Time management ( especially at work )

A collection of thoughts around time management and a recipe for achieving your goals, especially as applied to work. A 'light' / less structured version of the same can be applied even outside of work. It is essentially the Pomodoro technique, however, I did not know that this technique has a proper name when I started using it a few years ago.

• Every week, I try to plan out my next week and wrap up this planning activity by Friday of the preceding week. 
• This allows me to be better prepared and more deterministic about my next week.
• Note that distractions, and high priority events will always happen, but other than that, it allows me to make sure that my time allocations are aligned with what I set out to achieve.
• I assume that you already have a list of short term and long term goals and deliverables that you want to accomplish. 
• If you don't, then that would be the first step.
• Ensure that you carve out time, via Calendar-based events for all the different goals that you have decided on a short term and long term basis. 
• This is probably the most important step, because this allows you to evaluate the importance of each goal against the time you have available. In other words, in this step, you are putting your money ( attention ), where your mouth ( time ) is. It also allows you to prioritize your goals in a more concrete manner, rather than amorphously thinking, I will accomplish xyz. If you are unwilling to carve out the time for your goal, then the goal is probably not that important to begin with !
• The time you carve out for each goal, should be proportional to the importance of that goal.
• Ensure that you have proper calendar events for those specific carved out times. 
• Make sure that you carve out the time as 'free' on your Calendar, so you continue to be available to your team if a high priority issue comes up and if a meeting needs to be setup at the last moment for a discussion.
• Make sure that the duration of such chunks of time matches the stretch of time you can focus well. In other words, if you can focus continuously and be productive for x minutes, then make sure that the chunk is of duration x minutes.
• Keep a short mental break of say 5 minutes between such chunks to allow you to context-switch to the next task / goal.
• Sometimes, I did not keep this short gap and it made context-switching pretty difficult, and also led to mental exhaustion and potential burn out.
• For any meetings that you are an organizer of, make sure that the agenda is clear and well-defined. 
• Also,  have an expectation around which questions to anticipate and also from whom, which inputs will be needed. 
• If the topic / subject area could be big, it might make sense to meet with a smaller group ahead of time, to clarify an issue. 
• Make sure that all the meetings you are a part of, have a well-defined agenda / goal. 
• If not then solicit feedback from the organizer about the goal for the meeting. This ensures that you are aware of what the expectations are for the meeting, and how specifically will you contribute to that meeting.
• For One:One meetings setup some dedicated preparation time and follow up time
• For One:One meetings, setup some dedicated preparation time, in which you call out the high level talking points in terms of what you want to present, as well as discuss / ask.
• Additionally, setup some dedicated time after the meeting to follow up on the next steps / tasks that came out as a result of the meeting
• Some of the follow-up items might be high priority, and it is best to get those addressed then and there, or the items might be lower priority in which case those could be deferred to a suitable date.

On Focused Reading...

Reading without focus can often be like mindlessly watching whatever is being shown on TV. In other words, it is highly important to focus your reading to topic(s) that genuinely interest you, and not just which are 'out there'. Another analogy for unfocussed incessant reading, is snacking incessantly on potato chips. Reading without focus, can thus also be termed as 'info-snacking', i.e. continuous intake of info-snacks, without thinking whether they are causing an improvement in intellectual health or not. Since, this realization I have tried to be more focused in what I read, and where I read it from.

Unchartered Territory....

What's the good about unchartered territory ? By definition, no one ( or atleast you yourself :-) ) has explored it, it is wide open for exploration, you set the pace, you set the rules and you show the way, and this can lead to personal growth. Ultimately, life is about exploration, and people usually remember the explorers, and not the followers. The objective of life should be to try to stay in explorer mode, and resist the urge to be in follower mode. There are other ways of saying the same, namely try to leave your comfort zone and go and do something new and unchartered...

.... and then Google+ entered

Google.com is one of the hottest properties on the internet, and that has enabled the search giant to get to where it is. Several years passed since 1998 ( when Google was launched ), and then in 2005, Zuck launched Facebook. Gradually the engagement factor of Facebook became a force to reckon with. 

