Unformed Thoughts

Note: This post was written last Saturday. Today here means the 27th of April. Kindly follow along. :)

One more Saturday was wasted in shallow endeavors. I woke up at 7 today... feeling proud at myself, because I haven't really woke up this early on a weekend in a long time. Yay, I thought, I'll get so much done today!

Yeah, right.

After reading so many books on self-improvement, and making so many mental notes about trying to improve myself on the productivity front, I still haven't been able to make any inroads into it. My productivity hasn't increased. I still manage to waste time on social media. I still forget to work on things I'm supposed to work on, just as I talked about last week.

Another voice inside me tells me to stop being so hard on myself. It has only been a few weeks, it says. Perfection doesn't come in a day. And besides, you shouldn't be chasing perfection anyway!

I get that. After all my life wanting to excel at everything, I have begun to understand its futility. I can be great, but not at everything. I sure need to let things go and focus on only a few of them at a time. But I sure need to do something after all, isn't it?

Last week, when I was ranting about losing motivation after doing something for only a short while, I realized something.

I only tend to lose motivation when I haven't publicly committed to do something.

Ever since I have committed to writing two posts a week, I have managed to stick to the schedule, even if that means that I have to write in the bus of all places! I stick to the schedule because I believe that all five of you readers eagerly await my post every Sunday and Wednesday. (I know you don't, but I like to think that way. No pressure!)

In a similar vein, I believe that if I publicly commit to applying strategies for performing deep work, I might just find enough motivation to do it.

I have already promised to myself that my fundamental focus from now on is going to be writing. To become better at writing, I need to practice more and more of it, every day. Perhaps I need to write a million words before I can reach a place where I am satisfied about my craft. It's not going to be easy. There is no glamour in slogging away at a keyboard trying to hone your technique. But it has to be done. I have to pay my dues.

So here is what I propose. Starting today, I will write at least 200 words, every day.

This does not mean that I will be publishing something every day. It just means that I will be practicing every day.

How will I keep myself motivated to writing every day though? Who will be my accountability partner in this journey?

You.

That's right. I have made it easier for you, dear reader, to track my progress. Although I won't be publishing completed posts every day on the blog, I will be pushing my writing to the following Github repository, every day:

https://github.com/rajatarora/everyday-words

Needless to say, this repo will contain incomplete versions of future blog posts, as well as any freewriting / ramblings that I tend to write from time to time. Feel free to visit the repo every day to check if I have written anything. If I haven't, well feel free to bug me. :)

Yes, 200 words is too easy a target for me. On most good days, it is only going to take me about 20 minutes to reach it. But the real challenge is going to be finding what to write about, and actually sitting down for 20 minutes every day and writing. I will slowly increase the word limit over time, but let's just start small, shall we?

Wish me luck!

Modern life, especially for a knowledge worker, is full of stress. The realities of shallow, unproductive work, combined with several hours' worth of commute and a sedentary lifestyle – all contribute to the anxiety suffered by a typical employee working for a multi-national corporation. When she is not getting drowned in a deluge of emails, an executive is constantly getting tapped on her shoulder for a quick chat, or being forced to hear loud phone conversations of her colleague sitting three rows behind in an open office. What's worse is that such work does not stop once she's out of office. Contemporary instant messaging apps make sure that she's reachable to her team night and day. Production disasters keep on happening, even on weekends. It's circus hour, every hour, in a typical office in this day and age.

Such distractions in the workplace not only contribute to the misery of an office worker, they also inhibit her ability to perform what is known as deep work.

The realities of today's knowledge economy do not let anyone to work in complete isolation. One can, however, work towards finding a few pockets of time when one can disconnect from the outside world and collect her thoughts.

Let me be upfront about the fact that I don't have it that bad. Sure, I work as a software engineer – a class of knowledge workers famous for working long hours and leading unhealthy lifestyles. Yet I have somehow managed to keep work confined to the workplace and have a lot of time to myself. Still, I sometimes find myself wanting to... no, needing to disconnect from it all. And whenever that happens, I take a break from work and spend an entire day in my favorite city in the world... New Delhi.

