When Your Goals Get in Each Other’s Way
All of us who live in large residential societies know that WhatsApp group where the messages never seem to stop.
Someone has parked in somebody else’s parking spot. Someone has brought a ferocious-looking dog into the smaller passenger lift. A group of children has damaged the common lawn. Someone is complaining about the security guards. Someone else is asking whether the water supply has been restored.
And then there are the less contentious messages. Someone has brought mangoes from their farm and is taking orders. Someone is selling homemade pickles. Someone announces that they are taking orders for chilli chicken.
We can’t really ignore the group. After all, these are our neighbours.
One day, amidst this endless stream of messages, I noticed a curious advertisement for singing classes in our society. I casually mentioned it to my wife and moved on. She didn’t and said, “Why don’t you join? You love singing. You love songs.”
My immediate response was simple: “I can’t. My hands are already full.”
I was already pursuing several things. I didn’t want to become one of those people who spreads themselves too thin by taking on one more interest, one more project, one more goal.
Then, almost as an afterthought, I said, “Wait. I think I could do it.”
What made me change my mind? It wasn’t that I suddenly discovered I had more time. It wasn’t that I had decided to abandon the other things I was doing. Something else had occurred to me.
But to explain that, I need to go back a little.
We often talk about productivity as if the problem is simply a shortage of time. There is always something else we want to do. So we look for ways to squeeze more out of the day. We try to become more efficient. All of that can help. But there is a point beyond which productivity techniques cannot solve the problem. At that point, perhaps the problem isn’t how we use our time, but what we are trying to accomplish with that time.
The idea that we cannot pursue everything at once is hardly new. In Essentialism, Greg McKeown makes the point vividly by describing the futility of making “just a millimetre of progress in a million directions.” The essentialist approach is to make deliberate choices about what is truly important and focus our efforts accordingly.
I have seen a tendency in many people I work with. I sometimes describe them as Octopus personas. Like an octopus with its many arms reaching in different directions, they have numerous goals, projects and ambitions competing for their attention. They aren’t necessarily lazy or disorganized. Quite often, they are energetic, capable people who are genuinely interested in many things. The problem is that their ambitions exceed their available resources.
One useful way of making this visible is time budgeting. When we actually allocate the available hours to our various goals, the arithmetic can be revealing. There simply isn’t enough time to make meaningful progress on everything.
The general lesson, therefore, is fairly straightforward:
We should have a small number of carefully selected goals that we are genuinely prepared to pursue.
But there is another question that is less often discussed. Even after we have reduced our goals to a manageable number, are those goals compatible with one another? That is the question I want to explore here.
Having multiple goals isn’t necessarily a problem. In fact, some goals can reinforce each other.
The reason I eventually said yes was that singing wasn’t really going to be one more thing on my already crowded list. It connected with something I was already trying to accomplish.
As a productivity coach, I have always wanted to improve my speaking voice. Speaking is central to my work—whether in coaching sessions, presentations, workshops, or simply communicating ideas. In my search for ways to develop my voice, I came across Voice and the Actor. Interestingly, the book suggested that learning to sing could be an effective way to develop the voice.
Suddenly, singing didn’t look like another goal competing for my time. It looked like a way of pursuing two goals together.
So an attempt to become a better speaker eventually led me to take up singing—bringing two seemingly different goals together. That’s a very different situation from having two goals that pull us in opposite directions.
Imagine training to be a sumo wrestler and a race jockey. There is nothing inherently wrong with either goal. But the physical characteristics and training requirements that help you progress toward one may work against what you need for the other. No amount of time management completely eliminates that conflict. Of course, this is an exaggerated example. But real life contains much subtler versions of the same problem.
We may want to:
- build a demanding business while pursuing several equally demanding side projects;
- become an expert in one field while simultaneously trying to master another;
- maximize income while deliberately reducing the amount of time we spend working;
- write a book while taking on several other major creative commitments.
Each goal may make perfect sense on its own. The difficulty appears when we put them together.
It helps to think about goals in three broad categories.
1. Complementary goals
These goals help each other.
My singing and speaking goals are an example. The time and effort I put into developing my voice can contribute to both objectives.
