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.
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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When the Right Task Becomes the Wrong Choice
One of the biggest mistakes we make is assuming our ability to think remains constant throughout the day. It doesn’t. Our mental energy rises and falls. Yet we often choose tasks as though every hour is equally suitable for every kind of work. It isn’t.
Some tasks demand far more mental energy than others:
- Planning a project.
- Breaking down a complex problem.
- Designing a presentation.
- Writing an important proposal.
These activities require deliberate, sustained thinking.
Other tasks require much less mental effort.
- Replying to routine emails.
- Booking tickets.
- Paying bills.
- Organizing files.
These rely more on familiar patterns and routines.
Daniel Kahneman described two broad modes of thinking: slow thinking and fast thinking. Slow thinking is deliberate, analytical and mentally demanding. Fast thinking is automatic, familiar and requires much less effort. Most knowledge work involves both. The important question is not which mode is better, but when to use each.
The common mistake lies is doing the right task at the wrong energy level. This leads to what I call The Energy Cascade Principle:
As your available energy changes, consciously choose the task whose energy demand best matches it.
Notice that I haven’t mentioned any particular time of day. That’s intentional. Everyone’s body clock is different. Even for the same person, energy varies from one day to the next depending on sleep, stress, health, exercise, or circumstances.
The question is never:
“Is it morning?”
The better question is:
“How much mental energy do I have right now?”
Whenever you find yourself at a high-energy point—whether that’s after a good night’s sleep, after an afternoon nap, or simply during your natural peak—invest it in work that requires slow, deliberate thinking.
As your energy gradually declines, let your work cascade toward activities that rely more on familiar routines and fast thinking.
One of the hidden benefits of this approach is efficiency. We often think of efficiency as using better tools or finding faster ways to complete a task. But there is another kind of efficiency: matching the task to the mind that is performing it.
A planning session completed at your mental peak may take half the time and produce a better result than attempting the same work when your energy is depleted. Conversely, routine administrative work rarely benefits from your sharpest thinking. Doing the right work at the right energy level is one of the simplest ways to improve both productivity and the quality of your thinking. Once you begin noticing your own energy patterns, task selection becomes much more intentional.
The pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield observed:
“The best rest for doing one thing is doing another until you fall into a sound sleep.”
That insight is profound. Recovery doesn’t always mean stopping. Often it means changing the kind of effort.
After hours of strategic thinking, reading may feel refreshing. After writing, organizing your notes may be relaxing. After solving difficult problems, a walk, gardening, cooking, or exercise may restore your mind. You’re still engaged—but you’re no longer asking your brain to perform at its highest level.
But Don’t Let the Mind Go Completely Slack. Relaxing is not an invitation to spend the evening in mindless distraction.
A. G. Sertillanges, in The Intellectual Life, captured this beautifully:
“Yes, indeed, relaxed; but like a violin with all its strings completely slackened. What a labor next day to tune them all up again!”
Recovery should keep the mind gently alive. Reading, Learning, Meaningful conversations, Music, Hobbies require less energy while still engaging the mind.
The goal is not to maintain the same energy throughout the day. That is impossible. The goal is to consciously match your work to your changing energy. As your available energy changes, transition naturally to work requiring less mental effort and supported by greater intrinsic interest. By the end of the day, you aren’t forcing yourself through difficult thinking, nor have you abandoned your mind to passive distraction. Instead, your day has flowed naturally—from demanding to lighter, from analytical to enjoyable, from intense concentration to gentle engagement. Like water descending a mountainside, your work follows a natural gradient.
When you match the energy demanded by the task with the energy available in your mind, work becomes more effective, more enjoyable, and far less exhausting.
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(Originally published in Times of India on July 18, 2026)
Why We Procrastinate: The Tug of War Inside Our Minds
You know exactly what you should do. You even want to do it. Yet somehow you don’t. Instead, you check your phone, rearrange your desk, make another cup of tea, or convince yourself you’ll start tomorrow. Why? That is procrastination. But why does it happen?
I have had my own struggles with personal productivity over the years. Interestingly, procrastination was never one of my biggest challenges. Because of that, I never really understood what was going on in the mind of someone who procrastinated regularly. From the outside, it seemed simple enough. I assumed it was mostly a matter of low enthusiasm, poor motivation, or plain laziness.
That explanation made sense—until it didn’t.
I would see intelligent, capable, and hardworking people postponing things they genuinely wanted to do: starting a project, preparing for an exam, or reading a book. These weren’t lazy people. Clearly, something else was happening.
That question stayed with me until I came across an explanation that completely changed the way I looked at procrastination. It came from Tim Urban’s excellent book What’s Our Problem?
Tim explains how two parts of our brain are often engaged in a quiet struggle for control.
One is the Prefrontal Cortex, responsible for planning, judgment, learning from experience, and long-term thinking.
The other is the Amygdala, an ancient survival system designed to detect threats and keep us safe.
What really struck me was that Tim didn’t present this as a model of just procrastination. He described it as a much broader tug of war that also shows up in addiction, impulsive behaviour, emotional reactions and many other aspects of our lives.
That was my ‘aha’ moment. While procrastination had never been my biggest challenge, I immediately recognised this tug of war in other situations in my own life. If it could explain my own behaviour, I could suddenly appreciate how powerful it must be for someone who struggles with procrastination every day.
That idea stayed with me.
Later, while preparing my first Time Management and Personal Productivity workshop for teenagers, I wanted a simple way to explain it. That’s when Jai and Veeru were born.
They are actually very good friends. They live together peacefully most of the time and usually make a great team. But every now and then, they disagree. And when they do, a tug of war begins. Jai represents the Prefrontal Cortex and Veeru the Amygdala!
One thing is important to remember. Veeru is not the villain.
For most of human history, he helped our ancestors survive. Without him, they wouldn’t have escaped predators or responded quickly to danger. The problem is that the world has changed much faster than our brains have.
Today, the threats we face are rarely life-threatening. Instead, we face uncertainty, criticism, fear of failure, difficult conversations, exams, deadlines, and mentally demanding work. These situations are uncomfortable. But they are usually not dangerous.
Unfortunately, Veeru doesn’t always know the difference. And that’s where procrastination begins.
Procrastination begins when Veeru mistakes discomfort for danger.
When that happens, avoiding the task feels like the safest option. We postpone it, distract ourselves with something easier, and experience immediate relief. Unfortunately, that relief is temporary. The task is still waiting for us—often accompanied by more stress and guilt than before.
Understanding the problem was one thing. Finding practical ways to overcome it was another. As I searched for solutions, it became clear that people procrastinate for very different reasons. That insight eventually led me to develop six procrastination personas. You can read about them here.
Yet beneath every solution lies one common principle: support Jai. Veeru doesn’t need encouragement. He is always alert and ready to take charge whenever he senses discomfort. In fact, he often takes over before Jai even gets a chance to speak. Our job is to give Jai a fighting chance.
The next time you catch yourself postponing something important, resist the temptation to label yourself as lazy. Instead, pause and ask yourself:
“Is Veeru mistaking discomfort for danger again?”
Or, if you prefer the metaphor:
Who’s winning the tug of war right now—Jai or Veeru?
That one question changes the conversation.
Instead of fighting yourself, you begin to understand yourself. And that awareness gives Jai another opportunity to lead. Because, more often than we realise,
Discomfort is not danger.
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(Originally published in Times of India on July dd, 2026)