Zeigarnik Effect

in

2004: I was leaving India to come to the US for my Master’s degree. It is common in Indian Culture for elders to give parting advice. My friend’s mom who had never left India told me to write tasks in a book to become effective. I kept her advice in the back of my head but I didn’t act on it till years later.

2008: Productivity blogs were the rage. Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders was on the top of my list. I picked up his Hipster PDA system and carried it with me for nearly a decade. Even now, you will find a small stack of index cards clamped between a binder clip in my backpack. This was Merlin Mann’s way of capturing tasks. We were all followers of “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.

2021: I was reading Sönke Ahren’s book How to Take Smart Notes. He talked about the Zeigarnik Effect:

Unfinished tasks occupy and burden our mind. Burden keeps us from being creative and effective at other immediate tasks. Simply writing a task down in a reliable system allows the brain to "think" the task is complete even though it isn't. It frees up the brain to do more tasks.

I follow this up with Cal Newport who adds that the task capture system must be reliable. The brain must be confident that the task in that system will be completed at some time.

Literature Notes

in

I talked about Fleeting Notes earlier.

Next step is Literature Notes.

This is like a book report but not exactly.

Literature notes are brief paragraphs on the ideas that caught my attention as I read a non-fiction book. I’ve already captured these ideas in Fleeting Notes. Now is the time to understand them.

I open up the notepad with fleeting notes, and the book, and start writing literature notes. The key here is I must write in my own words.

Sometimes I supplement my literature notes with a scan of the text from the book showing it in quotations. This is an easy reference for complex ideas. I can always grab the book from the shelf. I use the scan text feature on my iPhone.

The idea here is for me to revisit all relevant ideas from the book in one place and in my own words. This is understanding. Learning comes from understanding, not the other way around.

I grant it, this is more work on top of reading. Cal Newport is right — he claims on his podcast that this method requires a lot of time. To me, writing literature notes on a non-fiction book feels like completion. If I just read a book and put it on the shelf, I feel that I am leaving something incomplete in the process of reading.

Literature Notes is neither about speed or efficiency. I am probably not going to turn these notes into academic papers or published books like Niklas Luhmann did and many others do. Literature Notes to me is about depth. It is putting down roots into ideas and cultivating them.

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

My Reading Habit

in ,

Cal Newport says on his podcast that he reads 5 to 6 books a month by making reading his default activity.

Cal has three kids, teaches in Georgetown and runs a growing media empire! He still manages 5 to 6 books a month — this adds up to 60 to 72 books a year!

Cal said look at your phone’s Screen-Time report, so I did. I was using my phone 2 to 3 hours a day. That is almost 20 hours a week! A part time job of looking at my phone on top of a full-time job on my computer.

If you ask people, they will say they want to read more but can’t find the time. I found some time to read one book a month. So I decided to make more time.

Here is what I did:

  • Deleted all social media apps
  • Deleted YouTube app, signed out of YouTube on my browser
  • Put the TV in the house where it is not too comfortable to watch it for long
  • Read in the morning before the world wakes up — I read between 6 AM and 7:30 AM
  • Make reading intentional by taking Fleeting Notes and Literature Notes
  • Made reading my default activity as I wait between tasks — so I may get 30 mins during lunch, 15 mins while dinner is cooking and maybe another 30 mins before bedtime

One last but important technique on reading more is to add variety. I sorted my unread books into four stacks.

  1. Easy Fiction — less than 300 pages, easy to read. Leguin, Grace Paley, Ian McEwan are in this stack.
  2. Short and Hard (fiction or non-fiction) — less than 300 pages, academic or classics where the language or subject matter make it harder to read. Virginia Wolf, Jane Jacobs, Michael Oakeshott are on this stack.
  3. Short and Easy Non-Fiction — these are less than 300 pages and are typically not written by academic types, so the language is easy.
  4. Long or Hard Non-Fiction — these are over 300 pages, typically 500 or more pages. Zuboff, Dalio, Ian McGilcrist and Nassim Nicholas Taleb are in this stack

I alternate between each stack. When one stack makes me think hard, another replenishes my brain. When one book takes over two weeks to read, I finish another in a few days.

I finished four books in October, five in November and six in December. The variety surely helped. Removing the habit of phone and TV helped the most!

Newsletter No. 2

in

Rhythm and cadence have occupied my mind this month. I am trying to pay attention to the rhythm in various things such as literature, how I do creative work, and how I like to take breaks. By paying attention to the natural rhythms I am trying to build a new rhythm of sorts.

Rational thinking, which dominates my brain, wants to set the metronome first and then cast the rhythm. I certainly tried to do so with this newsletter last weekend. I set the metronome to a weekly cadence — which I failed to do last week. I should have probably set the metronome after the rhythm has set.

Staying with the metaphor a bit longer… setting the metronome first would work only if I was trying to play someone else's music. What I am trying to do is find my own tune in exploring thoughts, ideas and skills. But nothing I am doing is new: blogging, podcasting, reading and thinking. Others do it more and better. It feels easier to imitate.

I see other creative people who I admire produce so much work and it makes me think I can do it too. But I need to remember that I spend 40 to 50 hours a week doing my day-job which is also creative and very analytical and takes a lot of mental energy. It also pays the bills. I can not share a large majority of the work I do in my day-job because we are under strict NDAs with our clients. So it seems that the work I can share is small and slow.

I don't want this to be an excuse. So I have started a time-block Plan from 6 AM to 6 PM for both, my professional job and my personal creative work. It is a challenging schedule but I deviated from it on only a few days in the last two weeks. By all measures it is working.

Here is the stuff I have written in the last two weeks:

Van Neistat

I discovered Van Neistat's new youtube channel. It reminds me of one of my favorite short movies on YouTube called 10 Bullets. Read the post here

Fiction and Non Fiction

I've been reading too much non fiction and discovered a hunger for fiction, like I was starved of something essential. I tried to explore that idea. I have to admit, my writing is not great in this one. As I read it now, it feels like I wrote before the idea had fully crystalized. Read the post here

Rhythm

I explore another rendition of the Rhythm thought with which I opened this letter. This time I hit up the writings of Ursula Le Guin. Read the post here

On the podcast front I am nearly finished writing the copy of my next episode. I am also close to having my recording studio set up so I don’t have to juggle the home computer that my wife also uses for her work. I should post the episode soon. You can find it listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and Stitcher. Search for "Sighthound Studio" on Google Podcast, or directly use RSS in your podcast app.