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)
The Journal That Helped Me Stay Productive for Years
Imagine waking up on a rainy Sunday and wondering, “What exactly did I do with the last six months of my life?”
Most of us can answer only in broad strokes: worked a lot, attended meetings, read a few books, spent time with family. The details have already evaporated.
Now imagine opening a neat matrix and being able to see, day by day, what you built, learned, fixed, wrote, read, and experienced. Not because you have an extraordinary memory, but because you kept a simple journal.
Before you stop reading, this is not the “Dear Diary” kind of journal.
This journal is more like a flight recorder for your life.
Every day gets one row. Every important role you play gets a column. Mine typically has four columns:
- Job
- Vocation
- Reading & Learning
- Personal & Family
Whenever you finish something meaningful, record it in the appropriate cell. A client presentation. A chapter of a book. A long walk with your spouse. A difficult conversation. A blog post. A new skill.
Over time, the spreadsheet becomes surprisingly fascinating.
One glance tells you whether your days are balanced or lopsided. Are you investing in learning? Have you neglected family for three weeks? Is your side project moving forward or merely living in your imagination?
The journal also becomes an unexpected source of satisfaction. There is something deeply rewarding about looking at a row packed with meaningful activity. It is tangible evidence that your days were not wasted.
And the benefits keep accumulating:
Reflection and Completion
Recording a task forces you to revisit it briefly. Did you leave any loose ends? Did you finish it properly? This tiny moment of reflection often improves the quality of your work.
Your Personal Highlight Reel
Most people underestimate how much they accomplish. A journal serves as a visual reminder of your progress. On difficult days, it can be surprisingly motivating.
A Built-in Time Machine
Need to remember when you submitted that proposal, completed that course, or started that project? The answer is usually a quick search away.
Effortless Reporting
Weekly reports become simple. Monthly reviews almost write themselves. Annual self-appraisals, resumes, and career profiles become far easier because the raw material is already available.
Balanced Attention
Reading down a single column reveals patterns. If your Learning column is empty for weeks, or your Personal column looks neglected, the journal gently points it out.
Productivity Without a Stopwatch
You do not need elaborate time-tracking systems. Simply recording meaningful accomplishments often provides enough visibility into how productive your days have been.
A few practical tips:
- Keep it digital.
- Use a spreadsheet.
- Record items as soon as possible after completion.
- Finish updating the day before you shut down for the evening.
- Highlight weekends in a different color to create visual boundaries between work weeks.
- Enable the Microsoft Office Clipboard if you frequently copy information from emails and documents.
The hardest part is not creating the journal. It is showing up every day.
But once you have a few months of entries behind you, you’ll wonder how you managed without it.
If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution that takes just a few minutes a day and keeps paying dividends for years, consider becoming the historian of your own life.
How to Keep Weekends Productive (Without Ditching Netflix)
Weekend productivity has very little to do with hustle. In fact, the biggest challenge of weekends is often the opposite: too much unstructured freedom. An entire day with no meetings, no deadlines, and no fixed schedule can quietly drift into endless scrolling, random YouTube videos, “just one more episode” or endless afternoon naps!
That’s why I recommend one simple thing: A Crisp To-Do List
A Crisp To-Do List
A useful approach is to maintain your larger master to-do list and then pull out a small weekend subset from it — a few meaningful options that fit the slower, more open nature of weekends rather than a normal workday.
The idea behind it is to have a solid set of worthwhile alternatives ready, so your free time gets utilized intentionally instead of getting wasted aimlessly. And yes — the list should absolutely include leisure too – a movie, a show, sports, music, even a proper neiksen afternoon of doing absolutely nothing, whatever you genuinely want to enjoy.
Because Netflix is not the problem, unconscious consumption is.
When entertainment sits alongside reading, reflection, exercise, errands, creative work, and conversations, it becomes a conscious choice instead of an accidental time sink. That’s the real value of a good to-do list: it keeps you aware of your alternatives.
Of course, some weekends are best spent completely differently — travelling, going on a getaway, simply disconnecting from systems and lists altogether. And that is perfectly fine too.
A weekend list might look something like this (you are not aiming to finish all of it — just to keep enough good options open and choose dynamically based on the flow of the day and the relative priority of each task):
- Go for a long walk, early morning
- Finish the book by reading the last 40 pages
- Call brother and check how his new center is coming up
-
Sketch a few ideas for decorating the empty hall corner near the window
- Watch a movie from the watchlist
-
Go shopping with the family for the upcoming vacation
-
Watch the freestyle swimming technique video bookmarked earlier
- Take an intentional afternoon nap
-
Sit quietly during sunset
The Sandwich Bread Problem
Once you are convinced of the need for a to-do list, the next thing to protect is its freshness. A to-do list is a bit like sandwich bread. Leave it untouched for too long, and it becomes stale — things past their usefulness: filled with outdated priorities, completed tasks, etc.
Thankfully, unlike bread, you do not need to bake the list fresh from scratch every day. Just keep revisiting it, cleaning it, replenishing it, and using it as your default place to decide what to work on next.
