No cashless makes me penniless; what about you?

These days I've a nightmare: will I or any of my family members fall sick that requires hospitalization? I pray that neither of my family nor any of my friends' family fall sick during these days. All the major health insurance players have removed many of the top (?) hospitals from Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore for cashless transaction. That means, if we get admitted to these hospitals, we've to pay from our pocket and then apply for reimbursements. If we apply for reimbursements, then we're at the mercy of the insurance company. They will invoke some clauses of the policy to partially reject your claim.

Perhaps the intention of the insurance agencies is good. I read that 10% of the hospitals in these cities account for 80%-90% of the claims! Hospitals inflate the bills of the insured patients. There are different categories of rooms in hospitals. Usually the maximum room charge per day is 1% of the sum insured. If you've a mediclaim policy of Rs 3 lakh, then the insurance will pay you only Rs 3000/- per day for the room. If the room charge is Rs 3700, you've to pay Rs 700 extra. But that's only half the story. In all the hospitals, every other charge is proportionate to the room charge. If the doctor charge is Rs 300/- in a general ward, you may to shell out around Rs 1000/- for the same doctor if you're in a room. Similarly, if the some surgery cost is Rs 10,000/- for a patient from a general ward, you may have to pay Rs 30,000/- for the same surgery if you're a patient from a room! I don't understand the rationale behind this at all. How come the same surgery be so costly if you stay in a room whereas the same doctor, same staffs and the same operation theater (OT)  will be used? Suppose your maximum room limit is Rs 3000/- but you stay in a room of Rs 3700/-, then the insurance companies will apply pro-rata calculation on all of your hospital expenses on that ratio. Although your sum insured is enough to cover your total medical bill, you still have to pay from your pocket as your other expenses will be capped as per the maximum room-charge eligibility.

The insurance agencies have defined a Preferred Provider Network (PPN) and defined packaged rates for commonly occurring deseases. The hospitals have been asked to comply with that. The insurance houses want to rein in on the soaring mediclaim expenses. It seems in the long run, we as consumers will benefit. But as the tussle between the insurance agencies and the hospitals are going on, guess who has to bear the brunt? It's us - the policy-holders, the patients. So let's pray that all of us remain healthy till  the clouds of uncertainties over hospitalization are over. Otherwise, no-cashless-hospitalization will leave many of us penniless.

More links:

1. Accept our rates to get cashless plan: Insurers to hospitals, the Times of India, 15th July, 2010.
2. Medical insurance cos shortchange policy-holders seeking reimbursement, the Times of India, 15th July, 2010.

Why am I so concerned about Time Management now?

Of late, I have started focusing a lot in managing my time efficiently. What is the reason for this? Well, primary reason is that I now have to spend one and half hours every day from my work hours in gym. Last October I got an injury at my left knee. (I'll write a post on that). I'm yet to gain full strength on my left leg after that. As per the advice of my Ortho doctor, I joined a gym to undergo a post-surgery rehabilitation program. I do my work-out from 11AM to 12noon every day. Then I take a shower. By the time I'm back to my work, it's 12:30PM. Well, it's lunch time then. I finish my lunch and come back to my cube. It's 1 PM. So two hours from my day is gone! Then my two year old son Krishu expects me at home by evening. On top of that, I have important projects at office. On a first look, it seems each of these jobs (office, gym, family) suck time off from the other. It's not so if I manage my time well. Hence I must manage my time so that I don't waste it. Remember that time is a commodity.

My biggest inspiration in my hope to manage time efficiently is someone who led multiple lives in a single life - a professor of Physics at Gauhati University, an Assamese author of repute who wrote many short stories and novels (he won Satitya Academy awards), a famous movie director (he won many Swarn Kamal & Rajat Kamal awards), editor of the famous Assamese magazine Prantik, editor of children magazine Sofura, Chairman of Indian Railway Service Commission etc etc. He is none other than Dr Bhabendra Nath Saikia. How could he achieve so much in a single life? I never had the opportunity to ask him that question. But I'm sure he was able to play so many roles at the same time because he could manage his time well.

For more on Bhaben Saikia, see the following two links:

• http://www.bhabensaikia.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhabendra_Nath_Saikia

If Dr Bhabendra Natha Saikia could manage his time to do so many things in a life, why can't I manage my time to do just three simple things - office, gym and family-time?

