Krishna Rao

Category: Productivity

  • Intention and Expectation

    Every action has an associated intention and expectation.

    Sometimes intention and expectation are articulated by our minds. We know why we are taking an action and what we expect from it. But often, they are not. This may not always be a problem. However, if you find yourself struggling to act, it might be because your intention or expectation is focused on the result and not the process.

    A well-formed intention helps bring greater meaning to action. It might even make it more enjoyable. Expectation, on the other hand, is a speculation. It is best tamped down.  

  • A better way to make New You plans

    A better way to make New You plans

    Change is in the air as it usually does when the calendar flips and we enter a new year. You sense new possibilities. Hope is renewed. You are excited by your plans to build the New You. Yet, you sense there is a tiny bug creeping about in New Hopeland. You don’t see it. Not immediately anyway. But you are familiar with the bug. It has upended many a plan to reinvent the self.

    The disillusionment begins really on the first day you get back to office and face the same old soul-crushing work you thought you’d left behind on December 24th. Because, come on, who really works full steam between Christmas and New Year? Anyway, back to January 2nd or 3rd, and we are living through the same old meetings, unreasonable client demands, and work that had to happen ‘yesterday’.

    Your New You plans are consigned to the corner of the bookshelf you’re too busy to organise. They join the New You plans from last year, the one before that, the one before that… you get the idea. 

    After going through this cycle for at least half a dozen times, I wondered if there is a way to break out of this cycle.

    The first question we can ask ourselves is, ‘Is our plan actually good?’. There’s no point in relying on our feelings at this stage. Because making the plans always feels good. “You get to experience all the excitement of becoming an entirely different person, without having yet had to put in the effort – and without having failed,” writes Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, in a recent column for The Guardian.  

    But pretty soon the plans will run into the headwinds of reality. 

    The first problem I face is forgetting. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve started and then simply forgotten about a creative project. Or the organic salad dressing with zero preservatives that has been used only once and now lies forgotten in the corner of the refrigerator.

    Then there is the matter of difficulty. It does not feel good to write a story, practice notes on the guitar, or lift weights. The fact that it does not feel good is surprising. But more importantly as with most things that don’t feel good, your mind’s default response is to try and avoid them altogether. 

    And what’s the best way to avoid the new behaviour patterns you are trying to adopt? By falling back on your existing behaviour patterns which are incompatible with the goals you set out to achieve. 

    The result: Creating the New You turns out to be quite the time and effort hog. Something the planning-you is simply blind to. Or as Burkeman puts it, “Schemes for constructing a New You are inevitably devised by the Old You, who has some pretty glaring issues.”

    Burkeman recommends that we make a “wholehearted committment to acceptance”. This may seem like an excuse for mediocrity. But there is a counterintuitive psychology at play here. “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” says psychotherapist Carl Rogers.

    ‘Acceptance’ works to neutralise ‘Perfectionism’, which is judgemental and clouds our view of ourselves and the situation we are in. Perfectionism also hates the messiness of reality – like the organic salad dressing which has turned a different colour. On the other hand, ‘Acceptance’ gives us a clearer view and the courage to step into the mess. It provides us with the belief that we can change our imperfect selves – however imperfectly.

    Time to buy a fresh bottle of salad dressing. After all, it’s the New Year!

  • Why I set Yearly Themes instead of Yearly Resolutions

    It’s January 2nd. The hangover has petered down into a mild headache. Declarations of “Never again” have been made. It’s time to turn the not-so-bleary-anymore eye to what lies ahead and make some New Year Resolutions. 

    While New Year Resolutions are routinely ridiculed because of their high failure rate, in a recent newsletter, author David Epstein wrote about why they are, in fact, a great idea. “Rather than perceiving our lives as a continuous river of time, we construct our inner autobiographies more like a staircase, punctuated by important dates, dramatic events, and first experiences,” writes Epstein. 

    While a 2007 survey showed that 80 per cent of New Year Resolutions failed, Epstein points out that it is pretty incredible that 20 per cent of people made a change thanks to the so-called arbitrary act of setting a goal as the calendar switched to a New Year. 

    My own experience with New Year Resolutions puts me among the 80 per cent. If I had succeeded, then by now, I would’ve regularly run half-marathons, wrote books (fiction and non-fiction), contributed to prestigious publications, went on treks to the Himalayas once a year, have an incredible bank balance due to astute investments, and check on ‘Slim Fit’ while looking for shirts online. 

