I paid $200 for Hey.com subscription because of the promise it had for helping tame my Inbox. Later I realized, you can’t control Email with one tool.
I now spend less than 10 mins each day on email.
You need 3 tools to fight your Inbox
Email Client
You could use Gmail but there are better email clients that can help you process the email faster. I use Shortwave these days. It’s a free client and speeds up my email processing 10x compared to Gmail
To-Do Manager
A lot of your to-dos are generated from your email. I used to mark these as unread before and keep unread till I complete the action. Slowly the unread count gets unmanageable. Now I create To-dos and archive the email. I use @RoamResearch for managing my to-dos
Read It Later Client
This is to capture the newsletter subscriptions that fill up your inbox. I use @getmatterapp as my Read It Later. I forward any articles I want to read to my save.getmatter email and archive them. This is for sure #1 improvement in my time spent on email
So in order to tame your email, stop depending on just your default Gmail interface and get these 3 free tools
Starting Small may be one of the most powerful ideas related to Motivation, Productivity and Getting Things Done
Here are 4 arguments why starting small is the best productivity advice you need today
Argument #1 – Getting Things Done – GTD
David Allen talks about the idea of Next action being clearly defined.. Your next action is not “Mom” or “Mom Birthday” it is “Call the bakery to order Mom’s birthday cake”.
Small, clearly defined and precise next action is much more likely to get done.
A big reason why we procrastinate is that we haven’t defined the immediate next step clearly and your brain – being lazy – is trying to avoid the effort required to determine that.
Argument #2 – Fogg Behavioral Model
Well, if David Allen’s argument isn’t good enough for you… Then let BJ Fogg convince you with his behavior model.
His formula, B = MAP explains that Behavior = Motivation * Ability * Prompt
In order to be above the Action Line, you either need to have very high motivation or the task has to be easy to do. While you can’t always control your motivation as it comes and goes, you can break down and simplify the task to reduce require ability and move yourself above the action line. Thus, using “Start small” you can trick yourself into action
Argument #3 – Motivation Myth
Further, on the idea related to motivation. In his Ted talk and his book The Motivation Myth – Jeff Haden says that we may have this idea about the Motivation wrong.. We think that motivation will strike and we’ll take action, but that doesn’t always have to be the case. You can create motivation through this loop -> Effort -> Progress -> Feeling Happy -> Motivation.
So, if your starting point is effort, defining the smallest possible step in the right direction is your best bet to actually get going.
You can listen to the 7-min Ted talk here.
Argument #4 – Physics – Newton’s laws of motion –
If none of the arguments above could convince you, hopefully Physics can do the trick. You can’t argue with Newton after all..
A basic revision of Newton’s 1st and 2nd laws of motion
1st Law – An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force
2nd Law – The acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied or F = ma
Once something is in motion, it doesn’t require as much energy to keep on going. Energy is required in getting started. And of course, the energy required to move is determined by the mass of the object F = ma.
If you were to apply this idea to a project that you want to start on, the Force required to get started is dependent on the mass / size of the project. Starting small will ensure that the energy required to start moving is small and something you can manage, increasing the likelihood of taking action. The bigger the immediate next task the more likely you are to procrastinate.
Once you are in motion, may be after you have put in 15-mins to get the project going, you’ll find it much easier to continue going for another 30-mins or an hour, thanks to the first law of motion.
TLDR
So in summary, if there’s something that you want to get done – define what the simplest/smallest version of that project would be and take action.
There’s a common saying Practice makes perfect, well the saying is wrong. If you are practicing something in a wrong way, it won’t make you perfect. It will make you remember the wrong thing perfectly.
For example, if you started playing cricket, and you are holding the bat wrong. Or you started painting and you are holding the paintbrush wrong; the more you practice the worse it will get as you get used to that grip.
Whatever you practice doesn’t necessarily become perfect, but regular practice does make things go into your memory and become permanent. So, a better quote would be, “Practice makes Permanent”.
In order to really get better and move towards perfecting your craft, you need to look into Deliberate Practice. Deliberate Practice involves monitoring the aspect of your craft you need to improve and practice that specifically. This is also related to the idea of Continuous Improvement or Continuous Experimentation.
So instead of just practicing the same thing over and over again, think how you can make your practice more systematic, more deliberate, more mindful and that way you can actually improve your performance.
I recently finished reading the book How to take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. The book proposes reading with pen in hand which I found to be extremely time consuming. But then I realized the important distinction between Time consuming and Time Wasting activities.
Reading with Pen in hand is extremely time consuming I had to work on this book for months. But not reading with pen in hands is time wasting I hardly remember anything from Sapiens or Thinking Fast and Slow that I read last year.
