Default design

When we don’t intentionally design a system, one will form anyway and it probably won’t be an optimal system; it seems to work for us, so we just continue to mindlessly use it. But using complicated systems for doing things like chores, cleaning, gardening and errands produces unnecessary stress.

Let’s look at a complicated system for cleaning our house that might get formed if we don’t deliberately design it:

Rita and Dhruv Gupta, a couple with two children, intend to keep a clean house. But the kids keep Rita busy and she can’t find the time to clean the glass showcase that is slowly accumulating dust. Dhruv is too tired to do it when he gets home from work. They also have a broken couch, chipped cabinet and paint peeling off the walls that they need to attend to. One by one, things start to pile up and the house starts to get messy.

One day the Guptas have guests coming over. Dhruv rushes around pushing the kids’ toys under the sofas to keep them out of sight. Rita quickly dusts the house, hiding the broken items and they are yelling and screaming at each other. So though the house looks ‘clean’ on the surface, there’s still a lot of hidden clutter and mess even when the guests do come over.

When we don’t intentionally design a system, one will form anyway and it probably won’t be an optimal system

Now, your house might not be this bad, but you get the idea. Things get problematical because there is no process by which to keep the house tidy and we get stressed out by the last-minute maintenance and constant mess. We clean only when we have people over and then let things deteriorate again until the next guest comes over, or until we’re sick of the way things are. A look around our house could reveal there are dust bunnies under the furniture, grime in the fridge, and we don’t even want to talk about what’s in and around the bathtub.

Designing a system that works

The solution to eradicate the mess is to design a simple system and create a routine that works for you. Here are some systems that might help you get started; you should modify them to suit your convenience. An important starting point is to write your ‘simple systems’ down, put them somewhere you’ll see them and focus on making them a habit for at least a month.

Here’s a sample system for house cleaning:

1. First, allocate a weekend dedicated to cleaning, so you can start your simple system with a clean slate. Get the whole family involved, and clean one room at a time, from top to bottom, clockwise, until you’re done. It helps to get rid of clutter.
2. Once your house is in order, have a clean-as-you-go routine. When you’re getting ready in the morning, do a quick wipe around the sink, toilet and bathtub. Put things away as you go through the day. Wash the dishes when you’re done using them instead of piling them to be washed at night. Mop the counters and table when you’re done cooking or eating.
3. Also have a daily routine: every morning, make your bed, take out the trash and restore anything that is out of its place to where it belongs. In the evening, sweep the kitchen/dining room and do a quick pick-up before hitting the sack.
4. Have a weekly routine: either designate one day for a quick one-hour clean [it shouldn’t be that dirty if you’ve been cleaning as you go], or have different days designated for different things—for example, wash the linens on Monday, vacuum clean the living room on Wednesday and so on.
5. Every few months, do a deep clean: wipe down the refrigerator and oven, clear out the cabinets.

Get the whole family involved, and clean one room at a time, from top to bottom, clockwise, until you’re done

Other chores

Besides cleaning your house, you probably have other chores you need to do on a weekly basis. It’s good to get a weekly routine going so you never forget to do them and you know when you have to do what.

Here’s a sample:

• Monday: Prune plants
• Tuesday: Clean the car
• Wednesday: Pay bills, update financial documents
• Thursday: Errands, groceries
• Friday: Change linen
• Saturday: Tidy the closet
• Sunday: Family Day

Efficient errands

By continuously doing chores everyday throughout the week, you will keep stress at bay, and also save time and money. Here’s a simple system that works well for me:

1. Keep an errands’ list and add to it as you think of things, so when errands’ day comes, you know exactly what you need to do. Also keep a running grocery list.
2. The night before your errands’ day, plan your menu for the next two weeks, jot down other items like—stationary that your kids require, or hardware like nuts and bolts you might need. Then look at all the tasks on your errands list and plan out the best route.
3. On errands’ day, you spend a couple of hours doing all the errands on your list and then buying all your groceries on the list. One trip, planned resourcefully, saves fuel, time and multiple shopping trips.

