Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved âwork-life balanceâ! Thatâs a powerful statement and validation of a feeling which I was carrying for many decades. I myself giving productivity seminars and coaching people to be productive and get the âwork life balanceâ. Actually, I stopped suggesting people on âwork life balanceâ long time, and was asking for âwork life fitâ , and I suppose thatâs the crack in my belief in Getting Things Done.
Very recently I celebrated my 42nd Birthday, and one of my well wisher has sent me this. đ§
And I came across this book, 4000 weeks! I lived 2200 weeks approx, and 4000 weeks is what typically a person leave at the age of 80! I just crossed my half life, And luckily this book got me into great revelation.
Master Your Time, Master Your Life
Brian Tracy (Time Management Guru)
This is what I believed, and striving so far to âmanage the timeâ, This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because this book made me understand the alternative, and it is so unsettling.
unfortunately, itâs the alternative thatâs true: the struggle is doomed to fail. Because your quantity of time is so limited, youâll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; youâll be obliged to make tough choices instead. And because you canât dictate, or even accurately predict, so much of what happens with the finite portion of time you do get, youâll never feel that youâre securely in charge of events, immune from suffering, primed and ready for whatever comes down the pike⊠and thatâs the âenlightening moment for me from this bookâ
lovely and short book on making us understand the concept of Finitude. The finite amount of time we have, and rather than spending this finite amount of time in struggling to manage it, how to be more effective by being in present and utilising it.
Key Take Aways
Patience become a form of power In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurryâto allow things to take the time they takeâis a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.
Hobbies have acquired this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time instrumentally. Iâm also guilty of this feeling. Sometime hobbies become kind of mandate, pushing me to consume me time under hobby to help me be more productive. Hobbies on other hand should help me relax not make me more busy. Kind a oxymoron.
Be in present. Youâre so fixated on trying to make the best use of your timeâin this case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right nowâthat it obscures the experience itself. A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not.
basic mistakeâof treating our time as something to hoard, when itâs better approached as something to share.
What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count? Itâs never late to find yourself doubting the point of what youâre doing with your life, because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred. we are no more preoccupied with the thoughts, ignoring the facts.
The real truth. that what you do with your life doesnât matter all that muchâand when it comes to how youâre using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
Photo clicked on Easter early morning in 1900, 5th Ave, New York
Where is the horse?
Photo clicked at same place on Easter Morning 1913
Assuming you can spot the car in first photo, itâs one single car moving along with all horse carts, and in the span of 13 year, canât spot a single cart in this rush hours by cars (there is one, if you have good eyesight)
So what?
The change is fast, itâs consequential and itâs quintessential for life. And as Heraclitus saidâŠ
We canât escape change, what will help reduce the anxiety for change is anticipating it. But without magical power or without magic ball, how to anticipate change or the future?
Anticipate future đȘ
Study Past
The past gives an ocean of information when it comes to understanding our behavior under a particular situation. If we are a good observer of the past, we can anticipate how we will behave with upcoming changes. As the changes are hardly drastic, unlike Pandemic like outlier events, the changes are typically subtle changes, what surprises us, is our ignorance. We ignore slight changes, which lead to big events. So, start studying the past, it could be as easy as just summarizing each day in your mind at the end of the day, week. (Can write diary, but Iâm not good at it, hence not recommending it)
Trends in other domains will soon affect your domain
The future, as I said, is not always an outlier. We canât prepare for outlier, and there is no point preparing for it, what we can do is connect the dots from past and help understand the upcoming future trends. Look for trends around, whatâs happening in other industries will soon come to your domain. You need to be aware and forcefully look for changes happening in other industries.
Be an Entrepreneur
Whatever you do, think like an entrepreneur, what does that mean? When you are an entrepreneur, you have skin in the game. You are invested, and you will have strategies to minimize risk. Now that comes naturally to entrepreneurial person, as he will always strive to survive and succeed. This is a mindset switch. Just thinking of yourself as an owner of a product, department, or organization you are responsible for, you will start working toward sustaining it. Thinking you own your life itself brings lots of clarity and ownership. We will stop playing blame games if we own our life.
