To Do’s

Inspired by ‘Eat that Frog’ I decided to buy a planner for writing down the things I needed to do the next day the night. My goal for this exercise began with the thought of noting down the tasks that I wanted to accomplish.

I felt the need…

I first felt the need for this accountability, on the occasion when I had family visiting me and during that time, my tasks kept getting postponed indefinitely, even the ones that were important to everyone. I realized that this was totally unproductive and I was not in control of my time.

In the process of being flexible and. accommodating, it became totally chaotic. I ended up doing random things at whims and then stayed up late at night feeling annoyed of not getting things done that needed to be done. This could be a simple task of making a meal or completing my exercise or working in the office. 

I made mental to-dos…

The chaotic timetable forced me to have a mental to-do and the need to be assertive to accomplish it. I decided what needed to be done and did it by leaving the room for random requests for the end of the day or week or month. This made things better but it made me realize, how easy it is to waste time on useless and futile distractions. I can’t spend my entire life living this way and decided to take responsibility to strike a balance between being a total-time dictator to being a chaotic random doer. 

I put the things on paper…

After reading the “Eat that frog” article by Om Swamiji, I was inspired to write down the things I needed to do the next day and it has been almost two weeks now. I started doing this ten minutes before going to bed and wrote down, the main things I needed to get done or thought I wanted to. This exercise is fantastic for many reasons:

1. Gives me clarity on what I should focus on during the day.
2. Creates boundaries to limit or remove distractions as I am always thinking about my to-do’s when random distraction comes during the day.
3. I realized, how easy it was to get distracted and could track the number of distractions (almost 40%).
4. This process has helped me reduce distractions and have discipline.
5. It is forcing me to reevaluate my choices of activities and also making me efficient and focused. (Focus is correlated to being efficient and this is really helping me complete tasks with single-pointed attention).
6. I now have metrics for self-improvement (need to be disciplined a lot more than I thought I was)

My efficiency is 5/8…

I am not happy with this index, but I need to work on more things. I sometimes think it is easy to blame others for distractions, but in this process I realized that I also am not disciplined enough to check how much time I spent on random social media browsing, watching shows or doing something totally unnecessary.

As an adult,  I find I need to be more disciplined and focused if I really want to get anywhere in life in terms of self-growth. Else, today I have a 40% of my time being consumed on things that have no contribution to my self-growth. This has helped me, and I will continue to write and improve my score in the coming time.