I remember my childhood when I went to primary school. My mother used to tell me “You do not look back when you go to school”, she had a tone of making a complain. I never looked back, I don’t even have an explanation why I do not look back from where I’m leaving. Today I’m thinking if I should have looked back, give her a smile, be more loving and caring child of my parents. I can’t change what I did in the past but I can change what I do in future.
Sometimes it’s important to look back from where we stand now. It gives an idea about our origin, about our root, about where we started our life from and how much we have advanced. Sure, there is no success pedometer that scientists were able to build and so I define success as how close we are to our expectations. Looking at my footprints I have a perception that I could set a realistic goal for myself in 2010 for 2011. It brought happiness for me and am quite certain it made you happy also!
Let me confess – sometimes I think of giving up everything. I want to slow down. I want to take rest, relax, step away from track and feel only silence. I’m glad I still have option to do all these and I am thankful to my Creator for making me that fortunate.
So what did 2011 brought for me?
Let me make a short list (I want to re-read when I’m 75 years old)
I moved into a better living place
I bought a car (actually I can’t still think it’s mine because I owe bank some money :/)
I found a almost perfect soul mate
I got some cool Apple devices including iPad2 and iPhone 4s.
I got promotion and I’m excited about my new role
I’m not still bankrupt
If I can keep current pace I can come back to you with ‘2013: Pursuit of Happiness – Part V’ at end of next year with some exciting news!
Thank you for tolerating all little bad things I did to you.
Thank you for giving me a smile when you see me.
Thank you for being a wonderful person in our little journey.
The title is contradictory itself – how can one achieve success if he had quit from something already? If you’re thinking that way, please quit from your thought because it’s a wrong thought. Please accept my apology if I had tempted your thinking power.
We are living in an age where everyone is free to publish writing on anything. Everyone turned out to be a philosopher, trying to entice us with their own philosophy. Internet, TV, Radio, Newspaper, Billboards are full with powerful advertisements that makes us feel that we are incomplete, weak and needy. Our friends, family and acquaintances have already been doped and we all started to believe “there is no tomorrow”, we want “everything by now”. So we run faster – faster than yesterday; knowing or without knowing our capabilities for a destination set by “others”. (okay, set by “us” but influenced by external factors.)
Did we want this faster life when we were asked “what do you want to be in future” in our childhood? We all had dreamed for a happy life; not a faster life. However, if we don’t keep our pace with others, we’ll fall behind. So what’s the solution? How can we achieve a happy life, peaceful mind, tensionless night and sound sleep?
I sell a major amount of my time for my career.
Do you see the major difference between “I work for a company” and “I sell my time for my career”? If you can then you are ready to value your precious time. If you know your time is valuable then you would care to quit from whatever distracts you and focus on what needs to be accomplished – in time.
In IT we can’t always plan to work eight (8) hours a day and get out of office. The life in IT is more challenging, more dynamic and more interesting than many other job life. Anything can go wrong at any point, any decision may turned out to be wrong and we need to fix issues ASAP – realtime.
Programmers/Developers may have to re-write whole implementation due to last minute change in product requirement. Quality Controllers have to wait long hours for Software Engineers to deliver product to test. Project Manager have to wait for QC sign-off at late night because he has to send daily update to stakeholders. Life is a crazy bitch everyday.
We still want to manage some time of ourselves, don’t we? Remember we wanted to achieve a happy life, peaceful mind, tensionless night and sound sleep?
I have been thinking about it for quite a long time and started to read books and online articles on “productivity”, “focus”, “time management” etc. The benefit was I could achieve all these in my life even by shipping two products in Apple Store this year.
I forced myself to quit from couple of distractions:
Social Networks – at office hours
TV – both at home and office
Personal Instant Messengers – in office hours
Personal Email – in office hours
I wrapped up several events that were taking unnecessary long time:
daily standup team meetings
chat/tea-break with colleagues – in office hours
I tried to set realistic @TODO list for myself and team day-to-day basis:
Identifying value of an action item
Doing two most important action items + one minor action item
Deferring less important action items for tomorrow, next week, next month
Questions:
“So how did you spend the time you have saved during working hours?”
: Hold on! I didn’t save any time during working hours. I have planned how I should spend every minutes of my working hours.
“So if you have not saved time, why did you do all these? What’s the benefit?”
: I did all these so that I can finish my daily TODO list in time and call it a day!
“I didn’t quite get your point; what did you do with the time you’ve saved?”
: You mean the other sixteen hours after office? I ensured that I can sleep minimum six hours, waste four hours in traffic jam, and spend remaining six hours in eating, bathing, chatting, social networking, self-improvement, family events, shopping – does it make sense?
“Dude, you totally suck! You are transforming into a machine!”
: Am I? I would defy that.. the whole point is to be effective instead of being efficient. Well I can’t force you to change your mindset, it took more than three months to change mine. I would expect more or less same timeframe for you to realize and adopt what I’m talking about.
I succeed in making my life the way I wanted by being a quitter.
What’s your story? How do you balance your 24 hours a day?
- hundred years ago the castle of sand collapsed!
- then?
- then there were silence. silence everywhere.
- then?
- then they started all over from beginning.
- building castle with sand?
- no, with golds.
I’m sorry if title of this post allured you here as I’m not going to talk about interior design. I believe it’s the people who make an office more live, energetic and happy place. If you have encountered a troublesome misleading missile in your office recently then read on. I’m going to tell you a story now.
Early 2009. Our manager decided to hire few fresh graduates in a small team. In about six weeks the team realized they got an arrogant come uncooperative co-worker and therefore decided to raise the issue in a daily stand-up meeting. That twenty minutes long meeting couldn’t take place without my presence because a colleague of mine had to say, “I think you need to work on your attitude.” while she glared straight in my eyes. I wanted to say, “Damn it! This is how I’m! You better deal with this me or you can work in another team” but on second thought I actually said, “I may sound arrogant and my attitude may not be appropriate for you guys but I can’t change myself overnight. I’ll be try to be polite and it’ll take some time.” The heat of that meeting dropped down and we all went back to our table.
I continued to do number of wrong things I shouldn’t have done. Was there another meeting took place? NO. It was not necessary as the senior and experienced people knew. They knew, we cannot change anyone by telling him that he is wrong. We can make him a better person only if he wants to.
I started to minimize number of wrong doings since when I felt I was wrong. It’s not possible to do things right way every time because we are none but human. It’s okay if we make mistakes but it’s not okay if we don’t correct them. How you can ever correct your wrong moves? You can’t undo what you have done but you can
STOP complaining about others.
STOP yelling at others fault.
START looking at own faults.
START looking at problems from different perspectives.
If you don’t know why a crime was committed then just know if you were in that situation you would be doing that crime.
Tonight, I decided to polish my own attitude towards people I interact with. I know I’ll be making tons of mistakes but as part of improvisation I’ll be analyzing my wrong moves at end the day. At end of weekend, if I get some time, I’ll write them down in my blog and share with you. I hope you’ll find them useful for your everyday life.