Here is a typical day of someone who sent this to Caterina Fake:

This style of working is explained further in “Don’t Multi-task When You Can Use Chunking”.

What does your day look like?

About six months ago, I had stopped reading all RSS feeds because I wasn’t managing my information input well. Over the past few months I was slowly creeping back into the same RSS habit and I didn’t like it.

The biggest problem for me was seeing that unread count number^*. It was intimidating and I quickly started procrastinating reading the articles, which was ironic, because we mostly read RSS feeds to procrastinate from doing real work

I thought to myself: “There must be a way to list all my favorite blogs and websites, I can add them and forget about it. Whenever I want to get updated, I just visit the page and read all the latest, and then go away again. There is no need to keep memory of how much I read and how much I did not read.”

I started looking at My Yahoo! to list the websites I follow. It allows to add RSS feeds and will show you the latest 5 posts from that RSS feed. But then, MyAlltop came along and solved it more elegantly for me:

• MyAllTop is easy to scan, i.e., read because of the newspaper-style 3 columns of blocks, compared to My Yahoo!’s big horizontal blocks (maybe there’s a way to get the layout of your liking, but I couldn’t find it).
• When you mouseover a link in Alltop/MyAlltop, it will show a few paragraphs from the article which makes it easy to discern whether the title is misleading or if the article is really interesting.
• The Alltop directory is very useful (which reminds me of the origins of Yahoo! – a directory of websites) in finding the best blogs on a particular topic, which is a harder problem than I imagined. I don’t know if Google Reader’s “bundles” had solved this problem, but I definitely find this a good resource.
• I used to regularly visit india.alltop.com to read the latest news but used to get annoyed by irrelevant-to-me blocks. Now I can just add the ones that I’m interested in to MyAlltop page.

In the end, I’ve switched from Google Reader to my.alltop.com/swaroopch and I’m finding it far more fun to read this way. This is also useful if you ever wondered what blogs I read, it’s all in one page.

If you have any other “How to control your information input” tips, please comment.

^* And if you wondered that I must be nuts to get bogged down by the unread count number, let me tell you that I’m not nuts, I’m actually a Inbox Zero freak. I tend to reach inbox zero on email every week regularly. If only I could say the same about my todo list…

Update on June 13, 2009: I wanted to try a new idea – to randomly see the list of feeds every time, so I ditched MyAllTop and wrote a small html file that uses Google AJAX Feeds API to display the feeds list. Let’s see how this experiment goes.

A big question that keeps coming up for an attention-deficit person like me is “How do you get into the flow?”

There are two things that work for me and I find them at loggerheads against each other. The problem is that it has been difficult to stick to either of them.

One is called being a night-owl, the other is called the MIT factor.

I love to work late nights. Life is completely undisturbed, you’re not going to get phone calls, there are no noises, nobody’s expecting email replies from you, nobody around to disturb you. All good.

But being nocturnal ain’t easy. Your whole life is thrown off-balance as well as your body’s natural cycle. Yet some of the best hackers I know are night-owls. They hack away their code and leave the rest to management. I’m not sure that’s a viable option for us in a startup where we do everything including working with many partner companies. Besides, I don’t wish it to go to such depths of imbalance, for example, I want to maintain my regular running but it is not possible when you wake up late. And running in the evenings on Bengaluru roads is defined as insanity. The struggle is productivity/flow vs. life balance.

The second is called “The MIT Factor.” Do the Most Important Task first thing in the morning. It’s that simple. Don’t think about what’s ahead in the day, don’t think about what bills are pending, don’t think about planning to reach office on time (just have a fixed deadline when you have to start getting ready and think no more about it). Just switch on your computer or take out your pen and paper as soon as you wake up and start working on it. The important thing is Don’t think. Just start working on it.

The problem with the second option is that if you don’t wake up early, you again end up in the daily grind where you may not get focus. And you need to have the discipline to immediately start working. Whatever you do at the start of the day sets the mood for the rest of the day. For example, you check email first thing in the morning? You’ll tend to do the same activity for the rest of the day.

