New Year Resolutions - What's your five?

Things to look forward to:

• Watching movies on DVD player :)
• Traveling and visiting new places
• Meeting people and making new friends
• Playing Badminton and TT
• Jogging early in the morning

Things to do:

• Get license for car and bike (atleast for the bike)
• Restart violin classes
• Read up classics and contemporary best seller’s
• Read up atleast Samkhya and Yoga philosophies
• Do a bit to improve environment and make home Earth greener

Things to not do:

• Laze around – the lying around and do nothing thing
• Delay filing of taxes and other torture procedures
• Junk and impulsive purchases
• Jumping signal on bike/ overspeeding on the road
• Delay payment of card/ phone bills

Things to improve upon:

• Implementation of Plans (atleast the short term ones) :)
• Paying attention to detail
• Increasing attention span and focusing on one thing at a time
• Prioritizing reason over emotion
  
• Financial planning and management

Lessons from a few readings

Of late, I have been reading books on time management and self development. It appears to be helping me with prioritizing my goals and also with developing my sphere of influence. There are two concepts, one from each area, which i feel is immensely helpful to keep you doing the right things at the right time.

One of the essential items in time management is to make a written list of all things that need to be done each day. Start off each day by working with the item which is considered most tedious or difficult but the completion of which is important. From the list, identify the top 3 things you want completed and work towards finishing it fully. Completing a difficult thing upfront is very motivating. It is the first level of satisfaction or fulfillment. A difficult task needs to be sliced and diced until it can be broken into simpler sub-tasks and taken up one by one to complete. That way, the overwhelming thought of not being able to complete a huge task is replaced by working on finishing smaller tasks and achieving them.

In the area of self-development, a key attribute is being pro-active in outlook. Now, this holds true for situations in life as well. The idea of being pro-active is to take responsibility for outcomes. In contrast, being reactive would mean to assign causes of outcomes to the external environment. The need to be pro-active is very important. I am coming to realize this. The idea here is the level of control or influence one has in managing a situation. A proactive person would look at a situation as a consequence of his own actions rather than the intervention of the environment. A reactive person looks at a situation as a making of external factors outside his control. Therefore, a proactive person takes responsibility for failures. That forms the first step in identifying the areas for improvement. On the other hand, a reactive person is a product of his environment. Failure is assigned to external factors, and mistakes are on everyone but him. This is taken more as a justification for having failed. While a proactive person looks at every situation with a view of self-improvement, a reactive person looks at it with a view of rationalizing his present state of existence.

Musings at midnight

My blogging frequency has gone awry. Now I wish I had not deleted the earlier posts I had in a different blog. They would have served as a good memory for renewing my blogging. However, no regrets. What is in my hands is the present and I am happy to use that to shape my future. Also, I am sure that once i get back to blogging, I will recollect my earlier posts sooner than later.

So, whats going on in my life right now. I am acutely aware that I am a half man half boy right now. seriously. thats the way you feel at 25. The boyhood in me makes me behave rashly and immaturely at times and the manhood in me makes me realize and learn from experiences. Sometimes I wonder what is the point in growing up if all it does to you is make you dull and dumb and monotonous. The routine starts to grow on you and kill the spontaneity. People treat you as an adult and expect you to be all understanding and all prepared to take on the world. I am still a kid at times. I like to be so. Thats were the fun lies.

Its pretty much life at the half way stage. A general lack of direction. I sometimes wonder if I were Alice tumbling down the hole. I come to the cross roads and see roads going in different directions. I dont know which one to take. I dont know where I want to go. Just a curiosity to know where each road leads to. However, the Cheshire cat reminds me that if i dont know to what end I am heading to, then it does not matter what road I take. The answer sounds appealing but i am still not convinced. Everyone around me seems to know which road they want to take, almost as if they were aware of the end destination they are headed to. But i know that they have taken the road based on how far of it they can see. They dont know where they are going either.

Many memories of childhood race through my head. It is not nostalgia. It is not about happy days and memorable days. When there is a lot of change in you, you become acutely aware of the past. You keep seeing distinct snapshots that remain etched in your head for all times to come. They are always there to remind you of incidents and circumstances that have made you the way you are today. Sometimes you wish things would have been different. At other times you just want to keep it from rising to the surface and overwhelming you. And then a general sense of calmness prevails.