STAYING PRODUCTIVE DURING QUARANTINE

Hi everyone. Hope all of you are safe and having a good time.

I would like to share in this article the things that I did in the last 15 days of lock-down.

Staying alone, in Gurgaon away from family was a difficult thought at first, but I tried to see it as an opportunity to improve my skills and work on the things I'm not good at. It really gave me a lot of time for introspection.

After binging on Netflix and Amazon Prime for the first couple of days, the realization came that something productive has to be done. So, I made a list of things which I planned to do in these days. It included some courses which I always planned to do but I wasn't able to take time out during the normal routine. I also wanted to get back into the habit of reading books.

1. BOOK READING

So, I started off with the Amazon bestseller - The Rudest Book Ever. It's a self-help book and the author, without much filters, explains about how we are always thinking about the non-essential things in our life, the things that don't matter and hamper our productivity. We tend to put a lot of weight-age on what others think and spend a lot of time over analyzing it. So, in this book, the author explains the very basics of the human behavior and how we can improve it. It's a must read book according to me. The major learnings from this book are as follows :

A. People are weird. It's not your sole job to find out why people behaved the way they did.

B. Rejections are normal.

C. ?Never seek love or companionship for completeness. It should come from within.

D. ?Screw happiness, it should not be your goal. Aim for self-satisfaction.

E. ?Screw pleasing people. Self-respect and self-esteem comes from yourself.

F. ?Admire your heroes, but never blindly follow them.

G. ?Learn how to think rather than what to think.

Next I read India Unbound by Gurcharan Das. It gives the account of Indian economic journey after the independence. Here the author categorizes the complete timeline from 1942 to 1999 in three major sections: 'Spring of Hope (1942–65), 'the Lost Generation (1966–91) & 'Rebirth of Dream (1991–99) and tell various stories and the historical facts of that time. The book is a great mixture of memoir, economic analysis, social investigation, political scrutiny and managerial outlook being thrown into the understanding of India. It talks about the all-important LPG (Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization) reforms that took place which were the need of the hour for the economy.

Here I have mentioned the list of books that I have found to be really informative:

A. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

B. Tipping point : how little things can make a big difference

C. Homo Deus

D. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

E. The Black Swan

F. The Intelligent Investor

2. ONLINE COURSES

The best way to improve your skills is to keep on learning about them. I always wanted to work on my excel skills, so I did a course by pWc on Coursera named problem solving on excel. The course is well planned and it really helped me to improve on my excel skills.

You can also do a number of courses on sites like Coursera and Udemy to name a few. There are heavy discounts on the courses on Udemy and what better time to improve on your skills.

Hope the pandemic ends quickly and till that time, keep on improving your skill set.

Thank you for reading the article.