Like a Carriage Horse!

If you have observed the horses that draw the Carriages, you would notice the blinkers around their eyes. This is because Horses have the tendency to go in whichever direction they are looking at. Without the blinkers on the Horse, the Horse drawn carriage would see-saw , back & forth leading to nowhere. With blinkers though, the Horse would just look straight in the direction and Carriage moves smoothly.


In the modern world of Multi-tasking, we are all mentally riding a Carriage driven by Horse without the blinkers. What I mean is we are dealing so much of the “Stuff” all around our 360 degrees without being focused…and no doubt we move around in circles ! … At the end of the day nothing gets accomplished…

If I got you depressed enough , Do not worry…There is a solution…We all need to wear “Mental” blinkers. “Mental” blinkers that will not allow us to waver …”Mental” blinkers that will allow us to sift through the Multiple tasks and convert to a sequence of unit tasks…”Mental” blinkers that will allow us to stay focused just enough to take us enough down the road on a particular activity…

So how to develop the “Mental” blinkers ?....It requires a series of steps as described below :

STEP 1 : Set aside a “thinking” time of at least 30 minutes on a weekend, where you are left alone without any disturbance from the external world…This is first of the type of “mental” blinker you need

STEP 2 : Pour it all out whatever is in your mind on the Things you need to do…be it a small task or a big project and write them down on a piece of paper even if it is just the name of the task or project…Please remember…this is not an one-time activity but a recurring weekly activity

STEP 3: Now, having thought through the “Stuff” over the weekend,let us move on to a weekday say Monday where the action begins… Put on again the “Thinking Cap” (Mental blinker) for a brief period of 10 minutes, this time looking at the list of tasks / projects that you collected over the weekend. And the activity would be to identify the “Next action” …a physical activity that will take the project forward by a step and note it down on the piece of paper

STEP 4: Now it is 9:00 am at the office …and wondering what to do ! if you had done a good job from STEP 1 to STEP 3, you just need to pick an activity from a project and would need to do it. One suggestion would to be split your work into blocks of 30 minutes (pomodoro technique) through out the day.

Please try this and I am too much eager to know how well it worked for you !

Perfectionism...Beware !!!

When I was a part of the Toastmaster Club, one of the key goal for every Toastmaster is to deliver 10 project speeches that cover different aspects of the presentation skills. In the quest for eliciting a “Wow” on every project speech, I would procrastinate every week, the delivery of my project speech. The result was I delivered 8 out of 10 projects over a period of 4 years! …I had used more than 150 meetings to deliver my 8 speeches…


The point is that Perfectionism is like Infinity….We should tend towards it, but never make it a Goal for we are never sure to reach it… So let us face it

• You may never attain that Washboard abs despite your exercise routine…nevertheless you need to exercise to avoid health risk

• Your blog traffic may never reach the level of Seth Godin’s…nevertheless you need to write to express yourself better

• Your personal wealth of your lifetime may still only match 1-minute of Warren Buffett’s earning in the current year…you still need to learn to make Money work for you

• Your presentation skill may not match that of Steve Jobs…you still need learn to Present your work at office to get noticed

• Your Voice skill may not match K.J.Yesudas …You may still want to modulate your voice to avoid the risk of putting the audience to sleep

There are always 100 people who can do things better than you. It is not because they are much more talented ….it is because they had put in more hours of practice of whatever they do. We can always learn how these folks are better at this particular damn thing …through only one way….by doing that particular damn thing day after day. All it needs is 10 minutes of your day….

As Leo Babauta prescribes …practice the following steps to start doing things & stop procrastinating

Step 1: Identify One habit for the month….not more than one…say Physical exercise

Step 2: Identify a time of the day when you will do it everyday…say 7:00 AM

Step 3:Tell the world through Facebook , Twitter that you are going to attempt the habit …Or sign up for a presentation at the Office (An alternate way is to Journal your experiences and sharing frequently)

Step 4: Just do it for 10 minutes everyday…Don’t over commit more than that (You are a perfectionist!)

Step 5: Do it continuously without a break atleast for an month…This is the key step…No matter whatever the day is, you should not break the chain of your habit…for you have to start all over again…

Step 6: If you have followed the above 5 steps, Congratulations !!! you have added an habit to your life ...

I have added the habit of Physical exercise & Salad diet for Breakfast to my life through the above steps. Now ,anybody you looks at me may not admire my athletic body. Do I care ? No…All I wanted is to exercise my heart daily to do artery cleansing…In the process, if I attain the washboard abs I am not complaining !