Google’s business model was to provide adverts highly specific to the search query, and it has been a grand success for them so far. One potential pro / con of this approach was the fact that the results were independent of who searched for the results. However, in real life, this is not the case. This is because the same search query can mean multiple things to different people. Google searches, while being highly relevant, were completely devoid of this calculation, and yet it all worked out great for Google…

Then Facebook entered, and with it the user specified a myriad number of their personal preferences, and choices, and likes and dislikes. All of this information was subsequently available to Facebook, and to the other third-party vendors who dealt with Facebook as well. The difference in the level of targeting that Google could provide, versus what Facebook could provide was astounding… This is because Facebook could not only take into account what the user was searching for, but also use a plethora of information about user’s likes, dislikes etc. and then subsequently present advertisements which were relevant not just from the search query POV, but also from the user’s POV…

I believe that Google did not anticipate an attack on their core business from this attack vector, and were complacent initially. Finally Google decided that social was an important angle to the whole targeted advertisement business, and tried to enter the social space. After a few ‘failed’ social experiments ( Orkut, Buzz ), Google finally launched Google+, and also updated it’s privacy policy to more broadly integrate user’s interactions across different Google properties. With this change, Google encourages users to log-in and stay logged-in across the different Google product offerings, and also enables Google to learn more about the logged-in user. Slowly, but surely, Google is on it’s way to building a solid social graph…

On Meditation..

Wrote this after a nice session of meditation:

Meditation is like cleaning the lens of your mind, before and after each day, to see things more clearly, to see your purpose more clearly, to see your destination more clearly, to remove prejudices and pre-judged notions about anything since ultimately, mind, not the eye, is what creates an impression within us about a thing. The clearer the mind, the clearer the vision, the clearer the purpose, and the stronger / focussed will be our actions….

Work and motivation

Some random thoughts on work and motivation:

* Hard Work always pays back handsomely in the long run.

* You can also prioritize the hard work to generate immediate / short-term / tactical results. 

* In any undertaking in life ( or a project ), one of the possible categorization of sub-tasks can be 
1. Seemingly boring tasks, or
2. Exciting tasks.

The boring tasks are uninspiring, dull and tedious whereas the exciting tasks shine, impress and motivate. It has happened to me in the past, that the seemingly boring tasks can combine in previously unforeseen ways to lead to something which is appealing and inspiring. In other words, whenever you get bored with doing ‘grunt’ work, remember that it can very well be beneficial later. 

One excellent technique is to start off with the grunt work, and to then ‘reward’ yourself with more challenging activities, and then alternating between them appropriately. Also, very often one of the reasons why doing a grunt task may seem pointless can be that you do not know a real life use-case / application of what you are doing. In such scenarios, it is extremely useful to research for the potential / existing applications of what you are doing and how it can e applied to real life. As soon as you see a link to the real world applications, pursuing the topic may make much more sense and much less tedious. 

One of the examples of this, which I very vividly remember was given by Professor Saraswati when he was explaining the concept of Integral Calculus. Infact, I would say that most of the ‘good’ teachers that I have come across, have this knack and knowledge to link a topic of review with a something that the audience would care about. But now, I am digressing....

Things which are _truly_ valuable in life...

“Over a period of time, I have realized that the things which are _truly_ valuable in life are those which you cannot measure in terms of money. Things like love, friendship, dedication, commitment, good intentions etc etc.. There are many more, and in my humble opinion, it is these “things” which truly define a person and make him/her valuable.”

Efficiency

“Efficiency matters more than the sheer number of hours you put in….”

Anupam Dhyani's blog

Anupam Dhyani's blog→

A most interesting take on life, by my friend Anupam Dhyani. The posts are mostly in Hindi.

P.S.: Hopefully Google’s automatic translation will someday be good enough that the experience of Anupam’s blog for a non-Hindi speaker will begin to approach that experienced by someone fluent in Hindi. 

The programmer’s ( author’s ) ‘itch’

At several places, I have read that any piece of software is essentially an expression of a programmer’s ‘itch’ to solve a particular problem. This is all the more true for FOSS ( free open source software ), since it is by definition non-commercial. I believe the same applies to writers/authors(*) as well. I believe, at some point of time the ‘itch’ / self-chattering inside a writer’s mind increases to a point that expressing these thoughts in the open, starts to seem natural, spontaneous and an itch-reliever as well ! It seems to me that I have reached such a point. This blog will serve as an itch-reliever henceforth !

(*) = I use the term writer loosely here, i.e. not in the generally accepted ( I believe ) sense of a well-published author, but as a person who merely pens down his ( perhaps less than earth-shattering ) thoughts. A more accurate representation of my intent would be ‘thought-expressor’ ?

