What is MITs?
MIT stands for most important task not Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Every day we have lot of things to do but what are the most important tasks if we do on that day will make us more fulfilled or push us closer to our goal. They are the critical tasks that will create most desired result for your goal and I put them on my MITs.

My MITs:
All of us are busy at our own level. We have lot on our plate but not necessarily an important one. If you do a small analysis on where you are spending your time and compare with where you want to spend your time you will find a big gap, which will disappoint you. I tracked my time for one week and was surprised to see where I was spending so much of my time. After that, I went back to Leo’s advice and started creating my MITs.

Content of my MITs:
While writing my MITs, usually I have either 2 or 3 major things to do for the day. The categories are:
 One for my own career goal
 One for my Reading and research purpose
 One for my office work

How to handle your MITs?
Though Leo says that we need to do our MITs early in the morning, my point is that it doesn’t matter when you do it. All you need to identify is when do you feel like you are in the zone? When do feel like you don’t get distracted? Analyze that and make that time totally yours. The idea is to shift this big task to the time when your mental powers are at their height and get the best out of it.

Deliberately choose your MIT:
Even if you are not a big fan of creating “To do” list things, I highly recommend you to give it a try. Don’t write 20 things on your to do list. Just make it as short as possible but make sure you have your MITs on the top of your list. You will feel productive after getting those things done and then you can shift your attention to anything that refreshes you quickly. Personally i check facebook, respond to my email or listen to music after cutting off one of my MITs from the list.

How I manage my MITs:
The general pattern might change but usually I mange my MITs in the following way.
 Write in my diary or sticky note and paste it on my table.
 Do at least one of my MITs as soon as I wake up
 Tackle another MIT after I check facebook and email
 One after I reach my workplace before checking anything else.
 One after coming back from work before dinner.

Challenge for the readers:
At the end of the day write what will be your MITs for the following day. What are the most crucial things that you think would bring a difference to your long term goal? Make sure they are small, important and achievable so that you can keep going. Write it down and place it somewhere you can see it. Do not start your day without having MITs on your list and do not end your day without getting those things done. In Brian Tracy’s word “Eat that frog.” Create your own style and stick with it for at least 7 days and keep moving. You can later make it a 30 day challenge to live your day with MITs on your list.

Over to you: What are the most important tasks for you today? How are you structuring your day to ensure your MITs get done before anything else?

Till next post: Live productively….

Why 30 day trial?

I don’t have any specific reason for this but at what I can say is that if you tried anything for 30 day it sticks with you and becomes your habit. You need some self-discipline and you need to choose something that really excites you to make it successful. You can take it as an ultimate practice zone. If you could do anything for 30 days without missing even a single day, I am sure you will learn a lot about that habit.

What if you failed?

There is nothing to lose. You can pick any other habit or hobby that you want to explore by devoting only 30 days of your life. Moreover it will be your own experiment and not an exam where you pass or fail. Just take it as a learning process, where you will learn about how self-disciplined you are and how much you enjoy trying new things in your life. Believe me; even if you fail you will not be in the place where you are today. You will learn something more than other people who haven’t given it a try.

Why you might fail?

Most of the people fail to stick with this challenge because:
• They didn’t start it with positive frame of mind
• They tried a lot of things at once.
• They lacked self-discipline
• Getting over excited and trying to do much at the start

How to do it?

-First of all be clear about why you want that habit in your life. If that is a big motivator to you, this challenge will be helpful for you otherwise it will be more fun than learning process.

-After you select one habit that fascinates you, go slowly. Do not try to overdo it. Trust me. It will be difficult in the beginning. Set the least limit that you will devote to something. Like if you are planning to read 1 hour daily early in the morning, try to start with 10-15 minutes in the early days and then slightly increase your time. Go slowly; you will reach your target by the time the trial ends.

-Don’t share it publicly with your friends through any sources like Facebook or Twitter. I haven’t found people being giving much support when you are challenging yourself. If you have a few friends whom you think will support you in this challenge, share it only with them.

