Dear Readers , I know you're a bit curious about "How do I manage to constantly read books with a full-time job? " So, here are the tips
1) Tip 1 - Being aware of my three-part split of the day. This is based on the fact that throughout the day few things are guaranteed to be happening.
a) My energy levels will fall throughout the day;
b) Power of temptation will increase throughout the day. Dain Airley has defined this as the ability "after a long day, saying no to various & sundry temptations, our capacity to resist them diminishes.
The way I like to visualize this is having this huge pot of ability to resist temptation and every morning I start with a fresh pot. I am going to have less energy throughout the day and things are going to get more and more tempting throughout the day, so it's going to be much harder for me to resist things.
What I do here is that every single day the starting is reserved for the activities that are high energy & high temptation. These are the tasks that require a lot of brain power.
The second part of the day is reserved for the activities which require high energy because I am still buzzing at this point and also activities that require a little less resistance. So this could include my exercise regime or fun parts of studying.
The last part of my day is where I have the lowest energy and procrastination is easy. This is for my creative tasks, for things that I would like to spend my time on and do not particularly require a huge amount of energy.
2) Tip 2 -The "Mission Impossible" Rule - I am the sort of person who if I put something on my to-do list, I would want to and physically need to get it done. I will not sleep until I have ticked everything off. This used to be my behaviour in the past but I gradually realized that not only is this problematic, but, it is not even ideal for the tasks that I am doing.
3) Tip 3 - The PR Law - Both Parkinson & Roosevelt have concluded that work expands to fill the time that you allocate to it. So what this means is that if I say I am going to write my Article in three weeks, or three months or three days, very often the quality of the work is not going to be different in these three different forms. So, if you give yourself a very very strict and ridiculous deadline, sometimes you would end up doing a lot more than you expected.
4) Tip 4 - Fun factor -There is this quote by Daniel Priestley that good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not a life of arduous struggle. Some struggles definitely cannot be avoided but the struggles that we can avoid and the self-imposed kind of work that we need to do might be affecting us negatively in long term, so I have made it a rule to force myself to do activities that are fun either by myself or by other people every single week. I am the sort of person who can forget to socialize esp. when I get very very caught up in the work so I have to force myself to do this.
Thanks a lot, readers for your continuous response. I am Arunima Jha. If you want to read my Linkedin Feed, follow me on LinkedIn
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