Small Business - Success Factors

The following factors, in my opinion, are some of the key driving factors for the success of a small organization. While it is true that the same factors are useful for an organization of any size, the factors below apply more to a smaller organization than a larger organization, due to the lack of dedicated functional resources which are usually available in a larger organization. * Cross-functional training In any organization, ‘silo’-ization of information is a problem. ‘Silo’-ization is a term I use to describe creation of distinct storehouses of knowledge / information about the company, and it’s processes. Some of it is unintended, simply because it is a tad impractical to know everything about everything in your organization. However, sometimes it is also intentional. In the latter case, there can be several driving factors: 1. Employee insecurity in imparting information which they think may be hazardous to their continued employment 2. Employee inertia to hold on to an existing skill-set and to not evolve with time. 3. Lack of good communication within the team leading to distrust, 4. Or just plain old laziness. This problem gets compounded as ‘silo’-ization increases and usually has an adverse impact on efficiency and viability of an organization as a whole. To counter these * Leading from the top While leadership from the top is key for an organization of any size, I believe it has a special meaning in case of a small company. In a small company, you typically get to know people more intimately than a small organization since one has to wear many hats at the same time. Therefore, top management personality traits can have a significant impact on the employees. * Documentation Documentation is essential for: - Maintaining project history over time. - Keeping a record of KPIs ( Key Performance Indicators ) over the years and trending them to evaluate current performance.

Business Process Mix

In general I have come to a realization that every organization needs to have an optimal ‘business process mix’. Firstly, what is a business process ? A business process can be defined as a sequence of elemental steps, which are required to ‘get a task done’. In terms of computer science, a business process is essentially an algorithm, i.e. a well defined sequence of steps which is required to transform an input to a desirable output. 

I believe for that for the ‘de-risking’ of day to day operations of an organization, having well documented business processes is essential. This helps in making the organization less dependent on a particular individual / resource for it’s day to day operations. This helps in increasing employee / management confidence in running a sustainable organization. A sustainable organization is one which is ‘fault-tolerant’, i.e. which has built-in redundancy. This means that the absence of a resource will not overly affect the core operations of the system / organization. A sustainable organization always tries to make itself redundant. It clearly identifies the core-strengths and functions performed by it’s resources, and tries to duplicate / cross-pollinate these functions all throughout the organization.

It seems to me that smaller organizations have a much higher need for documenting business processes, than larger organizations. This is because smaller organizations, by definition, have fewer resources and hence the responsibilities per resource increase. This increase in responsibilities leads to higher risk, per individual resource. This increase calls for a more aggressive business process documentation approach in smaller organizations, than in larger organizations. On the other hand, I have heard that it can take forever to get anything done in larger organizations, due to the highly structured processes. This can also be called as the ‘meeting for a meeting to organize another meeting’ syndrome. In such cases it would seem that it is important for someone at the top ( or the bottom, or at any layer in the hierarchy ), to be able to see through all the layers of management from top-to-bottom, and devise newer / more streamlined business processes. 

When nothing goes as expected ...

Over the past few days quite a few things have been going wrong. I am talking about several aspects of my life. The situation did seem grim initally. However, with a little bit of self-confidence, hard work, help of friends and I might add luck as well, I have emerged better off than I was before the calamity started. As part of this process of recovery, some concepts, have been reinforced in a more concrete manner than they were prior to these problems. These concepts are:

1. You always learn a whole bunch more from failures, than you do from a simple, straight-forward success.

I believe that no one will disagree with me when I say that the taste of success sure is sweet, but what is wrong to take so much pleasure from one success so as to become negligent of facts and fail to do a critical analysis of reasons for success. Life is a battle, everyday. This being the nature of life, it is best to convert every *attempt* at doing *anything* into a learning opportunity. Such an attitude helps in making one's character more resilient and *silently* self-confident. It maybe argued here that success implies victory, so what more is left to fight for if one has already won. This would be true, if life was a single *shot* affair. But, the fact is that life is *always* a fight, a daily one. While some aspects of life are under our control, the others are simply not. Hence, one may not always achieve success but there is also a chance of failure. The reason why failures help are because they make you much more prepared for the next battle as compared to a success. ( This does assume however, that one is willing to learn from one's mistakes !)

Another related aspect is the more battles you fight, the more prepared you are for the ones which are waiting for you. Here, the term battle is loosely used to mean *attempts* at achieving something, without caring for failure. The more one is obsessed with a potential failure, the more one gets discouraged from trying something. Therefore, one should never be shy of trying something new. As they say, leaving your comfort zone makes you a stronger person.

