Mind it! Start changing small actions and create new habits to conquer oneself.- 5 November 2014

[3] Start changing small actions and create new habits to conquer oneself.

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

Our immediate environment around us has been chosen or created by ourselves. Sometimes we do this selection mindlessly, and on most other times, we choose our action-initiators or inhibitors deliberately. Let us examine a simple example. We choose to watch TV at night. This is done mindlessly because others are doing so, and that seems like the only time to watch TV during the day as you are busy through the day. But, we also choose to watch some specific TV programmes, and we choose specifically the late hour until when we would watch TV. This is done specifically.

These choices stop us from doing our work in time, or if activated with proper deliberation, our initiators can help us in completing our tasks well in time. My elderly professor used to speak proudly of his students and his team to others and would acclaim that his students or his team members would never make it to a meeting or complete an activity in time. He would pause and then exclaim that his students and his team would always be at a meeting or complete their activity well before time.

I heard another professor explain to adult trainees that being able to complete tasks in time leads to a stress-free life. And, on the converse, not being able to complete actions in time creates stress, ill-health and also gets passed on to members of the family or colleagues and friends. I used to wonder if he was merely bluffing and trying to frighten the adult trainees to be serious about completing their tasks. It was not so. Immediately after he spoke, one after the other, each trainee stood up and recounted their personal experiences and agreed with the professor’s perceptions.

Most of the time, and with some friends that I know, all the time, we perceive ourselves as perfect individuals. We assume that we can do no wrong. We perceive ourselves as being a very objective individual, always able to judge what is correct and what is wrong, choose the right actions and deny ourselves wrongful actions. We feel that we have self-determination and that we can decide our plan of action for the day and go about and achieve it. Our short-term and long-term plans and actions are always completed to the best of our satisfaction, we claim to our friends and colleagues and family. We assume that all our actions are independent of compromise or judgement of others. We are wrong in all these assumptions. We are usually not able to achieve objective action, and we are never independent of the opinions and suggestions of others.

Let us examine a very popular and most familiar example that repeats itself every day around us. How many people we know who are chain-smokers or boozards? They know that they are wrong in their actions and habits. They attempt to break their habits and go for counselling and are also sometimes forcibly committed by their family or friends. They stop smoking and boozing, and after a while, they are back to their habits. What is the actual problem? We keep looking at others, at our environment, at our family and our friends and colleagues and compromise on our habits by judging others or learning from others.

The secret is that the source initiator for all our wrongful actions or non-actions or laziness or procrastination, the source is within our minds. We are responsible for not wanting to do something in the right time, in the correct manner and with the proper actions. We bring up some internal deep-down-in-the-mind thoughts that make it absolutely rightful and reasonable to avoid taking up actions that are necessary. We create a logical framework to postpone our actions.

How does it happen? When you reach your home after a strenuous 12 hour day, you find that the most comfortable place is the couch that is placed directly in front of the TV. I did a small experiment at my house. I removed the couch and other chairs placed in front of the TV and replaced them with a workout machine and exercising equipment and a yoga mat. I presumed that it would be the perfect change inducing innovation. It was not to be. My mind rebelled against doing exercise while watching TV, and similarly I could not sit on the couch and do nothing. After a day, the seating arrangement came back to the earlier positions, with the couch in front of the TV.

One should not choose drastic changes. Our mind rebels against us and creates a very strong inhibitor. Establish small and gradual changes. Remember, it takes about twenty-one days for our mind to accept a new habit, and it is usually about forty days for us to assimilate the new action as a normal behaviour. Place a potted plant next to the couch, and remove the side table where you would keep snacks, drinks or ice-cream. Is there a centre table in front of the couch? Remove it and place some bean bags and allow children and others to relax on them. Therefore, you have removed all options to eat snacks and also dinner while sitting in front of the TV.

This deliberate choice of making small changes should be extended to the office space also. Do you choose to drink a milky-extra sugar tea or coffee at the same time every day in the office? Make small changes. Walk to the canteen where they make the tea or coffee. Go alone. Talk to the attendant or canteen manager and change the manner in which you would have tea or coffee. Replace the sugar with sugar-free, or replace the milk with milk powder before choosing black or green tea with a slice of lemon without sugar or milk. Why? It is better to choose these life-saving habits much before you are forced to do so due to poor health.

Create small and effective changes in behaviour and habits. Ensure that you know your habits and addictions. Do you start the day with the morning newspaper? Junk that behaviour. It is the most threatening moment of the day when you are hijacking nearly sixty minutes of crucial get-up-and-go time in the morning. Read the newspaper later during the day, page by page at different times. Check the amount of time you need at the breakfast table and the cutlery that you use. Choose a smaller plate, and a smaller portion, perhaps taking more portions. It will force you to change your breakfast menu from an oil-driven omelette to a more healthy choice. Make these small changes for change is the only constant in your life, as the cliché goes. Mind it! 

Published earlier at - http://intellectualpost.com/mind-it-a-diary-of-vagrant-journeys-within-the-mind-3/

Mind it! - The world seems to work against me - 20 October 2014

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

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/