2007-11-11T11:24:49-08:00
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2007-11-11T11:24:49-08:00
<p>Mr. 'Million Things' is quite busy and has been working 25 hours a day, 8 days
a week on a product soon to be released. But he also has a very active
social life and other activities that include traveling, photography
and writing blogs. Since, unfortunately, a day is limited to only 24
hours and that Mr. 'Million Things' is already squeezing out an extra one hour
of it, sharing his knowledge (though very limited) and experiences with
others took a big blow. Then came to his rescue, a spark from the cosmos. I'm this Mr. 'Million Things' and the spark is SpongeFish.<br>
<br>
I have been quite busy at my work for more than a year now as our
company is planning to launch a product sometime soon. If one leaves a
computer running for weeks and months without reboot, chances are very
high that it needs a reset before it completely crashes. Similar was
the case with me and I managed to steal a week off from work for my
cross-country road trip. It was a total reset and I was back into
action after returning from the trip. Now I wanted to share my experience on this virtual rendezvous
of Internet but could not manage until one day I saw a comment to one
of my blog's asking if I would be interested in putting my travelogue
on SpongeFish and that there was a contest ending on the 12th of Oct.
This comment was made on the 4th and that grabbed my attention only on
the 7th. Just 5 days to share the entire trip? Not an easy task. I took
a look at the website and decided to give it a shot. But as the saying
goes "procrastination is like a credit card. You enjoy it till you get
the bill", I kept delaying it and on the 10th realized I didn't have
enough time, especially with my given work schedule and also that I was
heading for Chicago on the 12th by 8:00 PM flight.</p><p> </p><p>This was the time when I took a couple of moments to myself and thought
about the situation. I have been putting things on the back burner
forever. I wanted to change this, at least for once. This made me even more determined to participate in the contest, not with an anticipation of winning a prize but with a hope of winning over my "let me do it later" attitude. Here is the chain
of events that followed.<br>
<br>
1. I canceled my tickets to Chicago<br>
2. Started to write<br>
- while having breakfast<br>
- during lunch<br>
- midnight to the moment I crashed into bed<br>
3. Just about an hour before midnight PST (2 AM for me), I stopped, after putting as much as I could on the paper<br>
4. Hit the "publish" button on SpongeFish<br>
5. I saw instantly people started to like it. I was very glad<br>
6. The SpongeFish community picked it up as one of the best<br>
7. I won the cool little iPod Touch. Thanks to SpongeFish :-)<br>
8. I started to find more time to contribute the little I know and learn a lot from others<br>
<br>
My road trip was not a canonball run but this write-up absolutely was. It is wonderful how this all happened. I feel as if I started to create
time out of thin air. The fact is that I started just to manage it
better. Trying to get the priorities right.</p><p> </p><p>Now imagine I went ahead
and traveled to Chicago giving up on my narrative and chickening out. I
wouldn't have shared my experience here, it would have got washed away
in the waves of my memory. The motivation I got when I realized so many
people liked it wouldn't have existed. I wouldn't have won anything and hence there wouldn't have existed the element of success that acted as fuel to the next event. This chain reaction would have
continued and left me in disapproval with myself. But now, I ended up as a winner of both the prize and aslo the procrastination factor.
</p>
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2007-11-12T16:57:16-08:00