Things to do

My good friend Thakur Amar Singh aka Munnabhai M.D.S has posted a comment about my blog on Suburban Utility Vehicles. It is quite an interesting piece of reading, with his mark of subtle humor and finally a mordant comment on US mindset. Friends of Amar are aware that he loves to hate India but I guess even they would be perplexed now as to from when he started disliking the west.

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=18634797&postID=113463360990379665

Amar Singh was with Tata Motors earlier and looks like he has used his expertise in judging the usability of a SUV, but I fail to understand what aspect of my blog made him feel that I have less empathy.

I have become quite occupied these days. Don't mistake that my boss has inundated me with work. My days are busy doing personal things that I have been procrastinating for over six months, starting from simple things like ordering a cheque book to filing income tax returns. Inactivity for a span of six months has crept so much into me that I started postponing the simplest of simplest things like calling a friend.

One fine morning, a day of revelation, I decided I had to break this circle of inactivity and designed a simple "ToDo" list in excel. As you see it in the picture here, the format is simple, list down the activities that you need to do for the day under the date in a column and start attempting to finish the work. It is important to list down even the simplest things like calling a friend or picking up a brochure, because a more important work might get hampered if we forget to do these things. Although it might look very simple to read, this act of listing down things has benefited me so much. It is every ones experience that at the end of the day we feel helpless that we forgot to do a certain thing which is important. The act of listing down things to do will tune your thought process to remember those little yet important things and the chances to forget are practically nil.

I have also designed a color coding mechanism. If a work is complete, I would block that cell with green color. If a work has been attempted but yet it is not totally complete and needs follow up, I block it in yellow. If I couldn't attempt to do a particular task that day, I would block it in red. Basing on the color coding, that task would get carried on to the "Todo" list for the following day or the follow up date.

Most of my day now is spent reviewing and completing the tasks that are listed in my "ToDo" list. Although, writing this makes me feel like that tele brands guy you see on the television, who keeps repeating like a parrot that a particular product has shown him results, it is true that this activity has given me results. Lot of activities that have been pending are getting done now. Having said that I would like to clarify that, it is surely more important to start doing things rather to simply writing them down and blocking them red at the end of the day. That is all for the day, I have quite a busy day ahead, my "ToDo" list is waiting!