I vividly remember the very first time I did it. I worked at IVP then, and was totally burned out at the project I was working on at that time. I just needed a break from the constant pressure, but did not know how. Slowly and steadily though, a plan got hatched.

I have always been fond of walking. I routinely take long walks whenever I'm dealing with particularly knotty problems. Why not take a really long walk? And visit an unexplored place in Delhi too? I thought. It was a really interesting idea, and highly doable. I promptly spent the next few days devising the locations I would be visiting (mostly by browsing Mayank Austen Soofi's blog), eating and drinking arrangements, and things I would be doing to pass the time. Yeah, it was stressful. (Looking back, now I don't feel that such detailed planning was needed. But then, I was young and inexperienced!)

At last, when the designated day came, I packed a lot of things in my bag – newspapers, notebooks, pens, water bottle, paper napkins, coins, power bank... (somehow I needed to have all these things on a walk) and off I went to the village of Shahpur Jat.

Whatever I was expecting to happen... It did not happen that way.

I had pictured my outing as a leisurely stroll in the long forgotten streets of Delhi. Instead I got hot just by walking a few kilometers lugging my heavy bag. I had wanted to sit in a coffee shop and work on my story. Instead I got lost in the labyrinth called Mehrauli. Clearly I was trying to do too many things at once. At the end of the day (and after walking for nearly 20,000 steps) I was sweaty, exhausted, and not at all relaxed. I went home dejected.

Having christened my first exploit a failure, I set out to design a better itinerary. Walking was important, sure, but I needed to loosen up a bit too. More importantly, I needed to write in an alien setting. I wanted to experience that. Less walking, more sitting.

For my next outing, I went to Khan Market. I roamed around a bit, had breakfast at Subway, and moved my base to the nearby Lodi Garden. It is a really nice park with Mughal-era monuments and a lake with ducks! I found a comfy corner to sit down near the lake. Out came the notebook and I started writing.

Three hours later I was still there. I was in the zone. I had made some lovely progress on my story in presence of rustling leaves and quacking ducks. I had even made friends with a nearby dog!

I repeated the same formula several times again. Breakfast at Khan Market, writing session at Lodi Garden, followed by exploration of a part of city yet unknown to me. I have been to Sanjay Van, Jahanpanah City Forest, Hailey Road, Hauz Khas Village, Majnu Ka Tila, and so much more in this manner.

Sometimes I even like to visit commercial establishments during my Days in Delhi, as I have begun to call these adventures. My personal favorites are the Select City Walk Mall in Saket and Ambiance Mall in Gurgaon. I can lose myself for hours in a bookshop (Om Book Shop at Ambiance really speaks to me). I have even spent a solo evening or two at Cyber Hub... taking in all the lights and sounds and reveling in them... I have been on the rusty streets of Paharganj and looked at all its garish, bohemian setting. I have walked on the narrowest streets in Chandni Chowk and watched business worth millions happening in a single hour. I have spent an entire day at the National Museum and basked in the absolute absence of noise in some of its corners. I have even roamed in the streets of Dwarka, which can somehow be messy and tranquil at the same time.

All the while escaping The Man And His Various Obligations.

Have I become a better person after spending time alone in the city? I think so. Being lost in the crowd has given me a different perspective to life itself. I have begun to grasp the innate complexities in human beings. If not anything else, the city has taught me patience. My days out in Delhi start off as planned events, yet the end of the day looks nothing like I had envisioned. Over time I have learned to embrace this spontaneity of it all.

Over time I have also realized that the happiness I feel at the end of the day is not just because of me walking about and doing what I like to do best. Delhi itself also plays her part. The city has a lot to offer to a pilgrim of her lanes. Everywhere you look, you can see a melting pot of cultures from all over India and all across the world. You can experience the dusty lanes of Ballimaran as well as the immaculately manicured Mughal Gardens. There is so much to see, to hear, to feel, to smell, to taste...

