100% Productivity

When I used to be a student, I was obsessed with my grades. I mean don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated by maths, physics and other interesting subjects. But there were subjects that I had no interest in, and yet I worked hard on them just to score good marks. And that was not an easy task.

It’s one thing to do well in something that you like, it’s a whole different ball game to succeed in something that you despise. Even some companies use this reasoning to justify why they have a minimum grade requirement while recruiting freshers from college. They would want to hire someone who can consistently perform well on a task even if they like it or not.

As I said before, this was a tough task. And how I handled it back then was by following this one principle.

“At any given moment, you must be doing the thing that is the of the utmost priority”

This was a simple but extreme rule. It involved taking some small but tough decisions. Suppose there’s a cricket match on but you also have an assignment left to do. You do the assignment first, and then watch the match if you still have time left.

It would be crazy to expect someone to follow this rule exactly, and I knew that. But I tried to follow it as much as I could. This is the reason the day before an exam I would never be watching a movie, or even a youtube video because clearly there were more important things to do.

I’m really envious of the student version of myself sometimes because I have never been as productive as that era ever since. I think as I have grown up, for some reason “relaxation” or “chilling” has become a priority as well. So now If I am faced with the same choice, watching a match or doing some work, I would often choose to watch the match, convincing myself that it would help me feel refreshed, and relieve some stress. What an idiot I have become.