NOTE: If you have trouble viewing the web version, there is also a PDF version of my slides.

I was nervous when preparing for this talk because it is not a concrete topic, it’s something abstract and perhaps even illusive for many people, so when I started off my session, I asked people to set aside their cynicism for half an hour, I then established some source credibility, explained my view of how I look at productivity, success and happiness, and how GTD and Pomodoro tie into all this. The presentation above is quite self-explanatory, so I’ll not repeat that again, except for the demo-on-whiteboard part where I did a live session about how to do Pomodoro.

(photo by @the100rabh)

The session went surprisingly well, and most people grokked what I was explaining, which I’m still very surprised about. I guess part of it is because (1) the audience was so interactive and asked questions and (2) most people in the audience have already tried experimenting with todo lists and GTD, so it is a problem they were already facing, so they assimilated what I was saying very quickly.

(photo by @anenth)

The best part about Barcamp is that I got to talk about a personal obsession of mine and I would have otherwise probably never gotten a chance to discuss such a topic in-person with other people who are interested in this topic.

Some of the feedback on my session:

swaroopchSwaroop C H

Going by the interest and interactivity at the session, I would say I had a successful session #bcb10 #productive#relief

Jun 11FavoriteRetweetReply

in reply to @swaroopch↑

@hnprashanth
Prashanth HN@swaroopch i wanted to attend that but it was full, i couldn’t come in!! #bcb10
Jun 11 via TweetDeckFavoriteRetweetReply

It was even more fun to hear from people when days after the conference, they were actually trying out the Pomodoro technique:

arunbasillalArun Basil Lal

I started practising the Pomodoro Technique @swaroopch taught us at #bcb10. So far so good! (cc: @theAnand). (oops, this is interruption

Jun 13FavoriteRetweetReply

in reply to @arunbasillal↑

@hardfire
Avinash Kundaliya@arunbasillal @swaroopch @theAnand well, a fact is that Pomodoro Technique is well suited for exams. Tried and tested. higher efficiency !
Jun 13 via webFavoriteRetweetReply

http://twitter.com/kaushalgoa/statuses/80498975857324032

There were many other good sessions in Barcamp that I liked, I especially loved the sessions about the Namma Cycle project and about ShreeKumar’s adventures and how to survive while doing a yatra across the country, talking the locals, etc.

And I really do hope that the Namma Cycle project takes off – Murali who effused passion when talking about it has shown a lot of progress already – got sponsorship, got government buy-in, and is starting off at Bangalore University and has big dreams about turning Bangalore into a cycling city. That seems to be already under way, with the new cycle stand near M G Road.

Overall, even my non-techie wife thoroughly enjoyed the day and was inspired by the people she met at Barcamp. And that really says it all for me on how much I enjoyed going to Barcamp again.

Special thanks to SAP Labs India for hosting the Barcamp in their beautiful campus and the great lunch as well. And not to forget, all the organizers of BCB10, kudos to you guys for making it happen!

P.S. Regarding the Quantified Self phenomenon, I highly recommend reading the New York Times article by Gary Wolf on The Data Driven Life.

Update: Just remembered a related old article of mine – Creativity and Organization is Impact”.

If you don’t know what a mind map is, think of it as writing a single topic idea on a piece of paper, then drawing out a tree with new ideas as branches. You can draw as many branches and sub-branches as you like. That’s it.

There are two purposes for which I use mind maps:

1. Brainstorming

Nothing gets my brain thinking and crazily jotting down thoughts like a mind map can. This happens because it is not a linear format and encourages branching out in different directions. At the same time, you can group related ideas together which means you don’t have to detail each idea, the phrases should have quite obvious meanings from the branching hierarchy.

2. Attention Economy

“Pay attention to what has your attention” is another gem that I learned from Arif.

I have forced myself to spend an hour every week and update a mind map that lists my actions in the past week. If my intentions on how I would like to spend my ideal week does not match my actual actions, then, the problem becomes quite obvious. Otherwise, it will be yet another case of “What? A week is already over. Time just flies…” and then months and years fly by (and it has) and you’ll wonder what you’ve been doing all along.

To break this chain, I started being conscious of what I’m doing. At first, I was shocked at the drastic gap between inspiration and execution. But by constant review of this attention mindmap, I’m getting better at todo lists.

XMind

The best mind mapping software that I’ve come across is XMind. It also happens to be open source and cross-platform.

