Mind it! On making a strategy for a plan to prepare a time management process to begin my work - 29 October 2014

[2] Mind it! a diary of vagrant journeys within the mind.

On making a strategy for a plan to prepare a time management process to begin my work

I usually think that I am unable to get all my work done in the time that it should be completed. I plan to do my work within the time that it should be done, but then I turn around, and find that the time has a-gone by, and there is nothing left. So, I take the smart road. I start planning my work. And usually I find that I have planned all my work very meticulously. Very soon, I reach the same milestone – that all the time has gone by while I was planning to do my work, and there is no time left to actually do the work that I was planning to work on...

Now, I have begun planning the time that I am going to work on how to plan perfectly. Very soon, I guess that I will be able to divide my day perfectly into exact working hours to (1) learn how to plan, (2) read very good planning strategies, (3) understand the best planning strategies and (4) start making a time-table to make good plans. This way, I will probably be preparing the best plan and a superb schedule on how to begin my work.

I am sure that you are now wondering as to why I am not just getting to my work and start finishing it, instead of planning my work. That is very silly. That is not the way of a super manager or an efficient worker. You have to have a time schedule, to-do lists, a perfect plan and a list of team members to delegate the various portions of the plan and monitor and supervise them while they begin to start the work that you were supposed to complete in the first place.

Very soon, I have begun to realise that I am never getting around to actually beginning my work. I have therefore made a good plan on visiting the best book stores and surf the e-marketing web pages to look for the most excellent authors and books on time management, planning work and knowing my best psychological barriers in planning my work. I have also prepared a good strategy to purchase such books. I go to the best book stores, look for the books and check the prices and look around if there are good sales. The best books are very costly. But, I am very intelligent. So, I write down the title of the book, or take a photograph with my cell phone, and get back to the house and surf 2-3 different e-marketing sites. At least one of them is bound to have a sale on these books. Of course, during festivals, New Year or Christmas or other times, they do have a super sale. I could wait for those times.

This usually takes about a month of careful surfing, keeping notes, checking my notebook, preparing a checklist of the books that I want to purchase, and marking out my e-calendar of the best super sale times. Finally, I am able to pick up the 4-5 really costly and most useful and most absolutely necessary got-to-have books that will help me understand my inner self, recognise my time schedules and the inherent problems that they have. One of these books is bound to help me understand the gap between my energy levels, my problems with my aerobics and thereby make it very clear that I probably need to take up yoga or meditation because I am too stressed out by thinking of my plans.

One of these excellent books instructed me that it is because of a bad sleeping pattern that had accumulated over several years that my sleep was putting off my insomnia and preventing me from picking up on strategic mistakes in my planning. Therefore, my bad planning was hijacking my strategies and time management and preventing me from doing any good work. So, I had to develop a strategy of my sleepless hours, and I had to prepare a strategy for my good sleep hours. Of course, some wise people had told me to do good reading during my sleepless hours, so I have an excellent collection of books and magazines, newspapers and web printouts to read up and catch up on whenever I cannot sleep. But, I seem to be always on the internet or watching news channels on the TV when I am awake, so I am not able to pick up my exact sleepless hours.

But the plan that seems to really work is when I am actually sleeping. The book advised me that our mind is the bestest when we are sleeping, and that since there are no distractions, and before we pass on to deep sleep, we are able to plan our next day in a most effective manner. So, I keep a diary, some pens and pencils, a couple of torches and candles and matches to be ready when the idea strikes. Of course, I can easily switch on the lights in the room and make decent notes, or not switch off the lights through the night, and be able to write down the thoughts whenever they come. But then, I would not be sleeping, would I?

I wait until I am fast asleep and I have begun to delve deeply into my dreams. And, suddenly I wake up. It’s usually because of a mosquito or a humid draft or just an unpleasant dream, or most usually, it is due to hearing my own loud snoring. I switch on the torch, pick up the diary and start writing down a list of to-do items that I should work on, immediately on waking up, or for the morrow. This list gets my mind to work on various other related actions, and I keep waking up again and again to keep writing and writing and writing. Finally I am happy that I have washed off all the points of distraction within my mind and I have written them away. Now, I can actually get to sleep well. Almost, of course!

There is also another strategy. It is popularly known as ‘minimalism’. This strategy is actually quite silly. The idea is that one should make small lists – about 3 or 5 or 10 items only in the morning or noon or evening or night, and as far as I am concerned, about 2 similar stages during the night after midnight. Start with these small lists, and try to do the first one on each list. Once you have ticked off the first item, go to an absolutely different list of entirely opposite themes. Take up a very different task and complete that one. Jump off to another thematic area, and complete another task. This helps you complete about 5-7-10 tasks in a day. This is quite silly, believe me. Who benefits by completing their work without a plan?

The entire idea is to plan your work properly with a very efficient strategy, after learning how to do it by reading it up on the best books that you should take all the time you have in selecting very carefully before you decide the best time of the day to do some good thinking about it all. Its very simple, really. Mind it!

