Some recent personal experiences pulled me completely off track.
A silly church - politics spat blew my
deadlines and wasted valuable time and energy. It made me think hard again on
how we deal with such issues and stay productive. While we can’t run away from situations, it is
important how we tackle them effectively.
Prayer and meditation are strong tools to avoid distraction
and stress (my wife is a big
advocate on this). I always have the intent, but fail many a time. One old
theory on the topic is that meditation is just like exercise: it trains the brain as if gray
matter were a bundle of muscles. You work those muscles and they get stronger. And
the results are clear: it's not wanting to meditate but actually meditating
that improves your brain's performance. So next time, we blame on meditation,
please look inward and ask the question; have we done our part correctly?
Yet another way to deal with the situation is avoid multi-tasking.
While multitasking may seem to be saving time, psychologists, neuroscientists
and others are finding that it can put us under a great deal of stress and
actually make us less efficient. Studies by David E. Meyer, a professor of
psychology at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues found that for all
types of tasks, the participants lost time when they had to move back and forth
from one undertaking to another, and that it took significantly longer to
switch between the more complicated tasks. In a 2005 Harvard Business Review
article, Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart
People Underperform, Dr. Hallowell wrote that attention deficit trait
“springs entirely from the environment”. “As
our minds fill with noise — feckless synaptic events signifying nothing — the
brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and gradually to anything,”
he wrote.
Can we manage our situation and stay focused? The answer is,
yes. For that, we need to “recreate our boundaries” and “train our mind”. That
means not looking at your messages every 20 seconds, switching off the
cellphones in meetings, and not looking at your emails while talking over the
phone. Sleeping less to do more is a bad strategy. We are efficient only when
we sleep enough, eat right, exercise, and meditate. Focus on single tasking and
avoid distractions. Finally, the result depends on how sincere you are with
yourself.
See you next week!
2 comments:
Dear Saju,
I have been following your weekly messages. It is quite thought provocking and good. One point on multi tasking in todays article is quite relevant. These days in an attempt to develop a lean structure, companies tend to look for man power reationalisation and eventually multi tasking is resorted to. Though sucess in the same has been acclaimed, more ofen the man tends to break down due to reasons given by you.
Dear RS, thanks for your sharing. We miss all the charm in life when we aplit our time for multiple things in a given point. In retrospect I realise that I could not give quality time to my kids because I was too busy with too many things!
Thanks again for the encouragement!
Post a Comment