Art of Bitfulness,The

I was pleasantly surprised, when in an interview, Nandan mentioned that he opted for telephonic calls and "arcane" SMS daily. His co-author, Bhojwani, preferred WhatsApp which was more attune to current times.The cover page uses Futura PT Light font. Peter Reiner, of Paratype, has been designing, developing, and distributing digital fonts since the 1980s. The letters show a certain unpredictability at irregular intervals depicting that it is not governed by rule-driven science. Bitfulness has a blue background, and the page is white denoting the Sky indicating calmness.Many years ago, Mr. Naryana Murty mentioned that every sixth person he met in the world knew Nandan. That was before Nandan entered Politics and later started working on Aadhaar, and founded Non-Profit organisations, and Venture Capital Firms etc. Nandan now straddles many aspects of society within India and abroad. His contact list must be mind boggling. Hence, I set out to find out whether there was any cure for my malaise, though I operated on a far minuscule scale compared to others in this book, including the authors.I have found that I am seriously challenged by social media. It has been an acute liability to say the least: I have lost touch with the number of times I have exited out of WhatsApp and Facebook, I even exited LinkedIn. I use Truecaller and answer only those who are listed in my contacts. In chess parlance that is called building a "fortress", for those unfamiliar, a position that is impregnable.However, there is a cost to be paid for the missed interactions and opportunities it brings. I was all along bewildered by my myopic behaviour in this digital world. Many friends too thought my behaviour was toxic and wrote me off.Rephrasing B. B. King's songI have been down one timeI have been down two timesRight now, I am drowning, drowning in a Sea of InformationThe book has three broad parts. One constituting The Problem, the second constituting The Individual and The Collective.The book is basically an approach to spend time on our devices better. In the process the authors bring in their vast experience in the software field, also backing up all material in the book with a slew of psychologists, therapists, cognition experts, addiction experts, tennis players, etc.The book is well researched and at times throws up facts which can be at best described as Truth is Stranger than Fiction: the people with the smartphone in another room outperformed those with the smartphone in the same room.I do know that Nandan has a penchant for coining words like: The World is Flat and choosing #TechHalli for Bengaluru. The authors here use delightful words such as Kryptonite, prosthetics of the brain etc.This book is the need of the hour and can help folks to better manage technology and in my case as a lifejacket for the much harried.Thus, the authors are like Virgil, guiding many into Paradiso.

Extremely well articulated practical and simple insights which are not only easy but repeatable for taking control of our lives in a world with overwhelming impact of technology.Three fundamental principles - mirrors,not windows;don’t swim upstream & define ourselves are so powerful but simple advise.Reiterating journaling into “ bit fullness meditation “ is brilliant one and I found it very useful.Chapters of communication mode ,curare mode and how to be together are other ones which I quite liked to declutter my life and create an environment of solitude in chaos .I somehow disagree with one advise of using note taking softwares like Evernote,Roam Research,Obsidian etc and my personal suggestion would be to use pen and paper to make notes and the sheer pleasure of using ink pen (my favourite and you may choose other ) and a note book to write notes in school fashion is unbeatable.It may be true for me but I am a big proponent of this and you may try if not tried .But overall great experience and found it so relevant that I did speed reading once but realised to read one more time slowly which I did again to appreciate the context better .Great work by Nandan and Tanuj 👍👍👍

An extremely well written book by Mr. Nilekani & Mr. Bhojwani. For all those looking to reduce their mobile screen times this book is a must read. Some very good productivity hacks and solutions given to reduce the screen time and focus your time on real deep work. In todays time our mobile phones make us lose our sense of time and time management is all about making time and not finding the time. The 3 modes of attention viz., Create, Curate and Communicate have been very well explained by the authors. This book tells you ways in which we can get our time back which is practically lost every single day due to our continuous time spent on our mobiles phone while chatting or being on social media or just mindless browsing the internet or scrolling the various apps.

Nandan Nilekani has been one of the most influential Person in the World for Tech and Digitization,Right from the entrepreneurial journey of Infosys to Aadhar-Upi-Ondc.This Book helps us to understand how tech can be used to make our life's more Pleasant, in 2022 we almost depend everything on tech and apps, be it in metropolitan City or Village, right from the TDS level of Water used to grow Agricultural Commodities to getting them delivered to our door step. Health, travel and even our sleep time is tracked by alarm in our phones.This Book helps us to Keep Clam and use tech in better way without any hassles, please recommend this book to everyone around you.

Truth be told there is a lot of content out there warning against too much use of social media and digital devices. But most of it focusses on how social media is evil and how we need to detoxify ourselves.This book is unique because is focuses more on us, the reader, how our behavior and psychology has ensured we get addicted to social media and lose track of important tasks in life. This book clearly explains what the problem is instead of just preaching the solution.Additionally, it lays our clear actionable small steps to gradually improve our "work-mobile" balance.This book is not just another self-help book, but an honest attempt to understand the underlying causes of low productivity due to social-media/device addiction, and how we collectively can come out of that.Last thing, despite being so rich in content and references from the greatest minds, authors and scientists out there - it is such an easy read.If you have to read a book this year, let it be this!