Productivity Principles: From a Neurosurgeon

There are underlying principles of productivity that when combined create a formula that will not only allow you to achieve your goals, but also improve the quality of your life and wellbeing. In this class I will provide you with my distilled experiences from practising as a neurosurgeon whilst raising a young family, that have allowed me to thrive within a rapidly evolving and chaotic environment.

In this class you will learn how to:

Assess your own thinking.
Create a future environment where you are most likely to achieve your goals.
Plan your day and week to use your time most efficiently.
Deal with unexpected events and prioritise them.
Capture incoming action items in your "second brain".
Significantly reduce the cognitive strain from work and experience more energy and bouts of deep work.
Experience a mind like water.

In the class overview I will give you a bird's eye view of the over-arching structure of the class outlining the Plan, Execute and Reflect schema, before diving into the individual lessons and their respective projects.

Plan

In plan I will give you an experience of Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, by involving you in an experiment. After you have had an experience of Metacognition you will be able to engage with the next lesson explaining Hot and Cold thinking and the role this concept fulfils in becoming more productive. Next we will become more real world with an example from my work week of how to plan from a 168 hour perspective.

Execute

In the execute section of the class we will see how small changes to our "to do list" can drastically increase the chance of us achieving our desired goals on a daily basis. Following this, we will learn how to triage the constant stream of incoming information that may derail our planned tasks using the Urgent vs. Important matrix. Finally for this section, I will explain to you the tools I use to capture incoming data for later review, to ensure I have maximal focus on the task at hand.

Reflect

In reflect we will look at templates of how to reflect and review upon our day and week, to ensure we stay on track with our goals, improve with the next iteration of planning and most importantly - ensure we are having fun!

A Welcome Side Effect

A lightbulb has the primary function of illumination. A welcome side effect at times is that it gives off heat. Similarly, the primary aim of this productivity class is to illuminate your path towards a self-sustaining productivity system that works for you. A welcome side effect will be the warmth you experience when you realise that by implementing this system you have a much calmer mind and experience significantly less stress. In short, you will be one step closer to what is referred to as a mind like water.

Who is this class for?

This class is for anyone who struggles to be productive in a rapidly changing world that presents many distractions and unexpected problems. It is also for those who experience stress from the volume of work they have to process and would like to experience a calmer mind.

Who am I?

My name is Adi Kumar. I am a neurosurgeon working in the UK. What brings me most joy is to look after my family and see my patients doing well. I've learnt through studying disparate fields of interest that their are underlying principles of productivity that allow me to thrive both at work and at home, irrespective of the unexpected events that life may present. Fundamentally I am both a teacher and a student with the aim of empowering others through shared experience. My hope is that this Skillshare class teaches you the principles to experience a happier, more productive life.

Adi Kumar

Neurosurgeon, Teacher, Dad

21

2