Once you get things in order serenity follows, with a knowing that you don’t have to rush around cleaning things up at the spur of the moment.

I advocate doing the important things first; don’t put them off by focussing on the small things. But the small things add up to big things. They weigh on you till they become a burden.

Instead of waiting for that long weekend or holiday to clean the house, do it one day at a time. Clean everything and put it where it belongs as soon as you finish using it. In the end, your house looks immaculate, and you feel incredibly relieved because the clutter and the list of chores were weighing on you mentally as well.

Keep cleaning your house. Try it. You’ll love it.

A version of this article was first published in the January 2015 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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It’s tough being tired all day. I’ve had days where I struggled to make it through the day and didn’t have the energy to tackle anything that matters.

Hell, I’ve had years like that.

When you’re tired, not much seems appealing. Life is dulled, and you don’t get much accomplished. Worse still, you don’t have the energy to change the situation.

These days I don’t have many days like this, but when I do, I rest. We have gotten good at ignoring our body’s signals—much of our lives are spent training our minds to pretend as if our bodies aren’t tired, so we can be more productive.

This is wrong. It ends up in burnout and reduced productivity, because we inevitably run out of energy. Listen to your body—your long-term health and sanity depend on it.

Why we are tired

We are exhausted because we don’t rest enough. We think rest is not as important as other things like waking early, getting stuff done, attending a thousand meetings, being sucked into the world of online connections, reading and of course watching our all-important TV programmes.

So we cut down on our sleep in favour of these other things that are much more essential, and then wonder why our energy levels are low.

Sleep problems

Let’s take a quick look at some of the problems that keep people tossing in bed:

Not tired yet: If your sleeping pattern is set so that you usually sleep later, when you do attempt to go to bed earlier, you’re not tired enough to fall asleep.

Too tired: It’s possible to be so exhausted that falling asleep is difficult. This tends to be a problem less often than ‘not tired enough’ though.

Worries: You’ve got something spinning around in your head, so the sleep doesn’t come. Sometimes it’s replaying something that’s happened, or things that someone said, and at other times it’s worrying about something coming up or planning an event.

Electronic devices: If you’re using your computer, smartphone, tab or any other device in bed, you might be tired but have a hard time sleeping because your mind isn’t unwinding.

There are other issues, but I’ve found these to be the most common.

1. Formula for becoming a baby

So how do we solve these problems and sleep like babies? I don’t have all the answers, but let me share some of the things that have worked for me.

2. Exercise: A good hard workout or run, bike or swim will get you nice and tired. A good yoga workout is a wonderful way to exercise, as you learn mindfulness at the same time. Even if my workout is early in the day, I often go to bed with a tired body, and look forward to the rest. Don’t workout right before bed though.

3. Get up early: You can get your body to shift its sleeping schedule by slowly getting up earlier. Try 15 minutes earlier than normal for a week, then another 15 minutes. If you get up earlier, you’ll be a bit tired during the day, and when it’s time to go to sleep, you’ll enjoy the rest.

4. Establish a bedtime ritual: It takes time to unwind the body and mind. At least an hour before bedtime, start slowing down. Turn off the computer, TV or smartphone. Floss and brush your teeth. Put away things you were using in the evening. Sit down and read a book [not on your laptop]. This kind of ritual helps establish in your mind that it’s time to sleep, and your body takes this cue and begins to prepare itself.

5. Keep your room only for sleeping: Don’t eat, watch TV, use your computer, or do other kinds of activities in your room. Restrict those activities to the living and dining rooms, so that when you go to bed, there’s just one thing to do. Be sure to make the room dark when you go to sleep too—your body reacts to light.

6. Focus your attention: Once you’ve gone through your bedtime ritual and unwound, and your body is nice and tired, you need to quiet your mind. Here’s my trick for doing that—close your eyes and visualise the first thing you did today. That might be opening your eyes and getting out of bed. Then visualise the second thing you did—let’s say you washed your face or drank a glass of water. Then you started the coffee but first had to grind the beans. Visualise these tiny steps in detail. I never get past the first hour of my day before I’m asleep.