BTW, I have created a Time Journal for next three weeks. It's a simple excel-sheet with multiple tabs, one tab for a day, that logs my time for every 15 minutes from 8AM to 6PM on all working day. My sample Work Journal can be viewed here.

Time Management

Continuing with my post on Prof Randy Pausch, let me now write on his speech on Time Management that he delivered to University of Virgina. It was 850 capacity auditorium and it was full to its capacityon that day.

There are many talks, seminars, books etc on Time Management and I must confess - most of these are boring. But the one that Prof Randy Pausch delivered is just too good. It was a pragmatic lecture unlike the Last Lecture that he delivered to CMU. The speech was very special. We all can talk of time management. We all feel that we have just lot of time for us. But Randy had maximum three more months of his life left. Three months before he gave the speech, he was diagnosed with pancreatitis cancer. His doctor told him that he had 3 to 6 months of healthy living (euphemism for death in 3 to 6 months) ! This talk on Time Management is special because it was delivered by someone who really had a limited time in his hand.

The full speech is available at https://youtu.be/oTugjssqOT0. The power-point slides for this can be downloaded from University of Viginia's website here . I've just finished watching the video. I took some notes from this. Let me share these now below:

• Time is a commodity. Manage time the way you manage money
• Time is money. When we talk about household budget, we mean household money budget. Do we have a household time budget?
• Money can be earned any time in life; but time lost can never be re-gained.
• We just have too many things to do in life ; but time is limited.
• Better time management leads to happier and wonderful life.
• Fun: If you're not having fun at your work, why do it? Life is too short. Why not enjoy it?
• Goal is to maximize fun.
• A typical office worker wastes 2 hours a day. It's a universal thing that plague all of us.
• Being successful doesn't make you manage your time well; but managing your time well makes you successful.
• He said that he was not a smart person. There were smarter people around him. What he was good at was managing his time well. If you have to run with faster people around you, then you have to find ways to optimize what skills you do have.
• Doing things right way is more important than doing the right things adequately.
• Plan: Planning is very important. Failing to plan is planning to fail. Plan each day, each week and each semester.
• TODO list: break things down into small steps. Do the ugliest thing first.
• Multiple monitors at work helps. TODO list, email, calendar etc in separate monitors.
• Speaker-phone helps in saving your time.
• Telephone is time waster. Use it efficiently
• Learn to say NO.
• Know your Good or bad times: Find your creative time. Defend it ruthlessly, spend it alone. Find your dead time and schedule meetings, phone calls etc during it.
• Interruptions: Every interruption takes 4 to 5 minutes for recovery. We must reduce frequency and length of interruptions. New email alert is also an interruption. Turn it off.
• Time journals: Time a commodity. You better track where your time is going. Monitor yourself in 15 minute increments. Update every 1/2 hour throughout the day - not at the end of day.
• Work-Life Balance: You can become more efficient at work. So you can leave office at 5PM and spend time with family. Randy worked fewer hours after marriage and still he got his works done. In grad school, people who completed their PhDs fastest are those who are married and/or have kids.
• Procastination: It's the thief of time. Doing thing at the last minute is expensive. Stress comes in. Deadlines are important. Create fake deadline which is before the actual deadline and treat this as actual dead-line. Usually when he was procastinating, there was a deep psychological reason. We feel embarassed because we think we won't be able to do it. When you're procastinating, identify why you're not enthusiastic.
• Meetings: An average executive spend 40% or more time in meeting. There must be an agenda. A one minute minutes noting the decisions taken in the meeting...who is responsible for what by when?
• Email: Save all of it. If you want something done, only one recipient. If you really want something done, CC some powerful. If you don't get a response in 48 hours, most likely they'll never reply. So nagging is ok after 48 hours.
• Managing Time with bosses: Write things down. When is our next meeting? What's my goal by then? Remember bosses want results, not excuses.
• Important advice: Kill your TV. Exchange money for time at every opportunity when you've young children. Eat, sleep and exercise.
• Feedback loop: Ask in confidence what good or bad you are doing.
• Books: The One Minute Manager, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
• Action Items: Get a day-timer. Put your TODO list sorted in priority order. Do a time journal. Make a note in your day-timer to revisit this talk in 30days. Ask "What have I changed?"

This talk is highly recommended for any professional. I'm going to start with the action items immediately after this post.