-Try to replace a bad habit with another and not dropping it completely. This method works better than dropping one habit completely. When you are dropping one habit completely you might feel exhausted. So replace it with something more exciting to you. Like, if you want to cut your time you spent watching TV, try going outside and have fun with friends. You need to replace it with something you enjoy and not with something that drags you down.

-Write down the result in your journal. Yes! You will feel good. You will feel like doing a self-analysis on how you performed and what areas you need to improve so that you do it better. It is needed to motivate you. You need to write exactly how you felt and what sort of change the challenge is bringing in your life. Personally I use Excel sheet to track the days and time that I did it and the journal for descriptive purpose.

Did I mention above that you need to do stick with that new habit for 30 days in a row? You can’t skip it even for a single day. If you miss it you will have to start from the beginning.

Benefits of 30 day trial:

I won’t say it is easy but it is manageable
-You don’t have to lose anything. It’s not about your success or failure. It’s your own self experimentation. You don’t have to answer anyone. If you liked the change you can continue otherwise you can discard it.

-30 days will be enough time to experience the habit/task that you wanted to change. I am sure if you enjoyed that habit it won’t be difficult for you to do it in upcoming days. It means what you can do for 30 days you can do it for life.

-You will feel confident about yourself and you will have different perspective on habit change compared to before.

My personal experience:
Feb, 2009: After hearing a lot about the benefits of Yoga, I thought about trying it I woke up early morning watched Ramdev’s yoga program on Aastha channel for a few days to learn the basics. Later, I did it on my own without watching on TV. I really enjoyed it. I felt like I had a different frame of mind after doing yoga early in the morning. I had a lot of energy during the day.. After one year I decided to quit. Again from the month of November (‘11), I have started doing it. Now, I don’t find it difficult.

April, 2009: Initially I had a habit of watching TV and reading newspaper early in the morning. Later I came across an article which opened my eyes. It said that if you devote 1 hour reading on any subject for 5 years you will have ability in that field. I decided to give it a try. So I quit the habit of watching TV and reading newspaper and started reading books instead. I still have that habit and now I can’t believe starting my day without a book.

Recently I had read in a book the benefits of going on a media fast. I found that interesting. I thought about what I shall miss if I don’t watch TV, read newspaper or listen to radio for a whole month. I gave it a try. I can’t believe nothing bad happened to me. In fact, this habit really benefited me a lot. I was more focused on things that matter to me most. I was more productive the entire day. I didn’t care about the situation of Nepalese politics or what sort of problems were they creating. I felt like I was concentrating more on my locus of control and doing great work.

There are lots of things that I learned from this 30 day challenge method which can’t be covered in this single post. I do have plans to try this method for different things that matters to me like;
Going Vegetarian
Wake up at 4.30 am
Blog a post every day
Watch TED talks every day
Disconnect from social media

But it depends upon what really interests me at that point in my life. It might change from where I am and what really matters to me at that time.

Conclusion: Personally what I feel is 30 day challenge is really the most powerful tool for any sort of change you want to bring in your life. It is simple, manageable, action oriented and effective too. It is a fantastic way to train your body and mind to adopt a new habit in a short period.

Over to you!
Decide what changes you want to see in your life then commit to doing it for 30 days. Believe me you will feel glad about taking up the challenge. In fact, I believe it is the right time to go for the challenge as the New Year is around the corner and you can try to adopt new habits in your life. Don’t get frustrated if you fail to do those resolutions.

If you are still not sure then check this video, you will know what Matt Cutts from Google has to say about this challenge.

1.What format should my resume be in?
Both of them (PDF and Word) are equally acceptable but my preference is PDF. When you send your resume as a PDF, you can be sure that your layout and all the tweaks you have made to it will be preserved. While on MS word, it might be a problem, if the person looking at your resume is using a different version than yours. It means that each of them will see your resume differently if it is in word format.

2.Should I attach both formats and allow the employer to choose on their own?
No! You shouldn’t do this. If you are sending both the documents, your employer might check both hoping there might be some differences. If it is not, you are just wasting their time.

