Saturday-Pentacle

Saturday-Pentacle – Week 43 – 2019

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Saturday-Pentacle – Week 43 – 2019

An app I Found and pondering on –

Habitica – Found this app via this subbreddit. This app is a cool new concept for Habit creation or (bad habit) removal. It’s like gamification of Habit formation. I’m tipping my toes on this app.

Here are the mobile apps for this (if you wanna try out) –

My most popular Instagram post recently —

Between the lines
.
…Click the photo below to read the entire story.

An article (quora answer) I am pondering on —

Can someone break a habit without replacing it with something else? – Here is an answer I found on Quora this week, it shares a few important points on how one can replace a bad habit with a good one. It tells how neural highways work in our brains.

It’s a great way to come out of a bad habit. Like – Smoking, Drinking or an OCD habit.

A song I loved –

Waves by Jeremy Loops – I got to know about this singer via a YouTuber – Ben Brown. As he shot this video. But the track itself is so banging. I found myself listening to this track endlessly last Sunday.

Here is the Music video of it –

Quote I’m pondering on lately – 

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Until Next Saturday!

Thanks for reading.

Himanshu

A couple of things I could use your help with:

  1. Have a relevant topic, which I should be covering? Write to me directly or fill out this form and let me know.
  2. Join my reader’s list – It helps us a lot when you become a subscriber, it smoothens you experience on Lifestyle Architecture Lab. Being on the email list provides you additional benefits like some exclusive content, webinar’s, free goodies and all of it will be FREE. Please click the link above to join now or put your email address in the below box and hit subscribe.

No spam, ever. Only great stuff.

Saturday-Pentacle – Week 43 – 2019

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Looking back (An annual review – 2017)

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From past four years, I’m doing an annual review of my life. It’s the time when every year I take a pause and reflect back on my successes and failures in the past year. I publish it here in this Blog which keeps me publicly accountable for the goals for the coming year. Here is it for this year –

Photo by Tim Bogdanov on Unsplash

This is my fifth annual review, you can access my previous reviews for 2016, 2015 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), 2014 and 2013. This year also I’ll answer three questions, same as past 3 years:

  1. What went well this year?
  2. What didn’t go so well year?
  3. What’s am I working toward?

Hope it will be insightful and interesting for some of you. Lets cut to the chase.

Looking back (An annual review – 2017)

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Saturday-Pentacle

Saturday-Pentacle – Week 37 – 2017

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Saturday-Pentacle, Week 37 Issue

“Saturday-Pentacle”

Saturday-Pentacle - Week 21 - 2017

App of the week –

Trello

Time for a new app this week. Trello is a modern app for organizing about everything in your life. A work project, a healthy routine, a kitchen redesign project? Trello gets all these done in a beautiful way. It has a refreshing design and logic. It has four main components in it’s design as an organizing app –

  1. Boards – For each project you create a board.
  2. Lists – In each board you can put tasks into lists.
  3. Cards – In each list you can put a main task as a card, each card can have more details of the task and sub tasks as checklists.
  4. Menu – Like it’s name, menu is for certain tasks like filtering your cards, changing board background and activity log etc.

As I’ve been following Trello from past few years but not until recently I started using it more than just glancing. I found it quite satisfying for organizing purpose and design wise. In earlier days of Trello I couldn’t digest it’s horizontal design but now I’m growing more and more fond of it as I’m using it.

Just in case if I got you curious, you can go check out this app –

My most popular Instagram post recently —

Paint the world you need to see!
.
When you don’t know how to exist in the world you are in, paint the world with your imagination on the canvas of life as you need to see.

Article(s) I’m enjoying (and pondering) —

To Eat or Not to Eat? The Skinny on Intermittent Fasting – You are doing strength exercise for fat less or getting lean but it’s not working? This article might have something helpful for you.

Summary of the article – This article suggests intermittent fasting along with strength training to speed up your fat burning process. As the name suggests the logic is to put an extended gap between your meals. Intermittent fasting can be done in many ways, few ways mentioned in this article –

  • 16/8 method – Skip breakfast, and consume your first meal at noon and keep eating up to eight o’clock in the evening, then repeat.
  • 5:2 diet – Fast for 2 days in a week and those 2 days need not be back to back. Calorie consumption should be cut to 500-600 calories.
  • Eat Stop Eat –Eat what you want for 24 hours and then take a complete break from food on the following day. Repeat once or twice a week.

