What we learn? Or why my daughter inspires me?

Today my daughter taught me two valuable lessons. The first about drive and how the need to improve has to be motivated internally and secondly how compassion and caring has no age expectation or requirement but a genuine need to make another feel better.

A week ago She was given a project where she had to create a presentation about the canopy layer of the Taman Negara rainforest. She visited there a month ago and her presentation was on life cycles of the different sub species that she had researched.  She felt that her presentation in class was not as good as she thought it could be and now in her holiday she redid the presentation and presented it to her grandmother on our visit to KL. She had no need to redo this project but she was upset that she could have done better and decided that she should redo it. As an adult, I have faced so many instances where I have passed work or a presentation and told myself I could have done better. She just taught me we strive to improve not to impress others but to impress/better ourselves.

Then tonight after a long night yesterday with her dance performances and flying in today and a late dinner, she spent the last 45 minutes putting moisturizer and scratching the legs of her grandmother, who is facing end stage bile duct cancer which has led to rising bilirubin levels causing a severe internal itch. No one had asked her to do this but she knew my mum, her grandmother would find it comforting.  That's compassion and we all could learn from the gifts of our children.

She makes me proud.

The Journey begins

So i ended my last post with the fact that i am trying to organise my systems and processes to be more efficient and to manage my time appropriately. The first step was to define my Categories. They are Work, Home, Health and Dreams.

So on Work, i took a step back and realised that my primary organisational tool and what i worked off regularly was my email. I already had a good filing system where i would file emails but i realised that i was overfiling and losing track of the action items required. So now i have adjusted the system - every morning i get in and i go through all my emails. Any email that can be trashed is trashed, any email that can be filed (no action required), i file, any email where i need to read/review/strategise i keep in my INBOX. I only action on emails that i can get done in the next 10 seconds. SO i delegate, reply or forward immediately. So by mid morning before 10am i am done and all unread emails would have been read.

I then have my morning meeting with the team and we discuss our trading views and what we need to do for the day. Then its early lunch for me and then back at 1pm. I scan through for any emails that are urgent and address those but generally i leave all new new emails untouched.

Now i go to the bottom of my Inbox ie the item that has been there the longest. This involves projects that i am working on for work and home and needs time. Next i make a decision whether i have the time and energy and if its a priority project and if YES, then i work on it till i have completed the action item. I then resend an email to myself with my update and the next action item defined. This now goes to the top of my Inbox as the newest item.

Now if its a NO, i just resend the item and it moves back up to the to of the inbox and i delete the old entry.

I work this till 4.30pm and then stop to focus on our closing for the day. This is done by 5.30. Next i spent the next 30m just clearing all the new emails. So my next day i only have to deal with pertinent emails.

Now after 6 i am focusing on Health - to exercise Monday to Thursday with Friday off. (Weekends i am hoping to do at least 1 day).

Today after months of not training, i ran home from work. 6.25km in 1h 10m which is pretty bad as i did a 10km before in 1h 15m. Need to get this down to under 1h and then focus on moving up to 10km. Ultimately its to be able to complete 21km.

So the journey has begun and this blog is serving as my reminder to keep at it. I really dont know who will read all this in the end but sometimes, we write for ourselves and not for our audience.

How we plan but don't follow through?

This is my problem. I just read my last post - http://ramukavisved.blogspot.sg/2012/07/start-up-of-you-introducing-ved.html. And honestly i am very disappointed. It was a great post and was inspired by the book i read and my intentions was clear to build a platform for myself but as i got caught up in my new responsibilities at work and with family issues, i did not follow through. Being inspired is the first step to creating change BUT to be inspiring, truly inspiring, you need to follow through and that is my problem. There must be follow through. Now i have to say in my defense, i have been adjusting to a lot with increased responsibilities at work and also with home developments that have forced me to refocus a lot of my time and energy back to my extended family. I have in short, been overwhelmed. I am continuously drained and tired and my workload keeps increasing. It has been hard to focus on the big picture goals i had when i was struggling to meet my day to day workload. I needed another burst of inspiration. My wife spoke to me about a friend and how she found that he had a system for work where he was effective even as he worked from home. Now i started to think about this and i realised that i had no system of my own. So a few months back as we walked through the bookstore she gave me a book with the very simple title Getting Things Done by David Allen. I had no idea who he was but i was open to anything. The book appeals to me as it tries to define a plan or system (knowing that everyone has different ways of working) that can work. I wont go into much detail but the first step was to define all the actions, projects that i needed to work on and then create a system to go through this and then to have a weekly review and define the next action plans required. Seems simple enough but when you have a wave of work and home issues hitting you, you tend to lose that ability to manage effectively. I have started following some of the guidelines in that book and i can see a 20% improvement now. Now in the book it states that one of the key elements on any productivity system is the Weekly Review. I needed a way to be honest with myself and i have found that i am at the most honest and open when i write. So this blog is my honest account as i get focused on Gettings things Done and FOLLOWING THROUGH. I will end here but say that i have started Collecting all the tasks and projects that i NEED to do and also WANT to do. It is hitting over 50. SO my first step is to categorise those tasks/projects into 4 broad categories - Work, Home, Health, Dreams.