[Time-Management] Arise, awake and take charge!

 

`You Better Slow Down'

10th November 2009

I do hope you liked the spirit behind yesterday's message on the need to slow down in order to speed up. Read the following quotation:

Have you ever watched kids on a merry-go-round, or listened to rain slapping the ground? Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight, or gazed at the sun fading into the night?

You better slow down, don't dance so fast, time is short, the music won't last.

Do you run through each day on the fly, When you ask "How are you?", do you hear the reply? When the day is done, do you lie in your bed, with the next hundred chores running through your head?

You better slow down, don't dance so fast, time is short, the music won't last.

Ever told your child, we'll do it tomorrow, and in your haste not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch, let a good friendship die, 'cause you never had time to call and say "hi"?

You better slow down, don't dance so fast, time is short, the music won't last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere, you miss half the fun of getting there. When you worry and hurry through your day, it's like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life is not a race, so take it slower, hear the music before the song is over.

Author: Unknown

N C Sridharan

www.thetimefoundation.com

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[Time-Management] Arise, awake and take charge!

 

9th November 2009

 

`Speeding up by slowing down'!

Beware the fury of a patient man.

- John Dryden

 The above may appear to be confusing. How can you speed up by slowing down? But if you think calmly, sometimes we speed up so much that we waste a lot of time in undoing many things that we have done. Sometimes  we act in haste  without giving the job adequate attention, and at times  we react emotionally and impulsively and later on regret.

 

There are occasions when we want things to happen so fast  that we  become restless. We assume that we will get all the cooperation we need. We are very optimistic and under estimate the difficulty involved. In our anxiety to swing into action, we commit mistakes. Sometimes, we also do not give ourselves enough time to complete the task on hand. In this context, we are likely to commit mistakes. It may take much more time to rectify the mistake. Haste makes waste.

 

On such occasions, slow down. By slowing down, you are giving yourself enough time to plan the work. You give yourself enough time to evaluate the probability of failure. You give yourself an opportunity to be realistic. You need to relax. You need not become so restless. You don't have to do everything today. You don't have to become a compulsive time watcher.

 

To day before going to bed, ponder over the above topic and consider if you have been unduly in haste on some project that you are handling at present. If so, speed it up by slowing down!

 

N C Sridharan

www.thetimefoundation.com

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[Time-Management] Arise, awake and take charge!

 

6th November, 2009

 

Use it or lose it….

To find yourself, think for yourself.

Socrates

 

The mind can influence the functioning of the brain. This is what the experts say. The more the mind is usefully engaged and challenged, the more will be the brain activity. Experts who studied the brain content of geniuses   like Einstein say that in their brain there were more neuron connections and the density of the neurons  much more than in the brain of other people.

 

We have also heard the old adage `an idle man's mind is a devil's work shop'. We need to keep our mind active by giving it enough work. We can do many things to keep the mind filled with useful and challenging activities. This is what Einstein did. This is what Edison did. This is the strategy of geniuses.

 

One thing we can do is `free writing'. Free writing is just writing whatever  comes to your mind. Take a piece of paper and pen and go on writing whatever you want to write. Don't bother about the content or the quality. Just write. Do this regularly at a specified point of time every day. Have an appointment with yourself for writing. Look at the grass in front of you and write about the grass. Describe the colour and the texture. See how the end of the grass meets the horizon.   What does the grass remind you about? Write whatever comes to your mind. Describe the feelings that come to your mind and the memories it brings. Write down what does the grass represents in your life.

 

In this way, look at anything and everything that you see and write. This is a good exercise for your mind. Even today experts are analyzing thousands of pages that Edison and Einstein wrote whenever they had nothing else to do. It is the finding of the experts that their free writing had an influence on their success.

 

Try this and see the difference, not now, but at a later point of time.

 

N C Sridharan

www.thetimefoundation.com

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[Time-Management] Arise, awake and take charge!

 

5th  November2009

 

"Life is a field of unlimited possibilities."

-- Deepak Chopra

 

It all starts in the mind….

 

Our mind is always occupied with various thoughts and ideas. We cannot empty our mind. One in a million people can empty all the content of the mind and take it to `zero' level. It calls for an enormous amount of mind control and meditation. However, all of us can make use of the ideas and thoughts that pop up in our mind. Knowingly or unknowingly, many thoughts and ideas come to our mind. But they are squelched. `Squelching' is what happens when a water bubble bursts with a small sound. Once the water bubble squelches, the beautiful bubble is gone leaving no sign of it. Similarly, some beautiful ideas just disappear leaving no trace.

 

But people who have achieved great things in life had a knack of tapping the full potential of their mind. Einstein, it is said, would ponder as to what it would be like sitting on the top of a light beam. He would also ponder of  in such a situation  he would be able to see his own face! For a normal person such a thinking process would seem absurd or foolish. But if Einstein had not thought in this way, we would not have seen the Theory of Relativity!

 

Geniuses stumble upon an idea, and work on the same. But we stumble upon such ideas and dismiss the same as useless. The geniuses develop this skill at a fairly young age. In fact they may not even be aware of this.

 

May be our education system also contributes to this situation by not allowing the students to think originally. They are encouraged to memorize and reproduce what they memorized without challenging any thing.

