Selfless Service, Beating Procrastination and Digital Nomads

Feb 10

Feb 10 Selfless Service, Beating Procrastination and Digital Nomads

Here are three stories that stood out for me last week:

This story is as inspiring as it’s heartbreaking. It’s a story of two brothers who, in the hidden by-lanes of brimming Delhi, take care of mutilated birds. These birds are black kites — ordinary and nowhere close to extinction. However, they get tangled in sharp threads used for flying kites, a popular sport in India. These brothers heal them to heath where possible and feed them in cages kept at their home; the unlucky ones that have virtually no hope to survive are euthanised. For the longest time after reading the story, I wondered why would the brothers spend their meagre savings on these birds, and what do they get in return; not least a ‘thank you’ from those who survive. It’s the satisfaction of selfless service that propel them to do this, they say in the story. The heartbreaking bit is that they are running out of funds and may have to shut this shelter. If you wish to read about their work, here’s the link to their webpage.

Did you ever fancy leaving your work and city and travel all over the globe incessantly? At least I did. It’s a lifestyle choice that wasn’t even an option 20 years back. However, the rise of freelance work, coupled with the availability of fast internet in most cities, has made this lifestyle accessible to many. No wonder that co-working start-ups such as WeWork gained significant favour, for the timing was just right (it’s a different matter that the business model of WeWork was broken, but that’s a different story). It was time that a story comes that looks not only the positives but also digs into the limitations of such a lifestyle. This story in The Stylist takes a balanced view on the subject. Those interested in becoming a ‘digital nomad’ need not unplug themselves fully though. A first step could be asking for a more flexible schedule. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, believes flex-schedule is one of the key ingredients for happiness (he wrote about this in his book that I summarised here last week). However fancy it may sound, constant travel and shifting places comes with a set of drawbacks: “Travel fatigue, anxiety and depression, as well as stress-related symptoms, are very common among digital nomads…especially for digital nomads who start from scratch. If you’re starting a new lifestyle and a new business at the same time, it can be very hard,” said one of the digital nomads interviewed for the story. Read the story if you are toying with the idea of unhinging yourself from your work desk completely.

And finally, if you are struggling with smartphone addiction as many of us are, then here is a story that captures some of the ways you could leverage it to your advantage to fight procrastination. ‘…procrastination is on the rise. The fault partly lies with the endless supply of distractions we carry around in our smartphones, carefully targeted to our tastes,’ so begins the story, ‘all those beautiful AI algorithms are pushing the next most addictive thing it can think of in front of your nose. How could we do anything but procrastinate’. Interestingly, Alexander Rozental, a researcher at Karolinska Institutet, has developed a treatment for procrastination! You need to read the story to get the nuances, however broadly here are the key steps in the proposed treatment:

Revamp your goals to make them more specific and schedule them in your calendar proactively. Reward yourself when you achieve the task (for instance, I plan to do some mindless browsing after writing this newsletter).
Start small but start. I try this with learning Swedish, which I schedule for only 20 minutes every day. This is a little time investment and I combine this with a nice cup of tea so I end up enjoying the process. The limitation, of course, is that I need to find ways to trick my mind to read for longer than 20 minutes now (on at least some days).
Eliminate distractions. Easier said than done. But well I tried to do that by blocking my most frequented news-sites from my phone and if I need to browse them then I need to switch on my laptop…which is an effort…
Assess your values to understand the big why of why we are doing that task. Doing this helps if the motivation starts tapering down. For me, I remind myself that learning Swedish would enable me to integrate better and interact more with my colleagues. Usually this ambition nudges me to start.

Another useful insight that I took away from this story is that ‘the most important thing you can do to combat procrastination is to get enough sleep. “When your energy levels are down, your willpower is weak,”’. Fully agree and fully support and I wrote about it earlier in this piece.

Here is an interesting quote that I came across last week: