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how to be productive from the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius.
Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 and is considered as the last of
the Five Good Emperors.
During his rule, Aurelius found the time to construct a series of autobiographical writings,
now known as the Meditations.
In these writings, the Roman Emperor offered a number of key insights on how to be productive
and so here are six of the most important insights for productivity from the wisdom
of Marcus Aurelius.
1.
Manage your emotions well Marcus Aurelius says “You have power over
your mind - not outside events.
Realize this, and you will find strength” Marcus Aurelius’ rule was marked by warfare,
revolt, plague, and many other challenges.
The last decade of his life was particularly difficult with the revolt of the general Cassius,
the death of his wife, chronic physical pains and the realization that his son Commodus
would not be the man Marcus had hoped for.
He knew that he couldn’t control all that happened to him, but he could control how
he responded.
Instead of complaining and letting anything affect his focus and productivity, he chose
to see each obstacle as a way to move forward.
Through the Stoic routine, he was able to master his emotions and got the work done.
There are lots of factors that affect our productivity on a daily basis: The food we
eat, the weather, how well we have slept the night before, the difficulty of the task in
hand and so on but one of the most underestimated and often overlooked factors is your mood.
Several studies have now shown the importance of emotions on your performance.
One recent study of customer service representatives found that a bad mood made employees perform
worse than those in a good mood, and made them likely to take more breaks throughout
the day, lowering their total time working.
Conversely, as well as taking fewer breaks than those who weren’t happy, those who
were in a good mood tended to be about 10% more productive and produce better work overall.
When you’re happy, you’re in a good mood.
Good mood makes you enthusiastic and focused.
When you’re experiencing negative emotions, such as anger, sadness, or anxiety, you’re
in a bad mood.
When you’re in a bad mood, you’re stressed or even depressed and to make yourself feel
better in the moment, you start looking for distractions, like catching up on cat videos
or doom-scrolling your Twitter feed, which further leads to procrastination.
The study also showed that employees’ moods when they first arrived at work generally
stayed the same throughout the day.
Despite what happened during their workday, morning moods were a very strong indicator
of what the representative’s moods would be like by the end of the day.
Which means that starting the day in a good mood is paramount for doing your best work.
So what can we do to improve our mood?
Apart from prioritizing sleep, exercising, focusing on your diet and following other
healthy routines that would boost our mood, the Stoics would advise us to use this technique
called negative visualization.
Negative visualization is a technique to anticipate the worst so that we can adequately prepare
ourselves for the challenges that lie ahead.
By asking yourself what could go wrong, you imagine the worst case scenarios like your
boss in a bad mood, the bad traffic or irritating people you may encounter, and so on.
This way you are not only preparing yourself for these challenges but you are helping yourself
to stay calm if any of these unfortunate events happen to you since you have already envisioned
them happening to you.
So if your boss shouts at you for something, you will experience fewer negative emotions,
because you were already prepared for them.
This way you can focus on the task at hand.
2.
Do less To quote Marcus Aurelius “If you seek tranquility,
do less” Marcus Aurelius in his meditations reminds
himself the importance of doing less in life— and cutting out the superfluous actions from
his own.
Even though he was a very busy man with many obligations and responsibilities, he felt
that most of what we say and do is not essential.
If you take his advice and ask yourself at every moment “Is this necessary?”
Then you will be able eliminate the things that are not required, giving you more time,
and more tranquility.
In our modern world, we’ve been taught that if we want more money, peace of mind or recognition,
we need to do more, to add more to our ever-growing to-do list.
However, according to the evidence, if we truly want to be productive and happy, we
should actually be doing less.
The author of Your Brain at Work, David Rock found that we’re truly focused on our work
a mere six hours per week, which starkly in contrast to our collective 40-hour workweek.
When you stop doing the things that make you feel busy but aren’t getting you results
but are draining you of energy, then you end up with more than enough time for what matters.
As people with full lives, with friends, kids, careers, hobbies, passions, and suchlike,
we need to apply the wisdom of doing less to give ourselves more time and alleviate
stress without jeopardizing our results.
We need to identify what not to do.
For that we can use Pareto’s 80/20 principle that says that 80% of your results are being
driven by 20% of your efforts.
This helps a lot with our productivity because when we understand that the vast majority
of our results are being driven by a small percentage of our efforts, we can pinpoint
which efforts are driving the best results for us - and focus our energy on those.
So, for example, let’s say that you are in sales and you have a long list of clients
to call each day and once you study your data you will realize that 80% of your orders come
from just a few clients.
You could get more done and drive more revenue if you focused your time and energy on those
few clients, instead of running yourself into the ground trying to manage your entire client
base, and getting completely overwhelmed in the process.
The goal is to devote energy to those 2-3 most important tasks that are likely to give
us higher returns.
3.
Strategize Marcus Aurelius teaches us “The first thing
to do — don't get worked up…
The next thing to do — consider carefully the task at hand for what it is, while remembering
your purpose is to be a good human being” Marcus lived a successful life because he
was extremely self-disciplined.
Each morning, he followed a routine in which he would visualize all the possible outcomes
of how he would approach his day, the people he would deal with and the work he would do.
He would then strategize on how he would go about everything in his day.
Most of us, when we start working on something, start with unrealistic expectations.
We fail to think clearly about the process, and this lack of uncertainty leads to procrastination.
Not having a strategy will almost certainly lead to failure.
Once you figure out your important tasks, you need to systematically break each and
every task down into individual steps from the start, till the end.
This means forming an effective plan of action that consists of a deadline for accomplishing
the tasks.
It should be built on the foundation of mini-milestones that break your goal down into manageable
chunks.
Mini-milestones will ensure that you’re working toward your desired outcome in small
pieces and time blocks, giving you a more realistic sense of what you can accomplish.
This tactic puts you in the driver’s seat as you will be able to see any potential hurdles
and take any required action.
It gives you a sense of control over the tasks and projects you’re working on and once
you have such clarity, it’s that much less likely that you will end up procrastinating.
4.
Start your day with your most difficult task According to Marcus Aurelius “The impediment
to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way” It is well known that Marcus would tackle
his most difficult tasks first.
He never procrastinated on doing hard work or put off unpleasant duties.
He had a job to do and even though it was difficult, he never complained about it to
himself or to anyone else.
We assume that productivity means getting more things done each day but in truth productivity
is all about getting important things done consistently.
It is about maintaining a steady, average speed on a few things, not maximum speed on
everything.
When you have that list of things to do, there are clearly items that are more difficult
than others.
Suppose you are a salesman.
Making sales calls is one of the most important things you can do to close deals, but it’s
also one of the hardest, because you need to “disturb” the person on the other side,
and you may well hear 100 nos just to get one yes.
It would be natural for you, therefore, to postpone dealing with the sales calls for
as long as possible.
You procrastinate and avoid working on it and focus on everything else.
The problem with this approach is that on many days you would postpone it so much that
you would end up not making the calls at all.
It will always end up as the thing one still left on your list.
Which is why it is recommended to do your most difficult task first thing in the morning.
Earlier in the day, our willpower tends to be higher.
Our mind is clear and everything is quiet.
That means you'll be able to provide your best energy and effort to your most difficult
task.
It’s your one opportunity to prioritize the thing that matters to you most because
the deeper you get into your day, the more likely it is that unexpected tasks will demand
for your attention, and it becomes less and less likely that you will be able to spend
the time as you had planned.
Doing the most difficult thing first each day helps avoid that and once you have gotten
the important task out of the way, then the rest will look easy in comparison and you
will feel more empowered.
5.
Respect time As we learn from Marcus Aurelius “Concentrate
every minute like a Roman— like a man— on doing what's in front of you with precise
and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice”
Marcus Aurelius teaches us to use our resources such as time like a wartime general because
it is our most valuable and equitable resource.
Seneca, another great stoic figure and a teacher, wrote in the first century, how surprised
he was by how little people seems to value their lives as they were living them — how
busy, terribly busy, everyone seems to be, and how wasteful of their time and this has
remained unchanged for the last 2000 years.
Time is arguably the most precious and the least renewable resource we have at our disposal.
. Imagine walking down the street and seeing a rich man just throwing away all his possessions
– his money, his gold, his watch collection - All of it.
You’d definitely call that person crazy.
And yet we see others and ourselves throw away something far more valuable every day:
our Time.
The amount of time we get is uncertain but surely limited.
Wasting time is worse than wasting money because we can’t have it back when it runs out.
So if we want to be productive, we need to take control of our time and start distributing
it correctly.
Once you decide on your task and have a clear strategy, you will have to ignore the distractions.
Even if you try to remove all distractions, and are ready to start your day as you had
planned — to your brain, the allure of finding an excuse to do something easier is still
strong.
The hardest task is finding a way to make that starting effort pleasant.
The reason that it’s often hard to start the work is that there is no expectation of
an immediate reward.
Sometimes, that reward is years away.
However if you wrap your work with the expectancy of an immediate reward, you give yourself
a good reason to start.
For example, if you avoid or delay your work to check your instagram feed, you can make
a deal that you’re not allowed to log in to your instagram account again until a certain
amount of work is done.
This way you get rewarded by completing the unpleasant work with something immediate.
You are always in control of what you can do with your time and you can choose to stop
feeding your distractions and focus on the task at hand.
6.
Enjoy your progress In the words of Marcus Aurelius “Enjoyment
means doing as much of what your nature requires as you can.
And you can do that anywhere.
Keep in mind the ease with which logos are carried through all things.
That’s all you need” For Marcus Aurelius, enjoyment meant doing
his job.
Success is dependent on many factors.
Some are in our control while others are not.
Things in our full control include our effort, while external variables include things like
luck, and other people.
Success should not be measured in terms of what we achieve or don’t achieve but should
be measured by the amount of effort we put behind our work.
Many of us do not follow through on the things we really want because we are obsessed with
the big picture, instead of keeping an eye on the crucial, small daily actions.
We need to understand that building better habits is hard and maintaining good habits
is even harder but when we do small things consistently, we see results.
So, the next time you work on something, measure your performance by your effort.
As long as you focused one hundred percent of your energies into it, you have your success,
but don’t beat yourself up if you procrastinated or couldn't reach your goal - Have some self-compassion
because research shows that it’s forgiving yourself and not beating yourself up for it
makes you want to fix the issue and continue.
While success is not completely in your control, your focus and your productivity is.
So keep learning and keep enjoying your progress.
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