Since my early days when I was small Kid I have an habit of waking up early, for me anything beyond 5 AM is late. I have been getting up at 3:55 AM and my day starts at 4 AM. People always tell me that you are lucky guy, you don’t have this in life, you don’t have that in life. When you will get married you will not get time for anything else, they also blamed their small kids for keeping them engaged. In my opinion if a task is not important to you then you will not do it and if it is really important, I mean if something really matters to you then you will give your 100% to it. The problem with people is that they crib a lot and are usually jealous of successful people. What they don’t realize is that those people who achieved success in life paid a price for that. They worked hard, gave up the comforts in their life and made sacrifices. You too need to work little harder to do things that you wish to do but never get time.

Most of us brush our teeth every morning because we know it is important of our good dental hygiene, not because we have to. Similarly if a person has to do something that really matters then he/she will do it. No matter how badly busy they are in life.

Since past few months I am getting up even earlier now. I now get up at 2:55 AM every morning. Why? because my little lovely daughter keeps me engaged all day now and I like to be with her as much as possible. Earlier I used to wake up at 4AM and work for just 2 hours and go to Gym. Now I get up at 3 AM and I work continuously till 9 AM. So I work 6 hours non stop in the morning when I am in my best mental state.

I have started going to Gym in the evenings now. During this time I do all my most important work of the day. My day routine is never certain, people call in the day, I have to go out to meet someone. The day is usually full with little activities that keep me away from doing something productive or valuable. I have done this adjustment in my schedule ever since my daughter is born. I just can’t resist playing with her during the day at the same time I also want to stay productive. So that’s why I decided to wake up 1 hour early. I do this everyday without fail.

During those 6 hours in the morning I do the hardest work, that requires lot of thinking or which is very boring work :) and rest of the day I just do tasks like reading/replying emails, doing mundane tasks that can’t be ignored. All the high intensity work is scheduled in the morning.

One tip I can give all of you is that never start working on the tasks as they come, no matter how small or easy they are. Put them in your backlog. I personally use JIRA for my startup and I put all the new tasks in the backlog. You never know when these small tasks consume your 1 hour of productive time and it is also not good to distract from your planned work.

Long story short if you are like those people who always blame lack of time for not able to do something extra then without thinking just start waking up early. No other time in the day is better than mornings. Just wake up 1 hour early in the beginning. Do whatever little you can in that 1 hour, do that everyday so to keep the pace going on. Once you are comfortable getting up 1 hour early then start waking up 15 mins early. Getting 1.5 to 2 extra interrupt free hours just for yourself can really change your life. You can really do lot of things. Work on your idea, study new programming language, or build your product.

If you do that everyday you will also feel good about your life and you will start your day on a good note.

It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom. -Aristotle

I have mentioned this before so many times that writing on this blog is one of my favorite things in life. Here I just share my true feelings and I let out everything. This is just a short post as I am really very occupied with work these days. I don't think I was this busy before. I have so much work that sometimes I get little frustrated but end of the day I feel satisfied that this is exactly what I wanted to do when I started my company. When you start a business doing what you love and also earn money from it is the the best thing. There are times in the week when I feel little tired and exhausted but I am learning how to keep a balance of things.

I am working hard everyday trying to build a stable company. When I look back 3 years back I remember I had the same feeling. That feeling of restlessness, instability and an urge to do something more, better. Once you achieve your short goals then you should not stop but set new challenges for youself, this is how you grow.

I have grown my startup really well in the past 3 years. My turnover has increased 10 fold and I now have good client base. I am still not satisfied with that as I have some difficult goals to achieve in the next 3 years.

If you want to start your own venture then the first things you should do is to become very strong mentally. Without focus and determination you can't do much. You have to be ready to give sacrificies - that means giving up things that gives you comfort and pleasure. I have hardly seen a movie in theatre in the past 3 years, I stopped watching Television, reading newspaper. I stopped being in touch with my friends. Earlier I used to spend regular time hanging out with friends atleast 3-4 times a week now I don't even talk to them regularly, this is not good thing to do but you can't have fun as well as start a company at the same time. It is just not possible. You have to be ready to give your 200% in it. If you really want something badly then you need to give up everything else in life. If you can't make that sacrifice then no point starting up, just go back to your normal 9-5 job and stop cribbing.

These days I am starting some really nice Drupal projects. I am going to be even more busy in the coming few months. I hope I will be able to find time to write.

