Going Retro with Red

This is a post I wrote about six years ago. I find it silly and yet good enough to laugh at myself. Back then I called it "Color Me Red."

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~ With high regards to the one who taught me how to connect the dots from the war  to the flower in Chacha Nehru's pocket  to the Hindu Bridal Dress ~

Besides thinking about the most defining moment of my life, I was browsing videoduniya.com for some random and durlabh Hindi movies I always love talking about. I then came across "Red." Oh come on, I am not that big a bollywood fan to even think about watching or learning more about this movie. What struck me was the importance of this color in my life - so thought of blogging about it. Since blogging is so much IN today that even AmitJi (the LAAL badshaah), Bhuwan (wearing RED while playing a girl in dole dole dil), and Raj (waving good bye while wearning a RED and white t-shirt in DDLJ) find the time to do it, I thought why can't I ...I can't be busier than them.

So, the story begins with the role of this color in my life. This is definitely not my favorite color. I always went for calm and environmental colors like blue and green which lie on the other extreme end of the VIBGY...........OR spectrum. I am anyway not an intense person, at least in public - how could my choice be as intense as red? As a child, I remember wearing red only for dance performances. I never owned any other red asset as best as I can remember except for a red pencil box. Besides that, to me red was always a color of high intensity, high presence, high visibility, and very strong emotions. During high school, my English teacher (Padma Ms) taught us the importance of using colored pens. If you are in a normal mood, you would use blue; to disclose a sad news use black; to congratulate someone use pink; to break a good news use violet;.and to threaten someone or to write a revengeful letter full of rage, use RED. Oh my God, since then RED became more of a stay away color for me. Then there were those highly academic days, when I hated to see a red mark on my notebook highlighting the careless mistakes.

Nevertheless, being a true Gemini, life gave me enough reasons to remain confused. As I grew further in my teenage years, they told me there was a Rose day. Again, the same sort of color classification, yellow stands for friendship, white stands for peace, and red stands for love and romance....! So, I remain there confused--how far should I stay from this color? Was Lakshman Rekha colored too, if yes was it by any chance red? I started playing with the idea of someone giving me a red rose or, on a darker note, writing me a letter in red. I decided never to take either of them seriously as the status this color remained complicated at least to me. Meanwhile, there were times when I went for a blood-test and they took a large volume of red-colored liquid out of my body leaving me even more anemic. I must confess that after watching Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, I did buy that Mausam ka Jaadu's red dress but could wear it even once as everyone unanimously told me - this dress looks good only on Madhuri. I remember my mother telling me don't ever wear a red bindi, not even after getting married - go for a maroon one instead- red doesn't look good on wheatish complexion. Ok, I buy that! And there were articles in the Times of India regarding the Kargil war and the color red as its consequence. There was a time when a punjaban with warm si feelings looked at my wardrobe and said - come on your life is so colorless, how can you not have a red top??? Here in USA, when I went to a hair saloon, they suggested me to go for a hair color - some shade of red....I said - are you seriously kidding me? So, this is the relationship I share with red.

On one hand, the hottest spice we eat is red in color and then the color of "tika" we put during pujas is red too. There surely, is a meaning to this color. So, let me "stop" and step back. The irony is that I can continue with this post only when my g-chat icon turns from red to green. Till then keep redding!

On Savoring the PAPER in the DIGITAL Age

Who uses paper these days? Everything has gone digital; we communicate with each other using social networking, chatting, texting, and emailing; we plan for everyday things using online calendar; we read news online, and most of the bestselling books are now e-books. More recently, the digital space has been further expanded by innovations like MindMap (a note-taking tool) and Sticky Screen (digital version of the post-it note).

Nevertheless, I find myself using pen and paper quite a lot.  Here are a few tasks where I find using paper extremely effective and pleasant.

Planning: I use a paper planner instead of an online calendar for everyday planning. I can carry it wherever I want to and keep updating and tracking tasks from anywhere. Also, I make several paper based lists, e.g., shopping, packing, gifts, grocery, etc. On the wall beside my work desk, I stick a mini goal chart that provides high visibility to the 3-5 key monthly goals. On this wall, I also like to stick the visual equivalent of the most difficult problem I am working on – so that I don’t lose the big picture perspective. One may argue that a white board may also fulfill this requirement. However, being a minimalist, I find whiteboard to be too big to match up with the minimal size work desk I use.

Organizing Scientific Thoughts: Being a visual learner, I am able to understand a problem domain and the related works only by drawing figures and frameworks. Considering the fast pace of research contributions, the only way for me to stay productive is to use paper and pen. Also, most of the research ideas (and brilliant solutions) occur at odd hours and places. If I have access to any piece of paper and a pen, I can immediately capture them in black and white instead of having the ideas get lost or deformed.  Plus, I like to read, revise, and review research papers using the printed versions. Despite the strong support provided by Adobe Acrobat, I find marking, underlining, note taking, and cutting much easier on paper.

