Two most pressing issues with PLANNING

The following post is in response to a very thought-provoking post on planning titled Fail to PLAN.

Question: Even to this day I have tens of to do lists, resolution plans, goal planning documents that I end up creating after some or other self-introspection session. But none of them seem to ever strike a done deal. In fact, more of such lists keep on adding every few days and somewhere in the middle I lose track of them.

Response: You pinpointed the problem yourself – that just brought you closer to the solution. This is the problem with most of us – we tend to write to-do things at multiple places and then lose track of them. If you really want to get rid of this – here are the two steps. First, have a single TO-DO list and keep it handy. Whenever you recall any pending task – just write down on it. Don’t worry if the list grows upto 50 items. Second, keep a PLANNER. To-do list tells what to do and a planner tells when to do. Planners and to-do lists should be closely intertwined. I had the opportunity of looking at the planner/to-do combos of some really successful people and here are 2 ways both involving an off-the-shelf paper planner marked with date/day/time etc. One way is to write the to-do list at the last page(one of the extra pages) of the planner, and when you plan your day, just have a look at the list and map the most pressing items to the day’s portion of the planner. Another way is to use post-it notes to create to-do lists and stick them on the current page of the planner and do whichever is important on that particular day. In sum, I think creating an integrated system is the first step towards clearing your head and moving on to some real action.

Question: Does the problem lie in the way I plan or is implementation the tricky part? Or am I lacking determination or enthusiasm or motivation? What is it that will provide me the satisfaction of at least one all green to do list. I have some great planner friends and they have bestowed me with their best planning tips now and then. I have tried to follow most of them and yet what is constant is incompletion. How do you "just do it" after all?

Response: Once you have an integrated planning system in place, then comes the question of – how to actually do it. It is extremely difficult to answer this question, in fact I consider this to be a philosophical question. I think if you map something on your planner, e.g., I am going to sew a button (that I have been procrastinating for 6 months now) tomorrow, you have already taken the first step. The key to make the next and final step is - to take your planner very seriously. Mapping a task on the planner is like making a promise to yourself, and this is the most effective way of assessing one’s reliability. I heard a beautiful saying somewhere which suits the context very well– “the first person you should learn to collaborate with is yourself.” Only if you can collaborate with yourself, you can collaborate with the world. This is how success is defined in this era of connectedness – its all about collaboration and keeping the minor-most promises.

Minimalism unleashes Creativity

While both ‘minimalism’ and ‘creativity’ are two abstract concepts, they share a relationship that could be manifested using certain concrete examples. This post highlights a few of such examples with an intention to further glorify the power of minimalism.

Minimalism has been defined in multiple contexts including philosophy, religion, architecture, and user interface design. Ever since I consciously embraced the idea, I have had conversations about this with many different people. Barring a few, the idea per se does not sound convincing to people and what often follows is the cynicism towards the idea. So, I spent quite some time reflecting on the most convincing advantage of minimalism – and chose to cast creativity! Here is a list of some areas where minimalism is likely to lead to creative thinking.

1. Stuff. There cannot be a better way of understanding the minimalism-creativity correlation than visiting the New Uses of Old Things section of Real Simple. This just shows creativity at its best when faced with a scarcity of resources, i.e., physical stuff.

2. Wardrobe. Heard of the Six Items or Less experiment? This experiment is a challenge to limit your wardrobe to six items or less(excluding accessories and essentials) for an entire month. To understand the power of a limited wardrobe, one should definitely give this a try. You would be surprised by the creative mix and match combinations, fashion statements you eventually create.

3. Ancient Play Days. Remember the days when there were no TVs and videogames? The limitedness of the resources provided us with out of the box ways of having fun and getting entertained. At least the non digital natives would remember how many creative games and stories were invented back then.

4. Interiors. The scarcity of space or resources brings out the interior designer in anyone and helps invent visually interesting techniques such as using a stack of books as a side table. Some super cool examples can be found in Apartment Therapy’s Smallest home contest.

5. Computer Programming. An interviewer asks you to write a code to remove duplicates from an unsorted linked list. You somehow do it. You are then asked to design an algorithm to determine if a string has all unique characters. You still manage to do it given you have some mid-level programming expertise. Suppose there now is a twist in the question - that you cannot use additional data structures…now what? That’s how the interviewers test the creativity of the candidates, possibly to see how well the candidate could make use of the minimal information implied in the question.

6. Technical Writing. You are asked to describe your research study. Sure, you could do it and go on and on about the problem, questions, experiments, and results. But what if you are asked to condense your work into 8 pages? Well this is exactly when you are start thinking of new ways to present your results (e.g. use a pie chart instead of a table), and invent new terms to describe the study.

While Daniel Pink happily declares that the future belongs to the creatively gifted “right-brainers,” many people complain of not being creative by birth. I believe minimalism has the power to induce creativity into anyone who attempts to follow the path. While I presented only a handful or examples supporting the positive correlation between minimalism and creativity, I am on a lookout for more such examples supporting or even refuting the claim.