When goals are complementary, pursuing one can help you make progress toward another. This is a wonderful form of leverage.
2. Independent goals
Some goals don’t help each other, but they don’t interfere with each other either.
You might want to learn photography and improve your swimming. Neither has much to do with the other, but there is no fundamental contradiction between them.
If you have enough time and energy, you can pursue both.
3. Conflicting goals
Then there are goals where progress toward one can make the other more difficult.
This is where we need to be careful.
The conflict doesn’t necessarily mean that one of the goals is bad. It means that pursuing both simultaneously may have a cost that we haven’t accounted for. And that cost may show up as time, energy, money, attention—or simply the inability to make meaningful progress on either.
Thus, before adding another significant goal, it is worth asking a few questions:
- Does this goal support something else I am already trying to achieve?
- If it doesn’t, is it at least neutral?
- Does pursuing it consume resources that another important goal needs?
- Are two goals demanding fundamentally different things from me?
Sometimes we discover that two goals can coexist beautifully. And sometimes we discover that we are trying to train for the productivity equivalent of being both a sumo wrestler and a race jockey.
And we need to take a step back.
Because productivity isn’t only about doing more with the time we have. Sometimes it is about choosing goals that allow our efforts to work together rather than against each other.
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Is Organizing Your Home Really That Different?
As a productivity coach for knowledge workers, I spend a lot of time talking about being organized at work. And when I say “organized,” I usually mean organizing our digital world.
- A task.
- A document.
- A bookmark.
- A checklist.
- An email.
- A note.
Most of what we work with today exists somewhere on a screen.
Very recently, one of my clients asked me a question:
“You have given us some wonderful ideas on how to organize our digital world. Do you also have any tips on organizing the physical world?”
I said, “No. Not because I think physical organization is unimportant. I simply don’t venture into that area. There are professional organizers who specialize in organizing homes and physical spaces, and they certainly know much more about it than I do.”
I also assured him that the underlying philosophy isn’t very different, and suggested he check out my blog post on the topic
I had actually thought about this quite some time ago. I had always wondered how similar the two would be in practice. And at some point, I picked up The Home Edit by Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin.
As I went through it, I found something both pleasing and, at the same time, not particularly shocking.
Professional organizers think about organization in much the same way I do.
In fact, when you think about it, it would make sense that physical organization came first. Many of the principles we now apply to digital information are probably descendants of principles developed for organizing physical things.
Here are some of the similarities I noticed.
1. Organization is about making things functional
The objective isn’t simply to make a space look tidy. It is to create a space that is clutter-free and functional.
The same is true of a digital system.
A beautifully arranged folder structure that makes it difficult to find anything isn’t an organized system. Organization should make things easier to use. We should have a unique, planned place for everything we deal with in our work.
2. Organization saves time
This one is obvious once you experience it. If you know exactly where something is, you don’t have to search for it. And if you have a designated place for something, putting it away becomes almost automatic.
The same principle applies to digital information. Put things in their right places at the first opportunity, and they become much easier to find when you need them.
3. Good organization takes some work
Organizing isn’t easy. It takes time. But once you have a good system in place, maintaining it becomes much easier, although not easy. That’s true whether you’re organizing a kitchen drawer or your digital files. The initial investment can save you a lot of effort later.
Once you experience the tangible and intangible benefits of being organized, you become more willing to pay the small price of maintaining the system. You save time not because you work faster, but because you spend less time looking for things.
4. Organization gives you a sense of calm
Clutter creates a certain amount of background noise. When things are lying around without a place, your brain keeps getting little reminders that something needs attention. When clutter is minimized and systems are in place, things feel different. You feel more grounded.
You know where things are. You know what needs to be done. And perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to keep everything in your head. That is true of both physical and digital organization.
Physical organization is part of work management too
There is one more way I look at this. If you have a system for managing your work, organizing things is actually a subset of the overall system. Work management doesn’t begin with organization. Before you organize something, there is usually a preprocessing phase.
Something comes into your world.
You receive an email.
You have a conversation.
You read something.
Someone gives you a document.
You come up with an idea.
You first need to process that stuff and, where necessary, turn it into tasks, reference material, checklists or other artifacts. Then comes organization. And after organization comes the other side of the system:
When and how will you access it?
