On Productivity, Homeostasis and Literary Musings
Three pieces that I found interesting from the last couple of weeks of reading:
Stumbled across this interesting study which claims that the body can be tricked into losing weight. More specifically, the study was conducted on overweight adults who were made to wear weighted garments for few weeks and as a result ‘dropped pounds, without consciously changing their diet, moving more, or otherwise altering their lives’. The reason, the study claims, is that our bodies are smart enough to judge how much we should weigh, and any sudden shift would cause it to readjust to the original level (the underlying speculation here is that our bodies contain a graviostat). So if you trick the body to think that it weighs more than it should (i.e. via wearing weighted clothes), it will shed this additional weight. This concept is referred to as homeostasis. Same is true, by the way, if you lose large amount of weight too. In such a scenario, the brain will ‘recognise the loss and start sending out messages that increase hunger or prompt us to move less until, inexorably, that original weight creeps back on’. If further studies back this claim, we shouldn’t be surprised to see weighted vests as yet another health accessory that will start showing up in fitness apparel stores.
Also, read this study in HBR on what makes some people more productive than others. It’s not a controlled study, but an outcome of a long range self-assessment survey conducted with roughly twenty-thousand participants by HBR. However, there were still a few broad-brush takeaways, for example, working long hours do not necessarily make you more productive. My favourite one though is that the older and more senior professionals are generally more productive than their junior colleagues. This is not a counterintuitive finding at all. However, I was interested to understand what habits/actions do we end up cultivating as we become — for lack of a better word — more ‘senior’? The article delves into these habits, and I will highlight only a few that I personally need to work more on. Over the years, I have worked on making my meetings shorter and to the point. But this certainly requires further work. Moreover, I struggle with not checking messages constantly and that’s yet another area to improve. Read the article to browse through other habits and techniques, and though the article doesn’t dive deeply into any single one of them, it still serves as a good primer.
I came across this fantastic site — BrainPickings — littered with literary musings. And if you are searching for a good piece to start with, then try this one on John McPhee (whose Draft No. 4 makes for an essential read if you want to improve your non-fiction/essay writing skills). From this other piece, I am taking away one habit — of maintaining a diary — to help improve my writing, to have an accountability tool, and to have a placeholder for registering all my writing-related self-doubts.
A quote that I came across:
Study as if you know nothing. Work as if you can solve everything.