2. Hard work *always* pays.

Over the years, I have had some very vivid examples of the above, proven to me in a very direct manner. What has varied is the duration over which your hard work will pay, but for me I have found it always does. This lesson was reinforced again during the recent /battles/. When I say hard work, I especially mean hard work in areas which you are passionate about, and where you have *not* been asked to do that work by anyone else. Such activity is, to put it in another way, *pure* because it has not been performed due to any external prompting, but has been done completely due to your own passion. There is a chance that the quality of work while undertaking such an activity will be high, simple because it is borne out of an innate interest.

A tribute to Lokesh Venkat

21 March 2008 ........ 4:25 P.M. ->  Loki RIP

Update #2:

NTSB's reports :

• NTSB's interim report on the crash 
• NTSB's final report on the crash

Other News and Articles on this unfortunate accident :

• http://saulsse.com/2008/03/23/a-loss-before-the-weekend/
• http://www.sify.com/news/pilot-from-tn-killed-in-georgia-plane-crash-news-others-jegn7yjgife.html
• http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/2-dead-in-floyd-county-plane-crash/nJSsZ/
• http://www.aero-news.net/aNNTicker.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=f3b1f118-4ce2-429a-9db7-0081f457d7b8

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Update #1

If there was a guy who knew how to live life king size, it was Lokesh. An amazing attitude which made him get along well with every type of person. He was an amazing pilot, a very helpful person who always had solutions to your problems, always cheerful and a very big fan of Vijay Mallya. He had dreams of being a superlative pilot with the aim of eventually flying A380 with KFA. He also helped several aspiring pilots and guided them to success.

The unthinkable has happened, proving the unpredictability of life. I hope that God gives the strength to his family members to bear the unbearable pain of this tragedy. Unfortunately for us, the plane on which Lokesh was flying did not have a CVR or a FDR, so we will not be able to get the exact causes of the tragedy. I hope that NTSB is able to uncover the causes behind this tragedy.

Lokesh's Orkut Profile : http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=18214813016370570004

A Community dedicated to remembering Loki : http://www.orkut.com/Main#Community?cmm=46924220

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The pictures below are from my first, and unfortunately only flight with Lokesh Venkat. It was a great experience flying with him because he had the correct balance of being meticulous and having fun at the same time. He displayed all the qualities of a good pilot and I never felt that he was a 'student' pilot. What I am certain of, is that had Loki been with us, he would have been a great pilot. Other than having good piloting skills, he had a very outgoing personality. He was the kind of friend with whom you could talk about anything and be assured of being engaged in a well thought out discussion. Not a moment with him was boring and his sense of humor was worth emulating.

I had talked to him a few days before he passed away, I was in Vegas and we were planning to go to another flight when I would get back to Atlanta. He was very excited about coming back from India, after attending his sister's marriage. Also, he was nearing the end of his training and raring to become a commercial pilot for Kingfisher Airlines. This was because he had a lot of respect and admiration for Mr. Vijay Mallya and his achievements.

He left us doing what he loved to do ..... flying, flying faster and higher...

Our flight was from PDK to MDQ at Hunstsville, Alabama, and it was on January 04, 2008, and it was my first flight in a Light Sports Aircraft.

After landing at MDQ - Loki posing infront of a sleek Gulfstream

Loki managing the controls of N841 AA

Loki infront of the terminal at MDQ

Loki, aligning N841 AA for landing

Loki, checking fuel before taking off from PDK

Planning vis-a-vis Execution...

Sometimes , when someone asks us: "Hey, you were going to do this task 'x-y-z', did you do it yet ?", we reply by saying that even though I have not done the task yet, but I am "planning" to do it in the future. It is at times like these that we must reflect and think if we were really planning to do that task in the future, or was that statement used more like an excuse.

One must always consider that a person is always recognized and remembered by what he or she has already "done", not by what he or she "plans" to do. For example, let's take the case of Mahatma Gandhi's famous Dandi march. Suppose, that it so happened that Mahatma Gandhi expired a few months before the march. Assuming here for a moment, that the Dandi march was until then, Mahatma ji's largest venture, would we remember him by saying, "Mahatma'ji was great, because he had planned to undertake the Dandi march"? Would we remember him by saying, "Mahatma'ji was great, because his planned Dandi march would have mobilized thousands of Indians and bolstered the non-cooperation movement?"

