On Tyme..

“Time” is a peculiar resource unlike all other resources. In order to get anything done worth any value, we need resources like money, materials, energy and intelligence in different proportions along with a finite amount of time. Other things being equal, the amount required for any accomplishment will be different depending upon the person rather than the task at hand.

            Time is the only resource which is available in equal proportion/quantum to every individual. Everyday, everybody has 24 hours at their disposal, young or old, elite or ignorant, mighty or weak, rich or poor, highly accomplished or deprived, all have the same amount of time. Unlike other resources time cannot be saved, borrowed, hoarded or carried forward, it can only be utilized or lost for ever. In that sense, time is the most dynamic resource in nature with dramatic variation in its value/worth depending upon who uses it and for what purpose. It could be expended in temporary gratification or alternatively could be invested in acquiring long term skill, proficiency and expertise which continues to generate value over a lifetime. Time therefore, cannot be managed or manipulated like other resources and all time management issues essentially become the self management concerns for every individual.

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The time value being person dependant it is up to you to make your time less or more valuable by modifying your attitude and approach towards utilizing your time or wasting it. Understanding the 80/20 rule of time management is essential. According to the famous Parato’s Principle of Maldistribution which states that reality is made up of “Vital Few and Trivial Many”. Simply put, the 80/20 rule states that the relationship between input and output is rarely, if ever, balanced in practice. When applied to any work it means that 20 percent of your efforts produce 80 percent of results. 20 percent of your time therefore, is the prime time. Learning to recognize and then focus on this 20 percent is the key for making the most effective use of your time. If you learn to take care of the vital few, the trivial many shall be taken care almost automatically.

Remember the old saying, “Never put off till tomorrow what you want to do today”. You would also find that people generally do not plan to fail but most of them fail to plan. If you do not plan your time in advance and attend to the tasks as they come in your way, you hardly have any control over your time. To improve your time utilization you must plan your activities for tomorrow and prioritize them. Your task will always include crucial as well as non-crucial items. Some items are always more important than others. Without planning we tend to gravitate towards the non-crucial or trivial items because they are typically easier to do, more obvious to see, take less time, and may even be more fun than many of our crucial or vital items. It is therefore, essential to plan and prioritize and do the first things first!

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If you want to ensure that something is done positively, give it to a very busy person. The more you plan to do, the more things get done as per the famous Parkinsson’s Law, which states that a project tends to expand with the time allocated for it. It means that if you have only one thing to do in a day it will take all day. If you have three things to do, for the day, you will get all three done, and if you have ten things to do for the day you might not finish all ten but probably eight of them will be finished. Thus, having lot of things to do create a healthy sense of pressure and almost automatically much more is accomplished and thus the time available becomes more valuable.

All this may appear to be very simple and only logical but to make it a part of your personality, it takes a lot of doing because old habits die very hard. Also remember that if you want to learn to do something, you learn it only by doing. So, get started, modify your approach towards utilizing time and it will definitely start yielding more and better results for you.

Beyond the career/work-place success, utilizing your time more effectively and adding value to it enables you to do more of the things you want to do and enjoy a better quality of life everyday, both, at work and at home alike!

India Unbound!

This August, we celebrated the 60th Anniversary of independence. We as children and young students have grown up studying the glorious saga of the Great Indian Freedom Struggle. What makes it so special is the fact that even after being impoverished by colonial powers and ruled ruthlessly by the British Raj for more than 150 years, the appointed day came- when India awaked to life and freedom-the day when India stood forth again, after a long slumber and struggle, vital, free and independent.

Six decades later, the country that emerged from the wreckage of the British Raj, is undoubtedly the worlds largest and the most complex democracy. Over these years, India has definitely carved a niche for itself as a country which the First World cannot afford to ignore. Be it the NSG waiver, the 123 agreement, the Doha Round, the Tata Nano, the Twenty-20 world cup or the Olympics success, what binds them all is the premise- India Shining. With young, dynamic and visionary leaders, politicians and policy-makers in the making, India is poised after years of rapid economic growth, to take its place as one of the giants of the 21st century. An India whose very survival seemed in doubt during the conflagration of 1947 offers lessons in democracy-building that the rest of the world would do well to heed.

When I think how my country should be like in 2025, what I see first is a literate India. Even today, illiteracy remains rife with just under half our population unable to read or write in any of our several dozens of scripts. But we can no longer afford the attitude that literacy is an extravagance. In a race which no one can avoid, illiteracy is the main drawback that reflects a lack of opportunity for growth, prosperity and a happy life. With failure of tax exemption schemes and increasing cases of farmer suicides, India has to restructure its priorities and with visionary long-term planning, make correct decisions that can ensure equitable and sustainable growth opportunities to all.

The post 1991 era- the Rajiv Gandhi vision which was realized by the trio of Narsimha Rao, Manmohan Singh and Pranab Mukherji, saw the dawn of the information age in India. With opening up of its economy, India entered a world with a ubiquitous network of fiber-optic cabling and the imminent Y2K scare, which made an average Indian computer professional indispensable to the world. The services industry which flourished and marked the Indian rise in the world arena is, and will remain a skill intensive sector.

A vast proportion of India’s population-60 percent- depends on agriculture while producing 20 percent of the national income. In services, its reverse-20 percent labor producing 80 percent output. Thus a person in services produces 9 times as much a person in agriculture. In my personal opinion, the persistence of huge amounts of labor in low productivity agriculture is the principal reason why poverty is so hard to remove in India. To tax the rich and give money to the poor, is not a viable strategy and is not politically feasible. I believe India must shift as many people possible from agriculture to jobs where productivity would be higher, while investing more in agriculture to raise productivity there.

Like China, India must focus to make its low-tech manufacturing sector strong and shift towards an economy of scale to optimally utilize its geo-strategic, human and muscle resources. This again demands improvement in educational levels. India has failed to enhance employment in low-tech manufacturing as a result of hiring-and-firing restrictions, which have persisted since the Socialist days. It has meant a stagnant manufacturing sector in terms of output and also low employment, because people avoid building large factories.

In an economy of scale that I envision for India in the years to come, the quintessential factor for sustenance would be the sound management of resources. Channelizing the growing entrepreneurial energy, the increasing pool of enthusiastic and young manpower, management of the less tangible soft-resources, management of the low-tech manufacturing industries with less skilled workers, agricultural trade, foreign policy and sound money management would be the key areas.

The liberalization, privatization and globalization reforms have no doubt made India ready to take off for economic development comparable with rest of the developed world. The fruits of this growth however are still limited, encompassing a small percentage of Indian population creating a divide between the metro and rural cultures. In order to make the growth of Indian economy sustainable everybody involved must try to make it all- inclusive and ensure that hitherto excluded group of population becomes a part of the mainstream development process. We welcome the Delhi Metro but let us also join hands to connect villages and construct roads. We are proud of the Tata Nano, but let us try to make Singur smile too! Let us therefore, spare no efforts to make India a superpower leading the way for the world to emulate.