The bottom line is I think there is a psychological concept where you have to load the entire problem, the entire domain on what you’re working on into your head and that takes time, say 15-20 minutes and then you suddenly start solving problems. But if you subconsciously know that you’ll get disturbed any time in those 15-20 minutes, the brain almost gives up and doesn’t think it’s worth putting in that investment to get into the flow if it is going to ultimately get disturbed. Is this true? I have no idea, just a theory that I’m beginning to believe (I can’t remember if I read this somewhere or just an opinion I’m forming for myself).

I wonder how other people approach this concept of “getting into the zone.”

Further reading:

• Flow in Psychology as defined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
• Geek to Live: Control your workday by Gina Trapani
• Disconnecting Distraction by Paul Graham – I’ve been applying some of the ideas here and so far I’ve had good success.
• Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

A list of blogs I read has been published in the Mint Lounge newspaper on 13-Dec-2008 Saturday. Read it online on the Mint website or in the epaper section.

Thanks to Sidin for asking me to write this and publishing it in Mint.

Unfortunately, as typical of newspapers, my words were modified to something that is newspaper-y which is really not my style, and the article was printed before I got a chance to review. And no, that short bio was not written by me

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As a small experiment, I had put up a skribit sidebar where anybody can suggest what I can write about. Little did I know that it would actually be used seriously. Someone posted the topic “On how fresh graduates can learn independently and grow. Instead of waiting for the Company to help” and today, there are 9 votes on it!

To be honest, I think I am not qualified enough to answer this question. I am certainly no role model. But since 9 people have voted on it, I feel obliged to write something useful. I have jotted down some thoughts on what ideas and habits have helped me, it may not necessarily be useful for everyone. I hope these fresh graduates who voted will pick the best ideas and habits suited for them.

Character and Lifestyle

Instead of focusing on building a career, why not focus on building a character? The career will take care of itself.

• “Sow an act… reap a habit; Sow a habit… reap a character; Sow a character… reap a destiny.” – George Dana Boardman
• As Cal Newport would say, “Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.” … Too often, we confuse the medium (lawyer, doctor, engineer, etc.) with the message (what is important to us, what we want to do). So it’s far more important to figure out what you want out of life, then figure out how to achieve that rather than the other way around. And only you can figure this out for yourself.
• I would recommend reading First Things First by Stephen Covey to help you understand your priorities in life.
• Most important of all, find your inner peace. Remember that “Satisfaction is within.”

Career Building

Basically, you need to take initiative in what you want to achieve, no one can tell you what you have to do, life is not that simple. I’m glad the original question poser said that he/she wanted to grow “Instead of waiting for the Company to help”, you’ve got that part right already.

I recommend reading:

• The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 2: Skills and education
• Career Advice presentation by Garr Reynolds
• How To Get A Job Like Mine by Aaron Swartz

Get Results

• “Results, Jay. Results. Otherwise you can’t expect rewards.” — “Vertigo” novel, by Ashok Banker
• Do deliberative practice, not just “a lot of work.”
• Stick to the 10-year plan. There are no shortcuts to success.

Ultimately, you need to take action and get results. It’s not enough to just plan and hope. As Morpheus would say, “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”

Read

My personal slogan is “I read. Therefore I do. Therefore I am.” If I compare myself to my school days and today, there has been a major transformation in character and outlook, and I attribute that purely to reading.

A great part of my learning also comes from writing, hence the blog, wiki, books, and twitter. It might seem like a waste of time, but I learn more by communicating. But that’s just me.

• Read, Read, Read, the single advice given by Warren Buffett (one of the world’s richest men)
• Tactics For Reading, by Trent Hamm
• 25 Articles Every Student Should Read
• For every hour that you read, you must gain 3 hours of experience – Scott H Young

If you don’t know where to start, I would suggest The Personal MBA Reading List.

Friends

Make valuable friends. This is the most important tip I can ever give you.

Equally important, make the right kind of friends. Yes, it’s tough to let go of friends who you intuitively know are not the right influence on you, but speaking from experience, it is worth it in the long run.

As a wise man once said, “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.”

