Self Improvement

A collection of 40 posts

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

General

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

Self Improvement

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

Self Improvement

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

Books

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

Self Improvement

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

Books

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

Self Improvement

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.

A Byte of Vim

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

Books

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

Self Improvement

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,

Self Improvement

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

Self Improvement

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,

Self Improvement

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

Self Improvement

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

Self Improvement

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

Self Improvement

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?

Self Improvement

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

Self Improvement

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

Self Improvement

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

Self Improvement

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

General

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

General

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

Self Improvement

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

Books

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