SuperGlue’s Random Thoughts

I have three sisters - one elder to me and two younger. Two of them live in Sri Lanka & the other in Canada. They all married & have grown up kids. We grew up as a close-knit family when our parents were living. Even after I left SL to live in the overseas, mother made sure that we live in harmony and in close contact. Even though I did not make time to call them in particular, I did call them once in a while to ask them how were they doing and to give up dates of myself and family. Most of such calls were made on the same to, soon after I had called mother.
One thing that I've realized, since the mother passed away in last September, calls between the sisters & myself has almost disappeared. The elder sister did call me though in the first couple of weeks, soon after I got back after mom's funeral though. That was it!
Sometimes, I think, perhaps they can't afford to give me a call because they are too busy; or even because long distance calls are too costly that they can't afford to. I don't know… Such is life!

Earlier this morning we were invited for breakfast at a neighborhood friend’s house. The only guests present there was Mrs,his visiting brother and myself. One thing I noticed, the people in the breakfast table had various conversations, while eating their breakfast - nothing about their day jobs or anything like that; but various other topics such as food, entertainment & other matters of interest. While they were conversing, though I was trying hard to concentrate and join their conversation, my mind kept taking me back to stuff that is in my plate in the day job & whatnot. Though, I tried my best to join their conversation,any meaningful words to contribute to the topics they were talking about did not come. I know, this isn’t any good and acceptable social behavior.

Since the start of this year, I’ve been thinking about not to think about the day job stuff way too much, specially during weekends and instead focus my mind and energy towards much more interested things like reading or even put down my thoughts down, by way of journaling or even blogging; however it hasn’t been materialized just yet. One roadblock for this could possibly be due to me checking of day job emails too much during the weekends and that is something I must work on to discipline myself, to limit the frequency of the activity.

Here we are on February the 1st. First 31 days of the new year has already completed. Feel like it went fast, though much interesting haven’t been able to achieve to say the least. Much of the time during the month was spent in putting together work goals and personal development plans for the team and myself. In personal life, didn’t get to a good start in the new year by being getting ill with flu in the first week of January. There had been some minor skin problems too, which was treated by my friend Ashok.

Since last 2-3 weeks, we have been busy focussing on getting our goals and PDP ¹ sorted out for the day job, in prepping for re-org, that was announced early December 2018. Several drafts were done in various formats like word & excel and emails were sent back & forth. That's said, from the word go, I consulted a colleague from L &T ² to get some tips for putting together the PDP.

The 1st one to one meeting with the boss to discuss the PDP was held on January 21st, 2019 and a couple of more things were added as a result. Long story short, in the end, agreed Goals & PDP documents were emailed to the boss earlier this afternoon and also everything was entered on to the corporate software application. So, it's all done.

Now, to get on with everything that has been put on as Goals - both for the day job as well as for Personal Development. I can see next few months are going to be extremely busy, not only keeping up with of my own on top of day to day work & projects, but also making sure goals & PDP progress of my direct reports.

In the PDP journey, I will also have to complete a significant number of on-line training courses, to bring my knowledge and skills up to speed in the following areas, document Key Learning Points and Application in the Day Job. All of these will have to be completed by April 30th, 2019!

• Operations Management Foundations
• Operations Excellence Foundations
• Lean Foundations
• Lean Six-Sigma Foundations
• Process Improvement Foundations
• Leading Effectively
• Negotiations Foundations
• Negotiation Skills
• Finance for Non Finance Managers

1. Personal Development Plans

2. Learning & Talent Department

Holidays are over. Both the daughter and the visiting guests from Goa, all have now gone back. Both Monica and myself are back to our usual life. Our routine of going to work, getting back home, catching -up with day job stuff even after getting back home , fixing something to eat and getting some sleep continues. The home, most is 'pin drop silence', except occasional shout out throw at me from Mrs either to eat dinner or show away garbage. When we are not having a meal together, I mostly spend my time in the couch with my iPad, whilst Mrs either watch TV or gets on with her day job stuff on her work notebook.

I guess, this routine will continue up until mid February to early March, when we will be expecting MIL here for a visit. Then of course, come mid April or so, we will have daughter coming for her spring vacation, both of which we are looking forward to.

First month of simple bullet journaling with a paper notebook and pen seemed to have helped me to keep track of my tasks and achieve most of them, in particular in the day job. Before I make a decision whether I’d continue with BuJo into 2019, I might as well continue with my present notebook in the month of December too. With that in mind, set up Monthly Log for December in the BuJo. Migrated a just a few tasks from last month to this current months. After I receive the Hobonchi cousin planner which is expected in next few weeks, will be able to decide whether I would use the planner to combine planning + bullet journaling into one.

In the recent past, I’ve been thinking a lot about, my being obsessed with too much of a stuctured & perfection - both in personal life and in the day job. I’ve always liked to plan things in advance and complete my tasks to perfection. Being organized and attention to detail has always been priority for me. I suspect whether I had acquired this nature of mine since the childhood, inspired by my father and also from being a very active Boy Scout. My father being a very dedicated government servant in his entire career, has always served any organization he worked in a well planned & organized manner and completed his duties to *perfection. Similarly, he maintained the same high standards for anything and everything he did at home also. Being on time for any appointments and finishing any tasks on time has always been an important thing for him. In scouting, I learnt to *Be Prepared all the time. I was heavily invloved in planning & orgnizing both indoor and outdoor activities in the Scout Troop.

I believe, my obsession of being too structured & perfection has most part has helped me in maintaining my high standards, specially in the day job with increased depenability, which is a good thing overall. However, on the flip side, it has also contributed significantly bringing frequent anxieties, unfortunately. Lately, as a workaround to over come frequent anxiety, I’ve been trying a few things like, keeping a control over checking emails when not at work, spending more time under the neem tree, starting to read & keep a Bullet Journal and spend time in coinversation with my favorite 10C community. Though, I haven’t experienced remarkable improvement just yet, I expect to see even little improvement to the current status.

Earlier this month we had staff forum for the 1st time in a long time, since the prideccssor of the Divisional Head had retired.
After a slide presentation giving a business update on financials and customer feedback ratings, the Divisional Head addressed the forum. At the out set, he mentioned that it was the first & last time that he was going to talk at the entire session and in the future, it would be respective departmental heads must give an update of each of their business units' initiatives to the audience.

Addressing the audience, the Divisional Head emphasised mainly on cost efficiency, process efficiency and improving product & service. The Key themes were:

• Quality is all about customer expectations and constant change in expectations,
• Being able to meet customers' changing needs of expectations,
• Speed to market - Being able to work smarter & faster with a flexible approach,
• Make things happen - to design a product & service, that will enable crew to deliver efficiently,
• The product & service must be faster, more modern & more efficient,
• Sustainability - more environmental friendly products

All in all his message was very clear that we need to change the way we work. No nonsense with him - he wants us to make things simpler, deliver results faster with cost & efficiency in focus and ultimately support to create stress-free cabin crew, so that they can engage with customers to improve overall customer experience.

The new premium class kitchen officially commissioned earlier this afternoon and I witnessed the preparation and dispatch of first flight. It was an important milestone for everyone.

A few weeks ago, during a visit to the new kitchen, I spotted that some of the catreing trucks have gotten a facelift in the van body. Later I found out that this new livery will be phased in to entire fleet of trucks. The new livery definitely looks much cleaner, nicer and simpler.