I generally wake up early in the morning to catch up on work and also finish a bit of reading. Over the past 4 months I noticed a dangerous pattern emerging - I would wake up (if I could at all) and then chew a bit of mails. While the mails were being downloaded I'd end up going through the Google Reader feed or, steal a glance at micro-blogs. And, before I knew it, a good 30-45 minutes went past. That ended up eating into various other tasks/chores of the morning.

Not now though.

Which is why I think that there should be an online petition to ensure that John Poelstra posts a single helpful blog a week. This guy is so amazingly spot-on with his observations and life hacks that one could just read his posts and feel upbeat. This is a strong recommendation to follow his blog.

Anyways, for the past month or so I had a system whereby I write down a couple of ToDo/ToComplete tasks on my phone the previous night right before I go to sleep. The intended agenda of this system is to ensure that:

• I have a plan of work for the next day
• I know that the tasks are atomic and their completion is measurable
• I can see visible results of the tasks being completed

Guess what ? The first couple of days were a bit of a painful affair in figuring out what to accomplish within the early morning hours. But once there was rhythm it was fairly easy to get into the habit. The incentive at the end of the time window - seeing that I've made progress.

You can read John talking about it here.

The first steps towards getting the groove back were exhilarating and liberating. Gone was the sourness of knowing that I was getting distracted and work was being impacted. This was good enough to make me ambitious to try and see if I can now improve the velocity of getting work done. Accepting the fact that I was being a lazy ass and then trying out the simplest of steps to attempt to address the issue helped a lot. Getting a routine and adding self-discipline to it was a good insight. There are a couple of more problems I could solve with that combination.

I need to buy a USB Wireless dongle. Does anyone have a recommendation about a known-good model/brand ?

The security at Magarpatta is sometimes funny. Around half an hour back they weren't interested in a car filled with four folks wearing shades and blasting loud music but were fairly curious about an old woman who alighted from an autorickshaw with a bag full of groceries !

Theater all around

It started with this. And, yesterday Barkha commented about how 2010 has turned out to be a "good book year" for me. Over the years I've had folks remark about my reading habits and "how fast you read". Till the time Runa pointed out long ago that the book reading was actually a bit odd, I've never considered that I was a "fast reader". That is because I had to look at my Mum and anytime I saw her finish a book and then saw how much time I took to finish it - I was "slow". Anyway, this post is more because I have over the years promised a lot of folks about writing down about my reading habits and so forth.

For a small number of years after my birth I had to live outside the country - the parents were trying their level best to set up a better life for the family and, India wasn't the most promising place to do that. An aspect of living outside was that I grew up within a fairly mixed bag environment. And, somehow, since my mother seems to have always been a bookworm, I was lucky enough to grow up in houses where piling up books wasn't frowned upon. What was not encouraged was not reading them or, reading them but not talking about them. You get the drift - sooner rather than later, reading a book a day was the best way to end it. Which is probably the reason I ended averaging 6-7 books a week (do that math for per month and multiply it by around 6 years and you realize the tragedy of packing and moving). Since most books were borrowed from libraries and I really really wanted to cram as many books I could read (I salute and remain thankful to each and every librarian I encountered who just indulged in my silly game of borrow_today_read_return_tomorrow) I ended up reading books really quickly. And, there are shades of that habit mentioned in this blog entry.

So, once Runa did point out that I was being a bit unusual, I tried to observe what I did. Here's a rough list:

• I can read texts written in English at a fairly rapid pace and keep switching between text types/content types
• I can hold a thread of commentary/notes/review of the text I am reading while going through it
• The above doesn't work for Bengali and Hindi. In fact, for Bengali I've been known to go back and forth over the same paragraph
• I generally read nearly a page at a time. What this means is that children start reading a character at a time, progress to a word at a time and thereafter to a sentence and a paragraph. I seem to be able to read larger chunks fairly easily.
• I cannot seem to do an equally quick job of reading when I am reading off the screen (desktops/laptops)

And that is all there is to it really. The habit of book reading that I caught fairly early seems to be the main reason for all of this. The downside is that it is an obsessive thing though - these days I need to read some new content (preferably book/monograph/article) daily or else feel like a good old grump through the day.

During a New Year celebration show telecast on the national network, the character of a sutradhar (played by Om Puri) commented that "image itna bhi clean nahin rakhna chahiye ke badmein maintain karna mushkil ho jaaye"

And even though this can be a warped version of residences of glass and stones, the one thing that never fails to amuse me is that it is mostly folks who have murkiness in their dealings crying about transparency, openness and processes.

Quote from a mail received from the Room to Read team

We’re approaching the end of our 10th anniversary year and we’re still celebrating! It’s been an unforgettable 12 months filled with milestones. Internally, we’ve referred to 2010 as the “Year of Tens,” for not only did we observe our first decade, we also opened our 10,000th library, 1,000th school we're now supporting the education of 10,000 girls!

You may want to drop by this page if you'd like to participate.

Was reading a mail from mum. The old fashioned snail mail style. With her characteristic loopy Bengali script. What struck me was the mention of age and growing old. Perhaps the mention of my age (and thus indirectly implying her age) wasn't a good thing after all :)

The things you learn about your parents are amazing. What is more fascinating is that with age the ability to look at all sorts of decisions in the sharp binary mode goes away. Life is so complex and yet at the heart of it the moral story that can help guide one along becomes simpler. Stripped of all need to appear differently to different folks, the ability to see and perceive issues become very interesting.

I inwardly wince each time I read or hear someone end their experience of an e-book reader with a statement along the lines of "this is a good device but I love real books". That makes me sad for two reasons - first, it implies that the ones taking to the devices don't really love the "dead-tree" books and second, the conclusion wasn't arrived at after a small period of time when the reading habits were observed in light of the usage of the device.

The convenience that any e-book reader provides could perhaps be simplistically compared with the portable music player devices. Everyone crams up their device with all sorts of music and playlists with the intent that at any point when the urge to listen to music kicks in, one isn't left high-and-dry because the particular piece wasn't present. I kind of learnt it the hard way (or, was it the fun way ?) during my last visit to Kolkata. Earlier, each visit used to have a number of days of the multiplied by 1.5 number of books or, if that was difficult then I'd dip into the local bookstores to get them. This time around not only did I squeeze in some good amount of reading (during Pujas with a cold no less), I could also resist the temptation to visit the bookstores.

The e-book readers have a couple of problems probably peculiar to me though. Things like regional language books being unavailable, not all books being available in an e-book format, quirky prices of e-books (on Amazon, the cute "prices set by the publisher" does little to assuage the anger), not all books being available to a specific region and, more importantly, lack of portability between e-book retailers. However, in spite of all such hindrances, I seem to have managed to do fairly well this year And, more importantly, I haven't felt that I was missing anything given that my e-book reader doesn't render color :)

Unless the reading habits and book purchases are studied, figuring out whether the device would actually be useful isn't going to work out. Meanwhile, I do love my "real books". For example, I couldn't even imagine a Tufte book in an e-book reader format. But then, if, like me, you end up having to shift residences on and off, you wouldn't want to look at the faces of the packers-n-movers folks when they encounter stacks of boxes that are really far too heavy.