7. Change slowly: Be patient with sleeping changes—they are difficult, because when you are tired, your mind doesn’t have the discipline to stick to changes. Your body and mind want to do what it’s used to doing. But if you change a little at a time, and forgive yourself for ‘messing up’ [there’s no messing up, actually], then you can make changes.

This cure for insomnia didn’t work overnight for me. But I don’t think it took that long before it did begin to work. You can only go without adequate sleep for so long before your body and mind force you to catch up. So catch up by going to sleep earlier.

Another thing I noticed was that when I began to sleep earlier and wake earlier, it threw my sleeping patterns off for a while. It was a bit weird and took a little while to adjust, but finally getting a good night’s rest was rewarding.

This was first published in the April 2015 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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Arjun comes into office, switches on his computer only to find 100 new emails waiting for him. As he sifts through the mound of mail, his annoying colleague Snehal stops by his desk to tell him how her daughter stood first in her school exams despite having chickenpox. When she finally decides to leave, he goes back to sorting his email when he remembers that he has a meeting with the company director in 10 minutes. He goes through his notes. Things seem to be in order and he heads off towards the boardroom. As he is about to enter the room, his assistant rushes up to him and informs him that the numbers that he was supposed to quote in his presentation are all wrong. Unfortunately for him, the director witnesses this exchange and berates him publicly for his incompetence. Does Arjun’s day sound much like yours?

At work, we often face stressful situations, dreaded projects, irritating co-workers, frustrating bosses, an overwhelming number of tasks and messages, boring work we don’t enjoy.

These problems have one simple cause: we’re holding on.

It’s not your work that is stressful

The work itself isn’t stressful—it’s just action that’s taken or that needs to be taken. It’s our reaction to the work that causes the stress: our holding on to a wish that things were different.

It’s not the constant stream of interruptions that is frustrating—they are just events that happen around us, like a leaf falling or a bird flying by. It’s our holding on, in our minds, to the task we were doing before we were interrupted that causes the frustration. We wish we weren’t interrupted from the task, and we resent anything that interrupts us while our minds are still half on the previous task.

Our co-workers and boss aren’t the problem either: they’re just other human beings trying to do the best they can in this world. It’s our holding on to the idea that they should somehow behave a certain way, that they should do their best to make us happy, that causes us anger and irritation.

It’s not that we have an overwhelming number of tasks and messages that causes us to be stressed out—it’s our reaction to that number. It’s just a list of things, or a phone ringing, or an inbox with a list of messages. Those things are harmless. But when we hold on to the idea that we can do everything, and that we have to deal with all this at once, we become stressed, because obviously we can’t. We can only do one thing, though our minds are on all of them.

So what’s the solution? It’s letting go.

This is the Zen of Work.

Learning to let go

When you let go of these ideas of how things should be, how other people should behave to make you happy, how you can do everything at once, then the problems go away. They simply don’t exist.

There are other problems, of course—you still need to do the work. But the frustrations, stress, anger, irritation, feelings of overwhelm… those are all caused by holding on, and they’re in our minds. We also hold on to things that happened earlier—something someone did that wasn’t nice, a meeting during which we said something embarrassing, a mistake we made on our project—and of course this only compounds the pain, keeps the pain replaying on an endless loop.

Letting go allows the problems to disappear.

It’s that simple, and yet letting go isn’t always easy.

It’s a learning process

First you have to learn mindfulness, which is the key to the whole shebang. Mindfulness allows us to see these thought processes that are causing us pain, allows us to delve into what we’re holding on to.

Mindfulness also helps us return to the moment, so that all those things running around in our heads can fade away, and we live in what’s actually happening, right now.

We do a task without holding on to other tasks, or offences made by other people. We do a task, and then let go of it, and move on to the next task.

This takes practice, and so I suggest starting with a simple practice, like five minutes of meditation, and working from there. Once you get good at this simple practice, you can expand mindfulness to other tasks. Eventually you’ll get pretty good at it, and you will notice that the problems will start to dissolve on their own.

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