You organize a document so that you can find and use it later. You organize a task so that you can see it when you are ready to work on it. You organize reference material so that it is available when you need it. So organization isn’t the end goal. It is the bridge between processing something and using it effectively.
There is one thing physical organization has that digital organization doesn’t quite have
And that is aesthetics. A physical space has to work, but most of us also want it to look good. A well-organized kitchen, bookshelf or desk can give you pleasure simply because it looks inviting. Digital organization has aesthetics too, of course.
We care about how our desktop looks. We choose attractive apps. We arrange things neatly. But the definition of beauty is somewhat different. But aesthetics play a much smaller role in digital organization. The stakes simply aren’t as high.
And what about the physical things in our work?
Even in a predominantly digital work-management system, we still have physical things:
- Books.
- Notebooks.
- Pens.
- Paper documents.
- Equipment.
- Cables.
Things we need to keep for a project. The simplest principle I can think of for organizing these is: Don’t rely on your memory.
Give things a planned place. When you get the opportunity, put things back in that place. And if a physical space is difficult to access or contains many things, make a note of what is where. You could even take a photograph. A photograph of the contents of a storage box may save you from opening the box six months later just to remember what you put inside it.
If you’d like to go deeper into the idea of planned spaces, you can read my detailed post, You Don’t Need More Storage. You Need Planned Spaces.
Don’t make your brain remember where things are. Make the system remember for you.
Whether the “system” is a folder on your computer, a task manager, a bookshelf, a kitchen drawer or a storage box, the underlying philosophy remains remarkably similar.
Different things. Different tools. Different spaces.
But much the same idea:
Give everything a place, and make that place work for you.
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Stop Relying on Your Memory
“I will remember that.”
Those four words have probably created more unnecessary mental load than we realize.
We say them when we put something somewhere “for now,” when someone gives us a piece of information, when we notice that something needs to be done later, or when we tell ourselves that we will remember where we kept something. Sometimes we do. Often, we don’t. And even when we do remember, we may have to spend time searching our memory to retrieve it.
This is why I was struck by a recent post by Seth Godin, the bestselling author and one of the most widely read thinkers on marketing, work and ideas.
In his August 16 post, “Replace the filters,” Seth suggests a simple habit: when something needs replacing, put a recurring reminder in your calendar, record where the spare is kept, and save the link to buy another one. He also suggests writing down things such as the type of paint used in a room, or taking photographs of reorganized shelves and drawers so you can find things later.
His ideas are very much in line with something I have been saying about being organized. Being organized is an antidote to our fragile working memory. At its core, being organized is about retrieval.
Something that matters should be:
- Secured
- In a known place
- In a unique place
- Easy to access
When these conditions are met, you can retrieve what you need when you need it—without searching, guessing or mentally scanning.
The calendar is the simplest example. You expect meetings and events to occur, so you create a dedicated space for them. Events go into the calendar. They don’t live in your memory, scattered messages or random notes.
The same principle applies to many other things in my personal life.
I photograph the contents of my bed-storage compartments. When I need something that is rarely used, I can look at the photograph first instead of opening several compartments to find it.
I maintain a record of important keys. It tells me what each key opens, how many copies exist, and who is holding each copy.
I maintain a “Where is what?” table for the house. It tells me where things are kept. It is particularly useful for things we use sparingly or new things that have recently entered the house—Diwali lights, a CD drive, a rarely used tool, and so on.
I keep my brand colours readily available. For each colour, I have its glyph and hex code. Whenever I create publishing material, I don’t have to remember or look up the colours—I simply retrieve them from this reference.
These are all examples of planned spaces. Sometimes the space is a calendar. Sometimes it is a photograph, a table, a folder or a checklist.
Without a planned space, things get put wherever there happens to be room at the moment—a random note, an open browser tab, an inbox or a folder you won’t remember later. The item hasn’t disappeared. But practically, it is lost because you don’t know where to retrieve it from.
Being organized, therefore is about deciding in advance where things belong and maintaining those spaces so retrieval remains effortless. There is some upfront effort in creating these spaces. But that effort is largely one-time, while the benefits compound: less searching, less resistance to starting, fewer last-minute surprises and greater clarity about what deserves your attention.