Formulate
The anticipation also forms the basis for the next two actionable, âexploreâ and âformulateâ. How to formulate? Look for the following items to get some hints
What did last Yearâs strategic plan say?
What does your boss or organization want?
What new you expect this year and why?
Formulate Strategy
Write your vision statement.
Write down the strategic plan to show how you will respond and flesh out the mission statement out of your vision.
Figure out ways to make sure your future comes out the way you want.
The process is important, as important as the product BUT
The object of the plan is to change something so it must be IMPLEMENTED!
Any task you planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, âeven when you take into account Hofstadter’s lawâ in other word, even if you know that a given project is likely to overturn, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it will overrun your new estimated finishing time tooâŠ
Whatever you plan, you gonna miss it!
Iâm following productivity tools for past most than a decade, and teaching teams and people on productivity, time management and planning and prioritisation for past 10 years, and I came across this law!
Itâs like Iâm getting answers to my never ending grinding of brain to be âmore productiveâ and get my inbox zero!
It never happens, even if it happens, it stays that way for short while to be more frustrated and more demanding on self to be more productive, itâs never ending quest to be more efficient.
So the crux of this law is, even if you give yourself a standard advice during planning to give yourself twice as much as time needed for activities that your think you needed, could actually make matter worst, I.e failing in meeting that too.
This law is everywhere. We are so used to it, we just ignore it. However great companies are, however they are full of âplannersâ and âproject departmentsâ, they all face the same ire and same sense of âfalling behind scheduleâ. Whether itâs Airbus delaying and messing up with A380, or Boing messing up with its upcoming human space flight (Iâm sure both companies pride themselves for best of the best talents on world for risk based planning of their project. But here we are. Whether itâs desi L&T, having one of the biggest project departments in India, messing with timelines on each and every projects (ahmm⊠sea link) or Reliance for that matter. Or take our daily failure of estimating in how much time it will take to pick up the groceries on the way home from work. I underestimate each time. Itâs so evident, but itâs so hidden.
With much fanfare for this project, itâs what I understand 1/5th of whole scope, and not taking about cost escalations and timelines.
This is little unsettling, because the law seems true, certainly seems to be in my experience ~ it suggest something very strange : that the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans
đ§
Our effort to be come good planners, not only fails but causes things to take longer still. To be fair, specially during pandemic, whenever me and my partner tried to book some vacation in advance, eventually failed to execute due to last minute lock down announcements (planners are missing may be) or something at work didnât stick to the plan.
Trouble with so emotionally invested in planning for future my whole life is though, while it occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tend to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to take care. Non stop reviews of plan, anxiety on probable delays and upcoming delays, so much so, small success of achieving a milestone was getting overwhelmed by upcoming doubts on future millstones and actions to avoid those future delays, misses the opportunity on applauding what went great with last achieved milestones.
No one is certain about future, specially you can never be truly certain about the future, when we donât see present and appreciate it.
Itâs basically fight of tools. When you have plethora of tools available, you always get confused with which one to follow. In my case itâs R vs. Python
I like the ease of R to do data wrangling and get more insight but itâs Damm slow when it comes to running forecasts locally.
Python on other hand has huge ML libraries, and seems to be optimised for average PCs. Though the language itself is simple to learn, itâs not as nimble as R in RStudio
R also has many packages to do wonderful analytics specially forecasting, as thatâs my interest. Python also has similar packages but mostly ML is itâs strength.
Now when I get data, I really spend time is weighing the tools to be used by using them, and itâs killing the time. I think in need to Jordon my workflow on what to use for what and stick with it.
In this journey, I think Iâll be sharing some nice shortcuts and some challenges those Iâll be facing and coming up with some solutions, optimised or not.
Came across a blog with above title. And itâs wonderful. Itâs really mindset that.l needs to be fined tuned over what tools we use to make us more productive.
We have many tools and strategies as well as long list of self help books, whatâs needed is a mindset to change onceâs practice and become more productive.
What I have seen, including myself , we use and learn all these tools with Big Bang, but go back to original âproductivityâ, blaming either the tools, or being modest and blaming self discipline. Whatever those reasons are, the root cause is always âIâm not motivatedâ of being productive.
