The Productive Professional By Tanay Pratap, Dr. Satyendra Rai Published on www.wyzr.in Contents Preface: Read this first. 1. Introduction 2. Distraction 3. Procrastination 4. Physical Health 5. Teamwork 6. Manage Attention 7. Social Media ++ 8. Planning 9. Marathon learning 10. Subconscious programming Read this first. Too many of us oscillate between bouts of restlessness and lassitude. We are at once overwhelmed by the long list of things we want to achieve and the weight of it all pushing us into a haze of sleep, binging, lethargy, boredom. Do you see yourself reflected in this? Do you dislike being in either of these phases? If yes, then by picking this book, you've already completed the first few steps of recognizing the problem and resolving to tackle it. Now the question is about moving beyond them — a challenge that we must learn to overcome. Here's where I come in: I've noticed over some years that people are surprised at just how many things I am involved with and am getting done. It's one thing to be doing well and doing a lot at my job. The most common remark I have received, however, is about the work I get done outside my job. It's the initiatives and overall presence I have outside my office that astounds people. And I do get it; the "full-time" in full-time jobs is not to be taken lightly. I wish I could sell the idea that to be doing everything you want to do, you have to be haggard and impatient with the simple things in life. I wish so because it is easier to confirm your biases than for me to challenge them. Maybe we readily buy into this image because the long list of things we think we ought to do makes us feel like we need to be maniacs to achieve them. Or maybe we like to picture ourselves as another Alex Dunphy: a busybody who does not, rest does not have huge weekend plans and gets everything done. Maybe we believe it because that image itself tires us out of ever realistically attempting the long-list — and then commences the period of languishing. And round and round we go. But I am doing all the things I want to do, and I am sorry to tell you that I am healthy and happy. I am not stressed or grumpy or despairing about the things I want to achieve in the time life has given me. In challenging your biases, I know I have my work cut out for me. We have to undo the misconceptions that we hold onto, and I have to justify doing so each time. We have to then build another belief system, and I have to justify each step. In this all, I risk losing your audience because you may think that all this is easy for me to say, but hard for you to act on. You may dismiss this because you believe that to be productive the way we want to be, requires being an exceptional person. And that if I am productive, then I must have been exceptional. You may conclude that there is no use listening to me because you think you are not exceptional and nothing I say can apply to you. I want to reassure you that I am not an exceptional person. I was a mediocre student and I did not make it to a top-tier college. I had (and still have) my ups and downs. Failed math a couple of times, never had the perfect CGPA. So, I was never God's gift of perfection: I didn't excel at everything I tried. I say this because the second misconception many of us struggle with is the idea that to do remarkable things, you have to start from being an exceptional person. That you can't be an excellent writer without first having read all the classics in English literature (and then some!). That's just an absurd pre-requisite we build up in our heads. And this preconception inhibits us from even trying, from even starting. But the base-level student is never a clean slate, perfect to start from scratch. You start from wherever you are. Only your efforts will primarily determine the standard of your output. Efforts are effortful, and one thing I hope to minimize in your approach is wasted efforts. In using this book, I urge you to be patient with yourself. You cannot do everything at once. You cannot force behavioral changes in a day. So, do not try to deploy everything at once, because you will fail and you will be disheartened. This is a book about your mindset, about living each day better than the last, about rejecting linear progressions. In all of this, give yourself time. Introduction Reject the status quo I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, my mother urged me to "get serious" about studies by eighth grade. She tried to ensure it by prescribing that I spend "at least two hours at the desk every day." It is a curious but prevailing mentality to feel productive when you dedicate some pre-defined amount of time to work. It is imbibed in us early and carries through our whole life. Most people have 9-5 jobs, a time they are expected to spend productively. One can be particularly boastful of being productive when they complete a 100-hour week. Credit where credit's due, to all the mothers and teachers and workspaces because I understand that there is something to be gained by this. Firstly, it encourages routine and people often find that they benefit from it more than not. Secondly, it is an attempt to instill discipline early in (work)life by encouraging children