Breath, Time Confetti and To-Do Lists
Three interesting articles that I came across last week:
A very timely piece has come in the Harvard Business Review on how effective breathing techniques can be in reducing stress. How much of us actually think about breathing consciously and correctly? At least, I wasn’t thinking about it, till a few years back. This piece makes for a good reminder on how simple breathing techniques could be effective in combating stress, improving sleep and building resilience. All in all, there are four major sources of energy: food, sleep, breath and a calm mind. While we all know about food as a source of energy, and tons of recent research is being done on sleep (if you need a starting point here, refer to the excellent book Why We Sleep, about which I have written here), we rarely talk about breath. Well, that seems to be changing now. Recently, science writer James Nestor came out with a book on this topic (Breath), and now this article summarizes the latest research in the field. The centerpiece of this research, that was conducted at Yale university, is that while our breath pattern changes depending on the emotions we are experiencing, it’s possible to do the opposite also! That is, we can change our state of mind by simply changing the rhythm of our breath — long inhalation, for instance, would make us calmer in stressful situations. One of the effective breathing exercises mentioned in it is the SKY Breath Meditation. According to the article “we found that the participants who practiced SKY Breath Meditation experienced the greatest mental health, social connectedness, positive emotions, stress levels, depression, and mindfulness benefits”. I have been practicing this technique for the last ten years and it has certainly been my go-to tool while managing stress. I highly recommend reading this story.
This story, another one which I found extremely useful, elaborates the concept of ‘time confetti’. Perhaps we do not realize it but what happens more often than not is that we are not getting uninterrupted time for leisure. Think of the last time when you had an hour free to yourself. What was the first thing that you did? In my case, at such instances, I would usually pick up the phone and browse the latest news. Or, I would reply to some pending messages. And then, an email would arrive. I would convince myself that it would take only a few seconds to reply. And so my my leisure hour would break into several pieces of disconnected tasks. Even in the gym, the phone would remain with me and between exercises I would sneak into my mailbox. I am not proud of this behavior and a couple of checks that I have put in place include not checking my phone for the first and last hour of the day. Those are the hours that I invest in practicing the SKY breathing technique and meditation. However, so far I had not thought deeply about the remaining hours, especially the ones reserved for leisure. Ashley Whillans in this article beautifully describes how our time gets segregated into smaller chunks (hence the term ‘time confetti’), and when you see the analysis she has shown in the figures embedded in the story, it will become apparent to you too. So, the big question is what to do about it. Her recommendation is to follow the same principle as Cal Newport’s Deep Work (which I wrote about here), i.e. schedule your free hours just like you would schedule time slots for deep meaningful work. And, put your phone on flight mode when you are in these slots. This is surely a technique I will experiment with in the coming days.
And finally, I recommend reading this interview of Nir Eyal on why to-do lists are a productivity killer. Yes, you would haven’t thought so. ‘It’s not that keeping a list of things that you need to get done is a bad idea. It’s the fact that people run their days on their to-do lists. That’s what’s very harmful,” says Eyal in the interview. Why so? Eyal thinks that ‘to-do lists are nothing but another avoidance strategy’, i.e., putting a complex task on the to-do list would at times mean postponing it as there would be a tendency to pick the less complex tasks (‘reply to emails’) and cross them off the list, while pushing the unfinished ones to the next day. I can see Eyal’s point, however, I am not completely convinced. My version of the to-do list is that it’s a repository of the tasks that I need to do on that day and cannot be pushed to another. The tasks for other days, I simply schedule in the calendar.
A quote that I came across last week:
Get the strategy right, then implement small changes, repeated with persistence and generosity
— James Clear