Learn Your Trade

For example, if we are talking about a software engineer:

• Debugging is the most important skill, not coding. I wish I had known this when I was in college.
• Reading is a great habit that has a side-effect that you will also have the ability to read a lot of code and build up the structure inside your head about how the code works, just like you have to imagine what is written in a book or novel.

I also recommend reading:

• How To Be a Programmer
• Do Side projects
• Keep Learning

If you are looking for more in-depth knowledge, I would recommend taking a look at this Stack Overflow discussion.

Make A Difference

Consider this excerpt from a Business Week article:

One vocal camp even maintains that the repetitive nature of writing software code has corrupted Bangalore’s intellectual spirit. “These 20-year-olds are like coolies, doing the same job over and over,” says CNR Rao, a Bangalorean scientist who has been an adviser to the Indian government for decades. The software industry, he says, has turned the city into a glorified sweatshop. “Where is the innovation?” he asks. “How does this contribute to anything but greed and commerce?”

The joy of programming is the joy of building and creating something. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we can build and create something useful for other people? If yes, why aren’t we doing more of that? After all, there is no dearth of things that we can create.

Closing Statement

Hopefully, I have given some food for thought here.

If this article was useful, please feel free to post suggestions on what I can write about on my skribit page.

I’ve been pondering about specialization vs. generalization in terms of career skills.

I have this notion that I should be a maven, should be an expert at something. But yet, I mostly do things that are the very opposite of this idea.

Since I don’t tend to be a specialist, I tend to not focus on a particular topic. I want to learn about different things and hence I tend to meet people of varied interests, and consequently end up being excited about a lot of different ideas. For example, one of my good friends is someone who I happened to meet on a bus because my seat was next to his, and we talked non-stop for 5 hours from the moment we said ‘Hello’. I was able to connect with him well because I knew a bit about his profession and we had some common terminology right at the beginning of the conversation. And I really love having such conversations. It’s one of the things that really motivate me and it ends up throwing me in different directions.

Maybe it’s not really a generalization vs. specialization debate, and more of an attitude. Then again, I see that people tend to really pigeonhole themselves, such as “I’m looking for C++ jobs” or “I want only bluetooth jobs”. Why? Because they’ll get experience in a particular technology and employers will give higher pay packages to specialists. This means these people focus only on things related to that one particular area and ignore everything else. Somehow I’ve been unable to do this, even though I want to.

As Tim Ferriss puts it:

“Most people avoid certain actions because they view changes as permanent. If you make a change, can you go back to doing it like you did before? You can always reclaim your current state in most cases. If I quit my job in industry x to test my artistic abilities in a different industry, worst case scenario, can I go back to my previous industry? Yes. Recognize that you can test-drive and micro-test things over brief periods of time. You can usually reclaim the workaholism that you currently experience if you so decide to go back to it.”

This kind of sums up what I’ve been doing in the past six months – test-driving things over brief periods of time, trying my hand at different things.

Yesterday, I needed some inspiration, so I ended up listening to one of my favorite podcast talks – Jason Fried on “Lessons learned from building Basecamp” (transcript). A few things that he said made a lot of sense, not only in terms of software, but also in terms of career:

1. Reduce mass
   • Enable change. Enable speed.
   • Do not worry about what may be needed 8 months down the lane.
   • Make just-in-time decisions, when you have the data.
2. Every decision is temporary.
   • If it is too costly to change, it’s probably wrong.
3. Getting Real
   • Design the interface first.
   • This is the same as Cal Newport saying “Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.”
4. Iterate. Start small. Make your first version half a product, not a half-assed product.
   • Do a 30-day trial of things, such as your decisions of trying something new, etc.
   • But do the basics and do them well. For example, if you want to start a blog, don’t expect 1000 readers overnight, work at writing 5 good articles instead.
5. There are so many more ideas that could be applied including the concept of publicity amplifiers, transparency and trust, blogging, etc.

It’s funny that a methodology for software can be used for lifehacking.

Of course, it’s not just software programmers who have this debate, even designers and productivity specialists do.

Later, I realized that another way of looking at this is “doing as much as required, no more”. Why is this important? Because results matter more than “expertise”. I had an Aha! moment. Suddenly, I feel less guilty and more positive.