Bye.

People close to me know that I am always trying new things. I was overwhelmed with so much of work that I decided to disable comments on the blog of mine. I was not receiving tons of comments, just few of them but there were lot of spam comments that were going in the approval queue, it was really difficult for me to find time to scan them. Thats why I decided to disable comments completely. But today on 1st Jan 2013 the comments on my blog are officially open again.

I have been doing lot of thinking recently about the future of this blog. Lot of people who know me well complain that I write good but I don’t have a focus in my writings. They are absolutely right. This blog has been a place where I pen down all my frustrations and feelings. For so many years I am writing but never really gave a serious thought on helping others through this blog. I think if I try a little bit and spend some dedicated time then I feel I can write something useful and others might find interest in it.

Can I really help others through this blog?

Yes definitely. I can share my journey so far as an entrepreneur. I have failed many times before and have tried lot of things in the last 10 years but now in 2013 I think I am successful in establishing a decent company and achieving a steady income. We don’t have a very big team right now but we are planning to scale up little bit this year. Our 2013 target is to increase our team size to 10. Currently we are 5 people strong. Growing team is something I am always cautious of. It is very difficult to find ambitious people but I am glad I found few which are working with me right now and are equally passionate.

I can definitely help other by sharing my mistakes, learning and what problems I faced in crossing some common hurdles. I think many people want to start their venture but for some reason or other just can’t. Either they can’t find enough time along with their job or they can’t find the right partner. There are many blocking things but believe me nothing can stop you if you really want to achieve something in your life. In my case I was determined to never give up. When you fail once or twice your parents might not support you emotionally which could be setback for you but the key is to keep going on. Never let anyone stop you. Indian parents are always protective about their children’s career. They want us to work in well established firms for whole life, in that case it is wise if you start doing little something along with your current job. In my opinion even if you give just 1 hour everyday to whatever new you want to start then it is good enough to start. I will share specific tips on how I find time for doing little extra. Even now my day is full with different activities but I can always find time for doing something interesting or new.

In some way this blog is my bread and butter

When I look back I can easily figure out that I have received (and still do) so many project inquiries from this blog only. Most of my big projects are those which I got from this site. It is funny that our official website sparxsys.com has not been the number 1 source of new projects. I think that’s because this is very old blog and has good ranking on Google. So this is another good reason why I should be focusing on this blog now. I want more projects for my company.

I will be writing in Positive Tone now. Promise.

When I look back at the posts I used to write 5 years back I see lot of anger, disappointment and frustration in my writings which is good I believe that I was writing back then when I was struggling with my startup. Things are not rosy these days either but I know that being in negative state of mind won’t help. If it ain’t good then it is experience and learning! So now I promise that I will write very positive.

Little Improvements in the site for easy viewing

I have also made it easy for everyone to view the blog posts on the site easily. I have increased the font size a little bit, increased the line height too and most importantly I have decreased the width of the page. It should be pretty easy to read content now I guess. If not do let me know by writing the comments.

I hope this year I will be able to help others. May be this blog can give them some guidance or emotional support. I am not trying to become any sort of a guru. Just going to share my learning so that others can benefit from it.

Have fun guys and very happy new year.

I am going to start writing about everything that has ever occurred in my life so far. I know nobody really cares about it but I am writing because I just want to understand myself better. I really a confused personality and every now and then I feel that I am not really going anywhere in life. Something always bothers me inside, don't really know right now what it is but there is surely something deep inside me that keeps me pulling back and wont let me free. I want to find out why. Everything is alright in my life but just there is something bothering me all the time. It is not letting me what I want to be always i.e. HAPPY. Yes I think this is one of the most important goal for every human being and mine also. I want to by happy but at the same time I also want everyday of my life to be perfect and full of happiness without any hassles. I really long for such days when there is no tension in my life. I know tensions will stay with you but it is how you deal with them that matter. I just feel I am not able to cop up and this has been the case for so many years now. There is something I really want to do but I dont know what. There is some place that I want go but dont know where. Everyone should have a meaningful life and I also want to find the true purpose of my life.

So I am going to start writing down from the earliest memories of my life. I will be completely honest with my thoughts and feelings. This will help me to sort out tangled things in my mind. Want to write it doing on my blog so that I stay honest and open. May be someone is reading my blog and might be interested, I dont really care about anyone. I am very selffish I think. I disabled comments recently on my blog because I just dont want anyone else's opinion. It is just too much noise for me. I will write for myself.

