Set Higher Standards by YogiRavi

One byproduct of getting your biological clock all out of wack with international travel, is that it gives you a rare chance to make changes to your daily routine. You pretty much get a clean start. I decided to take advantage of this.

I have been trying for a while to lessen the time I need to sleep each night. Seeing as how I throw away nearly a third of my life sleeping, I figure that would be a good way to be more productive during my days. When I was a kid I used to get up relatively early without much trouble. The older I’ve gotten, the harder it has gotten.

My normal routine is to go to bed around 11:30pm and wake up around 7am. If I didn’t have important meetings in the morning, I would sleep in even later. On weekends I would often stay up until 2am and sleep in to 10am. I would normally exercise after work.

I found that following this routine, I almost always felt a bit rushed in the mornings. I also felt the pressure of having to exercise after work and deal with the massive crowd of people at out gym [the one downside of Microsoft providing a free gym membership is that people often decide to use it at the exact same time everyday].

Perhaps the worst byproduct of this routine was that I would be starving by the time I left work (normally 6-7pm) but wouldn’t be able to eat since I hadn’t yet exercised! My new routine solves these problems.

Coming back from India, I woke up [completely unplanned] at 4am. I was wide awake. I tried going back to sleep but couldn’t. I therefore just got up, got dressed and went to work! The next day, the same thing happened. This time, I went to the gym and then went to work. And so the new routine began. For the past 10 days (including weekends) I have gotten up between 4-5am. While it has gotten slightly harder to get up after the jet-lag wore off, I am still not finding it all that difficult.

In this new routine, I wake up, do my pranayama and meditate, and then head to the gym. I finish my exercise and make it to the office by 7am or so. Some days I take the bus, in which case, I get in by 7:20 or so. Since I get to work so darn early, I end up leaving by 5:30pm at the latest. Frankly, by the time 9am roles around, I feel that I have done more than in an entire day on my old schedule. I also find that I am getting a lot more done at work. My brain is able to concentrate much better in the morning. It doesn’t necessarily work as “fast,” or multi-task as well, but I find the sharper focus to be invaluable. By 7pm I am eating dinner and by 9pm I am pretty tired and head to bed. So the cycle continues.

The biggest plus that I find, is that no matter how bad my day went, or how unproductive I was at work, the fact that I got up so freaking early makes me feel like my day was a success. That is a priceless feeling.

For the past year or so, I’ve had this consistently and mildly annoying, yet sometimes debilitating affliction. It has been a real pain in the neck; literally. You see, I work in a place where you are never more than 5 feet away from a computer. It is your umbilical cord to the mother-ship. It is your best friend. Going computer-less for a day is like getting soft-serve without the sprinkles. It just isn’t right.

Personally, I like to think that my computer loves me as much as I love her. She’s a bit codependent and that’s ok by me. She keeps me mildly entertained and helps me get stuff done. In fact, I have such a good relationship with my computer that I thought it would be a brilliant idea to add another one to my “family” at work. So for the past year or so, I had a laptop and desktop computer sitting right next to each other. I’d read e-mail on one and write documents on the other. Brilliant! I am now twice as productive. Or so I thought.

You see, the monitor for my desktop was about a foot above my laptop. Unbeknownst to me, my head would be doing a quick back-and-forth between the two a couple thousand times a day. I hardly noticed. I only noticed the flurry of emails I could now produce. With twice the screen real-state, my ability to absorb the stunning gossip content on MSN during my lunch had now doubled. I was enthralled.

However, about six months ago, I developed a terrible pain in my neck. I thought it was caused by just using my laptop too much. I cut back on my laptop use and that seemed to help a bit, but the problem persisted on and off.

After coming back from my month away from work (and computers) last Sunday, I was completely healthy and pain-free. I was stunned, however, when on Wednesday I woke up to an incredibly sore neck. My range of motion was 90 degrees (not 180!). The pain got worse on Thursday.

I then turned to my best friend, my computer, for the answer. Turns out, one of the common causes of “Tech Neck,” (no, it’s not contagious) is the exact setup I have been using at work for the past year!

So on Friday I “broke-up” with my second machine, and settled in for a day of 50% productivity. Lo and behold, my neck actually felt fine most of the day. Sticking with this approach the past few days, I’ve seen rapid improvement in my condition. I can’t tell you how many hours of lost sleep and frustration I’ve had to tolerate with my neck issue. I’m just glad I caught the cause before it did irreparable damage.

Lesson learned. Take the time and spare no expense to make your workplace setup as perfect for your body as you can. There are a lot of resources online about workplace ergonomics. Read up!

This blog finally has legs. Not a newborn anymore. More like a toddler. A fast crawler.

