Month: January 2014

“Okay guys. I get that you love the game. From here on in, every game will be 90 minutes long. ”

Whatever the exact words may have been, the first signal to excited young men about to play football that they would only get 90 minutes out on the field must have been one of dislike. We don’t like constraints, at least at first. But, constraints are everything. Some of the best systems – the 9*5 work day, for example, are built around constraint. Sure, we don’t all stick to the 9*5 work day but my experiments with unconstrained workdays tell me that workdays with deadlines are most productive. At one of my clients, we had to get out at 5:30 because the bus to the city left then. Since it took most people between 1.5 hours to 2 hours to get home, there was a mad rush of intense productivity in the afternoon so we all finished by 5:30. There was no post lunch slacking off as the deadline loomed in front of us.

Twitter is another great example. Say whatever you like but keep it within 140 characters.

So, if and when you’re designing a system for yourself this month, think about constraint, e.g., you will only be allowed to hit your exercise/reading goals between 6am-8am and 7pm-9pm. It will focus your thinking on how you will hit your targets between these times. And, focus = magic.

A wiser friend who taught us poker had a couple of useful insights for the game. Poker, most of all, is a game about decisions and information. And, given the way probability works, it is very possible to be rewarded initially for bad decisions. Over time, however, it balances itself out. Bad decisions lead to bad results, without exception.

Conversely, in the short term, good decisions can often lead to bad results. Let’s take a simple example – imagine you’ve decided to spend a huge amount to do your undergraduate studies at a top university. Your financials may be in the red compared to a friend who has decided to skip university all together and is working instead. In the long term, however, the chances are very high that you will more than make up for these years in the red as it’s an investment. It’s a good decision. The results will show.

Most situations we encounter are much more complex of course. But, we do repeatedly run the risk of overreacting to bad results and not continue down the path of making decisions. Not making decisions is almost as bad as making bad decisions and probably worse in the long term.

So, how do we help ourselves make better decisions?

1. Actively think about your decision making process. Do you have a decision making process in the first place?
2. When you experience a bad result, reflect on the decisions you made and see if the decisions were right. If they were right, celebrate the fact that you made good decisions. The results will show.
3. Irrespective of the result, evaluate the decisions you made anyway. Improving decision making takes deliberate effort. And it definitely is effort worth taking.

Decision making is one of the topics I’m thinking about this year. There will be more to follow.. especially around thinking about our decision making process. In the meanwhile, if you have insights on what helps you make good decisions, I’m all ears.

As we near the weekend, I have one objective in mind – ensure this weekend is an excellent weekend. Last weekend was not. I had a lot to do and it’s showed in my week – it hasn’t been the best.

I think good weekends are critical to having good weeks and I think it’s worth taking the time to think about how you define a good weekend. My typical good weekend involves complete unwind on 2 evenings (typically Friday and Saturday), alarm-less sleep, work on various projects between 1 to 1.5 days, and play. And, overall, around 1.5 days of introversion to make it the dream introvert’s weekend in my case.

This is one of the reasons I’m not a fan of traveling on weekends when in a different country on a work project/trip – the cost of doing so becomes apparent during the work week. That moment when I complete my plan for the week early on Sunday evening, and get all set for a relaxed dinner and bed, is when I know that an excellent week will follow.

Intentional weekends matter. I plan to make the most of this one. There’s only going to be 50 more of these in 2014 and I look forward to making as many of them count.

As a commenter and friend reminded me the other day, the weeks are long.. but the years are short.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, had a great post up on the intrinsic value of blogging. He spoke of how numbers and stats around blogs were discouraging and how chasing popularity results in deconstructing what makes something share-able and creating sensationalist blogs like this.

Matt knows a thing or two about blogging. Seth Godin does too. He had an instructive post during the end of the year when he pointed out that his most popular posts were not his best ones.

My own experience of this isn’t too different. A couple of my most popular posts are those that went viral on Hacker News. I didn’t think they were particularly great – they went viral because they had a sensational element to it – the more popular one being a Bill Gates vs Jobs debate. I used to share my links in 5-6 places after posting. That’s down to 3 now. I’ve removed browser favorite links to Feedburner and Google Analytics, too. I didn’t see the point. Those numbers weren’t going to change the way I blogged (they threatened to, a few years back but didn’t – thank god..) and they hardly ever raised the right questions.

Matt’s solution to the problem is one I agree with completely.

The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will be clarified by distilling an idea through writing and editing, and your future self who will be able to look back on these words and be reminded of the context in which they were written.

Second, write for a single person who you have in mind as the perfect person to read what you write, almost like a letter, even if they never will, or a person who you’re sure will read it because of a connection you have to them (hi Mom!). Even on my moblog I have a frequent commenter who I’ll often keep in mind when posting a photo, curious to see her reaction.

There have been a few blogger friends over time who’ve written in asking about how they can be popular. I’ve tried to communicate the “blog for yourself” message but have not been able to articulate it as well as Matt. I will be able to do so now (thanks Matt!).

My only addition to Matt’s excellent post will be to caveat that very few great bloggers support themselves via blogging. Blogging, more often than not, is a side-project that helps them in their careers as entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, authors, and the like. Fred Wilson’s blog works the way it does largely because he’s a venture capitalist par excellence. So, let blogging never detract from the main thing. Your career is the first and biggest way to achieve real impact. Blogging generally is a side project.

That said, what a great side project it is..

It’s the new year. Every time the new year begins, it feels to me like we have an eternity ahead to do great things. I guess that’s possibly why we run out of steam on our new year resolutions by the end of the first month. There always seems to be time to fix it (or not).

But, something changed in my mind when I was writing an email yesterday where I spoke of 365 new opportunities to learn and get better. I stopped.

365? That’s not so many at all. Scratch that. There’s only 357 more. Before we know it, it will be March, then the summer, then the period looking forward to the end-of-year break and then December. Most importantly, there are only 357 opportunities to be awesome this new year.