apps like Pocket to do that for us. Doing so helps us continue with our task and gives us a curated list of stuff to read when we really feel like it.

Finally, like meditation, our goal throughout the day should be to keep our attention towards the one thing we are focusing on and when there is a distraction, we need tools and systems to guide us back.