I have spent my entire life living in Delhi – all 29 years of it. Yet, I cannot claim that I have seen the city in its entirety. There are so many crevices still lurking around... waiting for me to find them. It's these small nooks and crannies that give Delhi its unique character. I will find them, eventually. But when I do, I'm sure the city will spring up more of such hidden attractions. I feel that there always will be a large part of Delhi unknown to me. I cannot see it all.

You know what, most of the time I am distracted is when I can't find anything to do. But... I always have lots of things to do, isn't it? Then what happens?

A more pressing concern is, that I can't seem to remember what all things I have to do. I don't make a list. Furthermore, even if I remember some of my tasks, I can't seem to find motivation to do them.

For example, I need to work on my website design, isn't it? I have it all planned out on Notion. But do you see me working on that since the past two weekends? NO. A big, fat, NO.

What's worse... Since I don't do things that I have to do, I tend to find new things to work on! Like at a drop of a hat!! Just because I don't want to write a blog post, I take up a big programming project which will supposedly take three months to complete. Who does that?

Me. Apparently.

Before today, I never gave a thought about why... even after trying to do a gazillion things in the past, I haven't really made it. Why my github account is empty. Why I tire out of writing after 20 blog posts. Why I stop reading for months on end after reading a string of books back to back? I lose motivation.

My mind always tries to find newer projects to start, when instead it should put some real work towards finishing the ones it already started. The list of projects abandoned by me is too damn high.

And what's up with this stupid writing style huh? I hate it, and can't seem to change it. Always writing in triads. Always using too many commas. And always mentally bitching about it. (See, I did it again!) Yup, improving it would take a writing class. But what good is that? I'll start and then abandon it midway.

They say that you should not be too hard on yourself. But seeing this situation, how can not?

Ever since I can remember, I have been interested in a lot of things. I am a voracious reader. I write a lot of stuff. I am a programmer by choice. I collect pens and inks from around the world. I love to travel. I am an amateur photographer. I have a special affinity to the latest and greatest of gadgets. I like to make draw geometrical designs. I listen to all kinds of music... the list goes on.

In addition to that, I also like to code in my free time. I have a number of ideas about apps that I would like to develop. I'm a self-hosting enthusiast. I have a digital ocean server that runs a lot of services for my personal use. And that's not all. In future I would like to have a stellar technical blog (in addition to this one), learn new technologies (especially for the frontend), and give conference talks too.

Because of all these hobbies I have mostly had a nice existence on earth. Because I am into so many things, I can talk about more subjects than an Average Joe. I can also better appreciate the diversity of the world at large, and the endless expanse of mankind's knowledge. All because I care about more stuff.

But there is also a dark side to living such a life. With so many engagements I rarely have time to sit down and relax. And when I do sit down and relax, I have this irksome feeling at the back of my head that I should be doing something else instead of just sitting down and relaxing. There are always a dozen things in my to-do list.

More importantly, by giving attention to a lot of things at once, I have only succeeded in becoming a jack of all trades. You see, every hobby I have mentioned above requires a lot of practice to become good at it:

Photography? You need to know your camera inside out. You need to walk around for hours looking for that shot. You need to take at least 10,000 photos to master the techniques and composition. You need to spend months learning Photoshop and Lightroom so that you can edit with perfection.

Writing / Blogging? You need to be always looking for things to write about. You cannot afford to lose even a single thought, so you always have to note down anything that can one day become a blog post. If you want to write fiction, well inspiration can strike anytime. You need to be always ready to receive it. Of course, writing is not the end in itself. Any writer worth his salt will constantly edit and discard most of the words he would have written. Words are fickle.

Coding? You will have to remain always affixed to your laptop screen. Before you can even start to write any code, you have to figure out what to make, and how to make it. You code at your day job. You code in your free time. You code during your commute. Stack Overflow becomes your second home. You struggle with weird errors that your code throws up regularly. Sometimes you get stuck somewhere and can't seem to solve. You need to constantly keep track of the tech world, for new libraries and frameworks and language features are being released every day. It's tough to keep up but you have to.

