10 Ways to Manage your Time 10x Better:

1 - Become aware of your compulsions: The primary obstacle to reaching where you want to be from where you are is your distractions - your compulsions. It can be 4 hours of surfing on the net, frequent pubbing, excess need to gossip your time away almost everyday etc. If you check the routines of a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or Elon Musk or a Narayan Murthy or a Ritesh Agarwal or a Nikhil Kamath or Alakh Pandey - you will find that one thing they did not entertain in their lives was indulge in distractions. For example Alakh Pandey in an interview clearly says, " I would wake up, make videos, edit and upload them and go to sleep. Again wake up and Do the same." Ritesh Agarwal (the Oyo man) says, " Make sure that when your friends are sharing beautiful instagram stories or going to exciting places.. You are pursuing things that not that exciting or interesting (for them).. ". If you are binging 4 hrs reduce it to one hour, if you are pubbing 5 days a week make it one day a week.

2 - Improve the depth and span of your attention: Andrew Carnegie was once asked the secret behind his success. He asked the questioners, " Can you pay undivided attention to one thing for five minutes at a stretch?". When the test was conducted it was found that people are not able to keep their attention at a stretch on something for more than a few seconds. And our current state of mind is we have moved on from "long form videos" which are 10 mins to "insta and tick tok reels" which are a few seconds long and even in that we get bored. "The greatness of a man is defined by the intensity of his attention level." - these are the words from Swami Vivekananda, who was not only a spiritual icon but an intellectual prodigy of all times. If you have an attention that is intense enough and can be sustained for continued periods of time you can learn new skills and reach new milestones at will! So please work on intensifying the depth and span of Your attention.

3 - Work on stuff that really matter to you and have a vision around it: Draw inspiration from visions that are created around what is needed in the world rather than what you want to achieve. "India needs more tech innovators" or "We need to work on environmental restoration" or "We need more inspiring people around us" are much more effective and sustainable inspirations than "I want to be a billionaire first then I would think about the rest of the world." Have a larger vision. In that your journey will become a love affair - because you are now in love with people or beings that dont even know you and you want to contribute in a positive way in their lives. And then being in attention and gaining mastery over compulsions will not be an up-hill task anymore.

4 - Fool yourself into becoming super committed: Say right now you are in a state where attentive action is possible only for 3 to 4 hours per day. Don't try to straight away set a goal of 100 work-hours per week after watching Elon Musk's video. Chances are it will cause burn out & demotivation within a couple of weeks. Just try to increase one hour every week to reach a state where you can work for upto 6 to 8 hours with pure attention per day. This is a good beginning. In some time it will become your natural state! Then try making it 10-12 hours in the same way - slowly. This is the art of fooling your system into a quantum shift by taking small steps and acclimatizing at each step before moving on to the next.

5 - Draw pleasure from the process : The current social media and the other avenues to pleasure gratification like pubbing, smoking, adult website visits, even shopping, all rely on one thing - your dopamine levels. These activities stimulate your dopamine levels and get you hooked to the activity as a means for experiencing that state. Did you know that attention can release immense levels of pleasure chemicals if you practice it for sometime? Ask any cricketer, or professional artist - when Arijit Singh is singing a song or when Kohli is hitting Hafeez for a six do they seem like they are working? NO! they are in the same zone that a pot smoker would be after taking a few shots! Only difference is that they are making a positive impact on their own lives as well as on the millions who follow them. You can experience these same effects when you start to work on your attention levels. Start by applying attention in learning a new skill or building a new business or may be doing Yogic practices! Try it out! You will find that once your experience of pleasantness no longer depends on short term gratification activities then so many compulsive distractions that you seemed to have slowly fall off one by one!

6 - Ask yourself these two questions everyday: Vision is not a one time thing. There can be refinements to it, there can be small adjustments or huge shifts. Apple recently abandoned their Electric vehicle vision and channelized that entire team strength onto GenAI (ChatGPT types AI) Development. This becomes even more a possibility when you are just starting off. You should not be dissuaded by it or shy away from large shifts if you need to make them. That is part of your growth! Two questions you should ask everyday - 1) Does the vision that I have crafted really matter to me or is it really something the world can benefit from ? and once you have that sorted out, ask 2) Whatever I am doing and whatever I know about what I am doing, is it enough or do I need to upgrade myself? These two questions will make you sharper everyday and increase your appetite to learn more and more. Your days will not be spent mechanically anymore but will be an alive flow of activity each day! You function at your highest only when you are in a state of an alive flow rather than a mechanical repetition!

7 - Take Rest when you feel drained and Pay attention to recovery: Recognize when the signs of burn out happen. May be it expresses as lack of sleep, may be as dehydration and tiredness. Recognize at what frequency they are occurring and after how many hours of work they come. Let's say till 10 hours of work per day you are okay, but when you stretch it to 12 or 14 hours then after 2 days you start feeling terrible. Don't go there! Keep it at ten hours and work on enhancing yourself! It is like running a car at its peak but ensuring that the engine doesn't blow up! Yoga can be a way, meditation can be one other way, and your daily practices are definitely a way of enhancement! Take leaves intelligently and frequently before burning out. Your performance will be only as good as your recovery - this is an insight shared by the great Bruce Lee.

8 - Have patience and enjoy the journey - After starting your journey of transformation you may start looking at the progress from the perspective of results. Every outcome takes its own time. You might be in a process where outcome will come in two years. But you ask yourself where are the results every week. All that will do is impair your attention levels, your clarity and creativity. As a result even after being in a process that could change your life in just a couple years you could give it up in six months. Learn to enjoy the process and the journey. Take the outcome as just a consequence or a byproduct of that. You will end up doing a lot more in that this state than in a state where every second you are asking for outcomes.

9 - Don't assume a plan for too long a timeline - respond to changing scenarios: Make plans. But don't expect them to be full proof. Have the awareness and flexibility to make changes whenever you feel necessary. Transformation or Success or Enterprise is a journey where you learn along the path. How would you know that the new idea is right and the old one is wrong? If in a joyful and blissful state of mind a new path or idea opens up, just add it to your process and see! This could enhance your productivity, or shift your direction towards a great outcome or do both!

10 - Repeat the above in a playful and joyful way. Don't Give up! Keeping at the process for long periods of time is the only way something significant can happen around you. You may expect to be a millionaire in 1 year but actually the path of your bliss can take you there in 3 or 5 years. If you give up in the middle and start digging in some new direction every 6 months, all you will have is a lot of holes but no water! So remain with the process that you fell in love with, that drew your trust when you were in a clear, blissful state of mind. Just don't trust a state of impatience and frustration to overshadow that and take the decision on your behalf. Transformation is a simple journey. That means it is not complicated. But it is not easy either! Otherwise everyone would do it! So just keep at it!

May there be Joy Clarity & Success! ~

~ Susmit Aaditya Mukherjee ~

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