Stimulating Creative Thinking: Who doesn’t get creative while travelling or walking by the park? I always carry a small handy notepad or just a paper where I can capture these thoughts, and even sketch. I have noticed people playing with their phones and laptops as well, however, I prefer to be able to move lightly and find writing by hand much more relaxing than typing.   Quite a number of times, I have ended up with prototypes of some art projects, new ideas for home set up, or just with a clearer stream of thoughts.

Product Design and Redesign:  This one is my favorite. I have made several bookmarks (out of used paper material) to make reading more interesting. Not sure if any painting made using the MS paintbrush tool can provide an experience as rewarding as a sketch drawn out on a paper. It is quite easy to make paper folders out of used colorful envelopes to make organization more fun.  I don’t think making greeting cards, writing letters and thank you notes will ever lose its charm. Also, I have created a little paper-based birthday reminder tool that is at least as effective as any sophisticated birthday reminder tool online.

Labeling and Household Management: This set of tasks is quite obvious but a good one to remind ourselves of the reliance on paper. Many use post it notes for setting reminders –“do this,” “toss this,” etc. Paper is also used for labeling containers (“recycle,” “coupons,” “shred”), vital documents, spice holders, and medicine boxes.  I recently started using a label outside the refrigerator that says what’s current in the freezer section, as food items stored in the freezer usually get ignored and eventually wasted. 

I have come to realize that the feel of the natural medium of paper-pen does something to me that even a high quality digital editor and an ergonomic keyboard cannot do.  It has been scientifically proven that writing by hand improves focus and cognitive abilities. I personally feel very educated when I write on a paper.  I must admit that it does waste paper but all these activities could be done using leftover materials like freebie notebooks that we all unintentionally accumulate, magazines, used envelopes, and the unused space of a used paper. Moreover, once the paper has been used up, it is either used for a certain task (as a product), and it could be recycled.

I am not against using technology, but have just discovered my natural preferences as a result of monitoring my paper usage patterns. The digital media is very powerful especially for addressing a larger section of people, and in making a professional impact and personal branding.   A paper media cannot replace activities like blogging, professional networking (such as through LinkedIn), consuming information through forums and news websites.  However, for deeper, creative, and more personal stuff, I think one is much more effective using paper wherein half baked ideas can be quickly formalized while providing the much needed rest to the eyes. 

Evolution of Planning Systems

I am highly inspired by those who plan their daily lives in writing, and execute their plans successfully. I am equally inspired by those who everything mentally and yet execute everything perfectly. Since mental planning is hard to observe, I have only had a chance to observe various methods of black and white planning adopted by people from different age groups and professions. The planning technique can be studied from multiple perspectives such as

• Planning Medium (paper vs. digital) – it is said that visual learners prefer paper planners and linear learners prefer digital planners.  
• Term of Planning (daily/weekly/monthly)
• Abstraction Level – how much information is associated with the plan – notes, task duration, venue, time, resources needed, etc.

Another perspective that interested me is how planning on the whole has evolved over the past few years. In this post, I present further analysis of the various generations of planning originally introduced by Steven Covey in his popular book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” These generations are discussed in the chapter that describes the 3^rd habit called “First Things First” related to personal management. Without further ado, I present the 4 generations of planning systems.

The To-Do Generation (First)

This is the simplest and the most minimalistic form of planning wherein all you need is a flat list of tasks to do. An advantage of such a system is that it’s quick to develop and has no learning curve. This is very common and effective in planning for specific events such as shopping, travel, packing, etc. However, it is not very effective in terms of daily planning, which is the subject of this post.

The Calendar Generation (Second)

The main issue with the previous generation of standalone lists is that it is independent of the time dimension. According to Julie Morgenstern, a dangling task (i.e. unassociated with time) never gets done! The second generation addresses this concern. Herein, the list is not just prepared but also scheduled in advance with respect to a standard calendar. The tasks of the to-do list are mapped to certain days on the calendar, possibly in a time table format. Along with capturing the things to do, one can also record important appointments, deadlines, and due dates. This is the most common form of planning I have seen among people.

The Priority Generation (Third)

As people are getting busier and overwhelmed with responsibilities from all over, professional organizers suggest prioritization of tasks based on certain subjective preferences. The third generation is about making a to-do list and prioritizing the tasks so that the higher ranked tasks are scheduled earlier or at a more productive time of the day. For example, I would schedule working on my prime project early in the morning as I am a morning person, and then do the low priority tasks such as voluntary project in the evening. This kind of planning stipulates scheduling your priorities rather than prioritizing your schedule, and is simply powerful. I have seen very few people(top management/influential/successful people) who follow such a prioritized planning system.