Think Wild !!!

“A vision without a task is but a dream,a task without a vision is drudgery,a vision and a task is the hope of the world.”-From a church in Sussex,England,ca.1730

In one of the development project that I worked with Ashok , a software expert , we were in the middle of a discussion about the Data structure and Class Structure. Suddenly Ashok stopped the discussion (probably in exasperation!)  and asked me  if I could visualize now on how the Program would work at its full-scale implementation...

In an another discussion that I had with Ramsu (http://celluloidrant.wordpress.com/about/) ,an expert in Machine learning (never figured out what it means !!!) , I was attempting to decipher the reasons for his Professional success. Ramsu informed me that for every project he took up, he would visualize what success looked like and would work backwards to determine the steps needed.

I am beginning to realize that the  right-brained thinking of vivid mental imagery should precede our actions  which is left-brained and analytical . Richard Feynman, one of the top physicists of the 20th Century tells about he how he uses the power of visualization in his book “Surely you are Joking Mr.Feynman”….

“I had a scheme, which I still use today, when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something in my mind which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball), disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say “False!” . . . I guessed right most of the time…”

David Allen in his book “Getting Things Done” calls visualization as “Outcome Focusing”. So the next time you are faced with Things that need your attention ask yourself the following questions
"
“What does this mean to me ?”

“Why is it here?”

“What is the successful outcome?”

And if you come up with vivid imagery of the outcome, be it in words or pictures, you can go about deciding the Next actions…”How do I make this happen?” …”What is the next physical action that I need to undertake?”

If you can change the way you work to to these two steps of "Outcome focusing" & "The Next actions" , things would start moving without you feeling the stress...

Interesting Reads of the week

Accountability !   :  Groupon (Ex)CEO : I got fired today

Flavor of the Season (Setting Goals !) : H.A.R.D Goals

Person of the week : Jason Fried : https://twitter.com/jasonfried

A Small Step & A Giant Leap

‘What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.’ ~C. S. Lewis

We get into exercise mode when the Doctor says you better do it or be gone forever

We put money into Tax-savings instrument today when the deadline for producing the Tax-proof is Tomorrow or a day-after

We start preparing for that Presentation that is due today for the meeting that is today…

So, the theme is all for us to see …as David Allen of Getting Things Done asks us “When do you do the things? …When they show-up or When they blow-up? “ . In an age where the keyword “Multi-Tasking” is becoming integral part of the Resume, we have mastered the art of doing things in the nick of time …fire fighting from one day to the next ... all these coming at the high cost of Stress & Whining.

So, you may ask what is the issue all about? Well ,we could still accomplish most of the things on the plate without being stressed out provided we can take the following actions.

Having an “Inbox” :

A placeholder where you collect all the Tasks/Projects that you want to complete. The key for choosing the right “Inbox” is accessibility, because you want to dump things into this Inbox as soon as you remember a thing to do. Human memory is Sublime yet fallible…so trust the Inbox rather than your brain ! I would recommend todoist or rememberthemilk, which are cloud based tool for storing the “Stuff” that you need to do.

Determining the Action step :

So now that you have captured what you got to do , you now need to determine what is the next physical action you need to take to accomplish the task. You would need to review your “Inbox” on a weekly basis ,if not daily, to determine what is that next immediate thing you need to do to take the task a step forward. If there is one magic bullet for stress free productivity it is this, it is this, it is this….

Let us try the above steps with an example where the “stuff” you want to accomplish is “Doing the Tax savings for 2013” . So this goes into the “Inbox” as soon as it can. And in the weekly review ,please ask yourself

“ Now what ?” … “Got to determine which savings instrument to invest ?“ …

“Don’t know , I need to call the Tax consultant”…

“Do I have the telephone number of the Tax consultant?”… No I do not

“Call my friend and get the telephone number of Consultant”

You see that the next physical action to the “Doing the Tax savings….” is to make a call to your friend . As soon as you call your friend and get the telephone number , you got to determine the next step & thereafter.

It is this thinking time to determine the next physical action, which is hardly a minute ,that we miss. So the key for doing things as they show-up, is for you to become self-aware of the Next Physical Action & keep on deciphering the next steps . And as you complete each of the physical actions, you will see that you are moving towards accomplishing the tasks without the associated stress.