We tend to avoid time consuming activities, but happily go about doing time wasting activities. This is a kind of a unconscious bias that we need to be mindful about.
Trying to work on a detailed summary of the book, but that is a time consuming activity as well 🙂
If you are looking for serious advice on Habit formation, then there are lots of good resources out on internet. One of the best books on the topic is Atomic Habits by James Clear. You could also look at the works for Prof. BJ Fogg including his Ted Talk or his book Tiny Habits. This blog post is probably the wrong place for professional advice.
In case you are looking for advice from someone more average, and someone who has struggled to incorporate health and mindfulness into his routine, but still somehow figured out a way, then you may find something useful.
Bit of History
Before Corona Virus hit, I had worked hard to build a good routine, I was going try to do different 30-day challenges with a bunch of friends e.g. Cold Shower Challenge in January 2020, I did a 100 push-ups a day (spread over all day not in one session :P), etc.
But when the lock-down hit everything changed. All routines fell off track.
Watching kids and staying on top of office work was taking up all the time, and that was ok, it was more important to get the house in order. But as a result, I started experiencing a severe back pain.
As the paranoia around Corona Virus has subsided, I’ve been meaning to build some exercise routine again.
I have been slowly trying to rebuild some exercises and meditation into my routine. After multiple failed attempts and frustrations, I have reached a place where I am moderately satisfied with where I am.
If you are in a similar position and would like to figure out to build healthy habits in these difficult times, then the following tips might be helpful –
Start small
As I was experiencing back pain, I thought stretching would a good thing to start with. So I started by just doing 3 surya namaskar in the morning. Plus, whenever I experienced back pain, I’ll do a few back stretches during the day.
As this was only taking 5 mins, I didn’t feel that it was taking time out of anything else that I could be or should be doing.
I did the same thing with Meditation, I started using Headspace 5 mins sessions in Basics (free course).
Problem with healthy habits is that you don’t see the results in real-time. The feedback loop is too slow. The joy of drinking a Coca-Cola or eating an ice-cream is real-time – in the moment. The corresponding dopamine release is instant. Whereas, doing an exercise is painful in the instant, you will see the results in loooooong-term. It much easier for you to convince yourself to skip exercise than to say no to ice cream or binge watching Netflix.
Using a Habit Tracker can help you build a substitute for the long feedback loop. Seeing a streak on a calendar is win and putting that ‘X’ against a day could give you that instant dopamine release as well, and the feedback loop of checking the box or not is real-time as well.
Loss Aversion –
Habit Trackers are also useful for another reason that they build on the idea of Loss Aversion, that human mind prefers to avoid losses. Once you have a streak of a few ‘X’s on the calendar back to back, you will feel invested in it and you will try to avoid breaking the chain. This strategy is also known as “Seinfeld Strategy”, as popularized by the famous comedian, Jerry Seinfeld.
If you need a recommendation on a Good Free Habit Tracker, check out Loop Habit Tracker (only available on Android).
Even after using Habit Tracker, you will still have missed days. And it’s important not to beat up yourself for those missed days. Instead on these days, it’s important to remind yourself of the Two-day rule. Two-day rule is another popular rule around habit-building that basically says, “No two missed days together”.
If you miss the exercise one day, then make sure you don’t put two missed days on your Habit Tracker back to back.
Layer things on top
After I had gotten into a bit of routine with the small setup. I felt a bit adventurous and thought I’ll add some body-weight exercise to my routine e.g. push-ups, sit-ups, crunches etc.
So, I added another set of 5-min exercises following the Surya Namaskar.
So now my routine looked like 10-min exercise and 5-min meditation
Slowly over 2 months, I’ve added a third-set of 5 mins as well and now I have a more respectable 15-min morning exercise routine
Combining Two-day rule and layering
I think this is where the Layering becomes beneficial. In case I feel like I skipping some day, I’ll tell myself may be I’ll just do Set 1 – 3 Surya Namaskar.. No harm in that.. that’s easy.. just stretching.. Basically, I’m tricking myself into moving
Once I start, I’ll tell myself ok may be I can do one more set and skip the last one. Both sides of me win, the good side feels like that I got in some exercise, and the dark side wins as I didn’t do all the sets.
But next day, I’ll myself of the two-day rule and get all 3-sets in.
Remind yourself Why you are doing this
Another thing to note is even though I have been doing this routine for a while, it’s not something I look forward to. It’s like eating vegetables, you eat them because you know they are good for you. Instead if you had an option to eat chocolate all day, or chips with coke and some Jack in it (actually masala peanuts would be better than chips with that), you would look forward to that.