3.Do I need to send a cover letter or only the resume?
It’s not about correct or incorrect. It’s about effective and ineffective. So please make sure you write a cover letter along with your resume. As HR people, I feel we look at your resume and find out what your weaknesses are but in the cover letter we find out what your strengths are and how passionate you are about this job. Writing a cover letter effectively helps to brand you. If you want to build a rapport with the employer and give a sense of which you are beyond the academic and work experience, I recommend you to write a cover letter for the job you are applying for. Please don’t make a mistake of sending the same cover letter everywhere you apply.

4.What should I write in the email when I have already attached the cover letter?
You shouldn’t write a lengthy descriptive sentence in your email. If you haven’t attached a separate cover letter with the mail, you can write it in the email itself. But don’t repeat the same thing again and again. For an illustration, you can write something like this:
“I’d like to apply for____ position. Please find the attached documents.”
Please make sure that you have your signature in the email. As many of you are not using email signature, I would like to give a small format, which might be helpful for you.

For student:
Full Name:
Email address: (yes you need to put it. Sometimes your documents are forwarded by other people)
University /Major and Year of Graduation:
Cell phone number or Phone number:
Website or Blog:

For Employees:
Full Name:
Email address: (Personal not the official one):
Company Name:
Position at your company:
Department:
Company website:

5.What to write as the subject of the email?
It shouldn’t be an issue. But few people make the mistake of sending an email without a subject title. Please write a subject title like “Resume and cover letter of____.” In addition, Please don’t forget to check the name of your attached file before you decide to send it. I got a few resumes with titles like “Sunilko resume 2008.” This shows that you haven’t updated it.

It might sound minor but many of you have ignored these points while applying for the job. Yes! Like I said above, it is not correct or incorrect it is about personal branding while doing those things professionally. If you have a personal opinion about this, please drop your views in the comment section below.

1. Are you cell phone friendly? The numbers of people who use a cell phone to search on internet are increasing by the day and it’s no doubt that this will be an upward trend. What are you doing to tap that market? Don’t you think people will look for information about your company through their phone? Is your website cell phone friendly? Do people have easy access to the information they are looking for? Are the pages easy to view and read? If you have no idea about this start surfing your website through a cell phone. You will have a clear understanding about what I mean to say. Why should you lose those big markets just because of glitches in the website?

2.Do you have Videos? It’s no doubt that people are on the internet mostly for two reasons. 1. Visit social networking sites. 2. To check videos. Wouldn’t it be effective if you showed videos of your people at their workplace? You can even add more videos where your employees can share what it feels like being the part of your company. This would tell more about your organization and its work culture. People would feel glad to know about your organization even if they are not part of it.(like I adore Zappos) They might recommend it to others, who might be potential candidates for you. Besides that, you don’t have to waste your time on explaining to people about your work culture.

3. Are you social? Somebody rightly said, “Google is the next resume”. If you are using Google to know about the candidate, don’t you think they will try to know about your organization in the same way? Have you ever ‘Googled” your organization? How does it seem? Is it impressive? Have you used social media to attract people towards your organization? If you haven’t what are you waiting for? If you need permission, here is my say, Go! Right now! And start maximizing the use of those tools.

Never ever think that just posting or advertising your requirements is going to help you. Times have changed. People are looking for bigger things than before. What you offer them indirectly is what really matters? Start giving it to them before they even join your organization and I am sure you will meet your purpose.

At the conference, Tony shared that Zappos hires for culture. Applicants go through two interview processes, one for “the normal things,” like skills and abilities and experience, and one for “cultural fit.” If applicants don’t pass the cultural fit interview, they won’t be hired, no matter how good their skills or how great their ability to contribute technically.

One of the most interesting things about Zappos is that they have their own style from hiring to training their prospective candidates. Tony said that, they meet interviewees at the airport and take them to Zappos’ headquarters for interviews. After the interviews, and after the applicant has been taken back to the airport, the shuttle driver gets his or her say on whether the person should be hired. That means, if you treat the driver or receptionist poorly you won’t get the job.

