How to stay ahead in the Get-shit-done world?

What is Haiku Productivity and how it helps?

Greetings,

I hope you liked the previous article on Powerful Decision Making. Today, let’s talk about concepts which have been globally accepted by everybody, but perhaps rebelling against them could give us a different perspective of looking at the obstacles in our life. These include having complex ideas to deal with simple problems. These problems can be tackled with something that’s called Haiku Productivity. But let’s talk about that towards the end of this article. Let’s first talk about things that we already know but they may be hampering our productivity.

Success and innovation lectures, theses, articles have made the most use of the sentence “Thinking out of the box.” I’m pretty sure everybody has heard this sentence from somewhere or another.” Books like Lateral thinking by Edward de Bono teach us how to think unconventionally to solve modern problems. The idea got popularized in the marketing and advertising circuit back in the 1970s when the world needed powerful original ideas for brand building and marketing problems. But it is 2019, isn’t it? It’s been 50 years and we’re following the same strategy. We’ve lingered so much out of the box; we’ve forgotten what it’s like being in the box. We’ve presumed this box to be a negative concept, which it isn’t. The Analogy was created to get people out of conventional thinking. ‘The box’ actually means a conceptual framework (definition of the paradigm). We can successfully claim then, that the box is not made up of prison bars as we perceive it today. It is simply a base for the concepts that need to be portrayed through your idea. Although this ‘box’ acts as a limit for your idea, I’d still say limits are good for productivity as well as creativity. In the age of the beginning of the catchphrase that we’re talking about, incredible science fiction films like Star Wars, E.T and 2001: A Space Odyssey was made that received tremendous acclaim from the critics as well as the audiences. But today we’re so habituated to science fiction as a genre, we’re not concerned about the innovation of the ideas that could be shared through new-age sci-fi films. The reason why films like ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Gravity’ work and ‘Chappie’ and ‘John Carter’ and ‘Max Steel’ don’t, is because, despite being from the sci-fi genre, the makers of ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Gravity, went back to their roots. They broke every clutter down to the simplest idea that they wanted to communicate. The films that didn’t work were complex and vague for no reason at all. And the shift is pretty evident. People who think ‘inside the box’ attract a lot of audiences, because that’s what is new right now.

Over the years we’ve lost this way of storytelling. Living legends like Christopher Nolan and Alfonso Cuaron go back to the crux of storytelling by making people engage more with the characters and their little mannerisms, commenting on the behavioral pattern of human beings, than focusing on the technology and the lifeless computer graphics to enhance the abstraction of science to tell a story. We can slowly witness the change in art, literature, and business, too. The simplest ideas get most communicated. Film industries are trying to make movies on simple stories eg. Moonlight, Green book, Spotlight, The Revenant and Whiplash among others, while artists are revisiting the ‘isms’ they learned in art school and the business world is coming up with simple ideas that sell eg. Ikea and Dollar store.

Now, that we know what the world is and what it is transitioning into, let’s go back to Haiku Productivity.

Let me simplify how beautiful and effective limits are. Take a look at this example of how one can create poetry with a restriction of three sentences and 17 syllables.

Lightning
shatters the darkness―
the night heron’s shriek.

― Matsuo Basho

This is called a Haiku. Three sentences and 17 syllables is an insane limit. But the beauty it holds just can’t be described in any more syllables or sentences other than the set limit. Likewise, if we accept and embrace certain limits, we’ll tend to get more productive. This is called Haiku Productivity

We’re so used to breaking the rules, we don’t know how to follow them anymore.

Areas of your life that can be treated by utilizing the haiku rules are as follows:

• Clutter: Imagine if you could set a limit on the number of things you can buy for the next six months. Owning just around 100 things in total. You’d be more conscious about the things you own, and the things that you buy. Even buying books that you don’t read can be included in this list. Then you might start reading the books you buy.
• Time: Restricting yourself by having deadlines for every task you do, actually increases the thinking ability of your brain to get the job done.
• Work: Try to keep the work you do as minimal as possible so that you can focus on the things you do one at a time. When you know you have 4 things to deal with, it’s difficult to focus on any project.
• Relationships: Have you ever wondered why sometimes it is too exhausting when you deal with a relationship that’s pulling you down? It’s because you choose that task for your brain when your brain is supposed to do something productive. It’s just not necessary. Although it is beautiful to meet new people and know their stories and adventures, it is advised to keep your circle as small as possible, as we have limited time and energy to spend on people.

Limits and restrictions have always given me power over the tasks I undertake. It’s always brought structure and order to my work. Most people tend to get lost in the process of finding freedom and breaking the ‘box’. The journey then becomes directionless.

Since my content and art are mostly chaotic, a little order creates balance, which is an alleviating and satisfying experience for me and my team at il0g who, like me, love working under limits to boost productivity.

We, at il0g, believe, “Rebellion is not about breaking the rules anymore, it’s about making and following them.

Let’s start limiting ourselves to grow in life, to make the most of it. Let’s try incorporating Haiku productivity into our lives. I hope it helps you, I really do.

See you all after two weeks. Ciao!

Peace and Regards,

The Gray One