Midlife Crisis and Comfort Zone

During month of Sept. 2010 & Oct. 2010 I suffered from a weird sickness. Supposed to be some Australian Viral fever which kept me suffering with muscle and joint pain. I was totally out of office for these two months. When I joined back, I had lot to catch up. My juniors handled the work very well during this time and there was hardly any instance where they needed my involvement/decision. But once I joined office, I started feeling odd. These two months had made the team habitual to work without me. I was no longer getting the same importance like earlier. I felt as if these folks don't need me any more.

When I started digging deeper I found there were lot of issues and not so good decisions. But I was not made aware of those. Some different equations were building in the org structure as well. All these things made me uncomfortable somewhere deep inside and I started thinking of my position, future in the department. The two month gap also had kept me away from technology which is my primary skill and I was becoming more of a typical manager than a technocrat manager. I discussed all these things with my wife and the discussion gave me a new paradigm to look at not just what changed in these two months but what happened before that which led to this situation. It was one of those Aha moments that gives you new knowledge about the same things.

Life Hacker Asks The Readers for Time-Saving Tips

Life hacker is asking readers their time saving tips in their article Ask The Readers: Your Best Time-Saving Tips?. While everyone is busy giving their inputs, I thought of sharing the Thirty Day Excercise, Steven Covey mentions in Seven Habits of highly successful people. He asks us to work only in our circle of influence for thirty days. This way we can optimize our energies, be calm and efficient. One other best tip I found from the Quick Sprout article mentioned on Life Hacker site was to watch our communication. I am pretty habitual to keep my IMs on forever. This causes lot of people to ping me when they want rather than when I want. These days I am also getting addict to getting mails and somewhere in back of my mind, I feel empty when I don't get one.

Need to watch out.

Tools for best utilizing time

Some of the most useful tools for saving time are to-do lists and calendar applications. I did some search on the net for this and got few links. My personal favorites are Todoist & Google Calendar for all my personal work. However, I have found that MS Outlook works best for office environment. But better than both these is simple notepad (not windows notepad but physical notepad simple paper and pen/pencil)

LifeHacker did a survey of what people think is the 5 best to-do list management tools some time back. Paper/Pencil topped this list. I also found some interesting tools in this list. One of them is toodledo. What struck me most about this tool is that it is capable of attaching your goals to your to-do items/ tasks. It also can help you gather all related data/ files. This whole site is based on the principal of GTD (Getting Things Done by David Allen) to manage your time.

My favorite theory for time management is by Steven Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. He divides the work on two axes - Urgency & Importance. This creates four quadrants. The most important quadrant is the quadrant II which is for important but not urgent tasks. Steven prescribes to stay in this quadrant for maximum amount of time. However he observes that we stay in Quadrant I & Quadrant III for most of our time which is Urgent & Important and Urgent but not important. We should focus on moving to the Quadrant II from the Quadrant I by doing important works before they become urgent and learn to say NO to the urgent but not important work.

If I have little time in hand

Can I afford to ...

1. Exercise later for my own fitness?
2. Pray tomorrow for my spiritual growth?
3. Give time to my children later when they are no longer children?
4. ... to be continued

This is a sticky post. I wish to continue growing this list to define priorities of life. Add your items in the comments...

What caused me to create this blog

Today while discussing with my wife (well not really discussing... you know...) I realized that the basic reason behind all the issues I was facing is a mind set that I have ample time at hand. I am quite a laid back person. I take things easily in life. On one side this allows me to think a little more about life, but many times this thinking does not result in action. So... here I start my journey of realization that time I have in my hand is very very little and I have many things to achieve.

You may say..."That's nothing new. Time and again n number of people have said this." Agreed and some of them have said it to me as well... But then it is the second realization that has caused me not to listen to them. I many a times take offense against someone pointing my mistakes. My reaction is that of a rebel or I just ignore and many times I just provide excuses. Well... this is what stopped me from improving.

I am sure what I have realized today is not out of the world, but I am sure many people must be in same situation as me. I want to go out and shout just like Archimedes shouted "Eureka eureka". I am starting my journey on this track NOW and all those who want to come along are most welcome.