If you haven’t read ‘Delivering Happiness” written by their CEO, I highly recommend it. Let me share you another interesting thing about how cultural focus this company is. Tony writes that once new employees are finished with training, they are offered a $3,000 bonus to quit. When asked why they were doing so, he replies with simple sentence, ‘We only want people who really want to work here.” Yes! Around 2-3% of trainees take the bonus and leave while the employees who remain are more committed to the company’s mission.

I am sure every organization can’t take this approach and they shouldn’t either. But they need to focus on the message that he had given in the conference.
-Focus on your vision
-Keep your culture as strong as possible.

If you want to feel WOW! check their website and this video. They really worth your attention.

Of all these resources, personally I consider books to be the best one when it comes to serious study. As they are better researched and more specific to the topic. But recently I have realized that selecting “books with gems” in one particular category has become more challenging than before. As the market has grown bigger, each category is being flooded with tons of books every year. So I would recommend you to do your own personal research before you pick those books. I believe the following tips that I am sharing here, which I use while purchasing books might be helpful for you too.

So let’s begin.

1. My own personal list: Earlier I used to buy books based upon reviews in Newspaper, recommendations by people covered in interviews, talk with friends but these days I don’t follow them. Now I have made my own list, written in my notebook which is very well categorized. It took me more than 2 years to make this list and it is based upon my own research and my own needs. This list isn’t a perfect one, so I keep updating it based upon recommendations made by people whom I can count on. To name a few Josh Kaufman from Personal MBA, Tim Ferriss from Four hour work week, Ramit Sethi from I will teach you to be rich, Seth Godin and Derek Sivers.

Usually my first filter would be reviews from Amazon, NY times and fast company. I read reviews to know few details about those books and their ideas. While reading reviews I even scan controversial reviews.I have no problem with that. Usually, I find professional reviews in blogs and in Amazon quite phenomenal. After reading reviews from reliable sources, I go to bookstores with my list and read table of contents, preface, about the author and check out a part of the book which I find interesting. Finally if I find the contents and methods used by the author very powerful I make a decision to purchase it. In this way I keep on updating my personal list.

2. What’s the purpose of the book? – I never purchase a book without finding out the main purpose of that book. That’s one of the reasons why I read so many reviews about books ahead and try to filter them out. I can’t purchase a book just based upon customers’ review or the reviews from daily Newspapers. Most of the time it’s inside job. While figuring out the purpose of the book I need to read professional reviews, I need to read about the author, his/her area of expertise, the preface of the book, the table of contents and read around 5-10 minutes on my area of interest inside the book. I do this so that I don’t have to regret after making a purchase.

3. What is something that I really need to know now or want to improve? – Books are a key part of my self-education process. I never read books just for fun. But if a book carries a lesson and is a fun read I have no problem with that. I read books to learn something, to challenge my mental modules and apply those concepts. My readings are usually purpose driven. I read books to help myself to improve upon certain areas of my life. This is one of the reasons why I prefer non-fiction books. They give you real life problems, how people had solved them and how it changed their business or life. I don’t read everything because I find it irrelevant. I read books with focused writing and which matches with my current needs. Like at present I am interested in learning about Leadership and that’s one of the reasons why I purchased Tribes and 48 laws of power.

4. Credential authors: As there are large number of books being published in one particular category it would become very difficult to trust as well as a waste of time to read each of them. That’s one of the reasons why I trust few authors based upon earlier reading. I pick books from authors who have intrigued me from their previous ones. Few of the authors I quickly rely upon are Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Tim Feriss, Keith Ferrazzi, Marcus Buckingham. I love their style, their approach, their research methodology used for writing. It makes it easier for me to understand and retain what they wanted us to know. These writers bring a different level of enthusiasm and they even change my mental modules about any particular subject they have covered.

Sadly besides few writers, most of them fail to bring that level of quality and expectations as they did in earlier ones. So I wouldn’t recommend anyone to rely on any particular author and read their books blindly without doing any personal research on it.

Some Additional Notes to Readers:

• Please don’t rely on books just because they are on NY times or on International bestseller list. Those books might be good but they might not be the best one in their category.
• Similarly there are few authors who are popular in the media. They write very well which fits in the journals or Newspaper post but when it comes to books they simply push those embedded ideas again and again. Personally, I don’t find any point on reading books of those writers who fail to share new ideas through it. I would rather read their published articles than waste my time reading their books to have same piece of information. No doubt! Their ideas could make a good essay but not a good book.