So the next time you catch yourself or others around you thinking:
“I’ll remember that.”
Stop.
Don’t remember it. Design a place for it.
With thanks to Seth Godin’s August 16, 2026 post, “Replace the filters,” for the reminder.
Making Room for the Unexpected
When I stand on the balcony of my flat on the 17th floor, with just a metal grill between me and about 150 feet of empty space below, I still feel safe. I wonder, if there were no grill, would I be comfortable standing there? Probably not. The grill doesn’t change where I am standing. I am not using it, yet I can stand there quite comfortably because of the grill.
Similarly, when you walk on the floor, you hardly need any extra space to walk on. But imagine you have only that much space on a ridge; now you get nervous.
The mere presence of the grill or that extra space around us changes how we feel. Let’s call that psychological support a buffer. A buffer doesn’t have to be used to be useful, but its presence gives you comfort and confidence.
Think about getting ready for an important event. If you have plenty of time, you can get ready calmly. You may even enjoy the process. But if you have planned every minute right up to the time you need to leave, you are racing against the clock. You may still reach the event on time. But the journey there has been stressful. You would curse every red signal that is delaying you further, or get irritated even by an innocent comment from your spouse or friend travelling along with you. And if something unexpected happens and you are late, the consequences can be even worse.
Now, this is a no-brainer. Everyone would agree that, yes, one should have a buffer. But here’s the problem. We don’t have infinite capacity. We have a fixed number of hours in a day, and usually more things we want to do than we can comfortably fit into them. So we optimize. This is where the problem gets interesting
Let’s see something I faced today, at the time of writing this. Every Saturday, our group goes for a mini-trek on a nearby hill. The group starts at 7 AM. They don’t wait beyond that; whoever is there starts the trek.
But before I go, I want to do my usual morning chores, do a bit of stretching, have my oats and milk, and then go. So, I get up early on Saturday. Today also, I woke up on time, but as I moved through my chores and breakfast, it was already time to leave and I was yet to have my milk. I would have to skip my morning milk to make it to the starting point at 7. I chose to have my milk, leave a little later, and catch up with the group on the trail. I used my buffer to not miss my milk, as I would like to have good strength before I start. I could do that because I wasn’t asking anyone else to wait for me. And in this particular situation, I considered what I gained worth the small risk and inconvenience.
That’s a trade-off. And I think we make similar trade-offs with our time all the time. We are often confronted with this question: Where can I afford to consume the buffer?
The danger is consuming it everywhere
The problem starts when we treat every bit of unused time as an opportunity to fit something else in. A 30-minute gap appears in the calendar. I can fit a call here. A journey takes 30 minutes. I can leave exactly 30 minutes before the appointment. A meeting is scheduled to end at 11. The next one can start at 11.
Sounds logical!
But now there is no room for reality. The meeting runs five minutes over. Traffic is worse than expected. The task takes longer. And suddenly, you are in the red. We have optimized our time but in turn made the system fragile.
In the familiar story of the tortoise and the hare, the hare thought he had such a big lead that he could afford a nap. He had a buffer. He spent it. The problem wasn’t taking the nap. It was misjudging how much buffer he had. We do the same with time. The trick is knowing how much buffer we can afford to spend.
A buffer is not necessarily wasted time
This is where I think our productivity mindset sometimes misleads us. We tend to look at unused capacity and ask:
“What else can I do with it?”
But before asking that question, we should ask:
“What happens if I need it?”
That unused 15 minutes may never be needed. The meeting may finish on time. The traffic may be light. Nothing unexpected may happen. But the buffer has still served a purpose. It has given you room to absorb variation—and, in turn, the freedom to experience those moments with a relaxed mind.
And there is another way to make a buffer less frustrating. Hedge it!
If I have an important event and want to arrive early, I might carry my headphones and listen to an audiobook if I have to wait. I’m still protecting the buffer. I’m simply giving myself something useful to do if I don’t need it.
Punctuality is good. We should show up at the right time when we are expected to. And having enough buffer makes that much more reliably possible without stress.