The Inside-out Generation (FOURTH)

The problem with the earlier generation is that most of the people prioritize by urgency and not just by importance, e.g., exercise is important, but working against a deadline is urgent. So, people end up taking time out only for the urgent matters and procrastinate the important tasks till they become urgent and bubble up in the priority list. At the core, the problem is that people fail to understand/discover what is really important in their lives. This is because the earlier planning generations work in an artificial and shallow manner. They start with external tasks and try to bring these tasks into the person’s lifestyle. This outside-in approach only scratches the surface of a person’s life and does not get deeply ingrained in the life.

In response, we have the inside-out 4^th generation planning system. This is the transformational  generation – just like how there is a transformational/transitional person in a family – the one who changes the course of the family – by taking up a non-conventional profession, or by just being rebellious for a meaningful reason.

As the name suggests, the approach works from inside out. The gist is to determine what is important for oneself and then link the important things to daily tasks. This could be performed into two steps.

1. Preparation Step: Write the mission statement for your life – this is a one page statement that describes the overall goal of one’s life. Herein, first write down the different roles you play in life (e.g., Mr X may have the following roles to play in life - physician, social worker, husband, father, instructor, and human being). Then for each role, write down the higher level life goals (e.g., as a social worker, I want to offer free medical services to certain sections of the society). Your mission statement should be easily accessible and possibly integrated with the planner (add it to the first/last page of the planner so that it’s visible enough).
2. Planning Step: Every week, you look at the mission statement, and determine the tasks that need to be accomplished in the given week for each role of your life. What is important here is that the tasks should be aligned with the goals mentioned in the mission statement. Finally, the tasks are mapped to specific days of the week.

So, this is an inside out approach that starts out with the life mission and translates various life goals into tangible daily tasks. Preparing such a planning system involves a lot of thought, hard work, and patience; but is totally worth it. For an in depth understanding, I recommend the Habit 3 chapter of the 7 habits books which I am paraphrasing in this post.  For experimentation and curiosity purposes, I transitioned to a (handmade) 4^th generation paper planner about two months ago, and the results are amazing as of now. 

Ek Lamha (Hindi)

हमने जिया है एक ऐसा लम्हा
जिसके आगे ज़िन्दगी का
हर दूसरा लम्हा फीका सा लगता है
जिसका मवाज्ना अनजाने में
आने वाले हर लम्हे से करते हैं

उस लम्हे ने हमें अपना
गुलाम सा बना दिया है
इस ही कशमकश में रहते हैं कि
क्या ये खुशनसीबी है
जो ऐसा लम्हा जिया है
या बदनसीबी कि
फिर कभी किसी लम्हे में
कोई रोशनी न देख पाएंगे 

Clearing up the Colorless Dust

They say life always comes in the way of living the life of your choice. As we make the so-called “progress” in life, we get layered up by the dust of rut, chores, responsibilities, have-to-do tasks, and more importantly, the inadvertently developed mindless escapes.  In between, our natural inclinations and creative excitements get buried underneath. What if we could instantly clear off the accumulated dust, to resurface the vibrant colors we naturally bear?

This summer I am on a mini-mission to bring the natural colors back into my life. I am trying to eliminate quite a bunch of colorless mindless activities from my life such as: 

• Reading every single gossip on Bollywood celebrities (yes! you can certainly ask me about the  fashion magazine Sonam Kapoor is currently shooting for  and  how many scoprions are in the bachchan family, including the upcoming BayB)
• Checking facebook profiles of random people  (J okay we all do that!) ,
• Talking on phone for hours – reiterating the same things (the futile daily activities) again and again to different people (as if they care?)
• Complaining and coming up with creative excuses for not exercising
• Procrastinating making dinner – till the very last minute
• Mindless browsing for finding technical solutions (as opposed to directly searching and posting on relevant forums or LinkedIn)
• Writing ridiculously long emails to friends (pretty sure my friends don't read everything and they are not missing out on anything)

By giving these up, I hope to make a fresh vibrant room for my long lost and hidden colors by:

• Joining a dance class
• Waking up at a consistent time everyday
• Starting writing thesis  30 minutes everyday
• Finishing a wall quilt I have been making for a year now
• Coming up with mind blowing gift ideas for my loved ones
• Decluttering my apartment even more – selling off/giving away a bunch of items
• Compiling my currently scattered bucket list on 43things.com
• Making accessories by self
• Driving more often

I am ready to blow the pale dust away – and recolor my life. What about you???

Two most pressing issues with PLANNING

The following post is in response to a very thought-provoking post on planning titled Fail to PLAN.

Question: Even to this day I have tens of to do lists, resolution plans, goal planning documents that I end up creating after some or other self-introspection session. But none of them seem to ever strike a done deal. In fact, more of such lists keep on adding every few days and somewhere in the middle I lose track of them.

