Category: “Personal Productivity”

We have been unconsciously falling into a great little delusion: “The more I work, the more productive I am”.

The calendar is a widespread organizational tool because everyone understands perfectly well what a calendar is. Calendars have always been with us. They were used by our parents and grandparents. When I was a kid, we had a calendar hanging on the kitchen wall where my parents wrote things to do on some of the days, and circled important events in red. I remember my grandfather had a similar calendar in his office, and he would religiously cross off each day that ended with a big “X”.

Fear is, without a doubt, our greatest enemy when it comes to taking transcendental actions. It often prevents us from making the big changes in our lives: changing jobs or careers, moving to another city, or starting or ending a relationship.

A couple of decades ago I made the worst financial decision of my life. I invested almost all of my savings in a company that went bankrupt a few months later. Although at the time it seemed like a fairly rational decision (although not without risk), the truth is that it wasn’t. I made that decision in a moment of euphoria, just after I had made a small amount of money with a similar investment shortly before.

It is a reality that nowadays, unconsciously but relentlessly, we do nothing but train our brain to reduce its attention span. Our environment has become a great cacophony full of distractions and it is frankly difficult to ignore all the noise for a long time.