Time management – exhausted or confident?

30 November 2015 is the 180th birthday of Mark Twian (1835 – 1910) the famous American writer. The following quote is widely attributed to him ‘If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if It’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first”. However the quote was said for the fist time in 1791 by French writers including Nicolas Chamfort, Émile Zola and Apocryphal a little differently.

Later when quote arrived in English speaking nations it was modified, re-quoted and so goes on the story. The quote became a global phenomenon when picked up by time management gurus. If researched in detail, the quote was not related at all to the time management concept in 1791’s France. It was an advice to people of France to be prepared for worst things happening every day. Searching at amazon.com one can find more than 1200 books dealing with frog eating issue. If you narrow down your search to exact title ‘Eat That Frog’, in Business and Money Category you’ll currently (Nov 2015) find 15 books with that exact title in English language. However, the term is widely being used and I suppose that it is certainly searched few hundred thousand times a year. Google search engine shows that average monthly search for the term ‘eat that frog’ is more than ten thousand.

The simplest explanation about the quote in this aspect is that one should handle the most difficult task as first thing every morning. As per this perception, once you complete that most difficult task i.e. “The Frog” you’ll be highly relaxed and would be ready to happily finish all remaining tasks.

Let me admit that I had been a sincere follower of this school of thought for years until it started to taste bad and started hurting my stomach. Following this very approach greatly diminished my happiness level and my analytical capacity to handle tasks and other issues. However I figured out that this eat the frog idea leads to DBFE states i.e. Depressed, Bored, Frustrated and Exhausted stages. It makes you depressed even a night before to think about the ‘hard’ task for next day for which you have limited capacity, that's why it is labeled as hard!

Therefore I decided to challenge the idea and have put forward a rival model named as hsbc i.e. Happy, Successful, Boosted and Confident stages. In this model you start the day by happily handling the tasks. The happy handling of the tasks then makes you successful that in turns boost your morale. Eating the frog simply exhaust any person while hsbc model would leave any one confident and even lead her to the Creativity stage. I suggest all people who are stressed with deadlines to manage the tasks, to give a try to this approach. I am quite sure that most of them would end up being successful, confident and more creative. Further details about hsbc model can be found at: 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B018PXIBJU?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

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View other books in ‘Satisfied Careers’ series by the author: 

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/6005899.Azhar_Ali

Why 2015 Failed to get me surrendered?

There could be many ups and downs in ones life, a year, month or even a day. You can get good news in the morning that can completely be dominated by relatively bad news by evening.  Year 2015 started with many wonderful ideas in mind and in pipeline for me. I had been following a quite promising project since October 2014 and by January 2015 things seem quite on track. Whole team was quite happy but unexpectedly problems started to emerge leading to complete cancellation of the project.

This was not the only bad news the first month of year brought; I had to quit my long time associated company on 31 January 2015. I needed to realign my whole career strategy now; I did not have the crucial support of company when a break comes during free lancing work. Therefore after working for almost 13 years mainly as a free-lancer consultant I decided to go ahead with idea of a Job. A wonderful opportunity appeared in Qatar and after ups and down finally by August I came to know that I could not avail it! Coming back to end of January, I also applied for a Job with local company and got the job but it needed approval from some ministry also. It was expected that I’d start working by 01 March 2015 that finally realized only by 2nd week of May 2015.

Those were really hard times but thanks to my close friends’ network I managed to survive both financially and morally. Job was good but it had not been enough to build the day, it only helped to save the day and that also sometimes only partially.

However when ever I have downs in my career life I always started developing new skills and polishing the existing ones. It was hard time and I had limited budgets for such activities but I remained consistent. By end of July I had completed my Specialization in Entrepreneurship from Maryland University and another 6 courses related to disaster management and health care issues. All of this learning increased level of my internal happiness regardless of the situation around me. Then in July I also got my Master’s Thesis published as a book. 

Life started to follow a certain defined trend that was quite different. Previously I was going for international assignments thrice or more times a year, was getting money as per free lance international expert at much higher rates but now I had very limited options to increase my earnings. At this time I got the most severe blow due to death of my beloved mother. I know well that there is no compensation to this loss whatever we do.

After August while concentrating on my job’s work I started reading books more than I used to read previously. I tried to further develop my analytical skills and knowledge about ancient ways of life. I became interested in observation and assessment of the stress as a result of our current technology and living styles. At this stage using my notes I managed to compile a brief e-book entitled, ‘13 Ancient Ways to Overcome Technological Stress’. 

The book provides ancient and some not so ancient ways to keep us happy in spite of all the problems and technological stress. A Danish study done after I published my e-book clearly supported the idea I put in my e-book. I am sure that readers of this e-book would find the described ways useful and become happier in future by following them.

I did not surrender to year 2015 in spite of all hardships and who knows might turn it to be one of best years, we still have 47 days to 2016!