The Subtle Art of Being Free!

Aravind Venugopal
4 min readOct 20, 2019

“Everyone is free, it’s just that they’re prentending themselves to be busy” — Just Me

When my friends reach out to me, I usually reply back to them spontaneously unless or until I’m dozing off 😎. I also get a good amount of time to watch/create some content, play, read and do more things, apart from my academics or the works that I do.
It’s not like I’m super free without any work to do. But I believe, I can make some time available always to do things which I want. This is with the help of something new, that I figured out. This thing actually helps me to avoid telling this excuse always — “I couldn’t do it, because I was busy” and so on.

The person in this picture is obviously not me (thanks to Google)

The best way to make some free time so that you can use it for different purposes is by dividing the works that you have to do. I will share with you how I’m doing it. I promise you that, it’s going to be just a few minutes read. Let’s look into that briefly.

If you want to get X thing done in a day, divide that X into smaller fractions. Now, Instead of one big task, we’ve small tasks in front of us. Do you know what’s the advantage of smaller tasks?

Advantages of Smaller Tasks

  1. First and foremost, the tasks are smaller
  2. We tend to finish smaller tasks way more easily and faster
  3. We get an adrenaline rush (kind of 😅) when we finish off a task. This adrenaline rush can be used as fuel to move forward.
  4. Though we will be aiming to finish off one part of the work, we gradually move on to the remaining work to maintain a good workflow. Finally, a lot more fractions of work will be finished than what it would’ve been done if it was a single piece of a big task.

Also, if it is a big task, we won’t be able to measure how much effort we’re putting in, but by dividing it into smaller tasks, we can easily do that. Ultimately, this leads to an increase in our productivity.

Planning / Goal Setting

Another important thing in this whole technique is to plan how you’re going to do some stuff (or setting the end goals). If we have a plan in front of us, we tend to follow it. Even if we dive away from the plan unknowingly, we can easily get back to it later.

Planning/Goal Setting can be categorized as :
1) Long Term
2) Mid Term
3) Short Term

Detailed view on all these three types of planning and methods to improve your productivity is mentioned in detail and beauty in this article by Daniel Bourke. This will really help a lot to increase your productivity. A video of the same is also available.

Remember This!

Once you break your work into smaller fractions, write it down on a piece of paper or on any software application (I prefer Trello over any other thing). Also include, how you’re planning to do your tasks. Making it visible always helps us to move forward. If we have it only on our mind, we won’t feel any change. Our minds do a lot of stuff at times and something will always prevail over what you were doing the moment earlier. So, writing it down will always help you.

Sample Trello Board (Well, this is mine)

Try this method at least once to figure out whether it works or not for you. After doing this, compare it with how you used to do your works earlier. You will definitely find a difference. While following the “breaking-down” pattern, you will go through a lot of happy moments (or the checkpoints) when you complete each and every small fraction of work. But in the usual scenario, we will happiness only when we finish off the work completely.

If you think this will help you, do try it out. I’m sure that you will feel a change in how you do your tasks. Get started now itself. Postponing this will always postpone your success and happiness. Do let me know if this works out. All the best Champ!

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Aravind Venugopal

Java Developer | Flutter Developer | Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador | Intel Software Innovator