Category: Productivity

Categories
Communication Productivity

How to send a calendar link to schedule meetings without being a jerk?

When you send a calendar link to a prospect or a customer to schedule a meeting on your calendar, it matters how you ask them to book a meeting.

You should give more importance to them and respect their time.

In your email, don’t say – “Go ahead and book the time here: <link>”.

A more respectful approach is:

“How’s your availability later this or next week? If it would be easier to schedule, here’s my availability: <link>.” 

With this approach, you’re giving them a priority and respect by asking them their availability first.

Then you’re also sharing a Calendar link to make it efficient for them.

Categories
Productivity

Prioritization hack: Replace “Couldn’t” with “Chose not to”!

The next time you want to say “I couldn’t…”, just replace it with “I chose not to…”.

And you’ll realize how you are prioritizing things on your plate.

Here are some examples…

“I couldn’t work on…” → “I chose not to work on…”
“I couldn’t get back to you…” → “I chose not to get back to you…”
“I couldn’t reach on time…” → “I chose not to reach on time…”
“I couldn’t wake up…” → “I chose not to wake up…”
“I couldn’t exercise…” → “I chose not to exercise…”

You get the idea.

The more you say “I chose not to…”, you’ll realize it’s you, who are responsible for not doing the things that you had promised to do.

Eventually, you’ll start prioritizing the things that matter to you.

Hope this helps!

Categories
Productivity

The Evolution of Work

This is how work is evolving:

Location and time dependent:
🏭 Factory work
🏢 Office work

Location dependent but time independent:
⏱ Flex work
🏢 Hybrid work

Location independent but time dependent:
🏠 Remote-first work

Location and time independent:
💬 Async-first work

Categories
Productivity

1K Email Client

Our attention span has reduced significantly. 🥸

We don’t have time to read long emails. 🤨

It’s also a bad habit and practice to write long emails. 😏

If you want to get the job done, you should write shorter emails. 🤐

But it’s hard to break our habits of writing long emails. 😕

What if we build an email client with 1K chars limit? 🤔

As a sender, you can send emails with only 1K chars long. 🤓

As a receiver, you only can read first 1K chars. 🧐

If another person sends a longer email, it auto replies – “I can only read first 1,000 chars, please resend”. 🤪

What says?

Categories
Entrepreneurship Philosophy Productivity Startup

About Making Progress In Life

Practice trumps theory.

Execution trumps planning.

Action trumps thinking.

Doing trumps learning.

Writing trumps reading.

Playing trumps watching.

Creating trumps consuming.

Categories
Productivity Startup

Working From Home Is Here To Stay

Why working from home or remotely is here to stay – backed up by Stanford research.

51% people said, WFH was a better experience, 26% said it was about the same, and 13% said it was worse.

Has your company made a switch to embrace WFH yet?

Or are they still considering to open offices once the COVID is under control?

chart, bar chart
Categories
Entrepreneurship Productivity Startup

Bias for Action

Amazon had popularized this leadership principle called “bias for action.”

I find it is not only valuable for leaders at a strategic level, but also extremely useful for individual contributors on a day to day execution level.

Speed is your biggest weapon as an early-stage startup – especially in competitive and hyper-growth businesses.

Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive thinking.

Having a bias for action means you’re not afraid to make decisions and take action, even when you face uncertainty.

The first step to develop a bias for action is to simply put down your thoughts into some document.

Write down any fact, question, concern, idea, or task that you are thinking about.

Once you write down the first sentence, writing down the next one becomes comparatively easier.

The more you write down, the more clarity you get, and the path for execution becomes clear and easier.

Every single time, when we are brainstorming new initiatives, and when things get all overwhelming, I’ve seen writing things down has worked like a charm.

That’s when I realized, “bias for action” is not some fancy leadership principle that I need to learn.

It simply starts with writing down the first sentence.

Categories
Philosophy Productivity

Why It’s Bad Advice To Prioritize “Important” Tasks Over “Urgent” Ones

The advice on prioritizing “important” tasks over “urgent” ones is pretty well known to everyone. 

I think it’s bad advice. Or at least, it’s an incomplete one. 🤨

I don’t think it’s bad to prioritize “urgent” tasks. 🤷‍♂️

The important detail is – you should prioritize “your” urgent tasks, and not “someone else’s”. 👈

No one realizes that most often, the “urgent” tasks you respond to are someone else’s urgent needs, not yours. 🤦‍♂️

I struggle with this all the time.

Most of the day, I react to others’ urgent needs and do not make enough progress on my important tasks.

The tasks that are important to me should ideally be urgent as well. 🧐

If that’s the case, I don’t think it’s terrible to work on “my” urgent tasks.

It’s the trap of reacting to “someone else’s” urgent tasks is that I need to get better at. 😇

Categories
Productivity

How To Overcome Your Phone Addiction

📱 Phone addiction is one of the biggest non-drug addiction in human history. 😱

Study shows excessive phone usage leads to poor lifestyle, poor physical health, and poor mental health. 😨

But how to overcome phone addiction? 🤔

Here are a few things I follow:

1. Delete most apps, and ideally disable all notifications or limit to the most basic ones. 📴

2. Schedule a time to check the phone – give as much dedicated time as you want, but don’t check reactively for random notifications. ⏱

3. Keep your phones facing down on a table when meeting friends or at home. 📲

4. Change your habits and routines when you typically use the phone with something else (read books, play chess/sudoku, talk to people). 📖

5. Introspect your phone usage, use self-talk, and keep delaying the urge of checking the phone every few minutes. 💬

Hope this will help you to:

  • overcome your phone addiction (come on, accept it you have it)
  • reduce your screen time
  • build better habits as we kick-start 2021!
Categories
Productivity Sales

What Are Your “Posteriorities”?

As this is the beginning of the month, most of us are thinking about what tasks are our “priorities” for this month. ⚡️

But do you know what are your “posteriorities”? 🤔

“Posteriorities” are the tasks that are not urgent and are prioritized later.

But these could also be the tasks that you should never work on too – something you should prune from your list. 🤭

One of the common mistakes we often end up doing is – we start working on multiple tasks at once. 😬

The better approach is to focus on one task at a time. And when that is done, figure out the next priority task is. 

As you do take care of some priority tasks on your plate, sometimes your situations evolve and so do priories and posteriorities.

Tasks that seem important before, may not be important anymore.

As a result, you won’t waste time working on things that are not relevant anymore. 😇

And that’s how you can achieve more in less time. 🤩