Category: Productivity

Rituals are intentional. Habits are automatic.

When it’s something that is super important to you, start with making it an intentional ritual and it will eventually become a habit.

In Asian cultures, especially places like India and China, if you told somebody that you were hardly working, they would look at you with disrespect. In these countries, as well as many others, people pride themselves on working hard to make a living. The harder you work, the more you are held in honor.

Bullshit.

This type of perception has kept so many amazing people doing busy work instead of meaningful work.

Think about it. How did people feel when calculators first came to mass market? Were there purists who held the notion that we must continue to calculate things the hard way with pen and paper as opposed to the new calculator technology? You bet there were.

These are the people who got left behind, became irrelevant and no one remembers them.

The pragmatist smart folks knew that using the calculator was just a shortcut they could take to accomplish amazingly Big things and leave the rudimentary calculations to the calculator. Smart work and not hard work.

Same thing is going to happen with artificial intelligence. There will be people who will shun the technology and will insist that we use human intelligence for what artificial intelligence can do. Just a false ideology without any real merit behind it.

The smart folks will take advantage of artificial intelligence and all of its flavors as it becomes available to catapult their potential to the next level.

It’s too bad that many intelligent get left behind because they focus on working hard instead of meaningful impact. That has always happened when any new technology comes to market and will definitely happen with this new phase as well.

When I went on my honeymoon to Maui, Hawaii, we went to a luau – a Hawaiian feast with live music and cultural dances.

I remember when they were serving various dishes at the luau, they encouraged us to eat poi in the middle of each dish.

I had no idea at that time what the heck poi was and why would I eat that before eating the next dish?

That’s when I found out that they were encouraging us to eat poi as a palate cleanser in-between dishes so we could taste each dish separately and not have the tastes all mixed up going from one to the other.

I believe a poi for the mind is needed as well going from one activity to another. Especially in the world we live in going from one online meeting to another, if we don’t give our brain some form of poi in the middle, it all runs together and it would be very hard to give the right attention to each event much less to consume and be productive at the event.

My favorite forms of mental poi are the following:

• Taking a nap or at least closing my eyes for a few seconds focusing on my breathing
• Going for a short walk if there’s enough time
• Few minutes of exercise

I’m sure you can find your own mental poi that will help you reset and refresh in-between activities.

For many of us who are working from home, it is now more important than ever to introduce an intentional dose of poi between our mentally taxing events.

Since I’ve discovered the Open AI technology, I’ve been asking myself this question:

Should I still be racking my brain writing content or should I just let AI spit out the content and just paste the responses into my article…? 🤔

It’s definitely very tempting.

However, if you think about it, getting Open AI or a similar technology to write for you is the same thing as getting someone else to write for you. The main differences of course are that it’s free and it’s faster.

So in that respect, things have not changed as much and now we are just outsourcing to artificial intelligence instead of someone else’s human intelligence.

Also, in my own case, I’m not a professional writer by any means. And my reasons for writing are different than most. I write to:

1) Document my thoughts, feelings and any other information I would like to externalize in some form and not leave it inside my head

2) Exercise my brain

 

Yes, I definitely feel that the process of writing massages and exercises my brain which I very very much appreciate.

Neither of these things can be done with any AI that I’m aware of. At least not yet 😊.

 

 

I still remember the day when I was talking with a friend in college who was an English major and loved writing articles. I was an Electrical Engineering major and I hated writing articles. I could not understand how this person could love writing long form articles. In my mind, it seemed like a torturous thing to do.

Many years have passed since that conversation and I now produce many articles or blood a month. Some of them you might argue are too long 😊.

So how did that happen? How did I become a writer ?

Well, to be honest, the truth is that I still don’t ‘write’ for the most part. I talk.

Let me explain…

 

I have been speaking on various topics in classes as a trainer and speaking at conferences as a speaker all the world.

The first official class I taught was on C Sharp in Buffalo Grove, Illinois back in 2002. Since then, I have produced curriculum and taught in person as well as virtual multi-day courses online more than a few hundred times on many different subjects.

On the other hand, I have been speaking at conferences since November 2006 when I first presented a session in Las Vegas on the concept of SharePoint Excel Services.

Since then I have been speaking on all kinds of topics related to technology and sometimes psychology of employees in organizations.

Needless to say, I’ve done a Lot of speaking over the years and enjoyed all of it since I love the process of transferring the knowledge that I am acquiring to other people.

My conundrum was that I wanted to be able to replicate this transfer of knowledge through text as well so I could reach folks who love consuming this information through the written word.

So how do I do that if I don’t enjoy the traditional form of putting fingers to the keyboard to generate the text…?

 

That’s when I discovered the speech to text functionality within the Google and then the Microsoft ecosystems – the two technology companies that I utilize the most in my personal and professional lives.

And my life changed forever…

I now use the speech to text function everywhere! In fact it is my preferred mode of “writing”.

 

I use it to:

• Compose text messages
• Write emails
• Transcribe articles
• Write down my notes
• And everything else in between that would have required my fingers before

 

Don’t get me wrong, I still end up using my hands to massage the writing after I have done the initial brain dump using my voice. But that still is for me so much better than writing the whole thing using the keyboard.

So there you have it, the secret to how I became a writer (or a ‘voicer’… Is that such a thing?)