I am not really a good writer or blogger, this blog of mine has lot of posts related to different things around my life. Most of it is on Drupal which is my bread n butter and on Delhi which is my home. Rest of the blog has stupid stuff and the whole blog if unorganized. I think sometimes that I should work on making this blog focussed on few topics only but then I feel that I prefer it to be unorganized. This is my space where I can write whatever I feel and let everything out. Just like a daily journal. I feel bad that I can't write everyday but anyways I write whenever I can.

I havent really written what is happening in my life recently. Though facebook and twitter is one place where I usually post non sense stuff everyday but as some of my friends pointed that it is too easy to get carried away there and it is just waste of time. So I again made up my mind not to spend too much time on fb. May be once in 2 days are enough. I really need to get my mind focussed and motivated. There is so much noise out there. I completely stopped watching TV and reading newspaper and I must say it is one of the best thing I did this year. Whatever happening in the world doesnt really bother me much rather at this point of time I need to get my life in order and give all my energy to that.

I am juggling between tasks and so much work that I feel tired now. I was not admitting it but I am also human being and I too get tired. Any form of physical, mental or emotional activity sucks our energy and we need time to refuel. I am trying hard to get things in order so that I can plan things better and find time to rest but it is hard. Either I am in front of computer or traveling to meet clients for work or doing stuff. 7 days a week I am on my toes, which is good but I am not really getting things done. Most of my projects are getting delayed and the quality of my work is going down. I don't like that to happen for long.

I was recently blessed with a baby girl, she is beautiful little baby and I just love holding her in my arms and hugging her. Probably the best thing in life. I just love to thought of carrying her in my arm. Life does change when you become parent. I really need to work extra hard now.

One thing I hate these days is not being able to get up at 4. I feel shameful. I do get up to turn off the alarm clock but just couldnt gather the energy to get out of the bed. May be I am just working to hard that my body demands the sleep or may be it is the winters and cold weather. In any case I need to re-thing and change some stuff to get back to my usual schedule. Last month I got irregular with gym but now I am going to gym regularly. I am probably in the best shape of my life right now and I feel proud. I currently weight 67Kgs, a bit under weight but my body is in good shape and I lost lot of extra fat that accumulated on my body. I am not realy taking enough diet these days because I am always running around and missing lunch but thats how it is. I try my best in every way to do things right as much as possible.

About work, well I am still working full time but as my team is global and I really dont need to go to office so I am cool with that. I am working 100% from home these days, but I really want to get rid of my job as soon as possible. It is going to be a big decision, though I am running decent money from sparxsys, my company but the income is not steady all the time but I am sure things are good now. Right now I may possibly get enough work to survive 1 year which is good thing. I was looking for office space recently as I am thinking of increasing my team as it is tough to work from home as a team. We need to have a place where everyone get together and work. so not sure when but soon we may move to some office. It will add extra burden but thats the price we need to pay to grow. I don't really want sparxsys to become main stream company. By September I am planning to grow our team to 10 people. Lets see how things turn out. I am sure 2013 is going to be good for me. Lot of new and existing projects may come in next few weeks and I am really excited, though sometimes I worry how will I manage so much work. I am not good in delegating work to other team members, which I need to learn as I can't really do everything on my own.

One thing I realized in life is that I worry too much. Can't help it but I need to control my feelings and specially my anger. Lot of things frustrate me but thats how life goes on. Ups and downs are part of life and I need to learn to cope with it. I really need to end this year on a good note and for the next few days I really want to follow my plans and daily schedule so that when I start 2013 I am in a good pace.

Feeling tired writing now and it is getting late too. So stopping here. Bye.

Travelling in an auto and just saw this new meter that will give you receipt too but the driver told me that it costs Rs. 16000 and all new autos come with it now.

Just saw this gigantic santa at Rajouri Malls. Looks really nice I must say!!!

When my site www.ggsipu.info grew to 10,000 members, It started receiving more than 2500 visitors per day. I was excited to see so much traffic on the site. It shows that people like what I had been doing and I was happy that I was able to help them in their admission process. Unfortuanately Dreamhost shared hosting was not able to handle that much traffic and my site used to go down many times a day. It is really irritating to see your site down. It used to affect my visitors. Well I will not blame Dreamhost because I can understand that in shared hosting multiple sites are running from a single server and thats why the prices of shared hosting is so much affordable for small businesses like mine. I talked to Dreamhost support and they suggested me to go for VPS which is Virtual Private Server. This is like my own machine that will runs just my site and I will also have full control over my machine. It was too costly for me and I couldn't afford it. So I started looking elsewhere. Luckily few people suggested me to check Webfaction hosting services. Though they are also into shared hosting but I came to know that the speed that they offer is much higher than Dreamhost and the number of sites that they run on a single server is also limited.

