Archives for July 2020

Death by a thousand cuts

2020-07-23 By Sachin Leave a Comment

Lately, there’s been so much to do that I generally haven’t had much time to do the important stuff. Or at least set aside a block of time to do it all.

What I’ve been doing is whatever time I have available, just do a bit. Even if it’s only fifteen minutes, do something.

Now, this doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s better than nothing. And it means that I can’t use the excuse that I don’t have time, because I can usually find fifteen minutes or so.

Since I’ve been doing this over the past two months, I’ve been able to:

clean my office
sort out my piled-up mail
clear out old notes
read two books
do my literature review for my Master’s thesis
several reports
watch a series on Netflix (yes, at fifteen minutes at a time)

It may take longer to get things done, but not a long than had I not done anything at all. Plus, I don’t feel too much like a loser at the end of the day anymore. I now feel like a doer.

Scattered

2020-07-22 By Sachin Leave a Comment

Sometimes I would just listen to people and analyse them. It would often throw people off a bit while I’m staring at them intently, but that’s their problem, not mine.

What often interests me is their thought process. I will try to break it down and understand why they think that way, even if they are obviously wrong. I like to do this with conspiracy theorists, but I could never make it through – their minds are like, whoa!

I tend to think in a very structured way, analysing paths and possibilities. Others, well they just jump in. Now, jumping in may work well if it’s some sort of creative endeavour, but not so much when engineering something or troubleshooting an issue.

I’ve tried to teach my method and process of thinking, but only people who think the way I do tend to understand. Others may attempt it, but they just fall back to their way of doing things.

This sort of scattered thinking, as I call it, is common I found. It gets worse in an environment with many distractions, simply because there isn’t time to formulate a proper thought. But these are people with great ideas, though. However, they have a challenge executing. It’s all intriguing.

Maybe I’ll figure out a way to help them one day. If you thought I was going to be helpful, that’s very interesting.

No rest for the weary

2020-07-21 By Sachin Leave a Comment

For a long time, I’ve been an early to bed, and early to rise kind of guy. However, recently this has gone out the door.

With my job as it is, and me struggling to make progress on my Master’s thesis, I’ve been spending far more late hours just trying to do a few minutes of work. Not to mention writing a blog entry, and reading a bit; both habits with which I’m trying to keep up.

Getting up early used to be a thing that I used to look forward to. I would get up and exercise, read or meditate – something to get my day started right. Now, it’s get up and get going out the door. So I don’t start the day “right”. They say the most successful people get up early, don’t they?

This was bothering me for a while. On the one hand, I need the extra time in evenings to get my important things done, but on the other, getting the morning started “right” was important too.

It took some time to be okay with losing that part of me that identified as an “early riser”, as getting my Master’s thesis completed was more important and this time. Plus, it’s only temporary, and I could get back to that routine once this is all finished.

In the end, I chose to work on my thesis and forget about the early rising stuff for now.

Now, I just need to find a way to squeeze in an extra hour of sleep. These late hours are hard.

Budget time

2020-07-20 By Sachin Leave a Comment

In most organisations, budgeting is an annual process.

During this period business units take time to plan out the purchases for the next year. They look at projects that align with the strategic direction of the business and decide which will have the most impact. Reasonable estimates for time and cost is chosen. The process is relatively simple and often leads to a successful year ahead.

AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Budget time has consistently been a hectic, rudderless boat, with people often unsure what they are going to do next. And estimates are often based on SWAG – Scientific Wild Ass Guesses.

Now, most budget items have the best intentions, but depending on how your organisation uses the budget, it just becomes a burden. This could happen for a few reasons:

most organisations will not make a purchase unless it was budgeted for, so essential purchases may have to be deferred until the next year.
this leads business leaders to overload the budget with things they “may” do the following year, but not quite sure.
because the budget is so overloaded, finance departments have to go through and cut many budgets, because there is no cohesiveness in budgets as they are done separately across units. This leads to critical items getting cut sometimes, simply because they were large budgets.
because many of the items made it to the final budget may not have been truly important, they often get deferred.
these deferred projects lead the finance people to say that you never really needed that money and cuts the budget further the next year.

In the worst cases, because business units do not want to lose the money, they just spend it on something. Then that something is either wasted or implemented so poorly that you may be better off having not purchased it, to begin with.

This whole thing happens because of Year-on-Year accounting mainly.

Budgeting itself as a practice is not a bad idea. I work with a budget for my personal and home life and know the benefit of doing so. The difference is that I don’t lose my budget if I didn’t spend money over the past year, and the amount of money I earn the next year is unaffected by how much I did spend. Further, I don’t have to deal with shareholders.

Organisations can choose to be a little or pragmatic about this whole process but want to be pedantic instead.

Tsundoku

2020-07-19 By Sachin Leave a Comment

Tsundoku (Japanese: 積ん読)
(Noun)
Acquiring books but leaving it unread while letting them pile up with other unread books.

I have hundreds of books; I don’t know precisely how many. I’ve read maybe 10%, maybe less.

It hasn’t stopped me from buying more books. Right now, my Amazon cart has almost 70 books to buy later and much more in my wish lists. And my Kindle library? Well, I’ve got more than 500 books there. Those 99¢ books are going to take all my money one day.

It drives my wife crazy. One, because to her it’s wasting money. Two, because I’m always on her case about how she’s not watching how she spends money. I could understand her feelings.