 

Perhaps, we should challenge some of the known facts like what Galileo did by questioning why the earth should be flat or like Graham Bell who asked why is not possible to speak through wires.

 

 

So challenge and question and liberate your mind from the slavery of block thinking!

 

N C Sridharan

www.thetimefoundation.com

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[Time-Management] Arise, awake and take charge!

 

4th November, 2009

 

The power of the unconscious mind…

 

Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.

 

Blaise Pascal

 

Whenever we see an object, we see it consciously. We recognize its physical presence there. When we are not in our conscious awareness, we miss to see the object. I am sure you would have experienced searching for your key bunch all over your table without success while it was very much there! The reason is that the mind should pay attention to the object we want to see. When we pay attention, we can recognize our child in a crowd of hundred children.

 

But there is limit to our conscious mind paying attention. Our eyes cannot see every object that is placed in front of them. You can do a small exercise. Keep your index finger in front of you and move it from left to right and right to left. Now do it a little faster. Increase the speed of movement even faster. You will notice that at a point of time, your eyes cannot follow the finger so clearly. This is because our eyes have a limitation. If you have played cricket, you will understand that your ability to hit the ball accurately will depend on how clearly you can see the ball from the time it leaves the bowler's hand to the time hits the pitch in front of you.

 

If you want to play cricket based on your ability to see the ball, you will be bowled several times. You know that some fast bowlers bowl at a speed exceeding 100 miles per hour. At such a speed a cricket ball will always outrun the speed of our conscious thoughts. This is because, in order that you `see' the ball, it takes a tenth of a second for the image to reach the brain from your eyes. So you cannot consciously see the ball every time you want to hit the same.

 

Then, how does an expert batsman meet the ball with his bat?  It is done by the unconscious mind! The batsman's unconscious mind guides him to place the bat where the ball is traveling. The mind acts as a very powerful and sensitive computer. Striking the speeding cricket ball is just one of the many tasks your unconscious mind can do for you.

 

In order to make use of our potential to the full, we need to tap not only our conscious mind, but also our unconscious mind….

 

Read further.

 

N C Sridharan

www.thetimefoundation.com

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[Time-Management] Arise, awake and take charge!

 

3 rd November,2009

Not necessarily one at a time…

 

" The essential achievement of free will is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind"

-         William James, 19th Century psychologist

 

 

The most interesting thing about the mind and the brain is that they can cooperate with each other and one will complement the work of the other. Once we understand the link between these two important systems in us, it is very easy to tap our resources to the full. Not very long ago there were people who stunned the spectators by doing hundred things at the same time. They were called sadhavadhanis.  `Sadham' means hundred and `avadhani' means a person. These people developed a rare skill of simultaneously doing a hundred things and concentrating on all of them to a very high  level of accuracy.  Even to day there are dhasavadhanis who demonstrate their abilities to concentrate on ten different things at the same time.

 

This task is difficult, but possible. We need to understand that anything can be accomplished if broken up into small enough tasks. All you have to do is to train your mind and brain to do this by allocating a specific time for this exercise. Just like going to a gym  and doing work outs, this is also a mental gym. Try this exercise:

 

Sit in front of a TV and place small clock on top of the TV and start concentrating on the movement of the second hand for a full two seconds. Then start the TV and shift half your attention to the TV programme while keeping the other half  on the movement of the second hand of the clock. Do it for a few days and you would have picked up the skill of concentrating on two things at the same time.

 

Next, while you are doing the above, start reciting a poem in your mind such as `Mary Had a Little Lamb' and try doing these three activities at the same time. Do this for a few days.

 

Next add one more activity such as mental arithmetic into the set.  

 

You will realize that learning to do different things at the same time is not `impossible', but, `difficult yet possible'.

 

One word of caution: progress in stages and don't stretch yourself beyond your limits so that you don't fail and lose your self-confidence.

 

N C Sridharan

www.thetimefoundation.com

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[Time-Management] Arise, awake and take charge!

 

2nd November, 2009

Your mind is a multimedia system…

 

The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he justly entitled.

Andrew Carnegie

Your mind has enormous capacity and hardly any one has do used even a minute percentage of its potential. Many of us think and we can due only a few things at a time. It is not true. While it is good to develop our ability to focus and concentrate on one thing at a time, it is correct to conclude that we can concentrate on only one thing at a time. Capacity is different and usage is different.

 

Think about a multimedia computer system. While you are typing a page on a word document, the system can send and receive  data through the e-mail. It could also browse a website. At the same time you may also be scanning the system for virus. While you are doing all this, you could also listening to music through the audio CD inserted into the system. The computer can do all these simultaneously, without one interfering with the performance of the other. That is how the computer is configured. It is how it is designed.

 

A computer is after all an invention of the human brain and after all the human brain is triggered and operated through the human mind. If the man made computer can be made to perform several tasks simultaneously at the same time, the master computer, our mind can do several thousand more tasks than a mechanical device such as a computer can.

 

The only difference is that we have taken pains to understand the programme and the functioning of the computer, but we have not taken the effort to understand how to tap the full potential and capacity of the mind. If properly trained, we can do wonders with the mind by making it perform several things at the same time.

 

How can this be done? Read further….

 

 

N C Sridharan

www.thetimefoundation.com

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