Month: October 2010

Applying ‘Action days’ to our lives

I’m half way through the ‘Get it done’ guy’s book and I find it a nice read. It has many of the age old GTD concepts (atleast) so far briskly packaged.

One concept that caught my eye was the concept of an ‘Action Day’. A simple application of an ‘Action Day’ in our lives could work in the following situation.

Situation:
A whole host of household tasks are piling up. Eg: head to the bank, buy this commodity from so-and-so supermart half an hour away, exchange a spoilt appliance, buy a new tech gadget.

Complication:
Given our busy lives from Monday to Friday and (often) busier weekends, it’s just extremely hard to find time to do these things.

Solution:
1) Schedule an action day (eg: last saturday of the month) i.e. batch all the annoying errands to this one day
2) Get 2-3 friends on board so you don’t feel alone. Maybe they have their own action days or maybe they play your ‘boss’ so you report to them every 2-3 hours to report progress.
3) And make sure you either have a nice incentive or a strong consequence – whichever makes you happy. From personal experience, the consequence works better but hey, that’s up to you..

This could, of course, apply to other tasks that we have been procrastinating for a long time (Eg: read THAT book, read THAT research paper, work on THAT report etc).

In short, pick a date, get a friend on board and have fun banishing THAT task out of your life!

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Nice concept I thought. I’m looking forward to applying it..

Why we are asked to raise windows just before taking off or landing..

I’m not sure if this is a commonly known fact but I didn’t know it myself so I asked an air hostess as I used to find it annoying to be woken up and raise windows etc

Anyway, the reason we are asked to do is because passenger alertness can make a huge difference in averting crucial accidents/tragedies. A simple 80-20 will reveal that 80% of all accidents happen either during take off or landing (that percentage will be higher with modern technology making sure that planes don’t crash in space) and passenger alertness has apparently been known to avert tragedies..

In short, we are being woken up from slumber to make sure we are alert and ready in case a crisis comes along.

This reasoning explains why lights are switched off when taking off/landing. Again, if there is a crisis, it is so we are used to the dark.

:)
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When I look at this post again, I realize how boringly geeky (not the computer kind) it can seem to find logic/reason behind an action that can easily be ignored. The other way to look at it is that it’s good to understand why things are the way they are..

Well.. here’s to curiosity then!

Touchdown Sohar..

And it begins – Work life promised to have temporary relocations from time to time and Sohar (in Oman) has turned out to be the first destination.

While it promises to be an exciting and action packed project, I am also looking forward to the whole settling in process in a whole new place with different systems. Over the past 3-4 months, things in Singapore had settled into a predictable and fun routine with sports, work on additional initiatives happening like clockwork. All of a sudden, I’m faced with –

1) Staying in a new place and starting from scratch on every count..
2) Meeting and getting to know a whole bunch of new people (which is SUPER exciting of course)
3) Feeling disoriented on my work-week concept (Here, the week runs from Saturday-Wednesday)
4) Getting used to a wave of heat hitting you every time you step outside..
5) Seeing more brown gravel and sand versus the green of singapore.. :)
6) And lest I forget, calling a hotel room home..

Change is always a challenging experience – especially when it’s application to work means we have to ensure constant surgical precision.

So, that’s the goal – to get to surgical precision (my new term of the day/week/month) in the coming week.

Sohar – here we go! :)

Just because I can..

Today, bang in the middle of the day – I was just walking down to the bus stop and I spotted the bus that I was to catch to my next destination was almost at the bus stop.

So, I broke into a run which soon became a crazy sprint and I managed to get in JUST as the bus was leaving.

I’ve done this many a time.

Why do I do this? Obvious questions could be –

1) Do I care so much about time? Well, at times, yes.. but in most cases, no..
2) Am I crazy? Well, yes.. a bit – I like to think.

But frankly, I do it just because I can. I love the sudden burst of adrenaline that comes with an unplanned crazy target (to catch a bus when the chances are close to zero), I love feeling fit when I do manage to get there and I love play acting Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.

It’s little things like this that make me feel fully alive. It’s nice to add a dash of fun and predictability to routine, and to do things JUST because I can – once a while..

The moving to do list – from GigaOm

Fantastic Post
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We all have to-do lists. There are things we want to accomplish and things we think we need to accomplish, so we put it all in a list, and we get to work. At the end of the day, we look at the list, but there’s one item that didn’t get completed, so we move it forward to tomorrow’s list, but tomorrow, the same thing happens, and it keeps happening, until we finally realize that we have no real intention of getting that one thing done.

I call these items a “moving to-do list,” and I’m always on the lookout for them. They’re those things that follow me around for weeks or months on end, until I finally own up to it and say, “I’m never going to get to that. I might as well quit moving it forward.”

I’m not talking about those pesky to-dos that eventually really do have to get done. I have a couple of them on my list right now, things like fixing a mirror on my vanity or the trip lever on my bathtub. Eventually, if I keep ignoring those to-dos and moving them forward on my list instead of just doing them, the mirror on my antique vanity will break, and my bathtub won’t drain (not good). Hopefully, I’ll get to those things before that happens, but the point is, eventually, as annoying as they might be, we get to these kinds of things, because if we don’t, there are consequences.

What I’m talking about are those things that might not have obvious consequences if we fail to do them, or that have consequences we’re subconsciously willing to pay. These are things like:

1. Writing that book we’ve been meaning to write, or
2. Launching that new product or service. or
3. Making changes to our service offerings or websites so that we stop taking on certain types of clients.

These are those tasks that we’re avoiding for some reason, and we need to figure out why. A few of the possible reasons?

Obligation. We keep saying to the people around us (business and accountability partners, customers and clients, family and friends) that we’re going to write that book. We say that it’s something we really want to do, or we say that it will bring in additional revenue for our businesses, but it turns out that we’re not really all that motivated to do it, yet we keep moving the task forward, because we’ve promised that that’s what we’re going to do.

Guilt. We think it’s something we should do, maybe because everyone else manages to get it done or because it’s our “responsibility” to do it, but internally, we’re doing it for all the wrong reasons and don’t really want to do it, and we feel guilty because of that, so we just keep moving forward and saying that we’re going to get it done.

Motivation (or lack of it). A lot of the tasks we take on are driven by financial motivations. Maybe we want to (or think we should) make more money, but in reality, we’re quite comfortable where we are, so even though we might think or say that we want to achieve greater financial success, the financial motivation alone is never going to be enough to make us do the task, but we keep moving it forward, because we think we should want more money.
At the end of the day, it comes down to acceptance. Acceptance of what we really want, of our own definition of success, and of who we really are (and who we’re not).

Once you accept all those things and are OK, saying, “You know what, I just don’t even really want that. It’s not who I am, it’s not what I want, and it’s not important for me to be happy,” give it up. Take it off the list and file it away as a “someday/maybe,” if you think it will ever come back on the radar or if you need that little bit of security, just in case you change your mind.

The bottom line is that a moving to-do list adds unnecessary stress and frustration and a feeling of failure, when really you’re just attempting to achieve something that you don’t even want or that’s some arbitrary achievement that won’t even matter to you if you do accomplish it. Let it go, and be OK with it. Free up that mind space for something that you actually do want and that you stand a chance of accomplishing, because you won’t get in your own way.

What needs to be taken off your moving to-do list?