Category: Everything else

You’ve had a long bad day and stare into an unpleasant email..

‘Unpleasant‘ can range from unexpected to simply annoying at that point of time..

You’re readying your strong irritated response.

My advice from recent experience – ‘File it away’

The outcome is never going to be good and you’ll probably look at the email with a smile when you open it tomorrow. And you’ll wonder why you reacted so strongly in the first place.

Our annoyance (directed at others) is a result of our annoyance at some event during that day. Let’s contain it, and move on..

There is a school of thought that questions this. ‘Why internalize?’ they ask. Why think of yourself as the cause when it’s not always the case?

I agree with them – it is not always the case but it is useful to internalize it just for the fact that it puts us in total control of our own lives, reactions and emotions..

Practicing change..

I’m practicing a small change exercise – I realize I’m still not satisfied with the look of this blog (or my other one for the matter). So, I’m putting myself through an exercise where I’ll try and make changes to the template from on a regular bases and hopefully stumble on to a good one.

The only issue with this process is that the part of me that doesn’t like the change wants to go right back to the original..

And the fight of course is internal as the other part is trying hard to resist it..

Change is easy to preach and talk about, tougher to accept and internalize though. Even small change..

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! :)