Mind it! a diary of vagrant journeys within the mind.
THE WORLD SEEMS TO WORK AGAINST ME.
THE WORLD SEEMS TO WORK AGAINST ME.
There comes a
time in our busy work schedules and demanding family lives that we begin to
recognise that this world seems to determine the manner in which we should
dedicate our time. We may have the best time planners, the best handheld
palmtops, or the best dedicated software to manage our time, but day after day
after day, we realise that more than five tasks out of ten are not completed.
We make our lists, prioritise and partition our tasks and yet, we are nowhere
near the end.
Every aspect of this fast
changing world seems to work against us. The bestest time-saving enterprise of
the world, i.e. the zero-paper e-mail facility, is supposed to be saving our
times, changing our work behavior and yet, we seem to drown in it. I know of
some friends who work with 6-10 email services, have 3-4 synonymous email ids,
maintain a checklist of email passwords and finally, are never able to get
their work completed.
It
is certainly exciting to meet up with friends who were lost forever, 20-30-40
years since we were separated at school, neighborhood communities and college
and professional lives. Facebook and the earlier much talked about Orkut were
magical inventions. We discovered our long lost friends, got to know about who
married whom, who was working where and developed internet networks anew, or
established net jealousies. New colloquialisms came about, and we realised that
envy about the progress of a friend from long ago, or a relative with whom we
were not in touch with, is defined as “internet jealousy”. This trait leads one
to lose oneself within social networking sites, stalk friends and relatives and
destroy work or family hours and damage bonds that actually exist.
The
latest quagmire of quicksand with spiraling whirlpools is the attraction to
online shopping for books, furniture, jewellery and most welcome, even
groceries. Today, I see office colleagues maintain shopping lists, comparative
pricing between different online shopping sites, pocket diaries of passwords
and log-in IDs, and a watch for sales, deals and offers. There was a time, once
not so long ago, when 4-5 office colleagues would meet over Tea or moonlight to
watch a movie in the theater nearby. That time has long gone and forever so.
Colleagues do meet up nowadays, but they discuss comparative costs on online
shopping and try to figure out how and when to pick up ‘good deals’.
The
world is progressing and is taking us along with it. We are a daily partner in
the progress. There is a lot of fun and joy and pleasure in being able to
network with those 4-5 friends who never spoke to you while at school or
college, and those 2-3 super intelligent college mates who looked away from you
because they would never want to be caught talking to a nerd. So, we are happy
chatting away with them and making sure that they understand the progress that
you have made, vis-a-vis their life journey that does not seem to have got them
anywhere.
Similarly,
there is extreme joy in picking up that very cheap air ticket or that 75%
discount in that one single book that you were delaying purchase of over the
past two years. The “purchase one and get two free” offer is so obviously
tempting that you wonder why did people go and spend hours walking around in a
market or a mall. The easy-to-manage e-life is so good and so very perfect that
it makes the history of the world and the history of human civilization look
absolutely absurd and devoid of any possible initiative.
The
inherent danger is never visible. The threat from this greatly facilitative
world is in the impact on our time and the manner in which it destroys all work
schedules and one never gets to recognize it. There is a very simple test. Make
a list of ten ‘to-do’ items on a daily basis. Try to avoid repeating them over
consecutive days. So, in like fifteen days, you have about 150 ‘to-do’ items to
work on. How many do you actually achieve? Keep a watch and move the ones that
were not completed, as ‘carry overs’ to the next day. I am guessing that in ten
days, one would have more than ten ‘carry overs’ than the ten ‘to-do’ items.
That is when you need to write down for yourself, that all your sophisticated
attempts at time management are absolutely destroyed with the amount of time
that you devote to e-surfing, e-networking and e-purchases.
So,
how does one defeat this nefarious strategy of the world to continually
distract you, direct your attention to matters of the world that do not really
form any part of your work or family lives? You keep purchasing stuff that you
do not need and you travel to different parts of the world for the only reason
that the tickets were a ‘steal’, and you really did not need to go there. You
purchase that great looking furniture only because they said that it was 70%
off. But in doing all this, you were drowned in e-surfing for 3-4 hours of your
8-hour work day. It takes about a complete hour to de-addict and get back to
regular work in a speedy tempo. That means that 50% of a work day is skipped
and wished away in complete disdain.
I
was recently invited by a family to join them for dinner. The entire family
were known to me across three generations and I looked forward to meeting up
with them and enjoying a good meal. The lady of the house was a good cook and I
knew that she would have worked very spiritedly to plan and place at least a
3-4 course meal on the dinner table. I also looked forward to meeting my
friend’s parents as I had known them through my childhood and their
conservative and very orthodox approach to life and prevented me and my friend
from indulging in any dangerous or unwanted adventures or lean to any bad
addictions. My friend’s school and college going daughters would most certainly
want to chat away with me, for I was the cool uncle that was so unlike their
boring father.
I was in for a major major
disappointment. The lady had ordered in for food from a nearby restaurant and
she was proud to let me know that it was possible with a new ‘app’ in her new
upgraded cellphone. All you had to do was go – ‘click, click, click, click’ –
and “my husband ends up paying for the entire dinner, you know!”
– She said, in an endless monologue about her cellphone and how she got in an
online sale for Mothers Day. Her in-laws, my childhood harangues, were busy
with their palmtops, checking up on jokes being circulated on their group ‘app’.
To top it up, the old man scolded me for not having a ‘modern cellphone with good apps and Android and all that’,
for how else could he share those good jokes with me? And as I guessed, the old
man was actually forwarding the jokes from his group to his son,
daughter-in-law and granddaughters, who were sitting in the same room, without
reading it out loudly to them.
I
thought back to my childhood when my grandfather is reported to have tied me up
to his great big wooden chair to prevent me from any escape because he wanted
to read and recite the entire Ramayana to me, in great detail. And for years
later, my parents would retell the stories of how I would jump around like
Hanuman in order to escape from being tied up. I shudder in horror of what would
have happened if it was done similarly in today’s e-connected world. The
photograph would have been forwarded to everyone in Facebook, and there would
have been innumerable analyses of how my grandfather was probably torturing a
small kid.
Managing
time in today’s world requires disciplined strategies to escape getting
distracted and to avoid getting drowned in matters that takes us away from work
hours or family hours. It may certainly sound very churlish to advice against
doing what the entire world seems to be doing, and to avoid staying connected
when the rest of the world is doing so. Take some time out and contemplate. How
can one evolve and develop better time management measures within such
distractive attractions? Establish a plan, determine goals in every major task
and break it up into smaller tasks. Create an incentive plan to reward yourself
for completing 3-5 tasks every day.
Ask
questions about your working methods and about the output that is achieved. Are
you satisfied? Was there a goal to the manner in which work schedule was
planned for the day? Or, are you one of those persons who is content to watch
the dawn and dusk and not worry about the day in between? Mind it!
Earlier published at - http://intellectualpost.com/mind-it-a-diary-of-vagrant-journeys-within-the-mind/
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