Coronavirus lockdown: 8 tips to help you grow as you work from home

By Devashish Chakravarty

You will spend a lot of time at home in the coming days through lockdown and extended Work-From-Home (WFH) while the virus battle rages. Use this opportunity to invest in life-changing skills to forever accelerate growth. Here are eight skills to invest in —two each from learning, execution, communication and mental leverage.

Learning speed

Learning to learn is the foremost skill. It accelerates growth in your career, wealth, health, personality and time efficiency. To learn fast, leverage the working of your brain. Use chunking or breaking down information into small pieces, which can be retained by your short-term memory. To chunk, organise information into subjects, modules and sub-topics. Spend no more than 30 minutes in focused, undisturbed learning at a time. This makes it manageable and gives your mind rest thereafter, thus improving retention. Finally, shift learning from short-term memory to long-term recall by summarising what you learnt, asking yourself questions on the topic and practising problem solving. To learn more about this skill, complete the world’s most popular online course—Learning how to learn by Dr Oakley and Sejnowski, on Coursera.

Speed reading

A reading novice has a reading speed of about 200 words per minute while a master averages 2,000 words. Speed-reading is a skill you can learn and dramatically reduce the time you spend on reading emails, work material and learning topics. The three main concepts are pointing, jumping and chunking. Firstly, sweep your finger across a line as you read by focusing on the tip of your finger. Increase speed over pages even though comprehension may be low initially. Pointing focuses attention and prevents back tracking. Secondly, move your eyes from one 4 to 8-word block to another, training your eyes to read in jumps. Finally, move your finger down the centre of a page slowly, capturing each line as one chunk of information, increasing your peripheral vision. You can use a speed-reading app.

Action skill

While the first two skills dealt with absorbing information, they are useless unless you apply your learning. To overcome procrastination, put down an execution plan with deadlines in your calendar. Planning and goal setting increase mental engagement with the learning. Noting and executing as per your calendar ensures action without having to remember commitments.

Behaviour change

To make all round progress, act on multiple skills simultaneously. This will be exhausting when you expend some willpower to execute each task in a day. To avoid taxing your willpower, incorporate these activities as habits into your daily routine. So, if you go for a jog everyday at the same time, it is no more a decision to be taken. Now to convert an activity into a routine, use the motivation from the power of accountability. Thus, involve another person for going jogging together. Since you are accountable, you will soon slip into the routine of a daily run.

Speaking

WFH is the best time to improve a key professional skill—verbal communication. With online meetings becoming the default mode, most of your on-to-one discussions are now being done in the presence of the entire team either on call or video. Recognise it as a public speaking opportunity and target how you can improve this skill. First, pre-plan your communication—what you want to convey, in how much time and how you will say it for quick acceptance. Second, watch your tone, the reactions you get and experiment with words for greater impact.

Writing

The other equally important professionalskill is written communication. WFH has also increased the flow of emails. To improve writing and the art of written storytelling, start by publishing 250-500 words per day in a blog or a forum. You will struggle initially to find a subject or topic. As you continue for 3-4 weeks you will discover new structures, language and a style of your own. Thereafter with feedback from readers, you will develop a strong story-telling technique which will serve you well.

Meditation or focus power

Don’t dismiss meditation as a spiritual gimmick. It is a powerful mental tool that increases your focus and output in tasks, enhances quality of decision making and increases productivity through efficient task switching. Start by as low as 10 minutes a day and move up to 30 minutes but do it daily to see results in 2-3 weeks. You can use any meditation app or simply close your eyes and focus on the tip of your nose, mentally observing each breath going in and coming out. The biggest short-term impact is a drop in stress levels.

Reducing ANT

ANT or Automatic Negative Thoughts are random negative thoughts about yourself that cross your mind multiple times a day. These contribute to stress, social anxiety and even depression, thus reducing happiness and effectiveness. Avoidance and confrontation are two techniques you can practice right away. Being fully occupied in the current moment or mindfulness practice leaves no space for ANT. In the opposite technique, pause whenever you have a negative thought, question it and reframe it positively to break its flow and to reclaim your life.

TEACH TO LEARN BETTER

1. Use teaching notes

“We teach best what we most need to learn,” says the author Richard Bach. During learning, your retention capacity is as low as 5% when you attend a lecture, about 75% when you implement your knowledge and as high as 90% when you teach it. Start teaching colleagues by writing teaching notes first, thereby thinking deeply about the subject.

2. Summarise
What are the three main takeaways from each teaching session? Summarise your proposed lecture to highlight takeaways and share them at the beginning and end of your session. Use the same method when you are attending a lecture. Reflecting and writing a summary immediately after learning anchors your understanding.

3. Fill in the blanks
Peter Drucker, the management guru, said: “No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.” Your students will struggle, ask questions and expose logical flaws in your thinking and understanding. To fill in the blanks, you will discover connections with universal principles thus integrating your learning with existing knowledge.

4. Increased application of knowledge
When you teach you tend to live up to the learning. A student will listen to tips on marathon running from an athlete and not from a couch potato. As a teacher, you feel accountable to your students and have the motivation to set a personal example by implementing the learnings in your own life.

5. Improved communication
There is nothing more frustrating for a teacher than a learner who is endlessly struggling to grasp the content. When you teach, you get constant feedback on your communication skills from the learners whose absorption capacity depends on your ability to convey information. Your communication improves and spills over into your career.

(The Writer is Founder and CEO at Quezx.com and Headhonchos.com.)

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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.2020dailymotion.)