I personally believe that we wouldn't have thought so highly of Mahatmaji if his thoughts and ideas had remained crystallized as plans (i.e. never materialized). In other words, his Dandi march was appreciated and recognized, because it did happen, and despite all the hurdles it did get executed. The fact that the Dandi march did happen, and it did mobilize thousands of Indians is something which we give due credits for, to Mahatma'ji. Therefore, plans are not worth the piece of paper they are written on, if the plans themselves are not planned to be executed. The eventual measure of success of planning, are the achieved results and the results are only possible after execution. This post does not serve to undermine the value of planning. I recognize that planning is a very important tool in the success of a project, but planning must always be done with one eye on execution.

On Excellence

I have found that excellence is a habit, and it is not like a feature which can be turned on or off selectively. That is, if you excel in a certain sphere of life, then I believe that your chances of excelling in other, seemingly unrelated areas are high. That is because the secrets to success, in seemingly unrelated areas are the same, only their implementation is different. As a side note, my personal experience has been that there are some days, when I am more diligent than the average, and on such days the quality of my work, irrespective of the domain is of a fulfilling nature. On other days, the exact opposite is true.

Dedicated to all the Pilots

Read this somewhere, truly amazing and conveys my sense of awe for all those who fly !

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I hope there's a place, way up in the sky,
where pilots can go, when they have to die.

A place where a guy can buy a cold beer
for a friend and a comrade, whose memory is dear;
a place where no civil servant or lawyer can tread,
nor a management type would ere be caught dead;

Just a quaint little place, kind of dark, full of smoke,
where they like to sing loud, and love a good joke;
the kind of place where a lady could go
and feel safe and protected, by the men she would know.

There must be a place where old pilots go,
when their paining is finished, and their airspeed gets low,
where the whiskey is old, and the women are young,
and songs about flying and dying are sung,

Where you'd see all the fellows who'd flown west before,
and they'd call out your name, as you came through the door.
who would buy you a drink, if your thirst should be bad,
and relate to the others," He was quite a good lad !"

And then through the mist, you'd spot an old guy
you had not seen in years, though he taught you to fly.
he'd nod his old head, and grin ear to ear;
and say," Welcome, my son, i'm pleased that you're here".

" For this is the place where true flyers come,"
" When their journey is over, and the war has been won."
" Relax with a cool one, and a well deserved rest;"
" This is heaven, my son...... You've passed your final test!"

Opinions

Opinions

-        Sometimes it can be a curse to be ‘too’ opinionated. However, I feel it is absolutely very difficult to _not_ form an opinion about many things in life. Maybe that’s just me, in which case it still is OK since this is my blog and all of these are my opinions. :D But, anyways, here is my rationale for my line of thought. Suppose we consider _any_ juncture of your life, when you are seeing new things and/or meeting new people, it is but natural to think and mull over about one’s experience with the place/person/whatever. In general, it is a natural human tendency to place one’s experience in wide ‘buckets’ of goodness/badness etc. As time passes, one’s bucket of categorization becomes narrower and narrower, in other words, it becomes more specific, which again is natural. Here I would like to note, that opinions are based on one’s experiences and/or observations. Observations can be extremely subjective and can depend on too many variables to even comment about. Some parameters can be, what was your ‘mood’ at the time of observation, how was ‘your’ reaction to the person / place in the first place, did you interact with the person with a bias, was the person biased when he/she was talking to you which ended up affecting their reaction to you and thus inturn your ‘experience’ ? Thus, we can see that there can be many parameters which can end up affecting our observations and make them less subjective / more objective. Observations lay the foundations for our opinions, thus a subjective observation will lead to a biased opinion. Hence, for one to have an unbiased (relatively speaking ofcourse since one man’s bias is another man’s neutrality) it is important to be as objective as possible during the process of observation. In other words, one must be able to stop oneself from jumping to conclusions without proper observations….

Questions...

Questions

-          Asking questions, lots of them with genuine interest is one of the best ways of learning. Before a questions is asked however, it is very important to realize however that one must try to accumulate all the possible resources and tools one has to possibly answer the question. Let me try to answer what I sat. Questions are usually asked in response to ‘problems’. Now, it is possible that at any given point of time you might have the necessary knowledge base to attack a question, but you might not have the correct direction / approach to attack the problem. Anyways, my point is that the process of self-introspection / investigation into one’s existing knowledge base is very important _before_ one asks the question because once that is done, and your question gets answered, you know _exactly_ what you were missing in your thought process and/or knowledge base and you are much better able to integrate the knowledge acquired to attack future problems. Furthermore, such knowledge is more likely to stick with you for a longer period of time.

Joy

Joy == Knowing what you want, next, getting what you want because you know you want it, and finally the realization that you got what you wanted because you knew what you wanted. :)