Here’s how I try to be accountable even when I am struggling.

It is a tough time for me, I always come face to face with this kind of situation every few years. I am faced by this wall and the only way to go around it to climb it. Climb it without any help, no ropes, no ladders, no steps, no help. It is tough, it takes a lot of time to figure out what to do in life. I have had several episodes in my life where I am working on things, doing things and adopting them as my goals in life. I want to become an expert on things, for example, Social Media. Learn everything about it, be the expert, the voice of God when it comes to Social Media but then my terminology and how I describe ‘Social Media’ changed. I am now much more focused on Storytelling and what that entails for the future of advertising. Finding answers to the question of how the changing mediums of media consumption affect the art of storytelling in advertising. Anyway, this is a question I can only answer when I move beyond the wall.

The wall, as I mentioned takes various forms in my life, I have also noticed that it comes into existence every 2 years in my life. It is like there are questions to solve and they all pile up and become this wall of problems that either I have to cross or break down to pull myself out of a rut. As I get nearer and nearer to the wall I am put into situations that I don’t want to be a part of. Once this starts to happen I realize how I have been avoiding certain things in my life and how I have been addicted to a few things, activities or items that are highly unnecessary in my growth as a human being but still I become accustomed to them anyway. This forces me out of my situations, It is like an improvement plan but I want myself to break the wall this time around unlike other times where I have just found a way to beat the wall, to cross it with help (Some sort of help). The result, the wall has just grown larger and larger and I need to break it down, what that means is I need to identify my problems and break them down one by one, so that this period of transformation is the last one and I avoid these questions these ghosts from the past from returning. That is my only solution to ensure that I am not on ground zero again. Frankly, I am tired of putting together everything only to perpetually blow it all away because I have a glass ceiling over my head. A ceiling that was put in place from my past experiences and has stayed there and I have believed that is the top of my game, that is the best I can do.

I am scared to be successful. Sure, I want a lot of money, sure I want to be the king of everything but deep down inside I don’t think the belief that I can do it exists.

Do you have the same feelings? It feels like you’re working towards a certain something and then you work towards it. Achieve it. Get better. Life is good. Suddenly, you find yourself dilapidating. Falling over.

Do you also romanticize the notion of being a Pheonix and rising from the ashes? Is that your fantasy?

If the answer is yes then you need to change a few fundamental thought processes. It must sound nerdy and unnecessary to think about your life like that. Tweak it like it’s a presentation or an excel sheet. We don’t think about our lives in terms of parameters and properties, right? Maybe we need to reconsider that. Geeking about getting better at your own life can be a helpful endeavor.

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

-Alfred Lord Tennyson

You need to pull out the soul from within your words and that will help you reveal your nature, the true soul.

Here are five simple steps that I want you to take away from this piece -

1. Sit down, think and re-evaluate your life from the beginning, as a story. Make it cheesy, think about it in the third person. When I say think about it, actually think about it. Do it like you’re writing a screenplay. Taking this seriously is the only way this will be fruitful.
2. Identify the markers of failures from that screenplay. Try to watch it over and over again. Identify patterns. Usually, people have very real metaphysical “glass ceilings”. We reach that and then we self-sabotage and cycle back to square one. We start again, that is the trap you have to avoid. To avoid that, first, we need to understand what it really is. Identification is key.
3. It is not easy to break these patterns but once you have identified them you can closely observe what you’re up to. Journaling is a great habit to keep track of your actions without actually having to put a lot of effort into this exercise.
4. Alongside understanding what you need to fix, you need to ensure that there are no “leaks” in your personality that happen while you make these changes, new problems are a no-no, so to avoid that ensure that you’re making progress across the four areas that ensure you reach your maximum potential.
5. 5. Divide your tasks, across the board for the week using these four areas, don’t do anything beyond these four areas and it’s respective parameters that you will decide, the reason being you will focus on what you want to change and not whatever comes your way in ever-changing life scenarios.

My four areas of focus to feel fulfilled.

What I do, is I take 8 tasks every day (4 major tasks + 2 fixed tasks + 2 random tasks) Take those 8 tasks for a whole week across the 4 areas and use fractions of total tasks. For example, if you have defined a five day work week and you achieved 6 tasks every day, out of the predefined 8 tasks, you will have a total of 40 tasks out of which you’ve completed 30 tasks. Do this for every week. I measure what tasks I have been able to complete this way across the four areas of concern, I have. I can do a month on month comparisons too by this methodology. It’s simple and works for a meathead like me. I also do a month on month comparison on the basis of that.

You can also use Pomotodo app to ensure you are working on the four areas or cornerstones of your growth, I often refer to them like that. Pomotodo allows you to measure your time, with hashtags, you can create four hashtags based on your cornerstones and measure all tasks achieved. It also gives you weekly reports, the paid version is not expensive as well. Also, the built-in Pomodoro timer is great for accountability.

Another app you can try for this is, Boosted. It is a much simpler time tracking app that I really admire. It is clean and functional.

I hope this helped you out. If it did, show me some love.

Positive vibes to you.

Thanks!