Being Planned

I had recently heard the podcast of Robin Sharma author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari and The Leader Who Had No Title, a successful Canadian lawyer, a brat in his days and now super popular among geeks trying to build their business or achieve super productivity. You can listen to the full hour-long video below. I was walking just like any other day and deeply drenched into thoughts of my own life, I tuned into Robin Sharma’s interview. For background, my friend Sushant has given me some hard feedbacks a while back (check out my previous blog) and that was also one of the reasons I was unsettled right now with the other reason being improving my productivity in life or at work.

Robin Sharma goes on to elaborate that thoughts beyond these three things cause worries inside our head, which I kind of agree.

Out of several good things that Robin says, he points out the importance of being healthy, staying lean and exercising every morning. This validates and motivates me for my efforts towards doing so. I am drinking hot water and have decided to do brisk walking and jogging every day. I am also very minimalist in my desires and it felt really good to know about this:

Mahatma Gandhi, Mandella, Mother Teresa all had very little possessions - Robin Sharma

At work, everyone posts their weekly Top of the Mind. I have observed that senior leaders do not give very concrete TOTM but very higher-level problem areas like improve messenger adoption, identify problem areas, unlike me who preferred to post very small tasks like making a post on problem XYZ. I realized that I made this simple task unnecessarily complex and instead of being open towards others suggestions on my focus problems, I pushed out others unknowingly by posting super concrete tasks (masking out the problems itself) which probably would not interest others to contribute their ideas to. This was a simple example of being more open - as highlighted in my previous blog. I realized that I was hiding much more than I possess.

Next few things were startling for me when Robin says that we lack productivity because we lack concentration and lose focus. We get distracted and we lose our creativity in the garb of thoughts and we do not finish the tiny things which we could have achieved by the end of the day. In his own words, if we finish five simplest tasks for a day and do it over and over again, we can reach unlock new milestones in our life.

Distraction is the path to destruction - Robin Sharma

I cannot stop but link back to Robin Sharma’s point to finish accomplishments with a daily cadence. If we do not enjoy our daily tasks and get easily distracted into other small things probably we will never be able to achieve much towards our goals in the first place. We need to be focused on our goals and constantly work towards achieving them. For a start, I will invest my time and energy towards this practice - especially when working towards conversational commerce and collaborative ads at Facebook - the two key projects for me in this half.

As the first step, I will a post much higher level info about my daily work life and try to involve others into my discussion and thoughts. I know that I can do better and I am not super reserved or closed to others thoughts. I honestly feel way more confident and focused on atleast this first step towards productivity.