Enhance this One journey

What kind of a journey do we envision?

The question above is shaped by what we have come across in our lives, seen, felt, dreamt about. Extremely personalised it is!

By far the most important question that we should post here is- How? 🧐 This needs to be a continuous process & and not a one off blip or win! Because continuous has immense power.

We need to design, and plan repetitive interactions with What we envision ourselves doing or repeating into the future. Why? Cause this is the way we can make it sustain, with a very high degree of impact & precision (let’s not worry about mastering and investing 10k hours- nowadays stuff that we have started to adopt weren’t around for 10k hours in the past from today. This can be a topic for another day)

Al right The Design- we will circle back to this later.

First, we have to be mindful about few basics when we envision ourselves into the future. Number 1, the circadian cycle of a full day is still going to be around 24 hours- so lets not plan to overwhelm ourselves since the start. Second, we should be looking at themes and not specific names of roles that we throw around nowadays. For example- say if someone sees oneself into the future consulting organizations for helping them solve problems around business intelligence discovery- rather than being a certain niche category expert (viz. Tableau/Power BI) the theme here can be broadened to be Data & Solutions Architect. This allows one to be open to continuous improvements & self-calibrate along the way. Be mindful, the same is not true in the now while planning daily interactions- here we need well defined action wraps.

Now, the design.

The design has extremely important pillars and those are- healthy mind, healthy body, outcome/identity driven first principles based habits, focus time blocks, non-focused scattered time guides, regular rewards, irregular planned conscious choice backed identity freckles (only if required with caution).

The pillars encircle our identity, supportive of each other, and any weak areas can be easily intruded!

Let’s pick each and partially elaborate:

Healthy mind: practice of staying in the now with deliberate mindless attention (the no mind state). Attention lies only on the activity in hand- period. This comes with deliberate no mind states or meditations over a long period of time, that helps an individual create a space to practice staying in the now.

Healthy body: Sleep, time restricted food intake, stretches/movements.

Outcome/identity driven first principles based habits: These can be planning for great start to our days by adopting cold showers, journaling, writing a simple gratitude note daily, habit of reading & learning every day.

Non-focused scattered time guides: For example, whenever we travel, we can consciously choose to carry few of our favourite books along- allowing us to pick up books often in place of the mobile phone. The most important fact is, though a slight deviation here- if anyone needs our immediate attention we can expect a call- and need not check for guided distracting notifications (time leaks)

Focus time blocks: this space is for doing, repeating what we would love to do, even years from now.

Regular Rewards: This is very important, and underrated- there is immense power in rewarding the process compared to outcomes. Since, only if we reward processes, there will be more favourable outcomes.

Irregular planned conscious choice backed identity freckles [the imperfections that make us human]: Consider that we are building an identity, but there are actions/choices that often creates an anti-identity in a way tricks us into repeating so called mistakes and takes away our attention, makes us doubt ourselves, our intentions, and does an irrevocable damage time & again. Such are small battles that keeps us stuck into similar issues. One thing that we can do is move this piece from unconscious/uncontrolled impulse driven acts to conscious planned outings (if we can not avoid something absolutely, lets exert quasi control as per our terms). Why outings? since these act like identity thieves, so best to allocate time for them separately out of the usual fabric we are trying to create here. Often, such acts are done unknowingly, since these deeply embed themselves into the cue reward (pleasure) structure via the nature of the first step being wrapped around ease of access/easy on pocket commercial strategies. In general be extremely wary of easily accessible material pleasures in life.

Circling back to the design:

Coming to the point where we will have x amount of hours to spare into the future. Once we have the themes ready,

Start targeting the most impactful stories- stories that we want to come to fruition allowing for a lot of cross theme synergies. This can be done on a Kanban board using scrum principles (this is a fairly spacious area where we can find a lot of articles). The motive is to bring discipline, traceability into our lives- we are the most important client of ourselves, then why not apply the gold standard of theme/project management techniques for us first.

Each theme can be split into actionable items covering a sub story that can be sized for a week (something that we call Tasks)- and every task into subtasks for ease of tracking, adherence, and reflecting on self progress daily (also called daily scrum in project language). Every weekly user stories/task definition, can be categorized into BAU (business as usual), TAG (touch and go) and Sprints (that will attract large time blocks). For more on this here’s a link.

While we are at this- I feel there’s a necessity for me to share such a board. I have one prepared in the past, needs refinement- once that is done, will share a link to that here.

Thanks for reading!