Time or Energy?

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend ….Bruce Lee

I like Sports (more as a Spectator and as a arm-chair analyst) for a reason. On special days, you could easily see World-class performance in its entirety. Like Usain Bolt in the 100m race making the competition look pedestrian…Or MS Dhoni finishing up another Cricket match that seemed out of hand to everyone else…Or Mr.Messi ,time and again, conjuring up one of those convoluted motion that the Soccer ball could have ever imagined. In my humble opinion, while these folks have some special talent for that particular sport, it is their ability to get into a state of “flow “ that result in these super performances.

You may well tell me that the above discussion may be good for a talk over the coffee . But, is it practical in my daily grind where the turf resembles more of a battleground rather than the playground. There is no straightforward answer.However I imagine there could be an that lies in combining the following :

1. GTD (Getting Things Done by David Allen), an Organizing system that would help you in  time management
2. Energy management : Knowing your energy level through the day

The basic essence of GTD is to dump the Things to do out of your mind on to a piece of paper. Once you have done that , distinguish them as a Task or Project. If it is a task, you need to decide if you want to do it now or defer. If it is a project, it is a bit trickier and you have to spend thinking time to break it down to the actionable tasks. You got to build this into an Organizing system which will help you generate the To-Do list for the next week. Some of the common cloud-based tools for Organizing are Todoist, Tracks . The final piece of GTD is to sustain the above steps week after week.

While time management is difficult but attainable, the Energy management is still more difficult. It essentially depends on finding out what things you would like to squeeze in a particular day irrespective of how harsh the day is. It is not going to be an easy task to find your motivation. However once you find that, you just got to do that activity as the first thing during the day.

In summary, finding the state of flow for layman is going to be a tough task but not difficult. It is going to involve both time management as well as tapping the mental energy…I will share more thoughts on these in future posts. If you have any thoughts, feel free to let me know…Meanwhile I am switching on to the YouTube to get a glimpse of Messi !