I bought this domain name way back in March, but didn’t start blogging for a few months afterwards. Consistent blogging didn’t happen for many more months. Starting in September 2006, I really got into a regular habit of writing things down, and figured I might as well put it out there for other people to make fun of.

I track pageviews and broad site metrics using Google Analytics and my subscriber count through Feedburner. To be honest, the site metrics are interesting, but it is the subscriber number that really matters to me.

There are now 54 total subscribers to Set Higher Standards. Of the 54, 12 have signed up for the Feedburner e-mail delivery service to get the posts via e-mail as opposed to through an RSS reader. This really surprised me. I recommend anyone who wants to increase their readership to add this feature to their site. If you use Feedburner, it is totally free.

I pretty much had 3-5 subscribers throughout the entire summer (myself on two computers and Chuck!). There were a couple of spikes when this site got picked up by StumbleUpon, but aside from that, things have just been trending up slowly but surely.

In terms of site stats, I get an average of 120 visits per day (yes Todd, I exclude my IP address!) and 240 pageviews.

All in all, I am pretty happy with how things are going. I am curious as to how long the growth will keep up.

Rich people I know, fit into one of two categories. The first is wealth by assoociation through inheritance, family or close friends that have “helped them out.” The second is by working damn hard and taking big risks that most other people would run like hell from.

I don’t know anyone that just casually stumbled upon a boatload of money through an easy side business or online venture. I do know some people that joined start-ups at the right time, but they really fit into the second bucket of working damn hard and taking big risks (most start-ups never see the light of day).

I don’t know anyone that manifested millions of dollars through their sheer desire or just asking for the moola really really nicely. This trick might have worked to get a check-out-counter candy bar when you were a kid, but it ain’t gonna work in the real grown-up world.

I don’t know anyone that magically trippled their income by just hoping it would happen because they are one freaking nice person, and good looking to boot.

So basically, if you want to get rich you are really in for it. Better be prepared to work damn hard. What is damn hard? Harder than you have ever thought you’d have to work. Hard work can be fun, but it still takes time and effort. So next time you see a book with “Millionaire” anywhere in the title, just keep walking by. You don’t have time to read it anyway. You’ve got work to do.

It feels good to not have a sweet tooth any more. I used to love sweets. Just couldn’t get enough of them. I used to eat ice cream by the pint.

Lately, I rarely indulge in desserts. In fact, I have a tub of Soy Delicious ice cream in my fridge right now….and I have absolutely no appetite for it. It might sit there for the next month for all I know. I still enjoy desserts very much, it’s just that the craving isn’t there. I think that one of the reasons for this is that I cleaned up my diet. Getting rid of most of the processed sugars. Eating more whole grains. Eating a lot more raw foods. Eating a ton of fruit.

In the past, whenever I’ve made some restriction in my diet, I’ve allowed myself a “treat” every once and a while to satisfy my cravings. Now I know that there is no such thing as “satisfying a craving.” Once you satisfy it, the body will just eventually want even more!

Satisfying a craving is only putting fuel on the fire.

If you want to get rid of a bad food habit you need to give your body time to regulate itself, and have the wherewithal to not let your mind trick you into being lax with your commitment to change.

One of the most irritating things I hear from many people who try to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet; is that their body craves meat. In fact, a good friend of mine has recently gone on a strict vegetarian diet for four months, but is certain that it won’t work for her because she craves fish! Another friend is vegan, “aside from an occasional piece of chicken”…due to the cravings!

The cravings exist only if you let them exist. For both of my friends, they view their dietary change as a penance, where they are depriving themselves of something. There was no strong change in their mental and physical associations with meat and how giving it up would really help them and the planet.

Cravings are like the little kid that begs for a check-out counter candy-bar. If you give them one, you are guaranteed to get a repeat request!

If you can push through the craving, and learn to live an energetic and happy live without whatever you gave up; you’ll eventually find that the constant and never-ending craving and longing will never come back. You, and not the little whining kid in your head, will then be back in control!

During my recent trip throughout India, it struck me how stark the contrast is between the have’s and the have-not’s. The booming Indian middle class, buoyed and funded by technology ousourcing, are experiencing things that many in the United States (or those in any other developed economy) consider their god-given right to enjoy.

Modern shopping malls. New cars. Designer Jeans. Cell-phones. High-rise luxury condos.

The change is drastic. India is becoming materialistic. The poverty, however, is also rampant. Next to these new high-rises are sprawling stinking jam-packed slums. While India is quickly becoming the diabetic capital of the world (thanks to a westernized diet and sedentary work), many are struggling just to put food on the table.

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I finally made it to my apartment this afternoon, wrapping up my three-week journey all over the Indian subcontinent. After 36 hours of travelling; one would think that blogging would be the last thing on my mind……but I am on a mission. The mission is to not get jet-lag, that ill-tempered disease of the cross-continent traveller!

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