In all these methods Calorie-free beverages are allowed and food you take in the non-fasting hours shall not be compromised by eating burgers or other junk food. Be conscious with what you put inside your stomach.

I’m reading/watching/listening to —

1% Better Every Day – This is a keynote speech by one of my favorite Author James Clear. In this speech, James puts his habit forming theories across with Stories and tells us how being 1% better every day in even seemingly trivial things of our every day life can expand our potential exponentially.

Quote I’m pondering on lately – 

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”

― John Lennon

Until Next Saturday!

Thanks for reading.

Himanshu

A couple of things I could use your help with:

  1. Have a relevant topic, which I should be covering? Write to me directly or fill out this form and let me know.
  2. Join my reader’s list – It helps us a lot when you become a subscriber, it smoothens you experience on Lifestyle Architecture Lab. Being on email list provides you additional benefits like some exclusive content, webinar’s, free goodies and all of it will be FREE. Please click the link above to join now or put your email address in the below box and hit subscribe.

No spam, ever. Only great stuff.

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26 Things About Life I Wish I Had Known When I Was 20 Years Old

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Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash

As Ludwig famously said –

Less is More.

We are always running behind something and someone. When we don’t really know the meaning of this philosophy, we may want everything we see.

In the past 10 years of my life, I’ve slowly started to comprehend this fact. That less is more and this eventually became a fundamental value of whatever I do.

There are many other learnings like this which shaped me as a person in past 10 years. I thought to share these with you, as some of you might be in your twenties and find them helpful. So I jotted down these 26 learnings from past 10 years of my life as A to Z below.

How did I learn them you ask? I have learned these from various books, people and experiences.

I wish I had known these 26 things when I was 20 years old but here they are for you. The 26 reminders –

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Looking back (An annual review – 2016)

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From past three years, I’m doing an annual review of my life. Cause I want to pause and reflect back on my successes and failures of the previous year and publishing it here in this Blog keeps me accountable for the next year.

Looking back (An annual review - 2016)

 

This is my fourth annual review, you can access my previous reviews for 2015 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), 2014 and 2013. This year also I’ll answer three questions, same as past 3 years:

  1. What went well this year?
  2. What didn’t go so well year?
  3. What’s am I working toward?

So this is gonna sound cliché but I’m the man of making resolutions and working on them, every year. So this year also I created a list of new year resolutions like last year. Coincidently I’m posting this annual review almost at the end of second quarter of the year like last year.

I think I’m liking this schedule as it gives me some more visibility on the new year’s resolutions and I can add some more context to the happenings of the year. If that doesn’t make sense, just read it as I was feeling lazy!

Just kidding.

After the successful year of 2015, last year was not that successful overall but it was no less satisfying. I also experienced various sort of serendipities.

serendipity
sɛr(ə)nˈdɪpɪti

noun
the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

Ok! That was not an editorial mistake I knowingly put that word definition above. Why? Because I’ve fallen in love with this word “Serendipity”.

Serendipity in my own definition is a state when we fall in love with the universe and start accepting and loving the present moment, then the universe starts loving you back in the strangest of ways.

There happened many serendipitous events in the year of 2016. Through which I felt strange new feelings derived from wandering, wondering and affection.

I’m keeping this post as a single post, unlike last year’s 3 part post which took so much time and complexity to get published. Hope it will be insightful and interesting for some of you.

Lets cut to the chase.

Looking back (An annual review – 2016)

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Looking back (An annual review – 2015)

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From past two years I’m doing an annual review of my life. Cause I want to pause and reflect back on my successes and failures of previous year and publishing it here in this Blog keeps me accountable for the next year.

