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
Philosophy

Showing Up

Showing up is not easy, but it’s not hard either. So just showing up is not an achievement.

Giving up is easy (it’s painful, but it’s still easy). You have hundreds of reasons to convince yourself to do it.

The real achievement is when you show up again after you’ve given up.

Show up. Again and Again. Every single time.

Categories
Philosophy

Authentic Empathy

The conventional wisdom is – “Treat others the way you want to be treated.”

How about – “Treat others the way THEY want to be treated.”?

I make this mistake all the time. I think I’m trying to be empathetic with the other person by trying to give them nice and fair treatment – as per my perspective.

But that other person isn’t me.

So the whole empathy thing either doesn’t work or it looks fake.

Isn’t it probably better to genuinely understand what the other person cares about?

Isn’t it probably more authentic empathy if we treat them the way THEY want to be treated?

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. 🤩

Categories
Philosophy Productivity

Become a Creator

The one resolution everyone should have for 2021:

“Become a creator”.

Create anything from scratch:

  • start companies
  • build prototypes
  • shoot videos
  • write blogs
  • author books
  • create art
  • play music
  • play sports
  • build communities
  • start movements

It could be anything.

Don’t be just a consumer.

Be a creator.

Wish you a very Happy, Healthy, Prosperous, and Creative 2021!! 🎉 🎆

Categories
Entrepreneurship Philosophy

Work Hard, Not Just Smart

They say, work “smart” not “hard”.

The reality is – smart work is the fruit of a lot of hard work.

Hard work is how you become knowledgeable about lots of areas and an expert in a few areas to make better decisions for smart work.

Categories
SaaS Sales Startup

How To Win Competitive Deals

The conventional practice is to convince prospects that your product is superior to your competitor’s.

But it’s not required. There is an alternative option.

It might be sufficient to convince prospects what’s good about your product with a clear, honest, and informative way.

I even have a slide in our Sales deck that tells prospects about the gaps in our product that they will miss in the near term when they switch over from our competitors to us.

If the prospect feels certain that your product is good, and appreciates your honesty, it’s very likely that they will still buy your product.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Philosophy

If You Haven’t Won Yet

Believe that you will always win in the end.

If you haven’t won yet, it’s hasn’t ended yet.

Keep fighting!

Categories
Philosophy Productivity

You Don’t Need More Time to Get Things Done

There was a task I was dragging for the last 2 years. Finally, I got it done this weekend.

So it’s not that I needed more time.

What I needed the most was – the right energy to decide to work on it.

And once I started working on it – I just needed to focus and commit until I finish it.

I hope we don’t keep telling ourselves and others the same old excuse – “I don’t have time”.

The right energy, focus, and commitment is more important than time to get things done.