Productivity goals

I like listening to music while I'm working and I encourage others at work to listen to music too. I bought a good set of speakers for office because I believe productivity increases with good music playing in the background. Today, I introduced our new intern to the set of speakers connected to his computer and now he's spending more deciding the playlist and switching between tracks than working.

Own goal.

Three things

I turned 35 two days ago and there are three things I want to say:

1. Lately, if I take a holiday from work to finish some personal chores (you know, like one has to every once in a while) I get jittery in the morning and major FOMO for work sets in. I have to remind myself that it’s okay, and others at will handle it. But it’s only after a few phone calls and updates from work do I start to relax and focus on the task at hand. Me from ten years ago would never have imagined that I would ever miss being at work. In the past, I had ability to easily dissociate from work even while I was at work. What the hell happened and when exactly?

2. I still have major anxiety and self doubt. Just that it’s nature has changed and maybe I’ve learned to deal with it better. But it still sometimes manifest itself in the form of really strange dreams. Difference: most of them are no longer metaphors, but direct, full blown references to my anxiety of the moment. My subconscious gives me periodic reality checks in the form of these dreams. And while it hasn’t stopped me from day dreaming, but at least I’ve learned to compartmentalise the effects of my dreams, daydreams and reality better.

3. I finally got over the mental block of wearing clothes with horizontal stripes. Over the years I’ve been told me that only slim people should wear horizontal stripes so I hardly wore anything with horizontal stripes on it. I finally gave up on that insecurity and wore a tshirt with horizontal stripes on my birthday. To hell with the self proclaimed fashion police, I looked good.

I get results.

So CBSE 12th standard results were out last week and it was the usual:

1. Girls outshine boys

2. Students gets 499/500 (how?!)

Reminded me of this incident:
In what now seems like a different life altogether, I was a part time swimming instructor. I did a life saving and swimming instructor’s course in the long-ish break after school ends and before college life begins. I taught swimming to many children and women of all ages between 2002 till 2009. Many of those who came to me had developed a deep phobia of water after trying to learn swimming earlier. One such case was an 8 year old girl who’s mother wanted her to learn swimming but her previous experiences in the pool were, to put it mildly- terrifying. One of these days, she came in to swim and she wasn’t her usual chirpy eight year old self so I asked her if she was ok. As it turned out, she got 80% marks in her exams. Now I am an eternal ‘can do better’ student who was happy to put in the bare minimum effort and be happy with 70% marks. So my first instinct was to congratulate her! She gave me a weak and maybe condescending smile, I’m not sure which one it was. Then her mother who usually accompanied her to the pool explained why she wasn’t too pleased about it. She always got the highest marks in her class, but because her mother needed to focus oh her sibling who was born that year, she couldn’t spend so much time with this girl that year and this affected her results. I felt so bad for the disappointment this sweet eight year old girl felt and told her about how I never got great marks in school but I still became an architect and a swimming instructor (which in my book is a very cool thing to become) and I'm not doing too bad, as she could see clearly. I don't think she was too convinced but maybe she felt bad for me and made a show of feeling better. She stayed back an extra few minutes to take a few more adventurous (and completely voluntary) jumps into the deep end that day.

Hell yea I get results with my students!