Change, How Fast? How to predict?

Productivity, , , 
How to see the future without magical power...

Where is the car?

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, it’s one single car moving along with all horse carts, and in the span of 13 year, can’t spot a single cart in this rush hours by cars (there is one, if you have good eyesight)

So what?

The change is fast, it’s consequential and it’s quintessential for life. And as Heraclitus said…

We can’t 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 🪄

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 I’m 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 can’t 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, what’s 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, “explore” and “formulate”. How to formulate? Look for the following items to get some hints

  • What did last Year’s 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!

Hofstadter’s Law

Productivity

Any task you planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law” 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 too…

Whatever you plan, you gonna miss it!

I’m 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!

It’s like I’m getting answers to my never ending grinding of brain to be “more productive” 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, it’s 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 “planners” and “project departments”, they all face the same ire and same sense of “falling behind schedule”. Whether it’s Airbus delaying and messing up with A380, or Boing messing up with its upcoming human space flight (I’m 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 it’s 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. It’s so evident, but it’s so hidden.

With much fanfare for this project, it’s 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

🧐

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 didn’t 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 don’t see present and appreciate it.

Productivity

Productivity, ,

Productivity Is More about Mind-Management than Time-Management

by Aytekin Tank

Came across a blog with above title. And it’s wonderful. It’s 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, what’s needed is a mindset to change once’s 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 “productivity”, blaming either the tools, or being modest and blaming self discipline. Whatever those reasons are, the root cause is always “I’m not motivated” of being productive.

How counter productive is this? Oxymoron may be. But that’s the truth. The truth is, unless one has high Blood pressure or deep sickness, one doesn’t 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 I’m 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. I’ll 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/

See you soon

Long time no see!

Productivity
Thats for me 😅

long time no see

So that’s 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 I’ve it and post here whatever I think is relevant. May be after some time it will boil down to some categories. God knows. But let’s 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 it’s amusing to me.

Books I read #GoodReads : I read almost a book per month, and recently started making mind maps out of it, it’s 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 it’s as small as syntax error or sometime it’s choosing the right platform. It’s all about R and Python, but it’s 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

Let’s start, “The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up.”

Source unknown

So with those four five categories, let me work on next post.

See you soon

ERP

Productivity

Lately (late in my career), that is for past three years, i’m working on various ERPs. Offcourse i started the work on engineering domain. But thanks to my friends in other domain, who helped me in understanding other modules too. In my recent company i’ve developed my own ERP. it was made to take care of all engineering needs, and it was now running for past two year. Mean while i’ve also implemented full fleaeged ERP system. With which my software do seamless communication.

This implementation has given me insight on various aspects of organization, like finance, production, purchase and offcours engineering.

Point is, can i develop an ERP of my own? I think its not a tough target. But can i implement one? Yes for sure.

See you soon.

About the Tools!

Productivity, Programming Language, Technical

Day In day out I’ve to do Thermal Calculation, the fuel combustion analysis, mass balance or design of heat exchanger, Why not to formulate them & use it as a GUI based program.. I’m great fan ov Visual Basic 6.. & all my applications are stand alone.. means no set up required just save it & run it 🙂
Here I’ll share about the tools I’m developing

If you are intrested please mail me @ papasumit@gmail.com for a FREE COPY

You can see the Screen shots of the programs.. I’ll add details soon

Boiler Engineers Tool


Fuel Combustion Tool

Heat Exchanger Design

Finned Tube Heat Exchanger Design


More to come….