Don’t Follow Routines but these 3 to not to fail

One can find numerous tips to be more productive and efficient at work from different forums. What really amazed me was that most of the top attractive posts held a title with something negative in them. They included phrases like, ‘never do’, ‘common mistakes’ and ‘ruin your career’ etc. This posed a question if we are more afraid of doing mistakes rather than trying something new.

A golden rule for productivity and efficiency has been to decide, start and finish your task. It is good but I would say that only one word can make you much more productive and that word is ‘reject’. If you are able to reject all the non-necessary rituals at a certain time, you’ll be left with the one that is most important. This would allow you to fully concentrate on that particular task. However rejecting alone won’t be of success unless after rejecting all non-necessary tasks you start and stick to the one at hand.

Many of the career coaches have been saying to burst the routine to keep our interest in career and life. They have suggested us to try different things so that we stay interested in life. Agreeing to this to a certain level I would say that we still would need some type of routine. I call this a 3 routines formula.

We must develop 3 types of routines in our every day life. First lets say our work needs something done every day like answering important queries, so we need to do it. This helps us to hold our grounds at the stage we have already reached in our life or career. If we don’t do it not only we’ll be out of touch with our existing situation and duties we may face an ultimate danger of loosing that position also.

Next routine window should be the one in which we invest on ourselves. Successful people never stop investing in them. One must use a routine to improve her every day preferably. It could be learning something new relevant or irrelevant to your career or simply becoming expert in your existing skill. Only with continuous improvement and learning one can avail more chances in life. Limited skills would lead to limited doors only. Limited skills would be like having only few keys that are of no use when another door probably leading to a better pathway appears on the way. 

Last routine interval should be the one in which one does all unnecessary tasks. It could be answering non-urgent emails or any other task less important than the ones you completed that day. This is actually a great blessing. It allows you to postpone these less important tasks instead of completing them while you were busy with some other more important tasks. Lets say that while working on some important project you receive an email or phone call from a friend, you may postpone answering it to this 3^rd routine window. Thus you reject the interrupting tones at time you were busy and dealt them later in a routinely manner. A practical way is to keep a paper and pen near you and whenever any such interrupting call of work arrives note it for the 3^rd routine window to be tackled later. This would also allow you not to pile up unnecessary but to be done tasks.

In the time left other than these 3 routine windows you may do whatever is required but sticking to these 3 routine rituals can make a lot of difference in your life for good.

Few Lessons Learnt from Gaziantep

 Taking the inter city bus from Konya around mid night I was traveling towards the city of Gaziantep. This city is located near Syrian border with many camps for displaced people located around it. The city is so well known in the surrounding region that people are asking for ‘Made in Gaziantep’ materials instead of naming the country, Turkey.  The bus was as usual comfortable with all in seat entertainment and refreshments. However being night most people preferred to sleep and so did I.

I arrived in Gaziantep early on the morning around 06:30 am. Decided to take tea and something to eat. This time I had to make it to hotel myself so there were two options, I take the taxi or use the local transport system. Local transport system in most of the cities in the country is comparable to any European standard but knowing which route to take and which stop to use was a problem. Therefore I decided to ask the young guy serving tea. When I asked him he explained to me the public transport system. I then asked if I use taxi, his reply was ‘brother isn’t it pity that you pay 15 dollars to taxi when you can go by bus in just 1 dollar’. This was the first lesson I learnt in Gaziantep. However this guy in his good intention forgot that I don’t know the city well and there is a worth of time (some times) exceeding the costs.

I was not convinced so simply left for the doors on opposite side of his café so that he doesn’t see me taking the taxi all against his advice. From the other side I took the taxi for the hotel. The taxi driver after formal introduction started telling me about economy. His deep analysis was really astonishing like…’yes we are exporting a lot but most of raw material we import’. He also talked about political situation. The lesson I learnt was, it did not matter if you are taxi driver or a professor, it is all about personal development based upon your very own preferences.

On second day of my visit to city I met Mr. Ozhan, an old friend of mine. He is a regional business man but knowing the world better than many analysts. We talked about the huge amounts of credit loans the city’s municipality was planning to take or already taken. His reply was, this is a good indicator for economy. I was surprised a lot so asked him for clarification. He said, ‘look 10 years ago leave the municipality even the central government was afraid of taking any internal or external loan. Now they are taking bold steps and taking loans for heavy investments’. The reason he put forward was the right type of management and leadership country or local governments have got which made people confident to take risks and see an ability in them to pay back. Then when I asked why some of the European countries are in trouble, his straight answer was, ‘the people over there do not work, I work from 6:00 am till 20:00. I said but this much work is also not good. His reply was another lesson never to forget. He said, ‘it is the system, not the people who work. System makes people work. Why the USA is so strong? Because the system over there makes every one work!’.