Though webfaction only offer 100GB of space but it is more than enough, you will never need that much space anyways. The only downside with webfaction is that as compared to Dreamhost it is kinda difficult to setup your site. I had to read their documentation in details to understand the whole process, which is not very tough but yeah it took me couple of days.

Everything else is same on Webfaction, they also offer unlimited databases, unlimited emails, shell access and much more.

So if you need an affordable but fast hosting then go for webfaction.

Click Here to buy the hosting from webfaction (affiliate link). Trust me they are amazing. My site www.ggsipu.info is running on webfaction for the past 3 years and it is super fast as compared to my other Drupal sites on dreamhost.

Hey Guys today I am going to write a review of one really nice cloud hosting called as - Uhuru (http://www.uhurucloud.com). I received an invitation from a lady on linkedin 2 days back and she asked me to review this Cloud Hosting for free. She mentioned that I can host any database driven application on the free trial. Well I not new to Cloud thing so I immediately checked the site and signed up for the trial.

The login was pretty straight forward, if you have Google, Microsoft or Facebook account then you can simple click on any of these services and you will be logged in to their service in just seconds. Cool stuff. I like fast sign ups.

The moment you log in you will be presented with very neat interface where you can simply click on the big green plus sign to add a cloud.

Then just type in the name of the application and select some ready to install applications like Drupal, joomla, wordpress and more and click on the Cloud Push button.

I love Drupal so I select that only :) and within few minutes then Drupal was installed. Yes thats it guys. They will give you a subdomain like ABC.uhurucloud.com where you can access you application. Also don't forget to start your application.

What else. You can even point your own domain to this app.

BTW the Drupal username is "admin" and password is "administrator12345" in their installed. So just change that you enjoy their services.

Note: I am writing this review because uhuru guys promised me to give me one year free hosting and I am too greedy to refuse that.

I am attaching the screenshots for your ease. Go ahead and give it a try.

Today I sharing my personal schedule with everyone. Just like that :)

3:55 AM - I wake up. Jump out of bed, do stretching, 20 Push Ups and Wash my face with cold water.

4:00 AM to 6:00 AM - I start working. Starting with Daily Planning.

6:00 AM to 7: 30 AM - I go out in the adjoining park to my house. Jog 5 Kms and go to Gym. I don't do very heavy workout. I prefer to stay lean so I have been lifting same weights for years now. Just 25 mins of Weight Lifting.

7:30 AM to 8:00 AM - I get ready

8:00 AM to 9:00 AM - I take some eggs, tea and start working again.

9:00 AM to 10:00 AM - I again eat something, while working.

10:00 AM to 1:00 PM - Work work more work.

1:00 PM to 2:00 PM - Lunch Time

2:00 PM to 2:30 PM - Sleep

2:30 PM to 4:00 PM - Resume Work, second half of the day is meant for secondary tasks and daily chores. Sometime I got out after lunch for meeting people.

4:00 PM to 4:30 PM - Evening Tea and Rest

4:30 PM to 7:00 PM - Work

7:00 PM to 8:00 PM - I read blogs, FB, Twitter

8:00 PM to 9:00 PM - Go out for Daily Shopping, Milk, Egg, Bread and buying vegetables etc.

9:00 PM to 9:30 PM - Dinner

9:30 PM to 10:00 PM - Read book and start fainting..

10:00 PM - Sleep

On a good day I usually work 12 hours, and I try to do the most difficult tasks first thing in the morning. I follow my schedule religiously and this is my daily routine. I don't read newspaper and watch TV, because I think they distract me and I don't really care about the scandals and shitty news. I believe reading books make you a better person so I do that last thing in the day and it also make me sleepy. I go into sleep very quickly because I am dead tired and I see very good dreams.

Few people asked me to share my daily schedule so that is why I am writing a blog about it. If you are struggling with getting into a habit of doing things on time and trying to make your life better first try to get disciplined and lot of thing will improve.

Have fun!