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

I read Outliers, The STORY of SUCCESS by Malcolm Gladwell last week and found it fascinating.

Here’s an excerpt:

Cultural legacies *matter*, and once we’ve seen the surprising effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a third of a second, it’s hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our twenty-first-century intellectual tasks.

What redeemed the life of a rice farmer, however, was the nature of the work. It was a lot like the garment work done by the Jewish immigrants to New York. It was *meaningful*.

First of all, there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields.

Second, it’s complex work. The rice farmer isn’t simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. He or she effectively runs a small business, juggling a family workforce, hedging uncertainty through seed selection, building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the second crop.

And, most of all, it’s autonomous. The peasants of Europe worked essentially as low-paid slaves of an aristocratic landlord, with little control over their own destinies. But China and Japan never developed that kind of oppressive feudal system, because feudalism simply can’t work in a rice economy. Growing rice is too complicated and intricate for a system that requires farmers to be coerced and bullied into going out into the fields each morning. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, landlords in central and Southern China had an almost completely hands-off relationship with their tenants: they would collect a fixed rent and let farmers go about their business.

Here’s a second excerpt:

Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world called TIMMS. The point is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another’s.

When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friendss are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.

Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? **They are exactly the same.** In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe’s point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics *without asking a single math question*. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they are willing to work. In fact, we wouldn’t even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.

So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn’t surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

See how the two excerpts are related? This explains how your cultural legacies matter (and don’t worry, maths is not the criterion for success, this is just one example in the book). Another example is how cultural legacies are related to plane crashes of the respective national airlines.

There’s a lot more in the book like the Matthew Effect, the 10,000-Hour Rule, why “practical intelligence” matters, why “concerted cultivation” matters, about the KIPP schools, and so on.

The book is a must-read IMHO, just for the thought-provocativeness, even if not how to learn to be “successful.”

Most of what I learned about programming was during my first year at Yahoo!. I wrote so much Perl code and dove into naive attempts at distributed computing, and the like.

I was pretty proud of my code and that I put in hard work, and was vindicated when I went back to meet old friends at Yahoo! and one of the new recruits actually praised my Perl code (because he was now maintaining it). I was taken aback. Why? That was probably the only time in my life I was proud of the code I wrote and someone actually commended on it.

But I’ve stagnated in the past three years and have not been adding to my knowledge even though I’ve been working, meeting deadlines and earning my bread. On the surface, I’m adding skills to my resumé but inside I know I should be learning more.

My theme for the next 8 months is to focus on getting back to the basics, to relearn the fundamentals and get back the joy of programming.

Ever since I’ve been working for myself, I’ve been very happy to take technical decisions and seeing it right through to the code. I get a kick out of it. I need more of that.

I’m hoping to read more books like Ship It! and The Pragmatic Programmer vs. spending time on blogs.

I’m hoping to spend more of those-moments-when-you-need-distractions at Stack Overflow and technical mailing lists vs. reading opinion / “news” sites.

Of course, it’s not just about more information but rather about getting into the flow, getting into the mood.

I will try to be at the bottom of things rather than on top of things, although its hard to let go of the addiction of trying to be “inbox zero.”

In the big picture, there’s no reason to have this goal. I can just keep on going as-is. But my life is so empty without having something to work on. That’s the thing about goals.

Let’s see how far it goes.

Do you find it useful to have a time-bound dominant theme for personal development? Have you thought about what will you learn this year?

Of course, ideas are cheap, execution is everything. So I’m getting back to coding right now.

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.

Update on 29-Oct-2011: Also read this great article by Patrick McKenzie (a.k.a. patio11) called “Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice”

Today is the first day of foss.in/2008, and on this occasion, I’m happy to announce the first public release of my Creative-Commons licensed book on the Vim 7 editor.

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.

Ever since college days where I got hooked onto the Internet, I have been an avid reader of self-improvement websites and books. I used to prowl for content, before the advent of lifehacking and productivity websites. I eventually stumbled upon good websites like 43Folders.com, and my friend Pradeep cajoled me to read Steve Pavlina’s blog.

I was so glad he did. I ended up spending hours reading Pavlina’s articles. Reflecting upon the ideas in these articles was very beneficial. When I read that Steve was releasing a new book, I jumped at the chance to get it.

The book was different from most self-improvement books because it didn’t focus on productivity or time management. Steve claimed that he has discovered the essential principles of life!

According to Steve, there are just three core principles – truth, love and power. The secondary principles are:

• Oneness = Truth + Love
• Authority = Truth + Power
• Courage = Love + Power
• Intelligence = Truth + Love + Power

I found it incredulous to see someone make such a claim. So I started reading the book with a sense of disbelief.

While I started reading the book, I didn’t appreciate its brevity but the upside was that I got through the book more quickly. The basic concepts were things I understood but concepts like ‘oneness’ was something I couldn’t fathom.

Eventually, a friend called me up and was describing a personal problem, I started to test whether Pavlina’s principles were applicable, and voila, I was amazed to pinpoint to something which I was convinced was the root cause. It was at that moment that I started thinking that Steve might be on to something.

I had a hard time reading through the book, not because it was bad but because for every other page I would stop and reflect upon the concept being described and I would do some journaling to help me clarify my thoughts. In the process, I realized I was applying the ‘Truth’ principle and finally accepting some things that I “delayed thinking about” (read as “avoid”).

Eventually, I started reflecting upon the past ups and downs of life and see if the good things were as a result of cohesion of the three core principles. Well, it did. And at the same time, I could place a lot of my faults into the categories under “Blocks to Love” and “Blocks to Power” sections.

Strangely, I felt like I was reading one of those Linda Goodman books which claim to know every detail of the character of a person just based on the date on which they were born. The logical portion of my brain simply refuses to accept something like that is possible. Similarly, I have a hard time believing that someone can boil down the psychology and well-being of humans to such a simple list of things.

Nevertheless, the true impact of a self-improvement book is only felt months later, so I’m still in the process of applying some of the concepts and thinking to my daily habits. I find myself aligned with the principle of truth, but not with the principles of love and power. I hope some of the 30-day trials (as described in the book) in applying these concepts will pay off.

All in all, I would highly recommend Steve Pavlina’s book “Personal Development for Smart People”. It will make you think and hopefully make you grow as well.

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