But we don’t always have the luxury of keeping a large buffer. Sometimes, the stakes are low enough that consuming some of it is perfectly reasonable. When everything goes as planned, a buffer may look like wasted time. But when something goes wrong, you are glad you had it. And sometimes, if we know there is a good chance we won’t need the buffer, we can hedge it by having something useful or simply enjoyable to do.
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How to complete REx course along with the juggle of your Life
It’s perfectly understandable, it’s hard to complete REx course with the ongoing juggle in our lives. We don’t have luxury of time. In fact, we don’t even remember when we had it last! But learning cannot be stopped. It’s the 7th habit of Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Effective People – Sharpen the Saw! And we already chose to learn to “Stand Out”, didn’t we?. So, let’s find a way!
- Make the content omnipresent– The first action must be to organize the course content to make it handy. This would mean few things. Add Bookmark to the course web page in your PC/Mac browser – preferably in the bookmarks bar. Also, let your browser “Remember me”. If you have set your browser to share bookmarks across all your devices, you will have to do nothing to get the bookmarks in your Smartphone/Tab browser, but otherwise do it explicitly.
You may also want to create a label/folder in your email App where you keep precisely those 14/15 weekly course emails. A couple more ideas will follow.
- Eat the elephant– The only way to eat an elephant is by taking one bite at a time! Do not wait for a shiny day, that you will spare to just do this one thing! The day will never come! It’s like trying to swallow the entire elephant. Be content with what you can achieve in smaller pockets of time. Thankfully the course is already divided into small units, as small as 7 minutes.
- Grab those little unused pockets of time– Now that we have decided to consume the content in smaller, bits, the next question is, when? Thankfully, almost all the material is in the form of videos and quite conversational! I mean it doesn’t require you to stare at the content all the time. We can take advantage of it.
Identify all those physical activities where you leave your mind to wander. Here are my top favorites – evening walk, chopping vegetables (my wife likes this part) and my morning yoga sessions. Connect your headphone, start a video and get on with the physical activity that requires no specific mental focus. You might find the trick to play the video with smartphone in your pocket with screen locked, handy. The course starts moving inch by inch, each day!
In short, get the course work included in one or more of your existing rituals in addition to the regular study hour slots.
- Track the course completion – There is a recommended order to cover the course from Week 1 to Week 14. Prepare a tracking table (see the picture) where you could keep marking the completed parts, say by changing the font color and pick the next ones in the queue.
This mode of tracking helps in a way to even pat your own back, on your progress and get motivated to push forward the work.
- Keep an eye on takeaways– We will have to ponder over the key takeaways, after each of those sections. And here comes the best part of the course that is in the form of Summary of Key Points PDFs. Each word in those PDFs is worth its weight in gold.
You may want to download those 5 PDFs and keep them handy on your PC/Mac, for revisiting anytime you want to. As usual keep a link to that folder in your favorites/Quick Access of the Files Manager.
- Get The big Picture – You will need to get a big picture of the all the lessons together. It can come in many forms, but the one that I like is Mind Map. We could create a couple of mind maps that slice and dice the whole information and help forming your mind with respect to this knowledge!
- Let the Rubber meet the road – It’s one thing to gain the knowledge and it is quite another to apply it. The course has excellent homework exercise PDFs meant to assist for the same. Again, download those five PDFs and keep in the earlier mentioned folder to keep them handy.
The course provides guidance on the methods of picking up the goals and planning for them. We will have to extract several “goals” for ourselves based on the learning (Now, a train of elephants walking towards your dining table !).
Get all those goals and the steps required to attain them in your work management system and track towards their completion.
Can You Solve Problems in Your Sleep?
I am a dreamer. Well, not in the traditional sense.
What I mean is that I spend much of my sleep dreaming. I don’t say that with any sense of pride—it’s simply a fact. My nights are often filled with long, vivid dreams.
So when this topic came up last week at an IIT Bombay Alumni Association get-together, I immediately found myself joining the conversation.
Someone mentioned that they wake up remembering several dreams from the night before. Quite a few others nodded in agreement. Then the discussion took an interesting turn.
Several people observed that if they spent some time thinking about a difficult problem before going to bed, they often woke up with fresh ideas or a completely new perspective. It was almost as if the mind had quietly continued working while they slept.