Response: You pinpointed the problem yourself – that just brought you closer to the solution. This is the problem with most of us – we tend to write to-do things at multiple places and then lose track of them. If you really want to get rid of this – here are the two steps. First, have a single TO-DO list and keep it handy. Whenever you recall any pending task – just write down on it. Don’t worry if the list grows upto 50 items. Second, keep a PLANNER. To-do list tells what to do and a planner tells when to do. Planners and to-do lists should be closely intertwined. I had the opportunity of looking at the planner/to-do combos of some really successful people and here are 2 ways both involving an off-the-shelf paper planner marked with date/day/time etc. One way is to write the to-do list at the last page(one of the extra pages) of the planner, and when you plan your day, just have a look at the list and map the most pressing items to the day’s portion of the planner. Another way is to use post-it notes to create to-do lists and stick them on the current page of the planner and do whichever is important on that particular day. In sum, I think creating an integrated system is the first step towards clearing your head and moving on to some real action.

Question: Does the problem lie in the way I plan or is implementation the tricky part? Or am I lacking determination or enthusiasm or motivation? What is it that will provide me the satisfaction of at least one all green to do list. I have some great planner friends and they have bestowed me with their best planning tips now and then. I have tried to follow most of them and yet what is constant is incompletion. How do you "just do it" after all?

Response: Once you have an integrated planning system in place, then comes the question of – how to actually do it. It is extremely difficult to answer this question, in fact I consider this to be a philosophical question. I think if you map something on your planner, e.g., I am going to sew a button (that I have been procrastinating for 6 months now) tomorrow, you have already taken the first step. The key to make the next and final step is - to take your planner very seriously. Mapping a task on the planner is like making a promise to yourself, and this is the most effective way of assessing one’s reliability. I heard a beautiful saying somewhere which suits the context very well– “the first person you should learn to collaborate with is yourself.” Only if you can collaborate with yourself, you can collaborate with the world. This is how success is defined in this era of connectedness – its all about collaboration and keeping the minor-most promises.

Minimalism unleashes Creativity

While both ‘minimalism’ and ‘creativity’ are two abstract concepts, they share a relationship that could be manifested using certain concrete examples. This post highlights a few of such examples with an intention to further glorify the power of minimalism.

Minimalism has been defined in multiple contexts including philosophy, religion, architecture, and user interface design. Ever since I consciously embraced the idea, I have had conversations about this with many different people. Barring a few, the idea per se does not sound convincing to people and what often follows is the cynicism towards the idea. So, I spent quite some time reflecting on the most convincing advantage of minimalism – and chose to cast creativity! Here is a list of some areas where minimalism is likely to lead to creative thinking.

1. Stuff. There cannot be a better way of understanding the minimalism-creativity correlation than visiting the New Uses of Old Things section of Real Simple. This just shows creativity at its best when faced with a scarcity of resources, i.e., physical stuff.

2. Wardrobe. Heard of the Six Items or Less experiment? This experiment is a challenge to limit your wardrobe to six items or less(excluding accessories and essentials) for an entire month. To understand the power of a limited wardrobe, one should definitely give this a try. You would be surprised by the creative mix and match combinations, fashion statements you eventually create.

3. Ancient Play Days. Remember the days when there were no TVs and videogames? The limitedness of the resources provided us with out of the box ways of having fun and getting entertained. At least the non digital natives would remember how many creative games and stories were invented back then.

4. Interiors. The scarcity of space or resources brings out the interior designer in anyone and helps invent visually interesting techniques such as using a stack of books as a side table. Some super cool examples can be found in Apartment Therapy’s Smallest home contest.

5. Computer Programming. An interviewer asks you to write a code to remove duplicates from an unsorted linked list. You somehow do it. You are then asked to design an algorithm to determine if a string has all unique characters. You still manage to do it given you have some mid-level programming expertise. Suppose there now is a twist in the question - that you cannot use additional data structures…now what? That’s how the interviewers test the creativity of the candidates, possibly to see how well the candidate could make use of the minimal information implied in the question.

6. Technical Writing. You are asked to describe your research study. Sure, you could do it and go on and on about the problem, questions, experiments, and results. But what if you are asked to condense your work into 8 pages? Well this is exactly when you are start thinking of new ways to present your results (e.g. use a pie chart instead of a table), and invent new terms to describe the study.

While Daniel Pink happily declares that the future belongs to the creatively gifted “right-brainers,” many people complain of not being creative by birth. I believe minimalism has the power to induce creativity into anyone who attempts to follow the path. While I presented only a handful or examples supporting the positive correlation between minimalism and creativity, I am on a lookout for more such examples supporting or even refuting the claim.