Working from home full-time is a different experience than we are used to. You make or break things, there’s no one asking about your progress and there are no deadlines. It’s all up to you.

My productivity has varied a lot during this time and I was wondering how to make more days productive than they are as of now.

So I polled some of my friends who also work out of a home-office on how they they maintain productivity / motivation / focus, and I got some interesting replies:

• Manish Jethani says:

  • Make a separate “office room” in your home. You could convert your old study room into your office. You go into this room only for work — fully dressed for work (not in pyjamas!). When you get out of this room, you leave your work behind. In other words, you have a proper office located inside your home.
  • Cut out the distractions. Make your family know that this is your office. No visitors, no phone calls (except work-related), etc.
  • Follow proper timings. Work fixed hours.
  • To stay motivated while working out of your home, I think you basically have to enjoy what you do.
  • Self-discipline is the key.
  • The concept of an office, as we know it, is relatively new in our history. Throughout the ages humans have worked out of their homes. Think about it. It’s the more natural way of things. Thanks to the internet, working from home is likely to become the norm in the 21st century (also because commuting might become prohibitively expensive).

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One of the hard lessons that I have learned this year is “Always remember Carpe Diem“. The corollary is that “If you don’t execute on your idea quick, someone else definitely will.”

For example, long back Vikram had this idea that there should be a company which takes care of odd chores such as electrical maintenance or plumbing, basically handyman work. Yesterday, I saw www.handiman.in on the back of an auto rickshaw. I came home and checked it out and it does exactly that. It’s a very useful service and seems reasonably affordable, at least for IT people. I’m sure lot of people in Bangalore will go for it.

Today, Mrinal pointed to www.indimeme.com, a TechMeme for the Indian blogosphere.

I started kicking myself.

I’ve had this idea for months but I couldn’t really move on it because I don’t have the knowledge yet, for example, about clustering algorithms. However, I did brainstorm it with a couple of friends and thought we’ll work it out. But a single person beat us to it.

There is a range of reasons why such a website is a good idea, probably the same reasons why TechMeme is indispensable too:

• Allows people to see what are the latest topics that Indian bloggers are talking about.
• Allows people to see the discussions across blogs, not just one blog and its comments.
  • Encourages the above type of discussion.
• The portal can become the gateway of the Indian blogosphere.
• For the website creator’s point of view, it can bring in a lot of visitors. And subsequently, advertisers.
• An indispensable website means the creator of the website is indispensable too. Just like Gabe Rivera is everything behind the scenes of TechMeme. (Let’s face it, we’re all replaceable in our workplaces.)

And so on.

Anyway, the only downside I’ve noticed about IndiMeme.com is that the clustering results aren’t good yet, but the thing is it is already out there. It has been executed. It needs refinement. And I’m sure it’ll get there.

I don’t know whether I should add this idea to my already-long personal ‘deadpool’. Sigh.

When I started thinking about this idea, I came across one paper called Mining blog stories using community-based and temporal clustering which explained how this is a special type of clustering that takes time into account. They call it:

“[the] Content-Community-Time model that can leverage the content of entries, their timestamps, and the community structure of the blogs, to automatically discover stories. Doing so also allows us to discover hot stories.”

I was thinking whether the same idea can be applied to an RSS aggregator and then I found that was done too as well.

I guess there are simply no low-hanging fruit left in this accelerated world.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

– Leonardo da Vinci

Philipp Lenssen recently had a good post on tips on information overload by various people. It got me thinking about the various tips and tricks I’ve imbibed in the recent past and which work reasonably well for me. So I tried to collate them into one place:

