A Workout of Self-Perfection

It's very early in the morning and I happen to be up early, as I've been doing over the past 1 week. You see, I'm trying to regain my former practice of being early to bed and early to rise. I find the hours in the morning after a good night's sleep very conducive to work. The mind is at its sharpest and the quality of work produced is often the best.

Many people, yours truly included, has a habit of working late at night. That is understandable because that often is the only stretch of time when we are not disturbed by the phone or other human interactions. Quality work requires a concentrated mind and that is usually brought about by silence.

Work is very challenging in today's era of social media and the incessant bombardment of content from the internet. The very space where you are supposed to concentrate and work is also the gateway to a thousand and one distractions. At a click of a link, I can launch myself off to another trip of distractions, surfing from one gratification to another. To concentrate on what you are supposed to do requires a lot of discipline.

Many of the young claim that they can work or study better if they are listening to music or having the TV on in the background. "It's not so boring". "I can still study effectively". That's what they'll claim. But have they every wondered why they can't just work and study without all these distractions? If they could, wouldn't the session be a lot more effective and intense? Wouldn't the utilization of time be a lot more efficient?

It is true that, with the skillful application of a conducive work environment, one can get into the mood for work easier. Sometimes music helps simply because it drowns out other types of distractions. The music helps your mind to focus, and at the very least keeping you at your desk and putting your mind in a pleasant state. To me, that is only useful as a starting point. Just like sweeteners to hide the bitterness of medicine.

Having enticed the mind to start working, one then needs to get into the groove of work. That is often difficult because work is often dull--reports to write, bugs to troubleshoot and other repetitive chores to execute. A lot of our distractions are willing inducements to put off work. It's much more interesting to surf news sites or watch trailers of the latest movies.

This is when a good metaphor for work helps. I try not to think of work as something you have to do to make money. Work to me is an exercise in self-perfection. I don't work, I workout. Just like going to the gym to build up your fitness. Running on the treadmill can be a boring chore too if you are not motivated by the fact that you are getting slimmer and fitter and hence physically healthier and perhaps looking more attractive.

Work is often dull when you look at what you need to accomplish as a long and laborious project. Break up work into tiny chunks of tasks. All you have to do for the next hour is this tiny piece of exercise. It's an exercise that has a finite payoff--say a chapter of a report done or a diagram for a presentation drawn. Look at the task in isolation and not to be too bothered about the larger effort of fitting it into the rest of your work. When it is done, you are already closer to your end goal. Work gets finished simply because you are constantly moving in a forward direction through these tiny steps. That is the most important thing: moving forward and not sideways or backwards.

Breakup your work into a list of tiny tasks. Have the list somewhere you can easily reference. There's always one task that's easier or more fitting to the present mood you are in. Use that to start the engine. Once the engine is started, it simply has a tendency to continue moving.

The mind is like a distracted child. You need to give it the right inducement for it to follow your orders. When you know how to tame your monkey mind, you have an ally who could help you perform miracles. And that's what I try to do everyday. And the fact that I'm typing the last few sentences of my weekly blog post is testament to the effectiveness of my method. Any now, I'm enjoying the payoff of my task: clicking the 'Publish' button. And I'm off on another productive week!