Saturday, March 30, 2013

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 !

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