It has a very nice simple and fluid interface, intuitive keyboard shortcuts, nice handy marker icons and most importantly, feels like a coherent software.

Install XMind and try this:

• Click on the “Central Topic” rectangle. Press F2. Type “Life” and press enter key.
• Press the Tab key. Press F2. Type “Career” and press enter key.
• Press the Enter key. Press F2. Type “Finances” and press enter key.
• Press Shift+Enter keys. Press F2. Type “Family” and press enter key.

That’s it, you’ve now created a mind map and got a feel of the keyboard shortcuts.

But there is more.

• Click on the ‘Finances’ rectangle.
• Right click → Markers → Smiley → Boring
• Click on the ‘Career’ rectangle.
• Press F3. Add tags like ‘monthly review, skill’.
• Press F4. Add your notes.
• Press the Tab key and add subtopics like ‘The Big Goal’.

Continue filling out this mind map and you would have created your “World mind map”.

P.S. I’ve been thinking about writing more about productivity and lifehacks, so if this post was useful for you and would like to read about more such topics, please let me know.

To be honest, I don’t go to Barcamp for the sessions per se, it is mainly for the people and this is one of the most relaxed ways to catch up with friends and make new ones. I met a lot of people and had very good conversations.

My own session on webdev frameworks and their relation to newer technologies such as cloud databases had a rocky start because there were lot of first-time Barcampers and were expecting a talk-style session. Luckily, I was saved by 3-4 guys in the audience who got it and we had a lively discussion. The takeaway is that, yes, there are interesting possibilities when we natively integrate our webdev frameworks and cloud databases (via modifying the ORMs) and cloud computing facilities. A few people were interested in my suggestion to carry the conversation forward in some sort of mailing list. So please join the “evolving-webdev” mailing list if you are interested in exploring these technologies.

The other interesting session I attended was on philosophies of yoga by Shashikant Joshi. As expected, he gave a very different take on yoga than what we normally hear. He started off by explaining the meaning of the word ‘yog’ as “state of mind” and what our ancient scriptures say on how to attain bliss and remove sorrow. It was hard for me to not be reminded of GTD philosophy, especially the “mind like water” concept. I felt guilty that there is so much already written by our ancestors that we ignore and wait for people to rediscover it and preach it.

I missed Shree Kumar’s calligraphy session because it was at the same time. Oh well.

Besides that, there was a whole lot of hallway conversations.

Gopal was teaching people how to solve a Rubik’s cube. He has it nailed down to a few algorithms, I can’t even fathom how he had the patience to derive those algorithms. We timed him solving it. The first time he took 1 min 57 seconds to solve it. The second time he took 1 min 36 seconds. Phew.

Then in another freewheeling conversation, we were talking about Zeno’s paradox and all sorts of stuff like that.

All in all, two non-stop days of fun reiterated why Barcamp remains one of my favorite events.

Thanks to all the planners (@ashwin, @daaku, @dkris, @fagunbhavsar, @hnprashanth, @viralsachde and others) who made it happen, and to Yahoo! for sponsoring the venue.

You can read more about what happened via the #bcb8 tag.

This book is meant for both beginners and advanced users.

For beginners, it walks you through the first steps to learning about modes, discusses about typing skills to be effective and moves on to the editing basics.

This book will definitely appeal more to people who are Vim users already because it helps add a huge number of tricks to their arsenal, whether it is more efficient editing, personal information management, coding your own plugins or making Vim a programmers’ editor.

I hope that fellow Vimmers will find these notes useful. Even though it is in a book format, the writing style is more like a tutorial and is informal, which should be familiar to readers of my Python book.

Both books are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, so you’re free to download it, email it, share it and improve it. In fact, the book is on a wiki, so you can just click on ‘Edit’ in the left sidebar of any chapter to improve the book in a matter of seconds. When in doubt, please use the ‘Discussion’ link to add your suggestions and comments.

For those who prefer reading books they can hold in their hand, please consider purchasing a printed copy of the book. This will also help support the continued development of the book.

For those PHP gurus familiar with GeSHi syntax highlighting, I would greatly appreciate any help in improving my vim syntax highlighting source, especially in handling Vim-style comments, etc. Please mail me if you can help.

This book has been in the works for several years, so I’m glad to see it finally in good enough shape for releasing it. Although I haven’t done as many rewrites as I would have been satisfied with, I decided it was better to <insert cliché of “Release Early, Release Often.”>

I dedicate this release to foss.in and GTD principles.