Why I mention this is because every morning I have this urge to skip the exercise today.
Doing exercise is hard, and I don’t know if it’ll ever be something I look forward to, but you still need to do it.
I tell myself this will give me more energy during the day, and get more done at work, and I won’t experience back pain
It comes down the idea of Pain and Pleasure driving your actions. As the famous Jeremy Bentham quote goes, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do”.
So on the days you are don’t feel like exercising (which is everyday for me :P), remind yourself of why you are doing this in the first place.
July 21, 2020 is my 21 day streak of doing exercise and Meditation everyday.
It’s debatable whether you need to do the habit for 21 days or 66 days to make it stick. But I feel by doing I have earned my right, to brag about this on internet, and pretend to be an expert who can advice you on what to do. Take it or leave it :).
Re-posting my re-phrased re-sponse on that thread he-re. (Have you seen more re’s in one sentence? 😉 )
Multi-tasking vs Multi-focusing
In my opinion, multi-tasking is a must but it gets a bad name for no good reason. Actually, there is a good reason; we all confuse multi-tasking with multi-focusing.
Human brain isn’t good at multi-focusing but it is pretty decent at multi-tasking. I think everyone is good at multi-tasking. Don’t agree? Think of the last time you drove your car with music on, or had food while chatting with your family at the dinner table, ate popcorn while watching a movie, sing while taking a shower? In all of these examples, you are focusing on one thing e.g. while watching the movie your focus is on movie and not on the popcorn necessarily.
We multi-task all the time, the problem starts when we are trying to multi-focus e.g. Open your social media feed when you should be listening to the other attendees in that important meeting. Now your focus is divided and that’s when you end up doing a crappy job at both the things.
Good vs Bad Multi-tasking
To get more nuanced, Multi-focusing isn’t technically possible. No one can focus on more than one thing at a time. So may be the Multi-tasking vs Mutli-focusing isn’t a good differentiation. May be we should talk more in terms of Good Multi-tasking and Bad Multi-tasking. When you are multi-tasking, what you are actually doing is switching focus from one topic to another. This is called context-switching.
Context-Switching is a popular term in Computer Science and there are many different algorithms that can be used on how to optimize your computer’s performance. But here we are going to talk about how you can use this idea of context-switching to determine when is it ok to multi-task.
Cost of Context Switching
The first thing we need to be aware of and acknowledge is that context-switching is taxing for your brain. Every time you context switch you are paying a cost. It is depleting your mental energy and adding to your fatigue. Following image provides a good understanding of the “Cost of Context Switching”
By now, I think you may already be starting to understand that when somebody says “Multi-tasking is bad” what they are actually mean is that “Context-switching is bad”. I would say in the modern world it is more of a necessary evil. You need to understand how to optimize it, much like the computer science algorithms meant to optimize performance.
How to determine good vs bad multi-tasking
When it comes to multi-tasking there are tasks that make a good combination and tasks that make bad combination. Use the context-switching cost as a metric to determine which tasks can be combined.
In the multi-tasking example I took earlier of watching a movie while eating pop-corns, the context-switching has a long cycle. Your concentration is primarily on the movie and you may briefly switch context to the taste of pop-corns if something unusual happens e.g. a bad pop-corn, but after that you can quickly return to the original focus item – the movie.
But lets say if you were eating pop-corns after one year, and your goal was to eat those pop-corns mindfully, while enjoying the smell and feeling the texture and the taste of salt and butter and so on, then you need to be paying much more attention to the act of eating. If you were doing that while watching the movie, you would neither be able to focus on the movie nor the pop-corns as you would switching contexts too frequently.
In the other example of driving a car while listening to a podcast, same idea of context switching can be applied. If the traffic is smooth, and the podcast is on a topic that you are familiar with the context switching costs are low. But if you are in a bumper to bumper traffic or the topic of the podcast is novel or arcane and you need to take notes to fully understand it, then it might be better to pause the podcast and focus on getting home safely.
The Social Media Problem
I think part of the reason Multi-tasking is getting such a bad name off-late is because of Social Media. It’s quite likely that if you that the other task in the multi-task is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Youtube, TikTok, Texting or the likes. And that is a problem. It is also quite likely that you are not even aware that you are doing this other task and just doing it out of habit. And that is an even bigger problem.
Social media is really deceptive at hiding the true context-switching cost. You may think that just browsing through the news feed is quite harmless and you are just scrolling without really paying attention.. But that is until you see an interesting post or read an interesting comment and then you are sucked in. Your focus is on the comment and not on the meeting that you were supposed to be listening to, and the context-switching cost becomes too high.
