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 [...]
I remember my mother constantly reminding everyone around her about one thing: budget your money. Don’t overspend. Save for the future. Stay disciplined. At the time, it sounded like good advice. But its real weight became clear only when I saw people around us struggle because they ignored it. As my [...]
Most of my writing is about organizing digital life. Ironically, the physical world—where we were first taught to “keep things in place”—is where we struggle just as much. This is not about decluttering or aesthetics—the domain of professional organizers who can make your space look beautiful. I’m not talking [...]
You plan your day perfectly at 9 AM. By 11:30, it’s already irrelevant. A call runs over. An urgent issue pops up. A “quick” task takes two hours. And just like that, your carefully time-blocked schedule collapses. If this sounds familiar, the problem isn’t your discipline. It’s how our world works. [...]
I often think about the two women who have shaped my approach to work more than anyone else—my Mom and my Wife. They are very different from each other. In fact, they are almost opposites. But in my life, those opposites shaped me. My Mom and my Wife are two [...]
One of the most subtle productivity errors does not look like an error at all. It looks like initiative. It feels like momentum. It even feels disciplined. It is this: starting the day with the first task that grabs your attention. I call this behavior: running with the first task [...]
We all love the idea of being organized. But we hate the idea of cleaning up. And that’s the paradox. One of the hardest parts of staying organized is not arranging things beautifully — it’s keeping clutter from creeping back in. The Myth of the “Perfect Free Day” Most of us secretly [...]
Dr. Avinash Kulkarni (ADK) is an IIT alumnus and a PhD-trained engineer who has spent almost five decades building deep-technology businesses in India. After completing his doctoral work in the United States and earning multiple patents, he returned to India in the late 1970s to set up manufacturing in [...]
Last night, I received a WhatsApp message from my daughter. Short. Direct. Sounding urgent. “teach me GTD tomorrow morning i think i might need it im forgetting things” She’s deeply into art—paintings, sketches, mixed media (and the last I heard, she was experimenting with linoleum). She makes calendars, decorates [...]
In hindsight, travel drama seems to announce the beginning of many of our vacations. Once, during an Andaman trip, I forgot to collect the keys of our luggage at airport security, resulting in a late-night hunt for a key maker in Chennai. This trip had its own opening act. [...]