The last year and a half have been really busy. Traffic has come back to normal, which means that I am spending significant amount of time driving around, especially while driving back from office. I do take the ocassional Metro ride, but for the majority of the days, I make best of this time while driving to listen to audio versions of books on Audible. A few of the good books that I'd recommend.
In my role at work, I need to spend significant time at work in talking to people. While some of it is with partners, much of it is with my team members with whom I need to have my influence for continued success of my teams, and mine as well. This also gives me the opportunity to have interesting conversations with colleagues who may not be reporting into me, but find it useful to have that talk with me.
And this post is a byproduct of 2 such conversations in the past few weeks.
Managing Time, and Priorities!
While there are many things which may be in our circle of concern which we should learn to accept, we should always arrive to change what's in our circle of influence. Slowly but surely we also need to make this circle of influence bigger as well.
To manage time better, discipline and self control are essential. We could maximise productive time at work, one could work in silence by starting work early.
To do this, one needs to wake up early, for which one also needs to get to bed early the previous night.
We need to take a hard look and decide if watching TV or being hooked on to the mobile late at nights is really required. One needs to decide on a time and consistently follow a routine every day.
I compulsarily drop my mobile in a tray in one corner of the room and then go to bed. Over the last 2 years, this has helped me sleep much better.
And when I saw that I was wasting too much time on Facebook, Instagram I decided to set a 5 minute App Timer for both these apps. This is designed in Android phones in such a way that one can still squeeze out 15 minutes each on a daily basis. This is still much better than 1+ hour that I was wasting earlier.
We need to be conscious about where we employ our time. Everybody has the same 24 hours everyday. Believe me, 24 hours is a lot of time.
My father always used to say, "You can earn back lost money, but not lost time"
One needs to list out the things that one needs to accomplish on a particular day, prioritize them and plan a time - try as hard as possible to stick to this list of priorities for that day.
At the end of the day, take 15 minutes to check on what was done well, and what was not. More importantly, what needs to be done better or differently the following day - and adapt quickly.
Long back I wrote this Post on Time.
The Feedback Loop
We may be participating in the retrospective meetings in our "Agile" projects. On similar lines, we should consider having a personal retrospective on a fairly regular basis. A high level of personal awareness, and an ability to be self-critical is essential for this to be effective.
We get a lot of feedback, both implicitly and explicitly from the world around us. We need to filter out the noise, take what is important, and make those necessary changes in order to get better every day.
A Positive Mindset!
Much of this has to do with our personal upbringing, which hardwires our thoughts and beliefs right from our childhood days. In the past, I used to be a predominantly pessimistic person. With mental engineering, I have been able to have a more positive outlook, which has resulted in much positive outcomes overall, atleast in the last 10 years or so. On the topic of positive mindset, I wrote this Post some years back as well.
Consistency and Perseverence
The book "Good to Great" is about how good companies transform to become great. While much of the companies written about may not be relevant or even inexistent today, there are many things that one can pick up and incorporate into one's individual life as well.
One the of concepts that I really could relate to was "Crawl, Walk, Run!"
We need to be relentless in our pursuit of what we want to accomplish in our lives, which encompasses all aspects of our life - personal, professional and financial.
We can always start slow, become better at what we do and then eventually master it. At some point in time, there is enough momentum generated in the flywheel that helps in making extraordinary progress. This is only possible with unwavering focus, and a never give up attitude.
Personally, I have found good success with this approach in Cycling and Investing. Maybe a separate post on each of them if there is public demand.
Hopefully some day I can be really good at many other things too.
It's been a long post, I leave with a great dialogue from a movie that I saw not so recently.
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