How counter productive is this? Oxymoron may be. But thatâs the truth. The truth is, unless one has high Blood pressure or deep sickness, one doesnât look for his health easily (I know, some of you reading this will be as fit as Rambo, but listen me out), similarly as ping the burn out is manageable and the underperformance is not impacting my routine Iâm ok with my habit of loosing sight of my goals or procrastinate something.
But why to wait?
Look for opportunities and start now. Start now saving time and start now in investing future. Iâll talk about this in coming blog. Meanwhile do visit the blog which I came across. https://www.jotform.com/blog/productivity-is-more-about-mind-management-than-time-management/
So thatâs that, i started my first post way back in 2001, that time in blogpost. With an idea of sharing my know how and make all aware of current good practices.
My passion was welding and mostly all my early blogs are about them. Back then, 21 year old me learning lots of things, and it was fun.
last 22 years, has given me opportunities to diversIfy my knowledge. And I take pride in myself, of able to learn so many diverse items.
after a really long break, I tried to do some justice to my website, obviously moving to own domain was one, thought that will give some commitment to peruse this further.
Thinking got me here, and start with my 1st post. its mot technically first, but its first from my long lost love of writing and sharing.
Question is
What should I share?
What should be the frequency?
is it ok to share my other passions here?
will it be a good place, or is blogging right platform to share diverse information?
How to make this more relevant and vibrant.
So let me continue think Iâve it and post here whatever I think is relevant. May be after some time it will boil down to some categories. God knows. But letâs start
What I will be sharing?
Question is what I can share. Okie let me give a thought, what are my interest, as that will keep me driving.
#Welding and pressure vessel: this is long lost love. Past decade in away from this subject. May be I need to rekindle this, and start sharing what little I think itâs amusing to me.
Books I read #GoodReads : I read almost a book per month, and recently started making mind maps out of it, itâs interesting, and I think I should share this with you all
#Machine learning, Timeseries and Forecasting : New skill set. Want to share whatever amuses me or whatever I came across as challenges. Sometime itâs as small as syntax error or sometime itâs choosing the right platform. Itâs all about R and Python, but itâs a hell of a world.
#Software : one of the biggest hobby, and a full time Garage project of mine. I got lots of insights and sleepless night while working on smithing as basic as creating my diary or as complex as creating calculations tools (hosted on this website). So lots of opportunities to share my know how here.
#Behavioural Science: This is a subject, I fallen in love with as I groomed as Manager and Leader. I work on #Productivity and # Planning as well as #skills to develop myself and my team members, I think it will be super cool to share my insights here
Letâs start, âThe sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up.â
Source unknown
So with those four five categories, let me work on next post.
Ringtone: Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in Mobile Phones
By Yves L. Doz and Keeley Wilson
Nokia, which easily can be termed as the most innovative company, helped bring the mobile revolution which currently we are in, adapting the need of being connected 24×7, and at its peak having more than 40% market share and a true leader. Though unnoticed many of us donât know Nokia still exists and is the world’s largest 5G infra company and still innovating. But what touched us is the Nokia Mobile Company, and this book is about its rise and fall. Breaking general misconception and reasons behind its fall.
Against the general perception of failure due to not looking ahead or lack of innovation, the reason behind the fall of Nokia Mobile company is due to a change in business model to a matrix organisation
Thatâs the summary of why Nokia mobile failed so miserably, itâs just because of poor execution of matrix organisation. And thatâs what interests me, as a leader myself, justifying the use of matrix organisation for better productivity, itâs even important to understand the consequences of its poor execution. This book covers all those aspects with Nokia as a centrepiece. Whereat all the phases of it, we were touched as a consumer or as heartbroken engineers to see the fall of such a beautiful product company.
Small trivia
Before I begin the review of this book, let me share how mammoth the Nokia is. We always see itâs mobile and thinks Nokia started as a mobile company and ended as one. However, itâs surprising to know Nokia started as a Cable company in Finland in the 1800s, moved to Telecom infra in the 1900s, followed by infra for the first car telephone and diversified with the mobile decision in the late 1990s
What this book Is about
It tries to answer following questions, which generally we also want to know.