That reminded me of a passage from one of my favourite books, The Intellectual Life, by A. G. Sertillanges. He writes:
“Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes’ sleeplessness, in a second perhaps; … you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water.”
I have always loved that observation.
Sertillanges reminds us that insights often arrive when the mind is no longer working at full conscious effort—those quiet moments before sleep or during a brief awakening at night.
Then comes his memorable warning: “To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water.” The image is perfect. A brilliant thought may appear effortlessly, but unless we capture it immediately, it leaves no more trace than words written on the surface of a pond. His practical advice is simple: keep a notebook beside the bed. Today, our phone can play the same role.
Unfortunately, my dreams haven’t solved any of my problems. They have mostly produced wonderfully illogical stories. Most of my real “aha!” moments have arrived elsewhere—while swimming laps in a pool or standing under a shower.
Why do these insights appear when the mind is relaxed in the first place? Why is it that the solution often arrives only after we’ve stopped consciously working on the problem?
And I think the reason is surprisingly simple.
Sometimes, we are just too close to the problem.
Most of us have experienced this. You’ve been wrestling with a difficult problem for hours. You reread the same document, redraw the same diagram, or stare at the same spreadsheet, convinced that if you think just a little harder, the solution will emerge. It doesn’t.
Then you go for a walk. Or take a shower. Or swim a few laps. Or simply sleep on it. And suddenly, the answer appears. This isn’t magic. It’s perspective.
There is an old saying that we “can’t see the forest for the trees.” When we stay immersed in a problem for too long, our thinking becomes confined to the boundaries of that problem. We keep examining the same facts, making the same assumptions, and following the same mental paths.
Stepping away changes that.
Distance allows us to zoom out. Instead of seeing one tree in exquisite detail, we begin to see how the entire forest fits together. Connections that were invisible suddenly become obvious. Assumptions that we never questioned become easier to challenge. Ideas that seemed unrelated begin to combine into a solution.
Ironically, some of our best thinking happens when we stop trying so hard to think.
My Swimming Office
Swimming has been my favourite thinking environment for many years. Today, my routine consists of swimming uninterrupted freestyle laps for about forty-five minutes. There are no phones. No emails. No conversations. Just the rhythmic movement of the body and the quiet repetition of lap after lap.
For many people, that might sound monotonous. For me, it has become a thinking laboratory.
I often carry an unresolved problem into the pool—not with the intention of forcing a solution, but simply allowing it to accompany me. Somewhere between the laps, while my attention is no longer locked onto the problem itself, new ideas begin to emerge.
Article outlines. Solutions to work-related challenges. Coaching frameworks. Decisions that had seemed difficult only an hour earlier.
Rarely do they appear because I analysed the problem harder. More often, they appear because my mind was finally free to look at it differently.
Baths Have Their Own Magic
Swimming isn’t the only place where this happens. Many of my smaller “eureka” moments have arrived while taking a shower.
Years ago, while pursuing my MBA, I was desperately looking for an organisation willing to share data for an academic data science project. I spent days thinking about whom to approach.
Then, during a bath, the answer appeared almost effortlessly.
My brother owned a radiology diagnostic centre. The machines there had quietly accumulated years of digital data that could be analysed.
The solution had always existed. I simply hadn’t seen it while I was looking too closely at the problem.
Capture the Idea Before It Disappears
Whether the insight comes in bed, in the shower, in the swimming pool or during a walk, one lesson remains the same.
Capture it immediately. Ideas are surprisingly fragile. They often arrive with such clarity that we become convinced we could never forget them. Yet we do.
That is why Sertillanges advised keeping a notebook beside the bed. Today, a simple notes app is enough. You don’t need to write an essay. A sentence, a sketch, or even a few keywords are often sufficient to preserve the essence of the idea.
An idea that isn’t captured is no different from an idea that never occurred.
Stepping Away Is Part of Thinking
We often believe that solving difficult problems requires spending more time in front of them. Sometimes it does. But sometimes the most productive thing we can do is deliberately step away. Carry the problem with you, but don’t keep staring at it. The distance doesn’t take you away from the answer. Very often, it is what finally allows you to see it.
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