We have very short lives. The productive period of your life starts dwindling by the time you are 50. How much can we squeeze out of our lives by then? I have heard of people weeping about the fact that they had so many plans but fell short in their life time to fructify even 20% of it. This web page is dedicated to all such persons who are working overtime to meet the deadline. Let me share some of the tips.

First I have been thinking of it. Then I started practicing it. And now it has become my second nature.

Tips for you

Practice multitasking, multithreading, multiuser and whatever else you can think of. It is a virtue. In the Mahabharata there is documentation of Arjuna being ambidextrous. Ambidextrous is the capability to use the two arms for totally two different things at any one time. For example, you could try to write with one and type with another hand without shifting concentration. ( No time sharing !!). In Arjuna’s case, he could use his hands to fight with two entirely different kinds of weapons with two opponents. What you could do is start with attending to the telephone with one while continuing to write a memo with another.

Enhance your lives by doing many things at one time. We must pursue dual careers in diverse fields to draw the most from our lives. Pursue many hobbies and interests to make our lives richer. It needs a lot of time management. This has to be done with a missionary zeal. When I was at school I remember I used run from one block to the other or to the mess. The idea was that the running fulfilled the requirement of a good exercise and the end was that I was making it in lesser time. At other occasions you may take a leisurely stroll along the river bank, but the stroll should have a realized aim of leisure, contemplation or whatever is in your mind. When I was at the Defence Academy, there was always a hold up after the classes when the sergeants used to be going around checking the cadets. The library was in the Academic block. So I used to sit and spend time with august company like Time Life books or Socrates or Gauss, while hundreds of cadets stood outside in a line wasting the most valuable bandwidth of adolescent life. I used to go for a late lunch at 3 PM when everyone (and the sergeants) has left. What did I lose. Nothing! Nobody reads Astronomy when he is in the Academy, I managed.

How much sleeps does one need?

When I am busy in a project or when the bandwidth bug has bitten me, I can manage with as little as four to five hours spread over the day. Three hours in the night and another hour or so in the afternoon. That can keep me sustained in an alert state for days together. Whereas when I am involved in nothing interesting, ten hours of sleep in the night also does not seem to suffice. What can you say to this ? When I was involved in writing my software Microprocessor Simulator 8085 for Windows, I remember I was working with as little as three hours sleep in the wee hours for three months at a stretch. No hunger, not even thirst. Cold food lying on the table for hours before I could look at it. Yes, personal hygiene suffers. But it was an immensely enjoyable experience….every moment of it. One generally has to unwind for a comparable period of time after such an effort.

I detest handing over my life to other people. When others decide how you should spend your time. But invariably this happens in life again and again. You have to stand in a queue waiting. You have to wait for others in a meeting. These I detest, but I have a nice list of things that I do whenever I am in a situation where I cannot free myself. For example, if you are in an airport waiting for a flight, you could pick up a book. Not just any book, a book that you are interested in, you could carry one. I even remember an occasion where I could not even do that. So I said, lets give it a try at meditation. I had used the wasted time for a wonderful experience. Here is a list of classics written by people when they were under imprisonment. There is nothing sacrosanct. This is just an attitude. Imagine all the people of the world doing the same thing. We could achieve in five years with 6 billion people what we may have achieved in five centuries. Imagine, even if ten million people spent their spare time to face the artificial intelligence challenge. We would have huge resources in no time.

When you are surfing on the Net, do some kind of power surfing where you have multiple browser windows open and just go to each to save the contents to the hard disk, giving the browser a task to get more and jump to another browser window to do the same thing and on and on this could go on. And may be there is a download or two going on in the background. Don’t worry, the TCP/IP is too good to know which byte goes where. This ensures that the overall bandwidth that you get is the best that your telephone line could possibly support and the green LED never stops blinking on the modem. So at one time, you are doing so many of your favorite things. It could be computers on one thread, Black holes in another and ………graphics in the last one because they give you the maximum "bandwidth satisfaction". Moral: Don’t hang around online, Go about what you want and grab it fast. Again, I am not propagating abstinence from the wonderful online world of click where you want and cruise. I am only suggesting that you remain bandwidth conscious while doing whatever you are doing. I do a lot of chat myself.

When I am at home, it is usually the computer at one hand, music in the background, smoking on, and something keeps coming on the television at low volume. It could be the Discovery channel.

When you are at the office, you could be speaking on the telephone at one hand, working on the computer in front of you. And may be passing instructions to a person that you may have called to your office. Mind you, don’t waste his bandwidth so you can save yours. Some arsehole managers who survive till this century, believe that making the subordinate wait is a fine way of establishing command. The only thing I can tell them for the moment is that they must be good for nothing better. Encourage everyone to maximize their bandwidths and help them in doing so. Your organization will show remarkable growth in productivity.

Spend time with your family, wife and children. This is well within the designed ends of my bandwidth proposition. It is our duty to carry out our duties of a good husband or wife, a good father or a mother, a good son or a daughter. You must give them the adequate attention and time. The only thing is that you should make an effort to maximize the bandwidth in such activities. I will give you an idea. Instead of sitting by the bedside of a brooding wife or a mother, go for a high intensity outing or an entertainment with the whole family. Spend the time and spend it very intensely. You have effectively sucked on the family bandwidth very well and then you can go back to whatever else you were doing. I can guide you that money spent in such family outings are well worth it. The intensity is good for the bandwidth.

As far as your own entertainment is concerned, make up your mind about what you like to do. Don’t feel shy. If you feel that you would like to go and eat out, your favorite fish….trout. Grant yourself that. Go out and order as much trout as you could possibly finish (Bandwidth says no kind of wastage of resources). Eat it heartily and come back satisfied to go back to work. Go for the high intensity entertainment's. If it is a movie that is in your mind. Find out which is the movie which is a 'must go'. Then book the tickets on telephone and just go down to see it and be back to work thereafter. Let me warn you that its only 5% of the movies which can be considered good enough to give two hours of your life.

I fail to understand how people feel like spending hours in watching a test cricket match on TV which goes on for 5 days. Millions of people finding out exactly how one punter is hitting the ball thrown by another punter. At the end of their lives they shall report that they have intimately observed 2000 such punters throwing 200000 such balls in a variety of stadiums and matches. What a commendable achievement. What a waste of human resources….bandwidth. While these TV watchers will be merrily unaware of the facts of their own world like the "The internet", "Nanotechnology" or the "Taj Mahal". You may argue as to why these are more important than the punters.( I have heard that before.) Its just that I feel so. You decide for yourself. For that matter why are you reading these postings of this jerk from India. I do not say that games are a total waste of time, but certain things are. For example I watched some people playing croquet this morning. No intensity, no great skill enhancement, plain wastage of bandwidth. Example of an intense game is football. I personally like to invest time in things like Hang gliding, Microlight flying, trekking, sailing. These sports are rich in bandwidth with elements like "closeness to nature", "muscular training", "adrenaline rush", "time with ones self". Chess is a wonderful game even for the bandwidth conscious. It enhances many things. The mentions above are not exhaustive, they are only suggestive to get you looking in the right directions for what is meant by bandwidth. You may personally find lot of bandwidth in golf which is certainly not on my list. It is your bandwidth, you know best as to what is rich for you. Earnest Hemingway used to go fishing for all the contemplation that he did to write those great books. David Thoreau used to go up a river.