Could Nokiaâs decline have been unavoidableâjust an extreme case of Schumpeterian creative destruction?
Was it an instance of organizational evolution and adaptation gone astray down a dead end in the face of disruption and business model change?
Was this a failure of management volitionâthe wrong strategic decisions, poor choices of organization, inadequate management processes, weak leadership, and bad timing?
Some insights
Nokia always had the edge with its strong innovation. For example, although Sharp launched the first camera phone in 2001, it was Nokiaâs camera phone released the following year which really changed the landscape, providing not only superior picture resolution but also picture-sharing applications that paved the way for multi-media communication. This product innovation came from fifteen labs around the world and a number of technical cooperation projects and partnerships.
Beyond product innovation, Nokiaâs success was supported by an innovative and highly efficient supply chain system that had been built in the 1990s. Through this, Nokia was able to achieve much lower prices from suppliers than its competitors and ramp up new production lines to full capacity in a matter of days. In the 1990s it had also mastered lean production and Japanese quality processes and organized its integrated manufacturing around a few key regional hubs in Europe (Finland, Germany, Hungary), Asia (China), and North America (Mexico).
Just as success often results from many small positive steps, the roots of failure can usually be found in multiple small mistakes, which seem manageable when viewed in isolation. However following this book we can see small cracks, however, they are evident now, and could not be avoided in the actual scenario. For example communication gap between R&D and Sales and Marketing lead to ultimate failure with the Symbian operating system. Though a leader in OS development themselves, delay in adapting Android and working with Microsoftâs half-cooked mobile platform led to the last nail.
CORE principle
Author has evaluated the various ups and downs in Nokia with CORE dimensions .
C Cognition: this is what leader saw during that phase at Nokia, and strategise
O Organisation : itâs outing strategy to action
R Relationship : itâs about relationship with people.
E Emotions : Emotions are at play during various phases, this is what impacts the relatioy
My MindMap
Key Takeaway
Shifting from Symbian to Microsoft OS, Nokia overestimated brand loyalty and werenât innovative enough
Decision made in 2001-05 made its impact in decline in 2013-15. Management need to be mindful of its long term impact.
Strategic foresight and intellectual leadership would have no value if not acted upon.
Poor management choices contributed to strategic stasis.
Successful past commitments leave a legacy
Outside parties, customers, major shareholders, strategic partners, industry pun- dits, and regulators can excessively and unduly influence oneâs sense-making, particularly in adhering to a âbeing close to customersâ logic.
Failure of cognition may not result from ignorance or lack of information, or even poor foresight, but from inadequate sense-makingâi.e. not making effective sense of available information.
Management systems and processes have to acknowledge the irrepressible influ- ence of emotions, and thus leave some room for them to be legitimately expressed.
Where to buy. Available on Amazon as Kindle and Hard copy.
Recall watching many dish tv antenna on top of very weak Jhuggi or in slum areas? Thinking, people who canât afford food and clean drinking water, how can they afford a TV? Itâs not rational right?
Wrong, my fellow reader, People knows what they wantâŠ
Television is more important than food
The book tells the story of a man in Morocco. After he made a compelling case that he and his family really did not have enough to eat, he showed us his largish television with a satellite connection. We might have suspected the television was just an impulse purchase he had subsequently regretted. But that was not at all what he said. âTelevision is more important than food,â he told us. His insistence made us ask how this could make sense, and once we went down that road it was not that hard to see what was behind this preference. There was not much to do in the village, and given he was not planning to emigrate, it was not clear that better nutrition would buy him much more than a fuller stomach; he was already strong enough to do the little work that was available. What the television delivered was relief from the endemic problem of boredom, in these remote villages where there was often not even a tea stall to relieve the monotony of daily life.
The book Iâm about to review, gives such examples , which are so co-relatable. Letâs start the review
The Book: Good Economics for Hard Times
By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Both are Nobel holders and married to each other
The book tries to answers questions like:
Is immigration a biggest problem, to swing our attention, political environment and really a concern?
