Managing yourself

There is no denying that we are living online. And we are just about waking up to its fallout in our lives. The loneliness, the attack on privacy, the temptation and the habit of instant gratification. It’s all there. Ashesh Mukherjee, McGill University Associate Professor of Marketing, wrote one of the early insights into five noticeable trends that are shaping our lives – “too much temptation, too much information, too much customization, too many comparisons and too little privacy.” These costs come in two categories – commercial costs we pay as consumers in the form of overspending for instant gratification with very little actual value and social costs we are paying as individuals in terms of exposure to unverified opinions, fake news and increasing loss of privacy which will further erode as we integrate our lives with IOT devices. 

If you Google time management you will get a million results. Apparently a lot of people are searching for a way to manage time and a lot are writing about it. A lot revolves around a To Do list and thus ways of managing those. Some others talk of managing your energy and not time. Jeremiah Dillon, now head of Insights and Strategy at Google Cloud Marketing had a take that is easy to understand and apply. Think of yourself as a Maker and not a manager. According to him Managers typically divide their days in to 30 min chunks while the maker designs his work in half or full day chunks. Working without disruption is one of the most referred method for productive output. Deep Work by Cal Newport, the seminal book on working in a highly distracting world shows that shutting off the noise for prolonged period helps you think and do. The key in all this is an uninterrupted block of time that helps thoughts flow.