And then there is procrastination. No matter what you have to do, you always end up wasting much of your time in other nefarious pursuits. (Or maybe that's just me)

Creating is hard. One cannot expect to do everything in life and be great at each one. Greatness comes from deliberate practice, which requires time. Furthermore, deliberate practice only comes from a state of deep work. Which is why, it is important to have only a few things that you deeply care about. Do them repeatedly. Get better at them incrementally. Make small progress everyday.

All this means that... I need to choose. Having so many hobbies won't cut it any more. It is no longer fulfilling to me being a jack of all trades. I need to be a master of one.

A few weeks ago I made a promise to myself (and to all of you) that I shall be writing on this blog twice a week. It has been good going till now. I am certainly enjoying this ritual of writing, and I want to continue. This is why, I have decided to choose writing as my primary focus from now on.

By committing to publishing two articles a week, I already have to write at least three days out of every seven. With writing being my primary focus, I will up the writing frequency to be seven days out of every seven! Yes, I will write every day. I may still publish only twice a week, but those published article will become longer and more thoroughly researched.

I will also launch my technical blog by the first week of May (or earlier, if I can manage it). I will work towards creating a queue of completed (but unpublished) posts, so that I can keep up with the schedule even when I realistically can't find time to write.

Internet has become a necessary evil in this day and age. Nothing happens without the internet. Your files live on the cloud. Your communication happens on the cloud. Your entertainment is consumed on the cloud. Work and play, both happen over invisible bits being sent to and fro on the airwaves.

Although the internet has made lives of everyone a lot simpler, it has no doubt made carrying out one's day-to-day work a lot harder too. As I outlined in my last post, the convenience of the internet also brings with it a suite of distractions, all of which are highly detrimental to anyone hoping to do an honest day's work. Every time you sit down to do something... an email chimes in, or a slack message chirps, or a meeting invite is received... each distraction more important than the last. What should one do if the very nature of one's workplace is full of such distractions?

On some level, it is true that you cannot fundamentally change the way your coworkers behave in your workplace. Such behavior is so ingrained in your organization's culture that a lone wolf like you cannot affect a change in it overnight. There are however, certain things you can do to make sure that you get enough pockets of time to yourself to engross in deep work, while still maintaining healthy relationships with your colleagues:

Noise Canceling Headphones

One of the major sources of distraction in a modern workplace is ambient noise. More and more organizations are moving towards "open plan" offices – which are supposed to help with collaboration and serendipity of ideas, but instead end up being an all out noise fest, with all those loud conversations and ringing phones. Furthermore, the very reason they are more popular with modern organizations is due to the rising cost of real estate. Open plan offices simply support more people per unit area.

In such an environment, a good pair of noise canceling headphones are your best friend. They not only block out most of the ambient noise, they even send a signal to your coworkers that you are not to be disturbed.

Turning off notifications

If there was ever a survey of the most annoying aspect of knowledge work, untimely notifications would be there right at the top. Fortunately though, there is a very easy way to stop those pesky dings from your life. Simply block 'em!

Every modern laptop and smartphone nowadays is equipped with a Do Not Disturb mode. Switch it on and forget about emails forever.

If it was that easy, eh?

Remember that while it is very easy to block all notifications and work in isolation, these modern communication mediums are necessary to keep up with the demands of an increasingly globalized world. If you are switching off all notifications, make sure to communicate this to your coworkers. They might depend on you for several tasks. Let them know about the specific time slots when you plan to be unreachable, so that appropriate expectations are set accordingly.

Blocking time in your calendar

Your calendar probably is already full of crap. Meetings where you're not required, flimsy HR events or worse, repetitive status meetings for projects which have long since been delivered. Just looking at such a cluttered calendar is sure to give a bad start to your day.

If you are one of such people, start by de-cluttering your calendar. Remove yourself from any meetings where you're strictly not required. Then take five minutes to marvel at the resulting empty screen.