    However, the failure to stick to resolutions is only part of the problem. The more insidious issue is that by failing at them repeatedly, I had come to believe that I’m just not capable of sticking to New Year Resolutions, which represent some of the most meaningful ways in which I want to shape my life. So, I either did not take them seriously – “Oh, I’m anyway going to fail” – or was in a state of constant anxiety – “Oh my god, is this day I finally fall off the bandwagon!”  

    Enter Yearly Themes 

    A couple of years ago, on an episode of Cortex – a monthly podcast by CGP Grey and Mike Hurley – I heard about Yearly Themes. Like me, the podcast hosts had been disillusioned by New Year Resolutions. They proposed an alternative: Set Yearly Themes instead of Resolutions. (Check out Grey’s video on Yearly Themes.) 

    As the name suggests, ‘themes’ are fuzzier than ‘resolutions’. They represent the change you want to bring about in your life – without defining specific goals. As Grey puts it, “Instead of saying I am going to lose X pounds by next year or saying I am going to read one book a week at least, a theme would be something like ‘A Year of Reading’ or ‘A Year of Health’. Now, if that sounds broad, that’s the point.” 

    Let’s say you set a goal to lose 10 kg in 2022. You dive deep. You set monthly weight-loss targets. You figure out how many minutes you need to exercise or your calorie input for each day. Then, you get going in January. In February, a huge project comes along. You are working harder. You don’t have the time to exercise an hour a day for the next few weeks. You don’t exercise for a week, then another, and then another. You’ve missed February’s target. The subliminal message is that you’re going to miss December’s target as well. The goal appears to be getting tougher and more challenging, and your motivation drops. 

    Instead, a Yearly Theme like ‘A Year of Health’ is more adaptable. Don’t have time to exercise for an hour? How about 15 minutes? Not even that? Maybe, you can park the car a bit farther away from the office and log more steps. Maybe, you can skip the whipped cream on top of that cold coffee. As long as you can keep the theme in mind (which is essential), you can figure out alternative ways – big and small – to stay healthy. 

    Themes also encourage us to think about our systems – the things we do regularly – rather than goals – the things we achieve. As Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, puts it, “The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.”  

    And the direction is what ultimately matters. “When you are trying to build a better version of yourself, exact data points do not matter. All that matters is the trend line,” says Grey. 

    My Yearly Themes

    This brings me to my Yearly Themes. In 2021, I adopted two themes. 

    1) The Year of Small Actions

    This helped me in countless ways. I faced some challenging personal issues this year. I don’t think I could have created or exercised as much as I did without thinking in terms of ‘Small Actions’. I walked wherever I could. I worked in small pockets of time. I made 5-minute phone calls to stay in touch with loved ones. I don’t think I achieved any grand results. But I have changed a bit for the better – and that matters.  

    2) The Year of Measurement

    My focus on the second theme has helped me get into the habit of tracking my time in my work life. This has motivated me to work on my independent projects, where I don’t have a team, clients, or deadlines to provide any structure. I also wanted to track my habits. I failed at it – but that’s something I want to work on in 2022.  

    My new theme for the coming year is – drumroll – The Year of Satisfaction.  

    In 2021, I consumed content and contemplated the idea of happiness. Based on this, I have come up with a hypothesis:

    When I say I want to be “happy”, I truly mean that I don’t want to feel dissatisfied. (This is not true in every situation. But it is true in many if not most situations.)

    Satisfaction can be cultivated. That is, I can learn to be more satisfied, no matter what situation I find myself in.

    If I believe that putting in the work (any work) will bring satisfaction despite the results, then I will be more motivated to put in the work.  

    I do have a specific goal to cultivate satisfaction. I want to journal regularly this year, noting what work I put in each day and how that brought satisfaction to me. However, this could also take less concrete or different forms – like taking the time to feel satisfied after I have gone out for a walk or read a few pages from a book each day. 

    And that kind of adaptability is the point of having Yearly Themes. As CGP Grey puts it, “Having a theme is like creating a friendly bot to follow you on a path, to help notice branches and consider choices with you, reminding you to be a little different in little moments sometimes.” 

    Do check out his excellent video on the topic. You can also listen to Grey and Mike’s Yearly Themes for 2022 here.