Use Reminders extensively

Many of us have some fantastic ideas about our own memory capacities. We feel our memory is infallible and forgetting is something that just doesn’t come naturally to us.

Well, having a great memory is one thing; and ability to remember the right things at the right time is just the other. I realized it last year.

My cousin sister’s birthday is in June; and of course I did remember it… exactly 72 hours later. What made things more awkward was the fact that I had spoken to her just the day before.

Lesson Learnt: Set reminder for everything that you need to do.

• In office, I use the Calendar feature of Microsoft Outlook. It has some powerful features that you can use to set recurring reminders, or reminders to be sent to others.
• For personal matters, I use Reminder feature of my cell phone.
• For birthdays of special ones, I have two reminders: one for the day itself, and another a week earlier, to buy greeting card or a gift.

Count thy currency…

Count the currency every time it changes hands.
Sounds pretty obvious, eh? But just think about the countless times you must have just pocketed the wad of notes given by perhaps a close friend or a family-member, thinking it wouldn’t look good if you counted them right in front of them.
At least I suffered from these thoughts until a short while ago.

A friend had returned the 2000/- bucks I had lent him. Coming back to my PG room, I passed over the same to landlord as the rent for the month. He counted it while we talked and informed that it was only 1900/-.. a hundred less.
Of course, I paid the remainder amount, but then was left wondering whether my pal himself had erred while giving the money or whether I had misplaced Rs. 100/- somewhere.

Lesson Learnt: Whether you are giving the money or receiving it, count it thoroughly.

Welcome to my life!

Dear All,
Welcome to my (yet another) blog. Every time I create a blog, I promise myself it would be the last one… and then end up creating another.

This one is about the experiences of my life, and the lessons they have taught me. To begin with, it would mostly be about HowTo’s, GTDs, et cetera et cetera. Later on, when (actually, if) I get a bigger picture, a bit of philosophy might creep in.

Each post in this blog would be a live document, in the sense that whenever I learn something new about the same thing, the related blog post would be updated.

At the ripe young age of 27, I cannot claim to have seen it all. The things mentioned here would be stuff that perhaps all of us know, are aware about. The idea is just to log them.
Being a technical writer, am quite fanatic about comprehensive documentation! And, what could be more mission-critical than our own life!

Hope that the entries made here strike a chord with you…

Regards,
-Gautam
23-January-2008