Can You Be Productive All The Time?

Dec 5, 2021 | 1 comment

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As we were returning from our hometown after Diwali, the fields seemed to stretch out forever (as one would expect from a road trip in northern India).

Looking at the fields my thoughts traced back to our fields back in our hometown. When we were still there, my Mumma had asked my grandmother why the fields weren’t looking as lush and healthy as they are shown to be.

She gave quite a sensible answer – They are lush, just not right now. The fields have just been harvested and are left fallow so that they regain their fertility and can yield just as much the next time around.

Looking at the fields for a whole lot of time (8 hours to be precise) just made me think about aimlessly.

I realized, “Heck when even the Earth can’t be productive 24x7x365, how and why do we expect ourselves to be on the run every second? Are we so much better than the complex system we live in?”

Brain-dump aside, the fields gave me a new perspective on life. You don’t have to be productive every second of your life. Just like how the Earth has downtime during which it is left fallow and given time to regain its fertility, you too need downtime to recharge your batteries and get ready for the next round of productivity.

When you try to be productive all the time, you are doing more harm than good. While you think you are being productive, it’s actually the opposite because working without a break decreases your efficiency.

Being on the go every second can cause you to drain out your energy and lead to burnout.

Simply put that time would be better utilized in the long term if you take a break instead of working.

That’s it for this time (I had to prepare for my exam so that’s all I could write about). Don’t worry though, next week I’ll continue a little more on this topic, so stay tuned😃

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Why This Kind of Appreciation Feels Better

Nov 28, 2021 | 0 comments

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Being appreciated by someone can easily be considered one of the best feelings in the world. But one kind of appreciation gives you more joy than the rest of it – it is when they appreciate you for your hard work instead of talent or intelligence.

And there’s even a reason behind why this kind of appreciation feels more delightful than the rest of them.

In 1998, Claudia M. Mueller and Carol S. Dweck conducted a study with 412 fifth graders.

They were divided into two groups and each group was given two tasks.

The first task given to the students was very easy.

Regardless of the outcome, the students were told that they did well. But here’s the catch.

The first group (we’ll call it group A) was praised based on their abilities. They were told they’re smart, talented, or gifted.

On the other hand, the students of the second group (group B) were praised for their hard work and were told that their efforts paid off.

After the first task, the students were presented with the second task. It consisted of 3 puzzles with different difficulty levels – easy, medium, and hard.

The results of the two groups were quite interesting and varying.

Group A spent most of their time doing the easy puzzles. They didn’t even want to try the medium or the hard puzzles. Overall, these students had a low level of motivation and did not find the challenges interesting.

At the same time, students of group B spent most of their time on the medium and hard puzzles and had a good time solving the challenges. They also showed higher levels of motivation.

This demonstrates the concept of locus of control.

Locus of control means the degree to which you believe you have control over your life.

Group A was told that their results were an outcome of their abilities, and hence they believed that their results were dependent on the abilities, that is to say, not under their control.

They had an external locus of control (things happen to you) and believed success and failures are due to luck and fate, thus not something that they can control. When they failed they said things like I am not smart enough or the puzzle is too hard.

Group B was told that they succeeded because they put in the effort and therefore they believed that they could accomplish tasks because of their efforts. They had an internal locus of control (you cause things) and believed that they could control their successes and failures. They believed their hard work allowed them to do better in their puzzles. When they were struggling, they said things like I didn’t work hard enough.

When we have an external locus of control, we believe that the outcome is controlled by external forces and thus we see no point in putting in efforts or even trying. When we blame things on something else, we have an external locus of control.

However, when we adopt an internal locus of control we believe have more control over our lives and are willing to make the efforts.

Therefore, the key to having motivation, even when the external factors are terrible (such as an ongoing pandemic), is having an internal locus of control. You have to believe that it’s up to you to be responsible for everything that happens in your life.

But how do we develop an internal locus of control?

Control comes from taking responsibility. When you start to take accountability for your life and acknowledge that you are responsible for whatever happens in your life, you take your life under your control.

Moreover, know why you are doing what you do. Having a reason that drives you is much more important than doing something for external factors. When you want something, no one else needs to push you to make effort. Find yourself something you really want and put in efforts like your life depends on it.

Recap for memory:

Locus of control is the degree to which you believe you have control over your life.
Adopting an internal locus of control gives you the motivation to make efforts.
Appreciate people for their efforts, not just their abilities.

P. S. Let me know if you’d like me to write about any topic and if you feel that this post was written with a hundred other things going in my mind, its because it was 🙂

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Leave With New Favorites, Not Regrets

Nov 21, 2021 | 0 comments

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Have you ever eaten at a buffet?

