Doing Less

In my previous post, I talked about how Time cannot be really considered linear. In fact that is only an illusion to see it that way. What happens with our ingrained view of Linear time is we tend to cramp ourselves with things that we want to do. We keep doing things one after another at work and at home. If we don’t do anything we fall trap for endless social media scrolling or binge watching.

The only way we can start doing less is by starting to do nothing in between things to do. Is that possible ? Well, that is the biggest challenge of current times of information abundance and attention deficit. Do you remember the times when you watched the news for just 30 minutes everyday on TV. We may need to adopt similar mechanisms. Not everything needs to be read or seen or known. Pick a work, do it, do it till it is done, savour the satisfaction of doing it and then break. DO NOTHING for a while before taking up another.

Would you keep eating something continously for the whole day, every minute ? That would risk your stomach, organs and the whole body. Why do we not give the same consideration for the mind. Because we do not know the boundary and shape of the mind, it doesn’t mean we can keep putting junk in it forever in our waking hours. Contemplate, observe and erase the stuff that is not needed. This is like giving bath to the mind. Some call it meditation but whatever.

Now apply the samething at work, for yourself and for your Teams. Limit the Work in Progress as they say in Agile. This will have a profound impact on our productivity and progress as we give more focus on what we need to do. We focus by doing less and getting that done. We focus on Doing Less that gets us the big hit, the 80–20 rule. If you need, write down your thematic for the day, that this is the one work that I am going to focus on 360 deg, no matter what and chase down everything on this one work tooth and nail till the end.

You will get a good night sleep by Doing Less.