Then, block chunks of time (about 2 hours each), where you can plan to get some real, uninterrupted work done. Get a meeting room to yourself, switch off your notifications, put on your noise canceling headphones (probably listen to some lo-fi beats), and work.

Putting aside such chunks of time everyday will be a big boost to your productivity. You're not only setting up a workspace free of distractions, but at the same time by blocking your time in your calendar, you are letting your coworkers know that you're busy. They are unlikely to disturb you during that time.

Don't hog the meeting rooms though. No one likes those kind of people.

Blocking certain websites and apps

What's the use of setting up a pristine workspace for yourself when you can simply visit Reddit on your web browser and get distracted for hours on end? It is not feasible any more to block access to internet entirely during work, which makes the problem posed by entertainment website a lot harder to tackle.

Or is it? Well it's a mixed bag.

Technology exists today which can selectively block access to certain websites and let others through. However, such technology can also be easily circumvented. You can install a browser extension to block, say twitter.com, but then you can easily remove that extension from your browser too.

Simply blocking a few websites and apps is not going to cut it. You will need to have some discipline around keeping the blocked websites blocked for good.

Following a Routine

You can effectively remove distracting elements from your daily life if you follow a set routine. When you're on the clock, you can hardly make time for frivolous things like scrolling down instagram.

Make a list of everything you do on a typical day. Include everything. Assign a particular time to each item in the list and follow it religiously.

You may think that following a strict schedule will make you feel like a robot. You're right. For the first few weeks you will feel like a robot. But as time will pass, you will develop muscle memory for your daily tasks. Do a few things at the same time and in the same order everyday, and before long your brain will automatically make you do those, without you even thinking about it.

Believe me, when that happens, your mind will be free to focus on things that matter. Muscle memory is akin to automation for your body. Automate your daily tasks and deep work will follow.

When it comes to productivity... the internet is the worst. The more time you spend there, the less work you get done in your day to day life. It is a gateway drug to distraction. Heavy internet addiction can result in reduced performance at work, inferior personal relationships, and a sense of fruitlessness at the end of the day – when you realize that you ended up wasting all your time in pointless pursuits.

There is more to life than browsing reddit... more to life than participating in flame wars on hacker news... and more to life than endlessly scrolling instagram. Yet most of us keep doing it... because it gives a welcome respite from work that actually requires unadulterated attention.

What prompted this piece today relates to a small incident that happened a couple of days ago. As always, I was endlessly browsing instagram, when I noticed a small notice in the app:

All caught up. You have seen all new posts from the past three days.

I was like... Seriously??? What the fuck!!!

I let it go that time. So what? People must have not been posting that much. It happens. It's okay. I'm not a walrus. I even posted a screenshot of the notice on my... well... instagram story. 107 people saw it. Don't know why but I was secretly proud of it.

And then it hit me.

Having seen ALL instagram posts from my feed (I follow 600+ people) from the past three days is hardly something to be proud of. Heck, it is something to be ASHAMED of.

It is a symptom of a larger problem. This attention deficit that all of us seem to be having lately. Getting bored at work? Why not ping someone on Whatsapp. Nothing to do on the commute? Facebook, here I come! Please let me scroll endlessly.

To get a handle on the problem, I made a time log of everything I did yesterday at work, in 15 min increments. Something like this:

08:45-09:00 Clock in, set up workspace 09:00-09:15 Make coffee, check medium for new posts

and so on. In a 9-hour workday, the breakup of various activities came out to be like this:

Work: 02:45 hours

Meetings: 01:30 hours

Social Media: 02:00 hours

Lunch: 01:00 hours

Learning new stuff: 01:00 hours

Letting mind wander: 01:15 hours

Notice the break up? I only got 2 hours and 45 minutes of actual work done. In a 9 hour workday. I spent more time on social media than in various meetings. I practically did nothing for more than an hour throughout the day!!

Wow. Much revelation. Clearly something needs to change. There is so much time during my day that I'm not utilizing. I can use that to get better at work. I can use that to write more. I can even use that to do a side hustle!