If you have, you would have probably experienced the wide range of emotions that flood you while at a buffet.

First, you are hit with the joy and excitement of seeing all the tempting dishes laid down before you. The aroma of the dishes is tantalizing and it feels like an invitation to your taste buds. The array of dishes sprawled before you feel like a winning lottery ticket.

You begin to serve yourself the lined up dishes starting from the very first till the one your plate can hold.

You leave for your table and after finishing the food on your plate, you decide to get second servings of the dishes you liked the best.

You move forward into the main course taking in things that seem good.

As you come back to your table for the second time, you eat the dishes, a bit slowly, yet steadily.

You stand up one last time for the desserts. Someone tells you there is ice cream, and you head towards your favorite flavor and get scoops of it.

Licking off the last of the ice cream, you feel it. You feel it in your stomach that you’re done and you stop.

Your hunger has been satisfied but your cravings haven’t.

Looking at others’ plates, you feel like you are missing out on a lot of dishes.

As you leave for your home, the regret (as well as the food) begins to settle in. Just then, your friend says, “The blueberry crumble was so good, wasn’t it?”

What?! There was blueberry crumble too?

Yep, there was. You were just too busy devouring your favorite ice cream.

The feeling of regret intensifies and you realize that all the food in the world cannot unshackle the regret of not having eaten the dishes from a specific buffet.

If you have been to a buffet, and you tell me that you have not experienced this, you are lying. I refuse to believe the fact that someone can go to a buffet and not come back regretting that they missed some dishes, or didn’t have enough of one.

Even though there is no way to avoid regrets completely, there sure are ways to minimize them.

I used to think whenever at a buffet, I should eat as fast as possible. But that’s not the smartest way because it chokes the food pipe, thus making you full faster. So it’s better to take your time and eat the food at your own pace.

The second thing you could do is, taking up small portions of each dish. This way, you’d be able to try everything and still be able to take the second servings of what you actually like.

You can even take small sips of water (not too much, you don’t wanna fill yourself up with water) and take short walks in between.

You thought this was only gonna be about regrets at the buffet? Well, think again cause your life is not much different than a buffet.

You have an array of experiences available to you, that you’re excited to try in the beginning (your childhood), but as you move towards the main course (as you grow older) somehow your enthusiasm for the dishes dulls. And by the time you’re done having all your food and your ice cream (old age), someone tells you about blueberry crumble that you never got to have.

Why didn’t you get to have it? Just because you were too busy eating the same things over and over.

You should try everything – even if in small portions – so that you know what you like and what you don’t. You may even find some new gems when exploring.

If you don’t try everything, you risk not knowing what’s good and what’s not.

So the next time you’re at a buffet or leading your life, take control of situations so that regret doesn’t overwhelm your future with its presence. Take small portions of each dish and explore new things to know if they’re as good as the ones you already know.

Don’t be the one that leaves the buffet with regrets and leave this life knowing what you like and enjoyed, not with what you missed.

Recap for memory:

At first, take small servings of everything.
Try everything at a buffet, and in life.
Leave with your new favorites, not regrets.

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Why You Should Not Try To Be Someone Else

Nov 14, 2021 | 4 comments

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Here’s a little life update no one asked for. Remember the story I had shared in one of my previous posts? (It’s a short story I had written as an entry for a magazine competition)

I had shared it on the blog because honestly, I didn’t hope for it to make it through.

My teachers had asked me to make some changes in it since they thought it to be a little too simple. They said it could have been a better story coming from me, and didn’t include the climax and adventure they were expecting.

I was a little taken aback by it initially, since I thought it was a nice sweet little tale (and obviously not because I don’t take negative feedback well).

Ultimately I made the decision to give it just enough edits so that I could say that I have changed it.

Besides, there were two major reasons that kept me from changing it a whole lot:

I felt that if I changed it the way my teachers wanted it (even though I understand their intentions and know they wanted the best for me), it would have lost its essence. It would no longer be mine.
Tearing down and then rebuilding the story would have taken up more time than I would have intended to devote to it.

As a conclusion, I told my teacher “I’d like to forward it as it is, and I’d rather focus on creating something than how it turns out.”

With that, the story was out of sight and out of mind.

And guess whose story made it through anyways? Yup, that’s right, mine did!

Okay I admit, that felt quite braggy.

But that is where my point lies.

There could be uncountable factors that led to the story getting selected. But I’d like to believe that the foremost reason it got selected was because I remained true to myself and that is what the judges ended up liking.