Published at - http://intellectualpost.com/mind-it-a-diary-of-vagrant-journeys-within-the-mind-2/

Minimalism - is there a need to be minimal? - 3 November 2008

Minimalism - is there a need to be minimal? Can one succeed in minimalism? 
Bharat Bhushan - 3 November 2008

Sometime back in 1990, I guess, I had gone to visit a senior journalist friend at his residential quarters above his newspaper offices, and I found him living out of some bare bookshelves, a coir mat and a pillow and very few other accessories. When I questioned him, he said that he was a minimalist. That was the first time that I had heard the word, and I liked it. It seemed to be almost like a religion with him, and I found that he actually believed in living it out in that manner. I was quite taken up by it, and I do try to follow the tenets, from time to time, sometimes succeeding, and mostly, failing.

It is indeed very difficult to become a minimalist. There is an entire science to it, seemingly. The theory or the paradigm is known as minimalism. There are many net pages and material to read from on the internet about minimalism. There are experts out there, and there is software especially made to help you become a minimalist. I would not be surprised if there was a cellphone app also made for it. But, if you go around collecting all this stuff, you would no longer qualify to be a minimalist.

One of the most popular theories is that it is the removal of all the stuff that we collect and getting rid of all the clutter that we live with. This can be at several planes in life. It can be simply to get rid of the material matter that one has collected, and at the other plane, it can be to get rid of the clutter within the mind. It can also be to getting rid of the work systems that do not work for us, and to getting rid of all the wasteful planning methods that we have that destroy our future.

So, simply put, minimalism helps us review our past, the present and the future. We need to get rid of something, some clutter, junk or our belongings, from each aspect, i.e., the past, the present and the future. We collect tremendous aspects of junk within our mind and within our thoughts. We search for vague happenings that have happened a long time ago in the past, and we pull them out, stretch them to more tensile fragility than a simple rubber band, and pretend that it has more importance for the present and the future than it would ever have been.

But, to become a minimalist, and to adopt minimalism, there has to be a deliberate decision. You really need to go ahead and want to do it. It cannot just be a thought and it cannot just be an idea. You need to actually start and get to doing it. There is no planning about becoming a minimalist. You start when you think about it, and you start doing it. Pick up the nearest object, give it away. Pick up your wallet, and decide that you will not purchase anything. Pick up your ATM card or credit card and keep them away for a fortnight. These are simple actions. They help get you started.

When one embarks on the path towards total quality management, the ISO 9001 system requires that the aspirant firm makes a very deliberate top management decision to want to achieve perfection. That is the same with minimalism. Your top management, i.e., your mind and your thought system, should take the decision and make it immediately deliberate by beginning and creating output. One of the theories is that you establish a relay or a tag sport within your house and your office to begin to get rid of stuff. Keep hitting a different spot and continue to pick up something and get rid of it.

We are all consumers. If we do not purchase, if we do not pick up, and if we do not want to take up something or some event, life does not halt at its orbit around our actions. It goes on. The reality is what happens, and it is never the aspect of what did not happen. Whatever did not happen, never existed. It is counter to what does exist. The thought of the aspect that did not exist, will always distract us. Others will contribute to the thoughts and evolve it into a disappointment. Understand the myth and accept the reality. It never existed. THAT is the truth.

The knowledge of YANTRA - 16 July 2008

The knowledge of YANTRA and the aspect of precision in design and planning
Bharat Bhushan - 16 July 2008

YANTRA - the design

It is often dismissed as ridiculous superstition. Usually, the free-thinkers label it as the irrational belief in the occult. There could be diverse ways and means of explaining what we thought we knew, except that we do not simply accept it as what it was, or is. It was, to put it plainly, ancient knowledge about the precision of design.

Old, really old, really really old, older than ancient. Much older than the vedas (c. 4000 BC at the earliest). Its out there, staring at us, from all the ancient structures, the ancient cities and settlements, from Stonehenge to the pyramids to the ancient astronomers and the very ancient seafarers. To do what they did, successfully and repeatedly, it required a simple art of precision - namely, geometry. Known in so many different perspectives, but as the most ancients termed it - YANTRA.

The ancient knowledge of YANTRA, known to a very few, grew later in different forms, only becoming known as the 'Geometry' that we recognise, in the past 500 years or less. Before you begin to google and wiki me wrong, for what I am about to describe and explain, it is not to be found in google or in the wiki, and you have to admit, in today's web world, that IS an achievement.

There are books that label YANTRA, and for that matter, MANTRA and TANTRA, as occult science. Similarly there could be many who would disagree that anything related to the occult, could not be science. I am not willing to be drawn into that argument. Argue what you will.

There does exist the knowlege of YANTRA, and there does exist ancient knowledge presenting and explaining various aspects of it. I am only going to attempt a convergence of the existence of ancient knowledge and explore the various aspects of systems that relate to the science of geometry and present the usefulness in 'planning'.

Planning? Planning what? well, simply, the systems of planning, from thought to ideas to concepts to hypothesis to postulates and thereon to multiple and multivariate systems of planning sciences, sports, structures or governments and governance. In contemporary times, planning is pitiably discussed in the myriad wordplay of the lexicon of management, organisations, corporate processes, quality systems, kaizen, and even, surprise of surprises - futuristics and minimalism. There is too much theory out there, and very little attempt to present the very early beginner's tools of precision - i.e., geometry in all aspects of planning. Namely, perfection.