The Pillars of Personal Growth – Awareness

Until a year ago I never cared about personal growth. My days were occupied by work and family. I liked my job, I was paid well, and I enjoyed spending time with my wife and two kids. Reading was enjoyable, but after having kids, even that became a chore. Hundreds of books collected dust and thousands of articles were never read.

If someone told me a year ago that I could do 9,500 jump ropes a month, I would have laughed at them. But that is exactly what I have done. I read five books, wrote more than 30,000 words, meditated 450 minutes and exercised every morning in May. I don’t remember when I last missed my workout routine. How did I do it? Can you do it as well? Of course, you can. And I’m going to explain how in a series of posts. 

In this post, I will talk about Awareness: the most important element of personal growth. 

I always wanted to read more, do exercise and be fit. I kept ignoring this feeling of not doing enough for myself. My self-narrative was, “I don’t have time for this.” Thinking back, I was using time and kids as an excuse. I was sick of ignoring myself. Once I was aware of this, I decided to listen to my feelings. I decided to get back into the habit of reading. I decided to workout and write daily. But I didn’t know how to make time for these new activities. 

If we can increase the supply of time, we can add more and more activities to do. Unfortunately, we have only 24 hours in a day. The only way to try a new activity is to replace an existing one that is not working in our favor. To know what is worth keeping and what can be replaced, you need to know where you are spending your time. 

“One cannot even think of managing one’s time unless one first knows where it goes.”

– Peter Durcker. 

A good book read at the right time can be life-changing. One such book for me was Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. This book had a huge influence on how I look at my time. In this book, Drucker talks about how one can become effective. The concept that clicked for me immediately was recording, managing and consolidating my time. Most people have no clue how they spend their time. I was one of them. Our brain is not capable of remembering how we spend our time. We have to rely on external systems.

I took Drucker’s advice and started tracking my time. I tried a few apps that can be installed in your computer and phone to track your screen time automatically. The problem I found was that it didn’t track my offline time. Even though you can add time manually, these apps themselves become distraction. You pick up the phone to record your time, and there is a notification. You tell yourself to check just this one tweet. Before you realize, 30 minutes has evaporated.

After trying apps for a few weeks I moved on to the good old pen and paper method. When I started doing something I wrote down the start time and what I did. It wasn’t perfect. Sometimes I forgot to track my time. It was a struggle for a while. Then I started carrying a diary and a pen with me all the time. I replaced my phone with a diary and that did the trick. I started tracking every activity I did.

One unexpected result: my screen time went down almost 50%. I went from more than 4 hours a day to less than 2 hours of screen time.  

Once a day, I feed the time logs from the diary to a spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, I categorize my time into four buckets. Sleep, Personal, Family and Work. And I sub-categorize it further one level down. Work time is categorized further into buckets like meetings, calls, design, coding. Personal time is categorized into buckets like social media, workout, reading, writing and friends. It takes about 5 to 10 minutes daily to feed the logs from my diary to the spreadsheet. It is worth the time spent

You can download the google sheet time tracker template here

Once a month I go through the summary chart I create out of the logs and identify time-wasters. I replace those activities with habits that can compound in my favor like reading, writing, and playing with kids.  

“A large part of time is wasted on things which, though they apparently have to be done, contribute nothing to little”

– Peter Durcker

An activity considered a time-waster for me can be a compounder for you and vice versa. Here are some questions to eliminate time-wasters and identify habits that will compound in your favor. If you answer yes to any of these questions, you should try that activity. 

1. Do you enjoy doing it? 
2. Does it make you and others around you happy? 
3. Will it save you time in the future? 
4. Will you regret not doing it in the future?

Over time, I analyzed the logs and replaced time-wasters with compounding habits. Here are some of them. 

1. I replaced my morning screen time with a workout routine. 
2. I started reading books instead of scrolling the twitter feed in bed. 
3. I replaced a lot of meetings with coding time by delegating. 
4. We cut down on family TV time and replaced it with family walks. 

Tracking time made me aware of myself. It changed the way I look at time. It helped me get over the self narrative of “I don’t have time for this.” I started exercising. I got back to reading. 

It felt good for a while, but I couldn’t sustain all these activities beyond a few weeks. I drifted back to my old habits. It was easier to read short tweets than to sit and read a book 300 pages long. It was easier to sneak in 15 minutes of screen time than to do a workout routine for half an hour. Also, the hustle of daily life took over. I skipped a few days of exercise and I couldn’t get back. I failed to do my new habits consistently. 

Awareness got me into the game of personal growth. Routines kept me going with these new habits. In the next post, I will share how I overcame the consistency problem and made changes for good.