Increase productivity by adopting new skills

Jeyaraman explaining his points

It can be difficult to constantly remain productive, or to even start being productive for that matter. Regardless of students or working adults, almost everyone has a hard time motivating themselves to be productive. Thus, to help the students and staff improve their productivity, UTAR Centre for Corporate and Community Development (CCCD) in collaboration with Malaysia Mental Literacy Movement (MMLM) organised a webinar titled “Mind Skills to Triple Your Productivity” on 25 August 2020 via Facebook Live streaming.

The webinar was hosted and given by Jeyaraman Seenivasagam, a memory system and thinking enthusiast. He is also one of the judges of the Mind Competitions (Mind Mapping Competition) organised by the Malaysian Mental Literacy Movement (MMLM). In the webinar, he covered five topics, namely “Understanding How to Manage Productivity”, “How to Use Mind Mapping as a Mind Tool to Become More Productive”, “The Easiest Way to Instantly Become More Productive”, “How to Make Smart Decisions” and “Mind Mapping to Enhance Productivity”.

Jeyaraman began the webinar by explaining how to manage productivity. “A lot of people do not have a systematic approach to doing things, but rather they follow their feelings which is why they are not productive. Some also say that with good time management comes good productivity. However, that is not the case, as you cannot control the time, but you can control your attention and focus. If you focus on trying to complete the task, you can become super successful and productive,” said Jeyaraman. He added, “You do not have control over the energy that you have, but you should use much of it productively. Basically, if you take your energy and “invest” in it, you will gain good returns, that is you will be more productive and successful.”

Jeyaraman answering the participants’ questions

He then explained the easiest way to instantly become more productive and how to make smart decisions at the same time, in which he pointed out four categories that could help. “The first category is “Decisions”. Unproductive people are not good decision-makers, since they spend most of their time trying to decide and delay, which can worsen the decisions made. Thus, to avoid this, you should always remember this quote by Colin Powell, ‘It is easier to make the decision right than to make the right decision,’ which basically implores you to never complicate or try to make the perfect decision, but make the decision better as you move on,” said Jeyaraman. He also noted, “The second category is “Choices”. For this, you should remember the ATM analogy. Just like how an ATM has simplified the process for users to allow them to make easy choices such as withdrawing money and checking our account balance, we should learn to simplify the choices in life. Just as we simplify our decisions, we have to learn to simplify our choices, so that we can become more productive instead of wasting our time delaying and procrastinating with our choice-making.”

Jeyaraman continued by explaining the third and fourth categories, whereby he explained, “The third category is “Deadlines”. There are two types of deadlines, soft and hard deadlines. A hard deadline is one with a fixed time, like an exam, while a soft deadline is the time in between the hard deadline and is flexible, such as the time taken by a student to answer the questions in an exam. When faced with a hard deadline, it is up to you how you will plan your soft deadlines and you can learn to be productive by achieving your soft and hard deadlines. The last category is ‘Get into the flow’, which means you start to go into a momentum of doing a task. ‘Getting into the flow’ is something that is planned; you can decide to go into the flow for three hours in the morning with no interruptions such as checking your message notifications or your social media, with five-minute breaks every so often to relax the mind. You achieve much more when you get into the flow, compared to if you do your work in bits and pieces.”

Lastly, he briefly talked about using mind maps to increase productivity. According to him, with the use of a mind map, you can easily come up with points and have a general sense of what you want to do. Jeyaraman gave an example of writing an essay and said, “You can list out your points in a mind map first and then refine the points as you go on.” Quoting Colin Powell, he said, ‘It is easier to make the decision right than to make the right decision.’ Thus, by having a mind map, you can increase your productivity as you have ideas on how you would like to do your work and it simplifies your decision-making as well.”

The webinar ended with a quick Q&A session.

A brief biography of Jeyaraman’s background