Category: Productivity
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What I learnt from writing 30 articles in 30 days
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Over the past few years I’ve had many failed attempts at building a regular habit of writing. This current experiment which started on September 8 has been a bit more fruitful so far. I have been writing an article a day for the past 30 weekdays (including Saturday as a weekday). The average number of…
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Are we using too many apps without thinking about the consequences
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For a number of years now I have heard arguments and debates about technology. Is TV good or bad? Is the Internet good or bad? And for the longest time I had assumed that technology was neutral. It was a tool. And you could use the tool for constructive or for destructive purposes. However, as…
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The Tools we use and how they shape us
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Neil Postman in 1985 wrote that Television had changed the public discourse of the USA. Whereas for the past many years the culture of the country was shaped by written literature, ever since the Television came people began to think in terms of meaningless images rather than thinking in terms of propositions and arguments. I…
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Environments that foster creativity
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I recently started reading the book, “Flow and the Psychology of Creativity” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. One of the lines I found really interesting was this: It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively. This comes in the context of constantly coming across…
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Don’t Chase After Happiness
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An interesting fact of life is that one rarely finds happiness by looking for it. I’ve been coming across this idea in many different places – a couple of books, a YouTube video and an article I read today. Although the sources present the idea in different contexts, they all contain the same idea. Let…
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Why you need to take breaks
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We all know that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Interestingly, it also makes Jack generally bad at his work – or studies if he is a student. A number of articles have been written about how the pandemic and Work-from-home has made many of us into 24/7 employees. But what…
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Become the architect of your own life
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The title for today’s blog post comes from a line in the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. He is speaking about the powerful effect that environment has on behaviour. In fact, Clear argues that environment is often a better predictor of behaviour than motivation. (page 86) If that is indeed the case, how do…
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Opportunity Cost and the Finitude of Each day
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A few days ago I read an excellent article titled “Hundreds of ways to get (stuff) done and we still don’t” by Clive Thompson on Wired. I may have censored the title a bit. 😛 Thompson talks about the huge number of apps that exist today to enable us to manage our tasks. And yet,…
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Read 15 minutes a day
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One of my favourite authors of recent times has been John Piper. In one of his books (I don’t remember which), he talks about the habit of reading. To be more specific he addresses a challenge that many people who do not habitually read face. Reading is a skill that can be developed Many people…
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Parkinson’s Law and some strategies to deal with it
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Writing a blog post a day has not been easy and I have technically already failed (since it is past 12). And so this is just a continuation of a post from two days ago where I spoke about how I submitted assignments on time for the first time. Parkinson’s Law is essentially a theory…