The costs and consequences are even more severe and immediate when social media is combined with driving..
Summary
To summarize, I feel bad for “Multi-tasking” getting a bad name. I recall a time when “Multi-tasking” was something looked up on. To it’s credit, multi-tasking has helped us and continues to help us get more shit done. What we need to do is be more conscious of the context-switching costs and try to make educated decisions on when it is ok to multi-task and when it is not.
Last year (2019) I had been big on listening to audiobooks. I talked about it in my previous blog — How I read 52 books in 2019. Although listening allowed me to consume a lot more content and make use of “dead-time” e.g. commute or doing chores around the house, one thing I found lacking with that approach was the ability to take notes and thus limited retention of the text.
This year I’ve been trying to improve my reading habit and use my Kindle more. As a result, I’ve been highlighting a lot of stuff on my Kindle. Yesterday, I tried to move my Kindle Highlights to RoamResearch, which is a Note Taking tool that I have been exploring recently (and Notion has been taking a back seat as my note-taking tool).
To my surprise, there is no quick, easy and free way to export your Kindle highlights to the note taking tool of your choice. Here are a few choices that you may find available out there, which are either paid or didn’t provide the formatting as per my needs —
Paid options —
Most popular option seems to be Readwise which charges $7.99/month for Evernote export feature.
There is also Clippings.io which charges $2.99/month for a browser extension.
Free options with limited formatting —
There is also a free browser extension from Bookcision that seems to do the job for free, but the output was not in the format that I want.
You can plug in your Kindle into your computer and copy the myclippings.txt file, but in my case that sti
As I am still new to Kindle reading, I didn’t want to spend $8/month on a service that I wasn’t sure how much I would use. So I tried to come up with my own hack and that worked quite well for me. My approach is more focused on Formatting and builds on top of any of the free approaches listed above.
If you are interested in exporting your Kindle highlights for free, feel free (pun intended) to give it a try. Here’s the step by step approach —
Use Ctrl + H — Find and Replace to Replace all “Yellow Highlight | Page: ” with “”
This leaves just the page numbers in the column
Copy the first text line below the page number line and hold shift scroll down all the way. Basically, copy whole document except first page number line.
Copy this to the next column, so that the Page numbers and comments are aligned.
Sort the document by page numbers, this way we’ll have the comment and page number next to each other.
You can delete the extra rows after this.
Create a new column and use a concatenation formula =Concetane(“Pg “,A1,”: “,B1). Apply this formula to each row.
Copy paste this new column to Roam under Kindle Highlights section in a book or to which ever note taking tool you prefer.
To start with a confession, the title of this post is a bit untrue. I did not actually “read” 52 books in 2019, I “listened” to 52 audio-books in 2019. While it may not be as impressive as “reading”, I think listening works better for my lifestyle and I feel it may work for you as well.
This post is geared towards explaining how I achieved this feat (#humblebrag) and lay out some steps for you if you would like to experiment with this idea.
How to get started?
First, make a new year resolution/Set a goal — Just kidding :).. We all know those rarely work. For me, reading 52 books was NOT a goal that I set for myself for 2019.
It was quite serendipitous actually; I stumbled on a post on Product Hunt around “Startup book club” in December 2018. The idea of the club was that every 2 weeks the club members will read a non-fiction book from a compiled list based recommended of the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg etc.
The first book that I read as part of the club was “Atomic Habits” and the next one was “Surely, you must be joking Mr. Feynman”. These two got me hooked and I was surprised that instead of taking the expected 4 weeks, I was able to listen to both of them within 2 weeks. Then on, I stopped following the club’s weekly recommendations, but looked ahead at the bigger list for my next picks.
By June 2019, I had listened to roughly 30 audiobooks. That was the first time I thought to myself, hey I could potentially listen to 52 books this year. So although I did not start the year with that goal, but it did become a goal roughly mid year.
So, to get started you need two things —
A book that you’ll like — If you are not enjoying what you are reading, you’ll find excuses to postpone it. If you need some recommendations, I have a list towards the end of this post.
An accountability partner — The book club served as a accountability partner for me. I didn’t want to be the one stuck behind, when rest of the group was moving on to the next book.
Tips for you to listen to more audio-books in 2020
If you already identified the book and and an accountability partner and are looking for ways to find more time in your schedule. Here are a few tweaks I made in my lifestyle which I feel compounded over time and allowed me to read more books —
Replace podcasts with books — A while back, I had decided to spend less time reading random articles on internet and spend that time reading more books. I applied the same logic to my listening time as well, fewer podcasts and more audio books.
