A Quick Reflection on having a Happy, Active and Productive Day
By: Sharwari Kulkarni
Tags: Covid Diaries, Productivity, Beyourself, Entrepreneurship, Life Lessons

#MyHomeIsolationDiary #randomthoughts #RandomCovidDiary

I completely forgot about being in the home isolation today. No no, I didn’t cross the Lakshman Rekha and go out of the room but on this day, I was back in action. I am feeling better now and have started working with full enthusiasm after a while. So today, my randomness instincts got triggered to reflect on a few important topics on life and work and figure out what makes an ‘active and full of life in isolation’:

First comes life:

Here’s what I reflected today after 6 days of isolation and reading ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’: a little book comprising of the philosophy of life:

Being Active: We sometimes undervalue our state of mind. When the mind is calm and happy, we don’t get burdened about things that pull us down. We eventually do what we need to. It’s only our mental state that has the ability to make or break our life. Morrie was active till the end keeping his mindset positive even if he was physically dependent on others.

Health: I shouldn’t be talking about this because I have done enough mistakes related to this area. But I can just say that I have lost a number of working days because of poor health and repeatedly a phase used to come where I needed to take health breaks. Learned it hard way. Morrie didn’t let his physical condition come in the way of being active.

Work: That’s my passion, my dedication and everything that defines me but it’s a process, a long long journey with no specific destination. Enjoy the ride till you are on the way. That’s my randomgyaan and not Morrie’s. Morrie says it is important but it’s not the only thing in the world. It is important to have a life apart from your work. I wonder why everyone used to tell me the exact same thing!

Money: I don’t have enough at the moment but that’s okay. That’s where the entrepreneurial spirit comes. I see so many people around me worried about this one thing even if they have ample savings and a background where they don’t need to care about money. But the world run behind money in the way that there is nothing else in the world. Thankfully, Morrie and I are in agreement on this :-P Oh but that doesn’t mean I will work for free. Hell no, costs are attached to everything.

Death: Since I don’t have enough experience on this, I will let Morrie do the talking: He says, once we learn how to die, once we acknowledge the fact that we will die one day, we learn to live. It’s not about making peace with the idea of death but it’s about making peace with living life. Heavy, I know!

Family: People whom we can rely on. Without having them around life is miserable and then things will not be manageable. When Morrie was dealing with his deadly condition, he said he wouldn’t have the courage of fighting it if he didn’t have his family around.

Emotions: Earlier I used to feel intense emotions that I was unable to manage at that time. Nowadays, I am mostly with a ‘no big deal attitude’. I wonder where my emotions are gone! Anyways, I learned about self-awareness (HBR’s book in emotional intelligence is a good start to understand this), self-management and emotional intelligence 2 years back. Being emotionally intelligent is recognising your emotion and saying that’s okay, let me live this emotion and move forward. Morrie in the book literally lived all possible emotions and became intelligent to the level that he made peace with all the emotions. I think that was his superpower.

Morrie in the book talks about many more things like Marriage, Culture, Relationships, Regrets, Forgiveness etc. If you haven’t yet read the book and wondering who is this man, then let me tell you that. Mitch Albom, the author of ‘Tuesday’s with Morrie’ book has shared life lessons on these topics in the book. His professor, Morrie Schwartz, was a professor of sociology. He had researched a lot on social psychology. In the book, he was a subject who shared his perspectives as he was dying soon because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). So an old man is sharing his wisdom with the young man who is doesn’t know how to show his emotions, who prioritises his work all the time, doesn’t care much about emotions, family, and human values. Morrie helps to open his mind, soften his approach towards life with his wisdom.

The book shares important lessons but I felt that most of us already know them. The only thing which we don’t know is how to apply them in life. Morrie doesn’t tell us how to live his lessons. But yes, it is worth reading for sure. A short and impactful read it is.

Having a happy and active day has a lot to do with how we think about our life. The question we need to ask ourselves is “Am I only existing or living in the true sense?”

So these were some of the learnings from the world of philosophy. Now, let’s analyse this happy and active day from the point of self-help and productivity.

Let’s talk about the work now:

Coming back to having a productive, active and fruitful day, after experimenting with different productivity techniques and consuming a lot of gyaan on the internet on it, I figured out the following after a month of practice:

To-do list is total Crap: Having 30 items on To-do doesn’t serve any purpose. An efficient way of looking at it is having the ‘milestones’ of the day. 3–4 milestones are good enough for a day if you REALLY complete them. Focused work: No distraction zone is important. Yes! Turning off notifications really help. No meeting times help. And also, focusing just for 3–4 hours is fine than dragging things the whole day. Eat that frog: I had read this book long back when I was in college. It was useless then but now, I am applying whatever I remember from that. Complete the thing which bothers you the most first. Deadlines: Keeping them short helps. Because we tend to expand work if we have more time. Hence, better to challenge yourself with deadlines. Thinking time in 10–15 min chunks: We often set up things for half n hour or one hour but actually, 10–15 min intervals are good enough for completing few tasks, reading a book or learning a new skill. I am not there yet but trying. Note-taking: Can’t emphasize more how important it is. I used to store everything in my brain and then forget a few things. I am actually feeling like having more headspace now since the time I have started taking notes and noting down ideas, points of discussion etc.

So these were the learnings from psychology or rather the self-help side of things that go behind a happy, productive and active day. Philosophy is the way we think about our life and psychology is how we perceive and respond to it. For designing life, I think both are important when it comes to having a holistic perspective of life. But I would say when you really want to create a difference in life, immediate action is needed on the psychology front. There is a lot of actionable, practical wisdom lying in amazing books. Utilising 1% of which will change our life completely.

I am a beginner in both these topics: Life lessons and Productivity. But the beginner’s mindset is helping me to gather as many things as I can. Beginner’s mindset offers us a child-like curiosity and helps us to learn new things faster. Doesn’t matter what you do, embrace being a beginner. We can’t be experts in each and everything but our life and work are the two journeys we are taking so let’s enjoy them till they last!

Do let me know what do you think about the book I discussed. Share your reflections in the comment section if you have read it. Also, share your top productivity hacks and how you manage your day effectively. If you have tried any then tell me how they made a difference in your life.

Tonight, I am leaving you with the link to books ‘ Tuesdays with Morrie’ for life and ‘Eat that Frog’ for work. Happy reading!

#reflection #dailymotivation #thinkandreflect #OpenJournal #growthmindset #motivation #randomgyaan #randomrealisation