They say that knowing about a problem is half the solution. I know my problem. And I kinda know how to solve it.

I have actually written this before! Back in 2015, when I was working with IVP and seemingly following the 11 AM to 8 PM shift, I had written an hour-wise account of how a typical workday used to progress for me.

A lot has changed since then. I haven't followed the 11 AM to 8 PM shift for quite a while now. Shortly after writing that post I found myself working from 1 PM to 10 PM instead, which stayed on until I left IVP in November 2018. Nowadays I work at Info Edge India Limited – where everyone follows the normal 9 AM to 6 PM shift.

Ostensibly, there has been a drastic change in my daily schedule, which is why I decided to redo the post for 2019. Here we go!

4:45 AM First alarm of the day. Bixby in my Note 9 proudly announces the weather and calendar events for the rest of the day. God do I resent her for that or what! I shut her off after the weather report, but before the calendar events (obviously!)

5:00 AM Second alarm of the day. No Bixby and her pretentious announcements this time. Just a simple ringer, which I also shut off after cursing it (almost) loudly.

5:15 AM I wake up. Send off my phone, my fitbit, and my kindle to their respective charging stations. After all, they need to eat as much as I do!

6:48 AM Finally ready for office, I dash off to the train station. (In case you're wondering... yes, I leave exactly at 6:48 AM)

7:04 AM Reach the train station after walking for about 1.75 km. Run towards the 7:08 train.

7:08 AM Settle down for the journey. Find a nice corner in the train (it's moderately empty at this hour), and engross in either reading a book, or writing a post. Sometimes both too, one after another!

8:14 AM De-board the train. Get into the bus. Read some more.

8:51 AM Sign in to the office. Make coffee to wake up properly. Set up the workspace, consisting of the laptop, the mouse, the keyboard, and the headphones.

9:10 AM Start coding like a maniac. Spotify on full blast.

11:00 AM Walk a perimeter of the office, and move on to the cafeteria for a cheese toast (or a corn salad).

11:30 AM Meeting time! Something or the other is invariably scheduled at this time. If yes, then browse Instagram during the meeting. If not, continue coding like a maniac.

1:30 PM Lunch. And another walk.

2:30 PM Headphones are back on. But now they don't get to be on for a long time. Second half of the day is when most of my meetings are scheduled. And no, no instagramming at this time :(

4:00 PM Chai, and code.

5:00 PM Get into the let's go home mode. Start finishing up work. Send any emails if needed. Schedule any meetings for next day if needed. Have more chai if needed!

5:50 PM Sign out, and get into the company bus. Out comes the kindle.

6:24 PM Reach the train station. Run towards the 6:32 train.

6:32 PM Sit down, and continue reading.

7:44 PM De-board the train. Walk 2500+ steps home.

8:05 PM At home. Watch YouTube videos about new hardware, or about anything else catching my fancy at that moment.

8:30 PM Writing time. Continue / give finishing touches to / edit the things written during morning commute.

9:30 PM Dinner. I'm starving by then.

9:45 PM Netflix. Watch a couple of episodes of a show I'm currently following.

10:30 Try to fight sleep. Realize that it's not worth it. Doze off into oblivion.

Rinse and repeat the next day. Phew!

In the beginning of the post I said that a lot has changed since then. But if you compare and contrast this with the one I wrote four years ago... not much has changed. Sure I wake up an hour earlier than usual (and get an hour's worth of sleep less each day), the core components of my day haven't changed. Walking, coffee, code, chai, reading, and writing still form a big part of my day. I'm already on the verge of finishing up my ninth book of 2019. I've been writing on the blog about once a week since the beginning of the year. I still can't start my day without coffee!

Our brain does a lot of things automatically. You repeat something for long enough and the brain constructs neural pathways to make that happen without you even thinking about it. So much so that if you don't do it every day you start feeling that something is missing from your life.

Okay so I'm not going to keep calling it How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It is too long and too tedious of a title (sorry, Scott Adams!) Instead, I'm gonna call it the Fail Book. Yeah, I like that name!