Better dead-time management — There are many windows during the day when you have dead-time — commute is one big example, but there are many others such as doing chores around the house, grocery shopping or waiting in the line for the next iPhone (do people still do that?). I utilized those very effectively and you could be assured if I was running an errand, I would have my headphones on and I’ll be zoned in.
Utilizing Public Library —This is something I feel was a true game-changer. I’ve been a long time subscriber of Audible, but that gives you one audio-book a month for $14.95 subscription. Most popular audiobooks costs more than $20 each, and even though I love books I don’t think I would have spend roughly $100 on books each month. I believe this is also the reason some people may prefer podcasts or audio-books. After all, podcasts are free and for books you have to pay. This is where I discovered that the public library system in US (and I presume in many other developed countries) is AWESOME! Most libraries allow you to use apps such as Libby or Hoopla to checkout books online. Hoopla lets you borrow 5 books each month and Libby allows you to hold up to 8 books at a time, with a checkout window of 21 days. Most of the books I read in 2019 were thanks to the Northern California Digital Library. If your public library provides you this provision, you should definitely be leveraging it.
Have your next book lined up — This is also where the book club helped, but there are a number of other places where you can find great book recommendations. Having a next book lined up will help keep the habit going.
What next
As 2019 is coming to a wrap, I’ve been thinking will I try to do another 52 books next year? The answer is most likely not. As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t start 2019 with a goal to read a specific number of books.
In fact once I had set the goal around June/July, I felt a bit of a pressure to finish it and I felt the joy of reading waning a bit. I felt the urge to pick the books that were shorter, in order to get my count up. So for 2020, I’m not going for any specific count. I think I already have the habit/system in place. If I don’t listen to a book for a week or so, I feel something missing. I’ll go with the flow, and see what number I’ll end up with.
Something, I’ll like to change in 2020 is that I’d like to add a note-taking practice. As I am mostly listening to the books while driving or completing another chore, I’m don’t get to take notes or underline important points in the book. I feel this is something I can improve and it is something that’ll help me retain more. If you have any ideas on how I can improve this, please add a comment.
Book Recommendations –
If you are feeling inspired and need help deciding which book to pick up. Here are Top 5 books that I feel made the most impact on my life in 2019
Atomic Habits — Science of habit formation distilled into one book. Loaded with practical advice to introduce a new habit in your life.
Dot Journaling — A practical guide — This book helped me build a BulletJournal practice that was my go-to way for managing my projects, to-dos this year.
Why We Sleep — I used to be proud of being able to survive with less than 6 hours of sleep. This book changed my perception of that and now I strive to find more time for sleep in my schedule.
Don’t lose out, work out — I never lifted weights in my life, until 2019, and this book pushed me to do that.
When breath becomes air — Autobiography of Paul Kalinathi, a surgeon who lost his life to lung cancer. A heart-touching memoir that will leave you with tears in your eyes.
If you are interested in checking out the other books I read, you can see the complete list on my Notion page here.
Lastly, if you have some book recommendations, please leave those in comments.
I have been reading “Getting Things Done” by Dave Allen recently, and tried to adopt some of the principles in my everyday life. I started maintaining a list of all tasks in Notion, and have been following it for a few weeks. This morning as I was explaining how Agile works to a friend, it stuck me that GTD == Agile.
There’s a lot of overlap between the GTD principles and how we manage our work with Agile. Which essentially means that as effectively I use Agile at work to manage my product (SAP SuccessFactors Compensation), it can be used quite effectively to manage your life as well.
Here’s a recipe for how to implement this for you –
Write down everything you want to accomplish (product vision → life vision)
Create Epics for big projects that lead you there.
Break down epics into manageable tasks → stories
Have a big backlog of all tasks
Prioritize backlog and pull items into the Sprint (week long?)
Assign story points to each task
Over tea/coffe, have a daily scrum with your life partner
Measure your velocity, how many stories/tasks you are able to complete outside of your meetings and emails.
Measuring velocity will help you plan for next sprints better.
Have a Sprint review at the end of each week and see what can be done better.
So there you go, try this out and let me know what you think of it.
Recently saw this TED Talk on Time Mangement from Laura Vanderkam –
So here’s my To-Do/Takeaway from the talk –
– Write the performance review for next year now — this means that imagine it is the end of 2017 and it was an Awesome year, what 3 to 5 things that I did this year to make this so great..
– Every Friday afternoon — make yourself a 3 category priority list — career, relationship and self.. and lookout for the whole next of the week and see where you can plan those for the next week.