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.

No matter how much we talk about talent, opportunities, and other things we can blame on, making
things happen basically boils down to one thing – it’s all in the mind. And of course, you need to
put in some effort too, but that again is derived from your mindset.

For example, I have a few problems that I chronically face:

1. If I have an idea or come across something interesting or even start on a new project at work,
   I tend to have a lot of enthusiasm at first but soon forget it later in the drudgery of everyday
   life, and especially so when it comes to personal projects.

2. I tend to get worked up on deadlines and schedules without actually paying attention to the
   work.

3. I am constantly worried about not following up on things and not being organized.

About six months ago, I started following the ‘Getting Things Done’
(GTD) philosophy and it has helped me
improve a lot w.r.t. these problems. This helped me concentrate on actions and not only on
problems. As and when you keep showing up and doing things, you’ll see the progress yourself and
you’ll be a happier person. That reminds me of this LifeHack
article: “All you
need is the willingness to take the next most obvious step – then repeat the process again and
again, regardless of how you feel. Try it.Happiness comes from seeing the results of your efforts.
You don’t need it before you start.“

The gist of GTD is to concentrate only on the next physical action and let other things take care
of itself. This helped me deal with the second problem.

When it comes to problem 3, I’m way more organized now, to the point, where I think my actual
talent (or the lack of it) and the willingness to put in effort are the barriers. I hope Knuth’s
philosophy of being at the bottom of things
will help me here.

These three problems are similar in the sense that they tend towards one point – it’s all in the
mind. To alleviate it, I applied the GTD approach.

Similarly, if you’re worried about what kind of raise you’re going to get this year, etc., then
stop worrying. There is no use of worrying over things that you can’t control. You can’t control
the traffic on the road, so if you need to reach a place on time, just leave early and the rest
will take care of itself.

If you’ve been sweating it out for the past couple of hours trying to fix a bug and you’re not
making any headway, then it is important to switch to a different problem and then come back
later. You’ll come back with a fresh perspective, fresh energy and fresh ideas on what to look
out for and may be the things you’ve overlooked previously might be the actual problem. This is
also important because it helps you to always keep moving forward, one way or another, and you
don’t get stuck in one project and don’t move in other projects (and by project, I mean the GTD
meaning of ‘project’).

There has been many a time when I’ve gotten frustrated and feel like just banging my head on the
keyboard. This is where I take a step back, relax and say to myself ‘CUT to the G’ (yes, that’s a
phrase I coined for myself):

1. Concentrate
2. Understand
3. Think
4. Get Things Done

Each of these steps is important in its own way, but I personally underestimate the value of the
second step. Knowing what you’re exactly doing is a critical nature of a
programmer
especially because only you would know how the system exactly works and nobody else would look at
it, everyone else is just a end user.

Step 4 is eventually what gets you moving, but Steps 2 and 3 are equally important. As Abraham
Lincoln once said “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my
axe.” And to get to this stage, you need to do Step 1 which boils down to one thing – It’s all in
the mind. That’s why it’s so hard.

Footnotes

1. Related reading: ‘Leadership – Some Random Thoughts’ by Lawrence
   Rabiner.

2. That doesn’t mean to say that you/I can achieve anything and everything, it’s just that you
   need to get over the mindblocks to do even the simple things that you are capable of achieving.

I just finished reading ‘The Search’ by John Battelle. What an amazing story to read. Learning about Bill Gross and his IdeaLab alone was worth reading the book, and he still keeps ideating, like Snap.com. Heck, even Picasa came from IdeaLab.

There are many tidbits from the book that were interesting, such as about Louis Monier:

It was Louis Monier who took AltaVista from concept to executable code … “I’ve always been interested in big, nasty problems,” Monier told me. Search provided one of the nastiest. Not only do the numbers scale to the near infinite, there was a very real need for good search in 1994. “Search engines at the time were just terrible,” Monier recalls. “Yahoo was a great catalog, but it had no search. So I set about to work on the crawl.”

About Stanford:

Stanford’s 6,200-acre patch of rolling California woodlands is the most productive incubator of technology companies the world has ever seen. Nestled between the silicon factories of Intel and Apple on one end and Sand Hill Road’s venture capitalists on the other, Stanford is a place where students have already dreamed of starting their own companies or going to work for a pre-IPO start-up. And Stanford’s computer science department, where Yang and Filo hung their hats, is perhaps the most prodigious start-up incubator of them all.