Granular Tasks Reduce Resistance
Another useful principle is to make weekend tasks granular and actionable beforehand. Otherwise, you end up staring at free time without clarity on what to actually do with it. Vague tasks create friction. “Work on health” feels heavy, while “Go for a swim” feels manageable. “Improve networking” is abstract, but “Call Paresh” is something you can start immediately.
Smaller, clearer tasks reduce mental resistance. And that matters because starting is usually the hardest part.
A Better Way to Think About Weekends
A productive weekend does not need to look intense. The real goal is simply to avoid drifting through free time without direction.
Maintain a master list of meaningful things you want to do, pull out a small weekend subset from it, keep the tasks granular, and include leisure intentionally alongside everything else.
That way, when you finally sit down to watch Netflix, it feels earned instead of feeling like you quietly cheated on your own responsibilities all weekend.
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(Originally published in Times of India on 23 May, 2026)
The Personal Orbit Model: Why We All Need Time Management
I once came across a humorous parody of the classic advice columns you often see in magazines. (I’m paraphrasing here, but the spirit is intact.)
Reader 1: “I never feel hungry. What should I do?”
Expert: “Read Sahastra Pakakriya (सहस्त्र पाकक्रिया).”
(A grand old-style title — roughly, a compendium of a thousand recipes.)
Reader 2: “I feel hungry all the time. What should I do?”
Expert: “Read Sahastra Pakakriya (सहस्त्र पाकक्रिया).”
At first glance, it sounds absurd. The same solution for opposite problems?
But look closer… it’s actually correct. Whether you have no appetite or too much of it, what you really need is a better relationship with food.
And in a similar way:
Whether you have too much time and feel it is wasted,
or too little time and feel constantly rushed —
what you actually need is time management.
Most people think time management is about busy people trying to become more productive. But that’s a very narrow view. Time management is not about busyness. It is about life itself.
Your life is not made of years. It is made of days. Your days are made of hours, and your hours are made of moments. Which means:
How you spend your moments is how you spend your life.
And yet, people resist the idea.
Students tell themselves that discipline belongs to the future — assignments get pushed to the last moment, sleep becomes irregular, and focus keeps slipping in the face of constant distraction.
Homemakers carry an endless, invisible workload — cooking, caregiving, errands, emotional support — without clear boundaries or fixed hours, and their own needs quietly move to the background.
Professionals find their days consumed by meetings, emails, and notifications — activity fills every hour, yet meaningful progress often feels elusive.
Business owners live with constant unpredictability — everything feels urgent, long-term thinking gets postponed, and personal time slowly erodes.
Retired people suddenly have open days with no imposed structure — routines loosen, activity reduces, and a sense of direction can quietly fade.
Different situations. Same misunderstanding. Because time management is not about profession. It is about awareness.
This is another way to understand why time management matters — not as theory, but as something you can observe in everyday life. It shows what actually happens when time is not consciously managed. One simple way to see this pattern play out is through what I call the Personal Orbit Model.
At the center of our lives lies the first orbit — the orbit of daily routines.
This is the survival layer. It includes sleep, food, hygiene, commuting, and all the small repetitive activities that keep life running. You do this anyway — by habit, by need, or by compulsion. These things may feel mundane, but they form the operating system of life. This orbit is largely self-sustaining — it runs because it must. Which is why we rarely question or consciously manage it.
The second orbit is that of work and responsibility.
This includes jobs, studies, businesses, caregiving, and all the commitments imposed by systems around us — organizations, markets, institutions, and society. This is where most of our time and energy goes, and this orbit has a way of expanding endlessly: emails create more emails, meetings generate more meetings, and urgency keeps replacing importance.
This orbit is constantly nudged by the environment — expectations, deadlines, social norms, and systems keep pushing you forward. You may not always manage it in the most thoughtful or ideal way, but you still manage it. You get by.
We’ll come back to how to do this better. For now, let’s move to the third orbit.
Beyond these lies the third orbit — the orbit of aspirations. This is where meaning lives. It includes the things that make us feel deeply alive — music, writing, learning, fitness, spirituality, creativity, reflection, contribution, and personal dreams. And this is usually the first orbit to be sacrificed.
People often say:
“I’ll come back to it once life settles down.”
But life rarely settles down. The inner orbits don’t necessarily expand; executing them—often inefficiently—consumes all available time, leaving none for the third orbit, and slowly, almost invisibly, the outer orbit fades out of existence. With no external nudge—and with you as the only promoter, it becomes the easiest orbit to drop rather than protect, and this is how many people lose their dreams before they even realize.
This is where time management becomes important as a way of protecting balance between these orbits.
Time management, then, is not about filling every minute. It is not about becoming mechanical, rigid, or hyper-productive. It is about ensuring that your limited life energy goes where your values truly are.
It also means using time wisely with intent: doing the right thing at the right time, and consciously parking what can wait—even if you feel like doing it now. That requires a system you can trust—one that helps you choose, sequence, and defer without guilt. In other words, good intentions are not enough; you need a solid time-management system.
Perhaps the real purpose of time management is not productivity at all. Perhaps it is protection.
- Protecting attention.
- Protecting energy.
- Protecting relationships.
- Protecting health.
- Protecting dreams.
Because in the end, time is not something outside life. Time is life itself. And whether we have too much of it or too little of it…
we are always living inside it.
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(Originally published in Times of India on May 06, 2026)