Email

• Always bring the inbox down to zero regularly. ‘Regularly’ is defined by you.
• Never allow anything to be in your inbox > 2-3 days
  • If you’re not going to reply in that time frame, you never will. So simply archive it or reply with a one-liner saying you can’t look into it now.
• If you don’t have anything to add, don’t reply.
• Make sure you are clear on what is the action you are expecting from the recipient.
• Reply in bullet points. Because everybody skims.
• Once you’re done with the email (replying, taking action or reading), archive it.
• If it is not actionable, archive it. Don’t let it remain in your inbox.
• Use keyboard shortcuts.
• Mailing lists go into folders. I simulate them in Gmail using “Apply label, Skip Inbox” in the filters. The reason is that mails not directly addressed to me are not urgent, so I can process them whenever I have the inclination. Whatever is in my inbox is what deserves immediate attention.
• Minimize the number of times you need to check email. The minimum that is required for you to stop worrying about it. The beauty of email is that you can reply at your pace. Make use of that feature. If you end up constantly checking email, you’re better off resorting to phone calls or instant messenger.
• [new tip] Before you send the next email, go through the checklist.

Feeds

• Use your feed reader once in a few days. The world won’t stop without you.
• Use a desktop feed reader because it is faster to use.
• Have a ‘Try Before You Buy’ folder where you add feeds. If it doesn’t turn out to be useful, delete it.
• Have a number in mind, say 100 feeds. If you add a new feed, delete an old feed that is no longer interesting.
• If you end up doing a ‘Mark all as read’ on a feed 2-3 times in a row, delete it.
• Separate them into categories and/or priorities.
• Most importantly, read interesting things. Do not aim for reading 500+ blog posts a day. Optimize, don’t maximize.
• Remember that the goal is to derive some value out of this reading and that value is usually knowledge. If it is not helping you towards that goal, delete it. Don’t think twice, just delete it.
• While working, if you feel the need to distract yourself once in a while or read something interesting, don’t use your feed reader but use good filters like TechMeme or programming.reddit or a good link-blogger on your subjects of interest. Have a separate dedicated time for reading feeds.
• Take notes. Over time, you’ll judge if a feed is useful or not depending on whether you’re taking (any) notes or not.
  • You can also use a mental version of the “McDowell Grid”.

Inlets

• Cut down on the types of inlets – Email, Feeds, Twitter, IRC, Messenger, Phone, etc. (this one is particularly hard for me)
• Spend at least 50% of your time at the computer with all these inlets shut down.

Focus

• Personally I find productivity inversely proportional to information overload. The days when I’m productive and “in the zone” turns out to be the days when I’m less affected by information overload. The vice-versa is true as well. So if you focus on the right things, the information overload problem will get solved by itself.
• Maintain focus by having a todo list. Have a big todo list and then pick random tasks from that list depending on your energy levels and get things done.
• Never indulge in tasks outside of your todo list. If you’re not in the mood for any of them, don’t indulge in wilfing. Go out instead – whether for a walk, or call up a friend or even read a paper book. If you’re not being productive, just get out of the chair.
• Don’t use fancy software for writing lists. Use a good plain text editor (like Vim).
• Use GTD.
• Use an auto-pilot schedule (I’m still learning this).

P.S. Many of these ideas have been borrowed from elsewhere. It’s been a long time since I imbibed all these, so I don’t remember all the sources from which I gleaned them.

I recently started using my own home page in Firefox as a start-point for all the important links that I should visit from time to time. It’s been a good boost for productivity since it keeps the main thing the main thing:

This was just a simple ‘idealet’ inspired by Opera’s Speed Dial feature.

The advantages to using this are:

1. Quick access to things you need to access like your website management page or your bank website, instead of hunting around in the bookmarks menu.
2. Avoids the need for a bookmarks toolbar. I feel a toolbar takes too much screen real-estate compared to its usefulness.
3. When you’re bored, you open your homepage and visit some of the vast websites where you can learn stuff, like the ones under the ‘Grey Matter’ section.
4. It jogs your memory to visit some of the websites that you should visit from time to time, like any forums that you want to be updated on (instead of letting them flood your inbox).
5. Having a simple local HTML page as the homepage is much faster than an online start-page.
6. Backing up/restoring/editing a HTML file is simpler than a bookmarks database.

The only thing missing is that when I open a new tab, it should automatically open with the home page instead of a blank page. This can be done using the Tabbrowser Preferences add-on.

Update: Or you can simply use the many Speed Dial addons to Firefox out there…