Self Improvement

Stoicism

I read The Daily Stoic book by Ryan Holiday around a year ago. It changed my perception of reality with the very first page: Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that focuses on practical life instead of theoretical questions. It is concerned with everyday life and does not concern itself about

Learning where to invest money from MoneyLife

Investing in property and gold is the first thing that comes to mind for us Indians when we want to invest money. But somehow I’ve always preferred finding out a more systematic way of figuring out how and when to invest. Bajaj Capital has been my financial advisor for

60/40 rule

From Lessons on Leading by Jessica Steel : Leaders recognize that we should feel 60% mastery and 40% stretch in our jobs at any given time. We draw our confidence from the 60% we know we’re nailing, and we grow from the challenge of the 40% that is new and

Freewriting – Review of the Accidental Genius book

Semi-regularly, I’ve been doing something I called “Paper Therapy.” The idea was simple: “Write on paper till your brain has nothing left in it.” This stupidly simple idea has often been miraculous in helping me clear my mind and think of ideas or options that I was unable to

Book Review : Focus Manifesto

I was struggling with focus in the past week, and I needed a refresher of the basics. So I was looking for reading a new book that I haven’t read before, and luckily there was a free one – the Focus Manifesto by Leo Babauta of ZenHabits.com fame. The

Talk on Productivity at Barcamp Bangalore 10

At Barcamp Bangalore 10 on Saturday, I talked about GTD, Pomodoro and Productivity: 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

Passionate Programmer book review

Every once in a while I get an email like this: Sir, I am a beginner to python and programming. I started with the C++ and found it hard so one day via google I found your perfect tutorial “A byte of Python”. I read the whole tutorial in one

Book Review : Pomodoro Technique Illustrated

1. Have a list of things to do. 2. Pick one thing to work on. Start clock. 3. When tired, stop clock. Take a break. It worked because of two reasons: 1. Observing yourself led to the Hawthorne Effect 2. Time spent per day was a quantifiable measure of productivity.

My Bash and Vim setups

I find it surprising on how little time coders spend on their development environment (the “dev env”). And especially, I find it amusing that I can find, refactor and test code way faster than the Netbeans IDE users in my office, with just a shell and Vim setup. So why

Book Review: The Checklist Manifesto

I recently read the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande – a respected surgeon, noted author, MacArthur fellow, New Yorker staff writer, and a professor at Harvard Medical School. The premise of the entire book is the author’s dive into the concept of a checklist and how they have

Creativity x Organization = Impact

81 people have asked me about “Innovation – ways to make people innovate.” That’s a hard question. Especially because I’m always wary of using such an ambiguous term. And more so, when there are far more qualified people to answer out there. Since I have been asked the question,

About Deep Procrastination

Cal Newport, one of my favorite bloggers ever, wrote about the upside of deep procrastination last week. I had a few thoughts on the subject. So what is deep procrastination? You know you’re in it when “No matter how dire the stakes, starting work becomes an insurmountable prospect.” I

The point of being Done

Listening to Seth Godin say “What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do is ship” reminded me of the The Cult of Done manifesto: If you find the image inconvenient to read, here’s the text: 1. There are three states of being. Not knowing,

iPhone for productivity

I was reading the The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars and did not find it useful, because it was mostly about games or things that apply to people only in USA. So I was wondering if I had my own list. Stanza My most favorite application is

Twitter vs. Why we can't concentrate?

Attention Span I started using Twitter as an experiment, and it was the first and only social network I really participated in. It was great because I actually made new friends that I went on trips with, got the opportunity to follow the thoughts of interesting people, and whenever I

Why I do Time Tracking

The Idea A couple of months ago, I was going through a “productivity drought.” I used to repeatedly bounce between tasks. I couldn’t concentrate enough. Work was suffering. I thought to myself “Just how bad is the situation? Can I quantify it?” Then I started using a very old

Chunking

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?

What is your ideal personal finance life?

I have been reading personal finance-related blogs for a while now. But due to obvious reasons, it had become very important to have proper habits so that I have a healthy personal finance, and hence I started doing more research on it. But what is personal finance? I like how

One year since I had a salary

It has been exactly one year since I quit my last job. The good Things that I thought was important but didn’t turn out to be: It has been one year since: * I had to do something because I had no choice. * I had a boss. * I had to

Mindmaps

Ever since I read about how Arif Vakil uses a “My World Mindmap” to organize his life, I started using mind maps. It is such an utterly simple concept but yet I still find it fascinating. If you don’t know what a mind map is, think of it as

From Google Reader to MyAlltop

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

Thought for the Day

I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from

Barcamp Bangalore 8

I had a great time at BCB8. Even though I had ranted previously on the tech focus this time, the planners made it clear that all topics are welcome and Barcampers kept the same familiar atmosphere going. To be honest, I don’t go to Barcamp for the sessions per

Get into the Flow

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

Outliers : What leads to Success

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

Refocus on the Basics

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

"My Online Life" in Mint

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

How Fresh Graduates Can Grow

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

Announcing my free book on Vim

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

A principled life according to Steve Pavlina

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

Specialization vs Generalization

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

Tips for Working From Home

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

Always remember Carpe Diem

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

How to handle information overload

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

Career Advice

There have been many times where I’ve been asked for “career advice”, especially after a talk. I usually suggest them to ‘build a repertoire of things you have done, things you are capable of, things you like to do’. But I’ve never really been sure of this advice

A productive homepage

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

It’s all in the mind

(Warning : I just started typing this post because the title popped into my head, so what follows might seem like a lot of rambling.) 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’

Motivation

When I look at people around me, I often ponder how they manage to live life just like any other day. They tackle work and fun and go home and watch TV and sleep. Then, get up the next day and the cycle continues. I think of them as analogous

The Search

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

Paper

Long live Paper! The simplest solution is always the best solution — Swaroop Update : It seems this is my subconcious paraphrasing of Occam’s Razor principle.