“Don’t count every hour in the day, make every hour in the day count.”-Unknown
Everybody has 24 hours in their lives. Suppose if one hour is wasted in social media or it may be, for some unproductive task, can you imagine how many hours are wasted on this earth? There are 7 billion people on the planet. It may amount to a total of 7 billion hours wasted. But you think if everybody uses their one hour out of 24 hours for productive purpose. There are 7 billion hours of productive time on earth. This may be achieved because I may not have productive hours at all and people like me may waste this precious time, but there may be people who may be having more than one hour of productive time. Some creative people with growth mind set may have complete 7 to 8 hours of productive time in a day. If we aggregate these hours, there may be more than 7 billion hours of productive time a day.
Expert Level Performance
K. Anders Ericsson (1947 — June 17, 2020), a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University is internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance.
Ericsson studied expert performance in domains such as medicine, music, chess, and sports, focusing exclusively on extended deliberate practice (e.g., high concentration practice beyond one’s comfort zone) as a means of how expert performers acquire their superior performance.
Critically, Ericsson’s program of research served as a direct complement to other research that addresses cognitive ability, personality, interests, and other factors that help researchers understand and predict deliberate practice and expert performance.
He is the originator of studies in which he shared his knowledge that if you want to reach the expert level performance to any narrow field, you have to spend and learn for 10000 hours of practice. He did the research after studying professional athletes, world-class musicians, chess grandmasters and concluded how these high power competitive folks achieved their ultra high performing levels in their fields.
Spending 10000 hours means five years full-time job. Anyone can get frustrated. In the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich while winning seven gold medals all in world record time, media people asked Mark Andrew Spitz, an American former competitive swimmer and nine-time Olympic champion, “So, you must be lucky!”, He replied but in a very polite manner, “ It was not luck only but hard work. I worked out 10000 hours in the swimming pool.” It is an important calculation here that he must have worked out for 2500 hours every year that is considered to be 7 to 8 hours work out on daily basis. 10000 hours of practice hours were emphasized by the author Malcolm Gladwell in his In this stunning book ‘Outliers: The Story of Success’ written in 2007 and the book was a best seller for 3 solid months.
20 Hours Of Specific Learning
Best-selling author Josh Kaufman narrowed down this kind of learning in 20 hours. He said in his of one of the top 25 most-viewed TED talks published that any specific skill you want to learn can be mastered with 20 hours of practice. He said, “If you practice for 45 minutes a day for learning anything, say for instance learning a new language, you can master it in a month. He narrated four following ways to have mastery.
1. Deconstruct the skills
2. Learn enough to self-correct
3. Remove Practice barriers
4. Practice at least 20 hours
Lack Of Skills Kills
Any piece of work carried out without skills may be deadly and time consuming. You can never achieve your any type of goal you have aspired without proper skills. Skills are not only time saving but also save time and we can devote more time to constructive and important task. There are following few tips thought to be necessary for better mind set and progress.
1. Open Mind
It is said, “Parachute and mind will work only if they are open.” Open mind is positivity. One should be able to forecast and explore the possibilities. When half glass of milk is shown, optimists think half full but pessimists always think half empty.
2. Lateral Thinking
Explore all ideas which resonate with your passion and niche. Accept the critical observation of your mentor who has better learning experience. Blindly follow the principles and systems which have already been mastered.
3. Declare Your Research
Your experiments and interpretations are not only worthy for your records but also stepping stones for your followers. No records no access of those nuggets for others. Extracting methods and modules developed by you may help save thousands of hours of manpower.
4. Develop Problem Solving Abilities
Problem solving abilities are useful for treating mental and behavioural aspects. Problem creators are most hated but problem solvers magnetize the people and liked by people surrounded.
5. Communicate Better
Any amount of learning skills, research and inferences are useless if they are not communicated properly. Better communication makes the task easy for others to learn the things more profoundly.
6. Teach What You Have Learned
You are more than a monk if you learn implement and teach. The things learned are useless if they are not transferred to needy people. The positive transfer of training or learning facilitates the performance in another context.
Psychology of Productivity
We have ample time in a life span but there are individual differences concerning productivity. Productivity generally refers to the ability of an individual, team, or organization to work efficiently within the specified time to maximize output. Some people seem to be a natural super contributor or producer; others struggle to become more productive and may look to daily exercises and better habits to help them get things done. An individual’s productivity hinges on mental energy and a sense of internal and external motivation. It often emerges naturally from work that they find inherently meaningful or valuable.
Unfortunately, there are countless ways for productivity to be derailed. For example, it takes time for the brain to disengage from one set of tasks and to commit to another, so switching between many tasks at once will slow overall productivity. Suppose you are engaged in a task of coding in one of the modules of programming with deep concentration but you have been called by your senior to temporarily engage you for a moment to some other task, It will take almost 23 minutes to regain your concentration for the first task of coding.
Physical elements boost efficiency and play a vital role in fostering productivity like Exercise, healthy eating and sufficient sleep but high productivity results from a mix of factors like motivation, personality, natural talent, training or education, environment, support from others, time management, and even luck.
Take Away
- Deliberated and dedicated practice for predetermined period will convert novice to ninja.
2. Document and record every segment of learning skills