 

Sometimes the big picture can be so scary that it paralyzes you. That’s when you need to focus on the small picture and take it 1 day and 1 hour at a time. Focusing on things that are in your control and not worrying about the big picture that looks insurmountable.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.

—CHUCK PALAHNIUK

As they say, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time 🙂.

So many projects and initiatives never see light of day because the creator believed that it was not perfect. Such a shame because many of those things could have truly helped people who had a need for that information / product / service…

I know this because I have succumbed to this pressure of being perfect many times myself. Many more times than I would care to admit actually.

I was listening recently, on a podcast, to author Adam Grant talk about his own addiction to being perfect and how it is so much more rewarding to try to strive for excellence rather than perfection. I completely agree with Adam and wanted to write some words about that myself in this article.

If you’re a religious person, you most likely have that belief that nobody is perfect except God.

If you’re not a religious person, I can still bet that you don’t think that anyone in this world is perfect.

No matter what our beliefs are, we all know this in the back of our mind that none of us are perfect and nothing we do can be truly perfect either. Yet, it still ends up blocking us from getting stuff done at times because we feel that our creation (ex: product, project, article, video, etc) is not ready just yet. Much like this article that I’m writing. If I keep on thinking about this subject, I’m sure I will think of something new every single day. But if I really want others to read what I am writing so I will eventually have to click “publish” ☺️

Adam’s notion of striving for excellence instead of perfectionism is very thought-provoking. You might be asking at this point: how can something be excellent unless it’s perfect…?

I think the answer lies in the question. By definition, excellence means “extremely good” and surpassing ordinary standards. Notice that it does not say perfect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excellence

I would go even as far as saying that perfection is the enemy of excellence.

The practically unachievable goal of perfection holds us back from being our excellent selves.

You have to ask yourself: how many plans or projects do you have that are just in the phase of strategy, planning, half baked or “almost done”? I have lots on my plate for sure and I can bet you have many as well that you can list out.

So then the next question we have to ask ourselves: isn’t it better to either call it quits for certain things or take it to completion to the best of our ability and “click publish”?

That is exactly what I’m about to do right now and click publish on this article. I hope you can do the same and let the world benefit from your knowledge and wisdom. Best wishes! 👍

 

Have you ever found yourself thinking about something over and over without coming to a resolution? And then you have a chat with a friend or colleague about the same matter and as you are speaking about it, you come up with a solution yourself…?

I’m sure you have experienced that and you’re not alone. That’s a pretty common phenomenon that all of us have gone through one time or the other.

So why not just speak out our thoughts?

Why not give voice externally – audibly – to your thoughts that are driving you nuts in your brain?

You will find that once you give voice to your thoughts, many times the answers will appear automatically just like you were talking with a friend.

Give it a shot. And if you’re doing it in public, consider putting one of those cool earbuds in your ears and then you will appear like everyone else talking to themselves 😉

Your phone pings. It’s a new Instagram post. You click on it and go there. Check out the picture your friend posted and some comments underneath and then you try to return back to the article that you were writing on your laptop.

5 minutes later you get a text message from a friend asking what you’re up to tonight. You immediately respond back to him. Then once again you try to refocus your mind on the article that’s due today.

A few minutes go by and an alert on your phone tells you that Chick-fil-A is offering a bonus chicken sandwich when you buy one and that the deal is only valid today. You’re hungry. You love Chick-fil-A. You click on the notification and check out the offer and start thinking about heading over to Chick-fil-A in a couple of hours for a quick bite. Then once again you come back to the article which you know you have to get done by end of day today otherwise you’re going to be in trouble with your boss.

Altogether an hour has passed by now and you look at how much you actually got done writing the article. It’s just two short paragraphs.

What the heck just happened?

Where did the time go? You were moving so fast between your phone and your computer back and forth. How come it doesn’t feel like you really accomplished anything?

Moving fast doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting a lot of stuff done. Moving fast and doing stuff might sometime fool you into thinking that you are multitasking but we all know that’s a myth. You’re just switching from task to task really fast.

Why do we do this?

The reason that we switch from activity to activity and get that feeling that we are moving fast and getting lots done can be blamed on our amygdala. We get that spike of emotional satisfaction with these quick hits of pleasure. Not always good for long-term but definitely feels wonderful for a few minutes. Same can be said for vices like smoking or drugs. People who do it report being satisfied in the moment and craving for it but they know that it’s not good for them long-term.

Many of us go through these types of quick interactions on a daily basis. The hours, days and sometimes weeks just get away from us and then we wonder why can’t we get around to doing the things that really need to get done and really matter to us long-term.

The switching cost

There’s a cost to this “context switching”. It’s kind of like when your car switches gears. In the automatic transmissions these days you can’t even tell but there’s an actual slowdown that happens after each gear is changed.

Once you’re going from one activity to the other activity, your mind has to reset the context. It decelerates from what it was doing and accelerates into a different topic then decelerates from that topic and accelerates into the other topic. All of that costs time but even more importantly it has an energy cost to it as well.

Then what should you do?

If you had turn off your phone or at least put it on do not disturb mode, you would have not seen any of those distracting pings. Would you have missed out on something time sensitive? Usually the possibility of that is very low. Would you have gotten more done with your article that you know is very important and must be done by tonight? The chances are high that yes you would have made measurable progress on your task.

Life is short. If we want to truly accomplish things in life that matter, it is worth it to slow down the chaos in our lives to be able to speed up progress on things that matter.