Conclusion: Yes! You are right. It will take some additional time ahead while doing this kind of research on finding about the quality of the book but as soon as it becomes a habit I am sure you will start valuing your time and money more than before. You will start enjoying the process and the decisions related to book purchase. I won’t say this is a “be all, end all approach.” I’m sure there are more I’ll think of after posting this, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear any of yours.

Till next post Read Consciously!

At that right moment I had a month long vacation. This time, I decided to give it a try and figure out how life without internet would be and what sort of impact it would have on my personal life? I gave it a shot as my next 30 day challenge.

Initially like every other changes that I make, I resisted this one too. I wanted to get back into my comfort zone as I started to miss those things where I used to spend so much of my time. I wanted to view my facebook page at least once a day, I wanted to tweet something, I wanted to read those powerful blogs for at least an hour and I wanted to chat with my friends and feel that I had a fulfilling day. But without internet nothing was possible. See, how addicted I was to Internet.

Yes! There are very few people who have transformed their life through internet but it is not as cool as it appears to general public. Many early users have started to realize this fact and if you haven’t, stay till the end before you form your opinion.

Real life Vs Virtual (Digital) life:

First and foremost remove the thought that everything about the real life can be replaced digitally. Yes! Things might be replaced but that won’t help you bring the same experience in digital world that you could have from the real world. Personally, I tried almost everything to replace my real world with digital ones. I spent more time on facebook/twitter than building real world relationship. I started to read more from blogs and websites than newspapers. I even replaced paper books with e-books from Amazon with Kindle edition. I started to purchase things online rather than going outside and visiting malls to do the same thing.

While making a comparative analysis I found that doing things in these two worlds had big differences in result too. I started to feel that though I spent more than 4-5 hours on social sites it was ineffective compared to 1 hour real live talk. Though there were more than 200 friends in social sites I was feeling lonelier than before. I felt like I was weaving the thread to connect but I was more disconnected to myself. Similarly I started to feel that no matter how many hours I spent in front of computer reading those blog/ websites and those e-books they were less effective than what I could grasp with less amount of time spent reading from paper books. I came to realize that, even though I could do so many things in internet but still I felt like there existed some kind of wall in between which didn’t bring that sort of quality which I had in the real world. After all those real life experiences could not be replaced. Now I felt the differences between real and virtual.

NO! NO! NO! DON’T DISCONNECT YOUR INTERNET

Here what I mean is that just getting disconnected from the internet won’t lead you to a happier life. From my experience I have come to know that both of these worlds have their own value and we need to understand and make their optimal uses as much as possible. But I will make my stand that we need to get out of our cave and cultivate real-life relations more than before. If we spend more on internet we might get “burned out” with those social media. So we need to find our own level of balance over here and enjoy our life.

Action steps:
1. For one week track how many hours you spend reading on internet. On the next week track how many hours you spent on paper reading. Later make a comparative analysis on which did you find more effective?
2. Similarly, track how many hours you spend time on social networking sites trying to get connected and later track how many hours you spend time meeting them by going outside. Now make a comparative analysis on their different level of effectiveness.

Find out which brings more value and make them your priority.
Allow me to end this post with a popular quote- You were never alone when you were so much happy. You were always with a group of people in real world experiencing the real joy of life.

Today I have few questions for you. Please be sincere and reply to yourself.

1. Which really matters?
Having more than 500 friends in facebook or having effective and direct relationship with at least 40-50 people who matter in your life?

2. Which is social networking?
Adding 10 new friends everyday on facebook and never making an effort to build that relationship

OR

Trying to know who lives in your neighborhood and making an effort to listen and share about each others life?
3. Has your happiness level increased or reduced by just being a passive observer of all these so called social networking sites?

If it’s not helping then what are you going to do to increase your social influence and what are you going to do to lead a happier life?

The choice is yours. I believe we all have our answers but what are we going to do with it, is what really matters.