GTD Lists versus Values Lists

Any piece that screams about how to be insanely more productive or some such thing always got my attention. I have a hypothesis on why.

Now that the mid-forties have kicked in, between a paunch, career dilemmas, early signs of chronic diseases and the onset of common sense, panic has crept in.

A voice often asks: How could you possibly have been so irresponsible in your earlier decades? I guess this is what they call a midlife crisis.

One of the first things I did to course-correct was create lists of all kinds, to embrace the Getting Things Done (GTD) way of life. What, after all, is life without a plan? These lists, most literature has it, turn people into super-efficient creatures.

But after much tinkering with GTD tools and observing of how others use them, I’m convinced it isn’t worth it. This, because people are of four types. 

Type 1: Those who make lists and get things done. The ideal way to be.

Type 2: Those who create lists and get some things done. An okay way to be.

Type 3: Those who create lists and get nothing done. A sub-optimal way to be.

Type 4: Those who don’t create lists and get everything done. A super way to be.

When I examined my logs over time, I realised I rarely behave like Type 1. I swing between Types 2 and 3. On asking around, it turned out most people are the same.

Everyone makes plans with the best intentions and their calendars look packed (what a satisfying feeling that is, isn’t it?). But asked how they feel at the end of the day, most people acknowledge that they haven’t done much — and have instead moved various tasks to other days. 

Why? Well, when panic sets in, we humans have a propensity to create narratives that console. For our own sakes, we must appear important to ourselves. So activities are lined up. But it is then inevitable that we walk into Activity Traps where we’re so preoccupied with ‘utilising’ our time that we lose sight of the purpose of our activity, and even fail to prioritise. 

GTD Lists are the worst kind of activity trap — they don’t even look or sound like one. A way around this is to embrace What Values Matter (WVM) Lists. 

Ask yourself, what are my core values? For me, work apart, these include staying healthy, nurturing my family and bonding with friends. When examined, I found that the time invested in these buckets was negligible. It is then naive to expect my body to stay strong, daughters to bond, or friends to stick around ten or twenty years from now. 

To make amends, over the last two months or so, I’ve been investing my mornings in strength-training. Every muscle aches. It’s the price of neglect. 

I’ve been trying to reach out to my daughters; they still think it awkward. While I was obsessing over GTD Lists focused on work, we forgot how to bond. When old friends are called, after pleasantries are exchanged, long silences follow. Relationships starve when not nurtured. 

But try I must. All good things take time.

This piece was originally published in Hindustan Times & all copyrights vest with HT Media

Creativity: Discipline or Insanity?

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Often times, I have wondered if creativity is a function of discipline or insanity. My personal experience is a conflicted one.

On the one hand, there are times when I think it a function of discipline. For instance, when I have managed to a good night's sleep, spent time in the mornings with myself thinking of what ought to be done and accomplished, gone on a long walk or run, taken downtime at scheduled intervals, end of the day, I find myself both productive and creative.

This is borne out by various research papers I stumble upon often times. Like this one for instance on the daily routines of creative geniuses. 

"Juan Ponce de León spent his life searching for the fountain of youth. I have spent mine searching for the ideal daily routine. But as years of color-coded paper calendars have given way to cloud-based scheduling apps, routine has continued to elude me; each day is a new day, as unpredictable as a ride on a rodeo bull and over seemingly as quickly.

Naturally, I was fascinated by the recent book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Author Mason Curry examines the schedules of 161 painters, writers, and composers, as well as philosophers, scientists, and other exceptional thinkers.

As I read, I became convinced that for these geniuses, a routine was more than a luxury — it was essential to their work. As Currey puts it, “A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.” And although the book itself is a delightful hodgepodge of trivia, not a how-to manual, I began to notice several common elements in the lives of the healthier geniuses (the ones who relied more on discipline than on, say, booze and Benzedrine) that allowed them to pursue the luxury of a productivity-enhancing routine."

Then, on the other hand, there is a school of thought that argues creativity (or genius if you will) is linked to insanity of a certain kind. The most recent paper I came across was pointed out to me by my friend Peter Griffin. It appeared on The Atlantic with a provocative headline Secrets of the Creative Genius.

Kurt Vonnegut

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)

While mental illness clearly runs in the Vonnegut family, so, I found, does creativity. Kurt’s father was a gifted architect, and his older brother Bernard was a talented physical chemist and inventor who possessed 28 patents. Mark is a writer, and both of Kurt’s daughters are visual artists. Kurt’s work, of course, needs no introduction. For many of my subjects from that first study—all writers associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—mental illness and creativity went hand in hand. This link is not surprising.

The archetype of the mad genius dates back to at least classical times, when Aristotle noted, “Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.” This pattern is a recurring theme in Shakespeare’s plays, such as when Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, observes, “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” John Dryden made a similar point in a heroic couplet: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

I quite liked one of the more compelling arguments in this piece. Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist.

Often times I find myself veering towards this school while at work on something that catches my attention. Nothing else matters then, except the task on hand. People around think of me as a dervish in full swirl. It is a theme around which AR Rahman and I had an interesting conversation. Is he insane? Most certainly not. Does he have quirks? Yes.

What am I to make of this? I don't have a clue.

How to disappear online

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Lifehacker is one of my favorites for the sheer number of productivity tips they come up with. This post, on how to disappear from all things online, is one I stumbled on a while ago. I don't know how practical it is. But it caught my attention because I quit Facebook very recently and articulated why on The Other View. 

This infographic was originally published on Lifehacker and the link to it is right here. May I suggest you bookmark this website?

The only problem with trying to access Lifehacker from India is that it gets redirected to www.lifehacker.co.in. I'd have much rather I had the option to choose between the original www.lifehacker.com and www.lifehacker.co.in. This whole idea of geoblocks and IP targeting gets my goat.

If it bothers you, I strongly recommend using a plugin called Hola. I use Chrome for most of my needs and this plugin sits well with it. Haven't tried it with the other browsers. But do give this a look.

How to stop giving a f**k what people think

I just came across this lovely piece on LifeHacker on how to stop worrying what people think of you and start living. For a while now, I've wondered at the incredible number of thoughts that flood my mind. This piece has it that on average, 50,000 thoughts creep into a human mind. That means, if the person were to think of you even 10 times a day, it's just 0.02 percent of everything on their mind. Takeaway? Just do what you have to do and stop giving a fuck what other people think