About Yahoo:

Another reason Yahoo succeeded was its sense of fun – a characteristic that would come to define not only Yahoo, but nearly every Internet company seeking the fickle approval of the Web public. Yahoo pioneered some of the Web’s earliest social mores – including, for example, links to competitors’ sites in case a searcher could not find what he or she was looking for, and listing “what’s hot” prominently on its home page, thereby driving extraordinary amounts of traffic to otherwise obscure sites.

Thanks to practices like these, the company captured the public’s imagination early and often, garnering a slew of adoring press notices familiar to anyone watching Google’s rise to prominence over the past few years.

About how a mathematical curiosity led to PageRank:

Page didn’t land on the idea of Web-based search at the outset; far from it. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich starting Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes – a classic graph structure. “Computer scientists love graphs,” Page tells me, referring to the mathematical definition of the term. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. One could reasonably argue that many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.

About Google’s geeky sense of humor and control:

On April 29, 2004, Google filed what certainly had to be the most unusual S1 – the formal public offering document – in recent memory. At filing, Google declared it would sell $2,718,281,828 worth of its shares – a seemingly random number, which was, in fact, the mathematical equivalent of e, a concept not unlike pi that has unique characteristics and is well known to serious math geeks. By manipulating the actual offering to provide this knowing wink to nerd humor, Google was in effect declaring: the geeks are in control.

Perhaps, the most interesting part of the book for me was the last chapter – ‘Perfect Search’. Battelle profiles what could be the future of Search.

When it comes to search, as with the Internet itself, the most interesting stuff is yet to come. As every engineer in the search field loves to tell you, search is at best 5 percent solved – we’re not even into the double digits of its potential. And search itself is changing at such a rapid pace – in the past year important innovations have rolled out once a week, if not faster – that attempts to predict the near future are almost certainly doomed.

I’ve been working on the Yahoo! Buzz Index for the past 2 years, and many a time I’ve been asked (by friends and colleagues) why I haven’t changed teams yet. But I often ponder to myself – change to what? Being a rabidly information-hungry internet user (well, I’ve calmed down off late), I always found search engines remarkable and Buzz does a lot of analysis on search, it’s quite fascinating, and the sheer volume of data is equally interesting. I’ve had my share of ups and downs (and some very steep downs), but it has been interesting.

We do a lot more than what Google Trends does, however Buzz has a more practical business model in which the interesting insights are kept for the paid customers and the interesting stories are written for the public.

Isn’t it striking on how the ability to search for what you want (and relatedly, blogs have become an important factor in this) has made us more knowledgeable? All the articles on productivity that I came across have really helped me improve in my professional and personal life. My problem has always been converting thoughts into actions, but GTD and the ready-fire-aim approach are helping me improve, but that’s a whole different story. Search has helped me find lyrics of so many songs. Search helped me research about the places I travelled to and want to travel to. Search has helped me discover some hands-on activities that could help me teach the Parikrma kids to explore and think about science, the earth and the human body. I could go on, but just count the number of times you use a search engine in a day, and you’ll know what I mean.

All this has got me more interested in the Search-related domain as a field to work in. And all the money that Search makes is interesting as well Will I ever move on to working on something more in this direction, or will I find something more interesting tomorrow, or will I simply remain yet-another-software-coolie (which seems more likely)? I honestly don’t know, but don’t we all have a search(!) for “that one thing that drives us”?

I’m not saying that Search is the important problem out there in the world, far from it, there are more real world problems like our community, our economy, and quality of life. I believe that knowledge is an important way of empowering people, and Search is a step in helping people to keep finding and gaining knowledge.

I’ve been thinking about all of this, especially, because of Richard Hamming’s words:

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall. I went over and said, “Do you mind if I join you?” They can’t say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, “What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?” I wasn’t welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.

In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, “Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven’t changed my research,” he says, “but I think it was well worthwhile.” And I said, “Thank you Dave,” and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, “What are the important problems in my field?”

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, ‘important problem’ must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn’t work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don’t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.

I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can’t always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. And even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don’t have to hide in the valley where you’re safe. But the average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time and so he (or she) doesn’t produce much. It’s that simple. If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea.

Back to the book … As a colleague said, this book should be made compulsory reading for anyone working in this field.

Also, special thanks to Rajiv Vyas for sending the book across the ocean to me just because he thought “I might want to read it”! … come to think about it, how did Rajiv and me become friends? Well, he searched for something and chanced upon my blog …