Does welfare, free cash make people lazy?
Do we need to fear Automation? Will it take away all jobs, leading to more jobless people on ground?
Does inequality going to stay?
Is climate change really impacting productivity and poor people?
What this book do wonderfully?
The bookâs greatest contribution is its methodical deconstruction of fake facts: migration, we learn, is not on the rise â indeed, at 3% of global population, it is at the level it was in 1960. Natural experiments (involving Finns expelled from the USSR in 1945, Cubans flocking to Miami in 1980 and Jews settling in Israel in the 90s) prove that migrants do not steal nativesâ jobs; they just help expose the holes in public services and social housing left by austerity. As for trade liberalisation, which economists treat as super-important, Banerjee and Duflo suggest it brings relatively small benefits while doing a lot of damage to the poor in countries such as the US and India. The resulting discontent turbo-charges racism: the moment white blue-collar men lose hope and apply for disability welfare benefits, it is no longer enough for them to denigrate black people and Latinos as âwelfare queensâ. They must now be depicted as gang members or rapists.
My MindMap
Key topics and some insights
Impact on me
Current times, when you have more news coming on mobile than you go out and watch yourself or ask someone to validate it, and as people around loosing patience in a blink of an eye, and even knowing that the content received, has high probability of being a misinformation, we get biased and make out perceptions on surrounding and creating an irreversible situation around us. This book helps clear this muddy water, helps get clear reflection of self in clear water to know self better.
Reading this book helped me to understand my biases and basic assumption on human behaviour when it comes to subject like migrants, tax cuts or taxing riches, automation taking job away, climate change impacting once life, racist behaviour towards community either cast based or economy based.
The book clearly mentions, âWe should not stop telling the truth, but it is more useful to express it in a nonjudgmental wayâ. And it did wonderfully well in this regards it shares data points which we can see, validate and hence accept.
Key concept like to remember
StatisticalDiscrimination: This concept helps why police stops and checks black driver more often, why we see more Muslims âaccidentallyâ killed by authorities and why There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. Why we see so less women at leadership position. And how self discrimination impacts oneâs performance in a place, where there are no bias. (Self discrimination triggers once under performance thinking s/he is getting discriminated)
Where to buy? Itâs Available on Amazon as Kindle or hard copy. Great for collection.
Iconic Oral B Brush designed by IDEO, of which Tim Brown (author) is CEO. Till this point, we learned about ‘design thinking process’, with empathetic thinking, Defining the problem statement, Ideate the concepts, build prototype, test and launch the product.
The designer who designed it, once went to near by sea shore, and found few of colorful brushes washed over beach! the design came to its end of the life cycle, most of the part of the brush was intact.
Designer can’t prevent people from doing what they want to do with its product they own, but that doesn’t excuse them from ignoring the larger system. Often in our enthusiasm for solving problem in front of us, we fail to see the problem that we create.
Change by Design
The book is all about all round thinking while designing a product/solution for a problem. IDEO is the company, which has brought the ‘design thinking’ concept to masses. and Auther himself is known as one of the founding members of this key concept.
Key Concept/ Take away
Ideas for #Leader
What is design thinking
Finding interdisciplinary team members
Putting people first
Inspiring the birth of great ideas
Ideas for #Process
Look : Look at inspiration, ideation, and implementation together to become great at design thinking.
Prototype : Build the prototype of your idea and begin testing as early as possible to help you encompass all areas of innovation at once.
Storytelling : If you want to make your great new idea stick, use storytelling.
About Author
Tim Brown : CEO of IDEO
Tim is leading IDEO, and key person to bring ‘Design Thinking’
He has published many books/articles for this topic including for innovation.
Process on ‘how to innovate’ is explained simply, with three step approach. Innovation is an ongoing activity, its not an on/off like activity. One has to be mindful of his surrounding, get inspiration and how quickly we can bring idea to life thru rapid prototyping. Few example like complex product like google glasses the prototype was done in 30 min!
I Understand role of Empathy in design thinking, but the insight I got from this book is, empathy without action is of no use, what we need to do is act quicky and convert idea into reality by rapid prototyping.