Changing old habits? Yes, it's possible

I used to believe that changing a habit, which is as old as I'm, is difficult, rather next to impossible. But recently I'm able to change one such old habit.

Right from my childhood days, I used to go to bed late in the night. I could never wake up early in the morning. In those days, my school started at 9:30AM or 10AM and we used to leave for school half an hour or one hour before that. Children in my neighbourhood would get up as early as 4 AM and then study for a few hours. (In Assam, the sun rises at 5AM in summer days.) I could never do that despite my parents often telling me the virtues of early risers (Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise). I would get up at 8 AM, and then leave for school at 9AM. I continued the same habits throughout my days as engineering student during my under-grad and grad school.

The same habit continued in my work life too. Usually I have late night meetings. Then I'll work into the night till 1 or 2 AM and get up late in the morning. Will come to office at 11 to 11:30AM. So every thing was late in the day. It was like a consistently late-running train that reaches every station late. I remember one of my friends telling me about the Guwahati-Trivandam train that sometime used to run 24 hours late and you never know if it was today's train and yesterday's train!


Very recently I've changed my style. Even Indian Railways too is changing. Nowadays Guwahati-Trivandam trains run in time. So why cannot I? :-) I have started going to bed early at around 11PM. Next morning I get up from bed at around 6:30AM to 7AM. Then I am in office by 8:15AM. I go back home at 6PM. I don't log-in from home in the evening. I've started liking this new time-table.

What is the catalyst for this change in my old habit? There are three catalysts

1. I have joined a gym. The gym is in my office-complex and I do my work-out from 11AM to 12:30PM there every day.
2. The second is a realisation that most of us, including me, tend to waste lot of time in office in reading mails, surfing net, coffee-table etc. If I utilize my time efficiently, then there is no extra pressure to work from home in the evening and I can spend the evening with my family.
3. I couldn't attain any of three characteristics - healthy, wealthy and wise - attributed to early risers. I am neither healthy nor wealthy nor wise. :-) By waking up early, if I can get at least two of these attributes, I'll be happy. :-)
   

It's too early to say that I'm successful in changing my old habit. It's just three weeks into this new habit. I hope I'll be able to stick to this new time-table.

Boroline: Old is gold

Boroline is an antiseptic cream that I've seen since my childhood days. I thought that Boroline is used only when we have some small cuts or wounds. I've almost forgotten about it until I rediscovered it recently.

I often suffer from cracked lips. Sometime I have cracked heel also if I don't wear shoes continuously for many days. I used to apply different creams for these. These include: vaseline lip guard, Nivea lip guard, Lotus lip balms etc. For cracked heels, I used to apply some Crack, Dr Scholl etc. But I didn't recover from the cracked lips or heels.

Then someone (my wife or my mom) told me about Boroline. I tried it and I was so impressed with it. Boroline was magical. The crack in my lip or heel were gone after applying Boroline.

Then we found its usefulness as a rash-free cream also for our one year old baby boy. A few days back, we found that the diapers caused some rashes in his legs. There is a special cream named Rash-Free cream for this purpose. We applied that. But his rashes were not completely gone. The skin also turned rough as a result of the rashes. Then my wife applied Boroline and
the rashes vanished in a few hours!

I was curious about Boroline and so googled on it. I found some interesting facts about Boroline:

• It's a very old product. It was launched in 1929.
• It has a website too. It claims that Boroline works wonders to smothen cracked lips, cure cracked heels, soften elbows etc.

Now I'm a big fan of Boroline.

Amazing medicine for cough and cold!

A few months back, Gitika (my wife) had a cold. She recovered from the cold; but there was a cough which decided not to leave her. She suffered from it for a couple of days. Then one of her colleagues at Sahara told her about a medicine which Gitika could prepare herself at home. She recovered almost within a day or two after taking that medicine.

I had the same cough and cold this weekend. On 8th Dec night, I could hardly shut my mouth because of the cough. Gitika gave me the same medicine and I recovered very soon.

What is this medicine? Let me tell you about it now. There are just three ingredients:
1)Ginger
2)Jaggery
3)Ghee

Crush some small amount(e.g. 10gm) of ginger and mix it with small amount of jaggery. Then mix it with about half spoon of ghee. Then heat up the mixture for a few minutes and serve it hot.

I took it only once in a day before going to sleep at night. And I was cured of the cough. But you may eat it a few more times if your cough is severe.

I found it really amazing!