No. 1 challenge in taking care of your wellbeing...

Hello Thoughtful Humans,

Last week I was with a group of 234 students from an MBA Institute talking about thriving. Specifically, staying at the intersection of success & wellbeing.

In the end, we almost ended up doing Q&A for 45 minutes. While the experience was excellent in all the expected ways…when I asked students about their biggest challenge in taking care of wellbeing, guess what they shared?

Time constraints!!!

And these are second-year students. I almost wanted to say: “It only gets more complex! I can only wish for the time constraints I had as a student” :D

Isn’t it mindboggling that we teach students about extinct dinosaurs but not about time management which literally affects our effectiveness every day?

In this issue, the focus will be on time management and focus to support more productivity. This is also related to creating boundaries which I wrote about in a previous issue. Much has been already written about these. So instead of repeating those, am selecting a few concepts which are interesting, implementable immediately and show quick results.

Let’s go!

I don't have time...

Time is a fluid concept.

Weirdly, it can seem like a lot or very little depending on what you are doing.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman said in a profile in the New Yorker:

“This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said-why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass. “Time is this rubbery thing…it stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.”

When I meet my friends on a Friday night, I get up on Saturday morning and it feels like such a long weekend stretches before me. Time expands. However, if I am just lazing around on weekend, seems like it just flew by…and it’s Monday already.

And yet, the hours are the same. The difference is what we put into those hours.

Our instinct is to claim we just don’t have enough time in the day to focus on our wellbeing, is not really true. Do an audit. Try counting the hours you are spending browsing, watching TV, being on countless social media apps and doing other miscellaneous non-work-related tasks. Or see this fun visualization on where does your time go.

We don’t need to ‘find time’. We have time.

We need to just schedule it. Scheduling Expands Time.

Building & Managing a sustainable schedule

“When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control.” - Atomic Habits

We tend to think that we are lazy or lack willpower. When in reality, mostly what we lack is the skill of making a sustainable schedule.

Below are 4 tactics to help you build a strong schedule that helps you feel productive AND meaningful.

1.Align your schedule to your values:

Don’t tell me your priorities. Show me your calendar.—Shane Parrish

Fill your calendar with your values and corresponding actions, not just your goals. Values are guidelines for your day to day actions. If you don’t know what your values are, refer to the ‘Tools you can use’ section later in this mail.

2.Align your goals to your future-self

Daniel Goleman, author of Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, says that successful people maintain the “triad of awareness”: Inner, Outer and Others. Because “a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided.”

An interesting approach to applying this is to split the day/ week into two parts - help ourselves and help others. Allocating 2/3rds of our working hours to meet our future goals. The remaining time can and should be spent on proving support to others - our colleagues, friends and family.

3.Discipline is Freedom: Timeboxing

For scheduling to work, you must schedule every minute (mostly) of your day. This technique is called, “timeboxing”, and it can start with as little as 10 minutes.

Now, this might sound too rigid to some people. It does not have to be, though. You can always refine it to include some buffer time.

The reason this works is that it forces discipline. And discipline helps freedom.

Most people think of discipline as something which curtails you. Me included.

I used to never consider discipline as something which I enjoy. I always saw myself as a ‘free-spirited person for whom flexibility helped creativity.

However most creative professionals who are successful value discipline. Jocko Willink made this concept popular in his book Extreme Ownership: How US NAVY Seals lead and win that actually, discipline helps you be free.

Here is an example: I know the founder of Mentza, an audio discussion app and in spite of being an early-stage startup founder, he is always seemingly available for a chat. He happened to share, that he is an early riser and by noon he is almost done with what he needs to do that day. The rest of the day becomes flexible for him. He is more ‘free’ in the rest of the day than he would be if he wasn’t disciplined enough to be an early riser.

Similarly, if one is disciplined about saving and investing their money, it allows them financial freedom in the long run. If one is disciplines to eat healthily, it allows you the physical freedom to do things which you want to do for a longer period of time in life. And even the freedom to binge once in a while!

So, the truth is…the more discipline you are, the more freedom you get.

This is why timeboxing works.

And this is what it might look like.

It’s pretty simple, though not easy. You can do a deep dive into this technique here if needed.

4.Schedule both - Traction AND Distractions

A distraction is something we do that moves us away from our goal. The opposite of distraction is traction. Traction is something we do that moves us towards it.

Nir Eyal, the author of ‘Hooked’ shares,

“The difference between traction and distraction is intent. Any action can be either a distraction or traction depending on what we intend to do with our time.”

There’s nothing wrong with scrolling Instagram, playing a video game, or watching Netflix, as long as that’s what you intended to do. It’s when we do these things unintentionally that it goes downhill.

Reflection & Action

Building a schedule does not mean that we will never go off track.

But it does mean that we will get better and better at identifying our distractions. When we slip up, it is easier to know why it happened and then fine-tune it.

Action: For the next 2 weeks do a self-audit of your schedule:

• Does your schedule reflect your top 3 values? (Refer to the tools section to identify, if needed)

• Does your schedule make time for your key areas of life: Inner, Others and Outer?

• Does it have a time built-in for distractions and traction both?

• Try timeboxing. Did you actually take the time to do those tasks as planned? Did you overestimate or underestimate the time it takes?

This allows you to get better at understanding how long tasks take and making sure you make time for actions that reflect your values. The goal is to use a schedule to create days that make you feel productive & meaningful.

Tools you can use

• Identify your values. This website forces you to rank your values by a series of questions

• Struggling with values? Take a step back to do a deep dive course with others in a similar stage, to identify what you want to do with your life. It’s over 3 weeks and run by Network Capital. Especially relevant for young professionals.

• Pomodoro Chrome Extension on your computer helps design a schedule with breaks built-in.

• Free printable scheduling templates, annual/ weekly/ daily

• Go digital scheduling with any calendar tools. I use outlook.

• Your hour app and Quality Time are two good apps to help gain awareness of our digital time split.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, wrote, “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”

Identify who or what is distracting you and draining your time.

Awareness precedes action.

Keep Thriving!

Rashmi