What’s even more important is the fact that even before I knew about the results, I was happy with myself and the story because I did not change it for anyone else. Regardless of whether it’d win or not, it was a winner for me.

That’s a few of the many things that happen when you stay true to yourself.

Here are a couple reasons to stay true to yourself and stick to what you believe in.

It Pays Off

As you saw my story (pun intended :D), I stuck to my original storyline and preserved it, because I knew changing it would mean changing its crux. I took this decision, despite knowing that it wouldn’t be my best shot and could technically decrease the chances for it to get selected. Yet, it payed off.

Frankly speaking, it might not pay off this explicitly everytime. I hadn’t even expected it to get selected, yet it did. Maybe sending it without any expectations had a part in it.

But one way or another, it will pay off. That’s for sure.

You’ll Be At Peace With Yourself

Sacrificing yourself rarely ever leads to happiness. In fact, you’ll be at peace with yourself only if you don’t change who you are just because others want you to. Because at the end of the day, staying true to yourself is what makes you happy! When you’ll go to bed at night, you’ll sleep a peaceful sleep knowing that people see the person you actually are.

Life Will Be Easier

When you choose to be yourself, you wouldn’t have to waste your time in figuring out how others want you to be and fretting over it.

There’s no need for an exhausting game of “how do I make them like me?” You can just be who you really want to be!

And you don’t have to work hard to impress everyone. You can just be yourself and let them like you for who you are, instead of desperately trying to change yourself and hoping they will too!

You will be able to devote more energy to bettering yourself, than changing yourself

When you try to change simply to please people, all the energy that goes into trying to be something you’re not takes away time and effort from your business.

When you stop trying to change yourself, that energy is freed up which can now be utilised for better things – better things such as transforming yourself in the person you want to be.

You would have more confidence than you would if you were trying to mold yourself according to every second person

You choose to be one personality and when you have that personality day after day, you become more confident, more certain of that. However, if your try and switch up your personality according to how every other person tells you to be you wouldn’t know how to act in different situations and thus wouldn’t have confidence in yourself.

You wouldn’t be able to know how to handle a situation if you constantly had to ask yourself, “What would they want me to do?”

Instead of constantly asking yourself what other people would say or do in a certain situation, just be yourself and work it out from there!

Recap for memory:

Being yourself pays off, one way or another.
It saves you energy and makes your life easier.
It gives your more confidence and peace of mind.

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Multitasking Isn’t as Great as It Seems

Nov 7, 2021 | 0 comments

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Multitasking is often rightly referred to as screwing up several things at once. After screwing up quite a few things (writing assignments in the wrong notebooks while taking classes at the same time, forgetting the boiling milk while talking to someone), I can vouch for the statement.

Multitasking, in fact, doesn’t exist. You can’t do multiple things at once, you can just switch back and forth from tasks.

This switching comes with a price, though. And the price doesn’t make your work faster or easier. In fact, the whole process will actually take you more time and energy.

For starters, switching from task to task causes your brain to shift the attention from the first task to the next and vice versa. This means that your brain would require more energy to process the task and get acclimatized to it.

Moreover, this switching takes extra time, apart from the time taken to do the work itself. This implies that the amount of work that you can do in a given time drops sharply since a considerable portion of it is diverted to the switching.

The switching also decreases the quality of your work because multitasking requires you to shift your mindset from one subject to another quite often. The switching also decreases the quality of your work because it’s hard to stay focused on one subject for an extended period.

Changing gears from studying physics to studying English could result in worsening your performance in both subjects. While physics will require you to think logically and analytically, English will need you to be creative and expressive.

And lastly, you will make mistakes in your work.

You may miss the subtleties of language while writing in English because you are used to thinking like a physicist. Similarly, you may miss a step in solving a physics problem because you were thinking about English problems instead.

As a result, you lose time and energy fixing the mistakes that you have made either from neglecting the subtleties of language or from jumping to conclusions.

In short, multitasking not only drains your brain’s resources, takes up your time but also decreases the quality of your work.

The first thing you can do to avoid multitasking is doing its opposite – single-tasking. Avoid doing multiple things at once by taking on one task, committing to it and finishing it before tackling the next.

You could try the Pomodoro technique where you focus on your task for short bursts of 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 minutes. It can even be modified as per personal preferences.

You should also consider creating a list of your tasks according to priority so that you know which task needs to be tackled first.

And finally, be prepared to say no to those things that come in the way of you and getting things done.

Recap for memory:

There’s no such thing as multitasking – just switching from one task to another rapidly.
When multitasking, you tend to make more errors, get less done and decrease the quality of your work.
You can avoid multitasking by setting up your priorities, focusing in short bursts and saying no to distractions.

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