24 Feb, 2010

My Todo list – the most powerful weapon in my productivity arsenal

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (32) Comments

One of the simplest differentiators I have found between individuals who are successful and those who are not – is the former always maintain an organized todo list for everything in their lives. This sounds extremely obvious, but is by far the most powerful tool in my arsenal. Here is a random list of thoughts concerning my practice of maintaining a todo list for myself –

• It requires skill, attention and focus to be able to determine during ANY conversation / any event – items that should form a part of my todo list. I have invariably found that most unsuccessful people fail at this. They either (1) cannot determine in the course of a meeting / discussion something that forms a part of their responsibility, or (2) just don’t care enough to want to deliver their best, or (3) believe that their memory is infallible despite significant number of incidents in their life that have proven otherwise.
• I tend to ensure I always have some way of taking notes at ANY point in my entire day. Given that my laptop accompanies me everywhere (including places I’d rather not talk about ) for over 97% of my awake time – that is my preferred medium for note taking. I also have notepads scattered on every desk, and use the blackberry memo when nothing else is available. I will almost never initiate a meeting without ensuring someone (if not me) is available to persist thoughts/notes/todo items.
• It requires discipline to subsequently organize random notes I may have taken in a meeting into my final todo lists. This is mostly a 2-5 minute activity that I either engage in immediately after the event (when the subject is fresh) OR by the end of the day. This is again an area where many fail. I have seen individuals take notes down on pads they carry with them in meetings, but if the pad is merely an intermediate medium, then not transferring them subsequently to the final persistent format in an organized manner is almost as big a crime as not taking any notes down
• Todo lists are an asynchronous ongoing and continuous activity for me. I almost always ensure that the time interval between thinking something and penning it down in a structured format is under a few seconds or minutes at best. This applies to almost 90% of my thoughts. If I think of something, I jot it down. I firmly believe that ideas are not a commodity and each minute that I spend in thinking something of value, is wasted, if the thought is not captured in some persistent format.
• It requires skill to be able to reprioritize items ongoingly since a typical todo list will almost never end (mine has never been empty since the day it began). I use just-in-time reprioritization as I take up each task. Additionally I juggle and shift tasks around at the end of each day/week/relevant period too.
• It requires discipline to jot down every single item that needs to get done in some persistent form without relying on my memory. However the knowledge that not jotting something down will at the minimum require me to rethink it at some point down the line, and at worst may result in the permanent loss of a valuable idea, is an adequate incentive for me to not only imbibe the discipline but infact enjoy the activity immensely
• The value of a person is the value of the ideas that they execute. Merely thinking an idea and doing nothing about it not only does not create value, but rather destroys it, because now even the time spent behind conceiving the idea was a waste. The only way to guarantee execution is to persist the idea in a queue.
• This kind of discipline also requires a strong desire on my part to want to always deliver my best. If I was ok with mediocrity, then I would be ok with missing out on tasks that I need to get done. Since I cannot settle for anything less than perfection, the only way to ensure that is to ensure I am adept at maintaining a todo list with almost no lacunae. As a corollary this also therefore is the mark of someone who is paranoid about perfection. Someone who does not want to leave delivery to chance will always be adept at organizing their tasks in a persistent manner.
• Maintaining a todo list also requires a good sense of information architecture. A disorganized/non-prioritized list can sometimes be worse than no list at all. Before you begin researching complicated software to manage this, let me save you time by adding that I simply use a plain text editor (Keynote) to maintain my todo list. It allows me to create multiple text files and my entire todo list comprises of a few files organized line by line in an indented tree like point format. I must also add that my list is not always perfectly ordered in descending order of priority. I would say it is mostly in a reasonably rough order of priority such that I can assume that items on top are important and items at the bottom are not.
• A todo list lets me set milestones and creates a sense of achievement as items get knocked off my list. I love that feeling. Infact I can state with certainty that there is a palpable difference between my sense of achievement when I knock an item off my todo list vis-à-vis just wrapping up an adhoc task. The feeling of deleting or cancelling a task from my todo list is considerably more fun.
• Over and above my textual todo list – my email inbox serves as a second todo list for me. Any email that is an action item will always remain in my inbox until it is addressed.
• Paranoid that I am, I also end up managing todo lists for other teams and individuals where my confidence level with respect to them fulfilling this responsibility is sub par. If I think of something – no matter who it relates to – I will typically shoot out an email, or, in most circumstances, add it to the relevant priority log in our internal corporate wiki. This practice again stems from the belief that ideas are always more valuable than the time taken to think them and jot them down, and the only way to capitalize on their value is to capture them in a persistent form somewhere.
• Given that the process of maintaining these todo lists involves managing certain files, and certain web pages on my corporate wiki, I realize that I may end up procrastinating the process of adding items to these lists if the task of adding them were onerous. Hence I use automation to the maximum extent to ensure I never end up feeling lazy. I use a macro shortcut utility called Launchy, combined with some elegant keyboard shortcuts that I have configured, to ensure that EVERY single todo list I maintain including files in our corporate wiki representing tasks for other teams, are literally a few key strokes away – and I literally mean few keystrokes away – I don’t even need to use the mouse to access any of these files. I can access any of these lists with merely a few keystrokes. This ensures that it is always very easy for me to file something in the appropriate place.
• Practice is key. By now this process has become second nature to me. Our brain is interesting in that it makes ANY consciously repeated behavior pattern into a subconscious habit. The word “ANY” is important here. This applies to every behavior pattern. If you consciously make it a practice to maintain a organized todo list, you will find yourselves subconsciously doing so after sometime, and even ensuring others do so. If you however consciously make it a practice to procrastinate taking down notes, or maintaining a todo list, you will shortly find yourselves engaging in the same subconsciously to the extent that you will never be able to spot an idea worth jotting down or a task worth scheduling even when it is imperative to do so.

22 Feb, 2010

You know you hire the best talent when people want to pay to get in :)

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (5) Comments

At Directi we hire some of the best talent in the country. For tech hires we look favorably upon applicants who solve some of our coding puzzles. One of my colleagues just came across this amusing link on LimeExchange where someone is willing to pay for a solution to one of our puzzles -

http://www.limeexchange.com/software-development-freelance-projects/6188.lxp.Team-selection-code

We must be doing something right if candidates are willing to pay to get in