and young employees to get into the habit of putting in the hours. Since most good work takes time, it makes sense to be trained to concentrate for long hours. A concerning offshoot of this, however, is to feel productive by merely putting time into it. Having spent countless hours at the desk and then, later in life, at the office, I am here to tell you that time is a poor measure of productivity. Being productive is important for us to feel like we are doing something meaningful, which is intricately linked to living a good and happy life. Beyond a point, it is detrimental to feel productive by recording the number of hours you spend doing something. One way that it can be detrimental is that we start to see the number of hours we put in as value in themselves and care less about what that time was spent for. Not only is that shift in focus vain, but it is also an unreliable means of charting your growth. When we start to measure something, we start to optimize it. The worry then is to measure the right things, which comes from having the right perspective. By measuring productivity by means of time, we are condemning ourselves to a small gear in a large clock that mindlessly, timelessly goes on. But current jobs are not about the hours, they are about what you are getting out of those hours. How to know you're on the right path Though I would not call myself a content creator, I understand that by virtue of doing what I do, I create content nonetheless. I prefer not to call myself that because I find it too wide a scope for what I am doing; that is, sharing my learnings, my story, any bit of myself that may be useful to people. Apart from sharing that slice of life, I have been proactive on the professional front. From regularly documenting my work on podcasts to now bi-weekly newsletters. Some of my podcasts have been featured on Radio Mirchi and Spotify. I am grateful for it because these platforms have shown me that thousands tune in to listen. I have penned down some research papers too. All of it has accorded me a few awards and granted me the international platform to some conferences in the last two years. My priority however remains to help the hundreds of students I am in touch with to find a suitable place for them in the ruthless job market. I have mentored countless students online. The only metric I go by is of all my students, how many of the freshers are getting a job. It has proved rather successful, one can check my social media platforms for the same. I recall having started with zero followers on Instagram, barely three hundred on Twitter, some odd thousand connections on LinkedIn, and absolutely zero on YouTube when I started my social media journey. Today I have lakhs of followers across all these platforms. This is all done by making use of the biggest and largest programming community India has that I proudly built on Discord and which is 17,000+ strong as of August 2021, and growing every day. A lot of my time is spent talking to students, answering their doubts, ensuring the community is useful for everyone and is welcoming to all. Last year, I decided to take it all up a notch and created a cohort-based course. I was fortunate for its popularity, especially given the pandemic. Its second installment in 2021 was a lot of fun too, with a tonne of students joining from the cohort at neoGcamp. We have geared up for the coming batch because the demand seems to have risen further. This side of the work from the last two years would please most of us, but I am also glad to have been on top of my full-time job at Microsoft. I did not allow myself to slack off or do the bare minimum there — I love the work too much. One way to avoid slipping is to never let yourself get too comfortable: I worked on different products, different teams, applied (and won!) the hackathons they organized. It has undoubtedly allowed me to apply myself creatively, Outlook (web and mobile) to React, and then React Native. Thankfully, the efforts were never overlooked. The more tangible benefits have been three promotions in two years, landing at the hard-to-come-by position of a Senior Software Engineer. If you're even a teensy bit surprised and curious about the bulk of it all, then I am happy to tell you it happened because of what I do regularly, and it is what I will talk about in this book. This is going to be my record of practical tips I have lived by that have worked for me. Now that you know some of its results, if you care for any of it for yourselves, then this is the book for you. In 2018, my family and I were driving to Rameshwaram for a vacation. I was riding shotgun and had the space to reflect on my work. I knew I was doing well at Microsoft, but I also knew that I was not unique for my work there. Then I started thinking about how I was using my time — where was all my time going? Could I be doing something more with the time I have? As I kept thinking, I knew this moment was going to prove pivotal for my life. I felt restless as I devised plans of optimizing my time to reach the goals I envisioned for myself. And I knew I was going to have to make some hard decisions. Changing yourself for the better is not easy, but the right mindset can make