Looking back (An annual review - 2015)

This is my third annual review, you can access my previous reviews here (2014) and here (2013). This year also I’ll answer three questions, same as last 2 years:
  1. What went well this year?
  2. What didn’t go so well year?
  3. What’s am I working toward?
Keeping yourself accountable is a great thing I’ve learned from several people in the last year’s timespan. Many famous Bloggers/Vloggers and authors have mentioned it, they’ve mentioned one more thing which is – “In-order to make yourself accountable, you have to let someone else be the judge”. I couldn’t do that as of yet, but it’s in my resolution list for year 2016. [I’ve compiled a new year’s resolution list as well, will be tagging that here shortly] This year I want to remove a few not so good habits from lifestyle as well. So making myself accountable for the actions i take will be a good start, so I’m gonna let some of my close friends who can be as ruthless as this task will require to punish me if I don’t do well in this task. So that’s gonna be interesting, only time will tell.
2015 has been the greatest year of my life till yet. After the last 2 Annual Reviews, this year when I kept record my doings and held myself accountable for things I was doing for myself I felt more control over my life, far far better than in any other year of my life. It was like in some way I knew where i was heading. From the learnings of the last year 2015, I’m finding acquainted with more knowledge about areas of life which were untouched earlier which eventually led me to be in a self aware mode. I was completely in the zone of doing things in the last whole year.
I’m keeping this post in 3 parts to avoid it becoming a really really long post (longer than my target of 3000 words per post). First part will be – ‘What went well this year?’ I’ll just keep the next two parts as to be continued. In-fact i just don’t want this post to read like desperately moving towards closure but want to make it really in-depth and insightful.
Lets cut to the chase. I hope you find it interesting.
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creativity, discipline, good habit, habit, life, lifehack

How this amazing medium helped me read more than 9 hours a week?

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Recently I’ve found interest in an old school medium of book and article reading, even though its old but still got its charm. It literally helped me gain more knowledge than ever before in past sometime.

This medium is Audio! by the mean of Audio books & Podcast.

How it can benefit?

While commuting or going for a run, earlier I used to listen to all types of music. But recently after reading an article from a guy who works at buffer. He shared amazing routine of his where he listens to audio books and podcasts while running or commuting. Here is a brief of the reasoning he gave.

“Often we use to put aside less time for reading articles or books than we would want due to busy life. But guess what! its not that we have less time, its how we make best of our time.”

His words gave me a reason to stop and reflect on my daily routine. Lately I’ve started 3 new books and have put many articles in my read it later app. But yet I’ve not made any significant progress in that front. Not because I’m too lazy, but because my day job and workout routine  leave me rarely any time for reading books and articles. So I tried to think, where can I cut some slack and add myself some reading time? That’s where the power of this audio medium crossed my mind.

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Looking back (An annual review – 2014)

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This is my second annual review but first one which I’m publishing on my blog publicly, you can access my last year’s review on my Evernote here. Last year after writing my annual review i got a sense of purpose and a reflection of whatever I’ve done in the last year. This gave me a chance to take stock of what went good and what could have gone better and the way forward.
In this year’s review I’ll try to look back on the accomplishments from the last year’s list. This way I can analyze my performance and the processes I’ve adopted. This will help me perform better in this new year and i shall try to do better on the new good habits that I’ve included in my lifestyle but also get rid of the bad ones which I still have.
After last year’s review I’m consistently tracking my progress on various aspects of my life and that way I felt more control over my life, which was merely there earlier. Last year I had adopted to work more towards the process of doing things instead of focusing on the goal. By far I’ve achieved better than ever before towards the goals I seek in my life. Last year I’ve read somewhere that to inherit good habits, one should continuously do that task for at least 3 weeks and then it becomes a part of your memory (or may be muscle memory in case that’s a physical task). So I’ve tried experimenting this with a few things i do or i want to do in day-to-day life. For example, to include exercise in my daily routing, i was struggling badly. But since I’ve started doing something (running) which i love in the form of exercise and made a process which helped me not to miss it. I formed a habit of daily waking up at around 7:30AM and run the daily errands and then slip into my shoes and reach the society (where i live) gate. By doing this i got myself out of bed and forced myself to reach till the gate. If i reach the gate then I felt less urge to go back up to my apartment and i could go to my running track and do a running session without any hesitance. I continued it for almost 4-5 weeks until i faced an ankle injury. But by this i understood how to form a habit and go on with it. Now after healing from that injury I’m continuing my running with the same habit.
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