I sometimes feel powerless to resist the urge to buy a new book that piques my interest. Or if I have a particular need right now and come across a book, I’ll buy it immediately, even if that need dissipates soon after.

Then there are cases where I would buy a book on a topic, only to find that I’ve already purchased a similar book on the same subject before, but haven’t read it. Then I have two books on the topic that now remains unread. One of those topics is on procrastination; how fitting.

But why do it?

Because I thirst for knowledge, and I like to have it at my fingertips. And yes, I know much of that information is on the Internet, but you can’t be a book, where someone has taken the time to distil information on a topic and put it in an easily accessible format.

I used to feel down for not reading them all, but I don’t so much anymore. It’s worse for books that I started reading and didn’t like. I used to keep reading it, no matter how painful until someone told me, “life is too short, and there are too many good books out there to read, to read a shitty book.” Deep.

There are millions more books out there that I still haven’t read. I will never get to read them all, and I will never stop trying to. Maybe one day I’ll have a mansion with a library big enough to satisfy me. Until then, I’ll just put them in piles.

Habitica

2020-07-18 By Sachin Leave a Comment

About two months ago I signed up for Habitica, which according to the Habitica Wiki, is an open-source habit building program that treats your life like a Role Playing Game.

I spoke about Habitica briefly before last month, and so far, my experience has been positive. It has helped incentivise me to complete some essential items and make progress along with my goals. Enough so that I decided to take out a year subscription just to support the product.

It’s important to note that purchasing a subscription is not required for any part of the critical functionalities of Habitica. The only incentives for purchase add little value – like access to backgrounds or decorations. This, to me, was one of the things I liked about the product, in staying true to its purpose.

The critical aspect of Habitica is gamifying completion of tasks. The gameplay is tied to three main areas:

To-Dos – these are one-time tasks or items to do that do not reoccur.
Dailies – these are tasks that reoccur, whether daily, weekly, monthly or annually.
Habits – these are habits that you want to build or change.

You gain experience points (XP) for completing items from these areas. You gain damage and lose health if you don’t complete all of your tasks or dailies in time, or hit some bad habits (-). As you gain experience, you level up, and the higher you go, the more XP you need to level up.

You also get coins that you can spend in the market place to buy items such as equipment or quests. If you have a subscription, you can buy gems to get other things, but remember that these don’t confer any advantage to the gameplay (won’t give you XP or boost your stats).

All of these act as rewards to keep you going, or punishment to keep you on the straight and narrow. This is all part of using the habit loop in habit formation. Of course, you could cheat and just check off items, but you’re only cheating yourself, and then, what’s the point?

There is a strong community in the background, both in developing the application (it is open-source) and the forums (called guilds). The guilds are a nice touch with many Habiticians (that’s what they’re called) helping out each other. I’ve never asked a question and not get an immediate answer.

There are other aspects of the game such as quests, parties and challenges that I won’t get into, but adds character to the game.

I suggest you give it a try if you’re looking for a new way to help achieve your goals.

Toot one’s own horn

2020-07-17 By Sachin Leave a Comment

I always say to my IT team – 50% of our work is PR.

Now maybe that figure might be off, but a lot of our work should entail some form of PR (public relations if you don’t already know). This is because many people do not realise the work that IT does, especially in the backend.

More than that, though, many IT persons (and people in general) do not take note of their accomplishments. We generally notice it during interviews when asked questions like, “What are you most proud of?” or “Give a time that you overcame adversity?”

Perhaps it’s because we have always been taught to be humble and not talk about ourselves. So we’ve raised people not to recognise their successes, and further, not be willing to share those successes with others so that they may benefit.

Not being able to speak about your successes also limits your chances of growth in the organisation that you’re employed. You can’t get promoted if people don’t know the excellent work you’re doing.

Some simple ways of growing a habit of recording success:

Daily / weekly reports of things that went well and things that need improvement and share it with your boss and team.
Start a journal where you state things that went well, even if it was tiny.
Have a small knowledge sharing sessions, such as a lunch and learn, where you can share something you recently discovered or done.
Help another team member when they are struggling. Like the previous point, but this is more about building confidence in yourself.

These simple items are no way close to bragging, and you shouldn’t come out feeling inauthentic in any way. Give them a try.

Distorting the truth

2020-07-16 By Sachin Leave a Comment

Lying does not come easily to me. Even flattery – what we call mamaguy – is hard for me if what I’m saying is untruthful; any flattering thing I say is based on truth.

However, the world is filled with people who think that lies are just par for the course.

Politicians, for example, think nothing of lying to the electorate so that they can win elections or get their way. What we see right now in the US with the current president and his cronies willingly distorting the truth, being called out, and still getting away with it, is a really extreme case. Denying the truth (“fake news”), shooting the messengers (attacking reporters and whistleblowers), and pandering to emotions rather than fact, are all tools of the pathological liers.

With the US leading the way with these distortions, others will be quick to follow suit. It’s only a matter of time before the politicians in smaller democracies find themselves doing the same, or even worse. I mean, if one of the “greatest” democracies can act like that?

With the elections of my country in the air right now, I’m concerned that we will begin to act that way. I’ve already seen videos being shared about with fake facts, and some repeating consistent allegations (like money for votes). It shows how much we have not grown as a people.

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Archives for July 2020

Death by a thousand cuts

Scattered

No rest for the weary

Budget time

Tsundoku

Habitica

Toot one’s own horn

Distorting the truth

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