Author: Andrea Grassi

I recently noticed that I work best when my routine is in check. When I wake up, do my meditation, have slept enough, etc.

I can see that I’m more focused and productive, and overall more happy.

But what role do these habits play? Do they fix something, or do they enable something?

Depending on your life a routine, a habit, can be an enabler, something that allows you to do more, or a fix, something that allows you to do what you’re supposed to do.

You can see them as supplements: are they healing something, or are they empowering you?

Each one of us is different, and each habit has a different goal and purpose, but the question is still worth asking.

One of the greatest things I’ve learned while researching burnout was the “Gap-stress”.

This is probably an invented term, but the concept is simple: It’s the stress caused by your expectation about what you need to do for a job/task, and what you are capable of doing.

If you look at the wording, you should know it’s no coincidence that I’ve used the word “Expectation”. Why? In some cases, we have broad requirements for a task or a job.

When this happens, we fill in the missing pieces by adding our view of what should be done, what should be considered success.

We might not even confirm these beliefs with the stakeholder, we might assume we’re on the right track.

In these cases we are, effectively, our own worst enemy. We build a fake requirement in our head that we cannot satisfy, we fail to deliver, and we feel bad.

To fix it we do need to speak with people, ask for confirmation and move forward. If there are missing pieces of the puzzle, ask again until the picture is clear and there are no fake gaps.

Can it still happen if everything is clear? Yes, in that case we should discuss topics like “Why are we assuming that one person can do all this?” or, why do we think that person has all the skills required because that might not be true”

One of the main issue I generally have with social networks is that their goal is to rob you of your time.

They want your focus, to keep you in their system, and they create artificial “nice things to do” for you.

One example: birthdays/anniversaries.
You would have loved congratulating with someone on their birthday, call them, hear how it’s going, etc.
Now, though, they invite you to say something nice for a birthday.
Why would you need this? Didn’t you already know the birthdays of your closest friends?

You do, right? Or at least for the ones you care for the most.
This way social networks can create a net that has two goals.

1. Keep you in their system again
2. giving you some kind of positive reinforcement/gift for using them (while they robbed you of so much time for other reasons).

Are all social networks bad? Of course not, can they be harmful to us? Of course yes, and it’s up to us to see the patterns some socials use to control us.

I love productivity tools, task managers, todo lists, note taking apps.

I love them because they always try to do something new, something flexible, something powerful.
You could think that after years and years of note taking apps we would have the perfect app, right?

We don’t.

Some are too easy, some too complex. The same goes with todo list. In that space, we would expect the innovation to have stalled and reached some kind of maturity but no, we continue to see the rise (and fall) of many todo apps, when all we want is an easy way to

• input a task
• schedule a task
• reschedule a task

We don’t have this. We do have all the nice features, priority, comments, collaborations. Not only that, but we do have a lot of them, and I’m sure they’re useful. But at the same time they all (well, the ones I’ve tried) fail with such a simple requirement.

They fail not because the feature isn’t there. But because it takes more than it’s needed, more clicks and more navigation.
That’s why many people revert to the old reminders/notes apps they have installed in their system.

Easy doesn’t suck.

“Accepting your strengths” sounds like a straightforward thing to do, right? Who doesn’t like them?

Well, maybe you would like to explore other skills that you have, maybe you don’t want to rely on them too much, maybe you don’t think they’ll help.

Until they do. Or at least that was my experience. I recently realized that one of my greatest strengths is willpower.

I’ve known it for a long time, but I didn’t really rely on it as I do now. Why? Furthermore, I’d say mostly that I find it hard to have sustained willpower over the course of many days.

But guess what? It helps my life immensely, so even if I feel “will-deprived”, trying and keeping up makes a difference. 

Embrace yourself, because if you rely on the good things you do, the others will become easier.