the change infinitely more sustainable. The point is to see these changes as part of your personality, and not just things that you do to become someone you want to be. An easy example of this is so many people's fight against sugar: it's easier to give up on sugar when you tell yourself that you're not the type of person who eats sugar, rather than tell yourself that you cannot eat this Kaju Katli because you don't want to gain that extra kg. The determination to meet your personality guides your actions and gives you results immediately. On that drive, I kept telling myself, "This isn't enough, I need to change. I need to get more out of my life, out of my daily routine". So, I started optimizing my day-to-day, and it is what has gone into this book: I started by recording my daily activities. I knew I would get this transcribed and later transformed into a book about productivity. As of right now, writing this introduction has been one of the last things to happen for it because everything that follows is very clear, very straightforward instructions about actual activities that happened to see my time optimized and my activities skyrocket. It worked for me. It might work for you. Just read it from someone's perspective of having tried and succeeded. Then ask yourself: Would this work for me? Let me try it out. That's what you're thinking should be around this book. No magic beans Output builds over years of experience. I stand by the fact that you will see immediate results when you start optimizing, but that is with respect to your initial stage. However, the output one aspires to is achieved over years of experience. Compared to what I anticipate a fresher's journey to be, the aspired output was easier for me to achieve because I had years of experience behind me, albeit unstructured. I mean to say that I have been a teacher and a mentor on and off since 2014, well before I decided I wanted to do it consistently and include it in my optimized lifestyle. I took the teaching online in 2019 and my previous experience allowed me to orient myself properly. Even with the optimization mindset, I would not have been able to achieve the kind of results I have, had I not had the years of mistakes and learnings before me. We have already covered the idea that dedicated time alone does not help achieve any success, but a slight variation also holds: cramming more hours cannot force out results. You're trying something new and you will have a mindset to guide it. Changes often demand learning curves, which means you will face some resistance in your path. The thing to avoid then is to force yourself through it and work yourself harder, hoping that that alone will pull you through. It's a bad strategy because you're burning yourself out, it is unlikely to work because results are not merely a product of your efforts, and the energy it takes from you and the failure that follows mixes to create the feeling of resentment. So, avoid this at all costs. When you meet with resistance, the thing to do is to shift your focus from the result to the method — find something in the process that makes you happy. Channel that happiness into maintaining a routine to continue working. As you keep on working, you will give yourself time. And you will eventually pull through the learning curve. For me, the pull is in mentoring students and introducing them into the market of tech. The thought of being useful in that manner is all the motivation I need to create YouTube videos, Insta reels, and tweets. It couldn't have been anything else, because my modest background compels me to realize how important education and well-informed mentoring is. Having done the best I could from where I started, I feel the need to share it with more people. This is not to say I am in some ideal situation, where every day of work is a happy day of work, and that if you're not happy then you're doing something wrong. Most people dislike at least some facet of their work. I, for instance, hate making reels. But the way out of it is to tether yourself to the thing that you like doing and are able to do because of the task you don't like doing: I don't like recording reels on Instagram, but I do enjoy reading the comments I receive on it to interact with more of you. So, when I feel irritated in the process of recording, I try to focus on what I'll get as a result of this task to just get through with it. Having the right mindset is a game that we must keep playing. The mindset guides the mood and the mood carries the well-being. And the most common learning of the 2020 pandemic has been that we must all take care of our mental health because, if neglected, it alone can be the undoing of all our activities. So, don't push yourself to do things you hate or things that are too hard. Take your time, intersperse it with activities you love, take breaks — because activities that may not be economical or just an absence of doing anything at all can itself ensure productivity in the long run. Subscribe to www.wyzr.in for the full book. Why should you subscribe? ● Access all the titles on Wyzr, finished and upcoming. ● Use features that make reading easy and enjoyable. ● Engage with a growing community of readers.