Pragya Bijalwan, chief marketing officer of Crompton Greaves, believes in the power of the Pomodoro technique, which recommends working for 25 minutes and then taking a break. Then, after frequent intervals, take longer breaks. She says it helps because one can break away from monotony, but for those 25 minutes, one has to really focus on work.
She spoke to Storyboard18 about work pressures, how to get through the weekdays and weekends, and her hacks for the workplace and the home.
Edited excerpts:
The creator economy has taken the world by storm. Which influencers and trends are you following?
Everyone is hooked on social media. In fact, Gen Z spends in excess of 240 minutes per day on social media. While I don’t belong to Gen Z, I’m pretty much on social media to know about a lot of things.
I’m pretty much a fitness freak because I think it’s very important to keep that side of your system alive. One person that I have followed over the years is Milind Soman. I don’t follow many of them, but when I follow them I get quite inspired and there are no stereotypes.
You don’t have to hit the gym to be fit. What I’ve learned after seeing a lot of content is that you just need to be in your space and there is always room to exercise. I try to consume as much during the day, more so because I have a health regime. Secondly, if I don’t practise health and fitness or exercise for a day, I feel guilty of not doing it… So, that keeps me a little bit alive and also motivated.
There’s a lot of talk about burnout, workplace toxicity and hustle culture. What steps have you taken to avoid the adverse impact of the always-on culture on yourself and your colleagues and what advice would you give them?
There are so many things happening around that one wants to be everywhere. Marketers often have this fear of missing out. If there are 10 platforms, they think there is a need to be there on the 10 platforms. One has to make a frugal choice. Work is a lot different. Similarly, you have to make choices on the way you also operate.
So, one is that you define your work. Quite often, what happens is that when you really want to do everything, you get busy, you don’t get effective. So, one is to think about getting effective rather than to get busy.
Just because you’re working 12 hours a day, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing the best of the work. After four o’clock, I don’t allow for anything. It’s all pre-blocked for me, which basically says: No meetings after that from my side.
I have blocked lunch time, I have blocked reading time for myself, which helps me and my team members to divide the time and not stay just busy.
Secondly, it’s very important to be realistic in your ambition. You have to define the top three things you have to go after and just stick to that.
One more important thing is don’t overkill yourself with ambition. It is good to be a perfectionist sometimes, but it’s also okay to lose that perfection sometimes for peace. If that 10 on 10 is not going to be sustainable each time, then you have to take a call for yourself.
Sometimes, when you get involved with your work, you get very emotional and passionate about it. Withdraw yourself at the right time – that will ensure your mental health or your mental capacity does not get exhausted.
Is there any sport or fitness routine you practice to steal a few minutes of me-time for yourself?
I work out late in the evening, after office hours. I directly hit the gym. Over the weekends, I have lately started playing squash, which requires a lot of strength. More than that, it requires a lot of mental agility because you focus so much on the game.
What does your weekend look like?
Like anyone else, I actually look forward to the weekend. I would say a little bit of work to the point that it adds on to my knowledge area. It is a cocktail of a lot of activities which provides me relaxation and also helps me see things outside of my work area.
So socialising with friends, going out, reading a lot of stuff, and also playing my sport. I also believe in mindfulness, so tranquillity to the extent that if I can sit and just close my eyes and focus on something for half an hour, I do that either on a Saturday or on a Sunday.
It’s basically anchored towards a Sunday because Saturday goes into a lot of other things. So on a Sunday, I need to again clear my mind so that I can be ready for Monday.
Share one work hack and one life hack you swear by.
While a job requires us to attend meetings back to back and read a lot of stuff, I try to take breaks in between. Pomodoro technique says to work for 25 minutes and then take a break. Then after frequent intervals, take a longer break. I think that helps because you break away from the monotony. But for those 25 minutes, one has to really focus on work. The biggest distraction these days is your phone.
On the personal front, one hack which works is – and I think it’s quite dated – is to have a to-do list. So, I think that’s one thing that you can do is to have a look at your diary and then you can just go through what your week looks like.
I keep a diary and I maintain it every day in the morning when I land in the office between 9:00 and 9:30. Morning time is the best time for me, where I take on the most difficult task. Because if that gets sorted for me, which has been a pain for a little while, then the rest of the day looks easy. So, I try to eat the frog first.
What are you watching or streaming this weekend?
I’ve been watching One Day at a Time on Netflix. It’s about an American-Cuban family and it is a comedy drama. The family members have battles with each other when they talk about what they want to do. They talk about people having different preferences in their life and how the family still works together in a different country.
What are you reading? Any recommendations?
There’s a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. So it talks about two systems about humans. System one is about intuitive systems. If there is a problem, my intuitive self says that this is what can work out. I am very quick in my response. I immediately react to it.
System two is about a delayed decision but a thought-out decision. And you apply all kinds of projects to arrive at that. Now it talks about how system one and two can work together to arrive at the right decisions. It also talks about cognitive bias.
A piece of wisdom you would like to share?
Life is not always the same. You’ll see a successful person and will look up to him or her. But remember, that person has gone through a lot of downs as well. So I’m a big fan of resilience.
I keep saying this to my team because we have a lot of Gen Z crowd. We need to take care of the new-age trend. And these are the future of our target audience for us. Everyone wants to move really fast. But when failures come, it’s very difficult for some of them to really absorb and learn from it.
It’s very easy to see 10 things happening and say you’re lucky. Nobody is lucky. They work through that. You haven’t seen the failures behind it. So my mantra is that if you fall seven times you should stand up eight times.
Always plan your day because a lot of things are unpredictable. But be ready for that. Work around it. And if you persist and you have the resilience, you’ll always see the right things happening at the end of the day. But don’t lose that resilience. Because speed is one thing. But sustaining that speed is another thing.
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