Do you think ever, do you have enough time each day to finish all of your tasks? Have you ever questioned how others manage to finish their work on time while you are usually running late? Let me define the phrase “Are you chasing the right stuff?” Before getting into the responses of these questions, let’s start with examining a case.
Consider the following scenario: You have to attend a family wedding tomorrow, your son has a PTM today, and your spouse is ill. In the morning, you must attend your son’s PTM, have to take your spouse to the doctor, and to purchase a wedding gift from a specific location. You take the day off from work, go to your son’s school for PTM and run into some old friends who invite you to tea at the nearest tea shop; you can’t say no because you haven’t seen them in ages. The doctor’s visiting hours will have ended by the time you get home and now will be available in the evening.
You are now leaving to purchase the wedding gift. The market is crowded because it is wedding season and you have to purchase the perfect gift for your relative and by the time you get home, the doctor’s consultation time is only about 30 minutes away, so you rush with your spouse and phew…you are able to catch up. You return home after the examination. Although you completed your day’s tasks, albeit not exactly as planned, you are exhausted and unhappy by the end of the day. This is exactly the time you need to question yourself “Are you chasing the right stuff?”
Here, I would like to introduce the term ‘need’ at this point. Needs are the items that are required for our basic survival. Let us illustrate this terminology with a food example. Any staple food, such as rice-dal-sabzi is our ‘need’ for survival. However, our hearts ‘desire’ biryani over dal and rice, and butter naan. Desire is the second term you must understand. What exactly is a desire? Desires are things you want but are not required for survival. There’s no harm in going above and beyond to satisfy our desires. But our desires must be realistic and relevant too.
In above example, three tasks or needs were present: PTM, spouse’s check-up, and gift shopping. These were three simple tasks, but because you were not attending to basic needs and your desire to look good in front of friends by having tea with them and relatives by buying the perfect gift took precedence, you ended up mixing priorities, consequently the spouse’s check-up almost being missed. Most of the time we chase wrong things, feel tired and become unhappy.
Many of our problems will be automatically solved if we analyse our tasks on the daily basis, categorizing into ‘Needs’ and ‘Desires’ and determining whether the desires are relevant.”
Dr Manjula Pooja Shroff is MD, CEO Kalorex Group