Anyway. In today's post I'll write about yet another important lesson imparted by the Fail Book, which seems counter intuitive at first but turns out to be extremely powerful. In the book, Adams says:

Reduce your daily decisions to routine.

We don't realize it, but we have to make a lot of decisions every day. These not only include the decisions you make as part of your job – during business meetings, brainstorming sessions, and while figuring out the best approach to solve a particularly nasty problem, but also micro-decisions like what to eat and what to wear. In fact, it is these unimportant decisions that take up the majority of your willpower, leaving your ability to make important decisions severely impaired.

Picture this. Assume that you wake up two hours before you leave for office. Let's enumerate the different decisions you need to make before you head out:

Should you shave today?

What to wear to work?

What to eat for breakfast?

Are you packing your lunch?

If yes, what?

Each one of these decisions take up a small amount of your time. Taken together, the actual amount of minutes don't really add up to much. But the real culprit here is the amount of fragmentation it causes in your morning routine. Instead of having a large block of time for yourself, you're left with a number of small pockets of free time tucked in here and there... only because you had to make a number of small decisions for yourself... none of which are going to matter the next day. Or even the next hour!

Now picture this. Assume that you still wake up two hours before you leave for office. But this time, you simply follow your routine instead of taking time to decide what to do next. Instead of making your decisions one at a time, consider setting up a block of time, once, to decide your daily morning routine:

You will shave every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

You will iron your clothes for the coming week every Sunday evening, and hang them in your wardrobe in order.

You will have cereal, a fruit, and a cup of coffee every day for breakfast.

You will pack your lunch only on Tuesdays (sprout salad, PBJ sandwiches) and Thursdays (Pasta, corn and veggie salad).

You will revisit the breakfast and lunch menu on the last Sunday of each month.

There you go. Your morning routine just changed from a haphazard, indecision-infested fracas into an orderly, peaceful habit. Keep following it for six weeks or more and you'll find that you have developed muscle memory for all your morning tasks, and you can do them without thinking.

You can even apply the same principles in your work life.

Distracted by too many emails? Turn off your notifications and make a routine to check email once every two hours

Not getting too much exercise? Make a routine to take a walk at 11 AM and 4 PM every day.

Managing a lot of people? Can't seem to find time to do enough one-on-ones? Make a routine to talk to one member of your team about his / her work issues every day at 10 AM.

Automate everything that can be automated, and you will find your productivity levels rise substantially. Also, by doing the same thing at the same time every day, not only will you get better at them, you will manage to find more time than ever to pursue your hobbies and interests.

Let's face it. I'm a lazy bum. And a sucker for choice. And a stop-a-project-midway-to-start-a-new-one kind of guy. Following through takes some real discipline in my case and most of the time I'm not able to provide it. Evidently, most of my personal projects suffer due to this.

If not for my laziness, I would have already pushed out a software project, would have started writing a book, and would have had a flourishing blog. (Even if laziness is not supposed to get ALL the credit for my failures, I like to think it so.)

Anyway. Crying over split milk is a lost cause. All I can do now is to try and buck of for the future. To this effect, I have decided something.

From now on, I will write on this blog every Sunday and Wednesday. Without fail.

Bleh, you say. Writing twice a week is no commitment. Anybody and their mother can do it. What's so special about it? Are you a fucking retard to think that by writing twice a fucking week will make you a fucking superstar?

Well, no. But at least I will be doing something I love, with the regularity of well oiled machine. If I don't follow a schedule I tend to let my mind wander away from the task at hand. A commitment will make me sit up and take notice. Writing two posts a week doesn't take too much of an effort. I do that during my commute nowadays. Thinking about what to write... now that's something!

It's not that I haven't made such commitments with myself before. A few years ago I was trying to cultivate a habit of blogging everyday. (Go back enough on this blog and you will find those posts.) It was kinda fun, but over time I ran out of things to write about and my posts stopped having any substance. By publishing just a couple of posts a week, I'm hoping that I would be able to write at least 500 words having some real takeaways.

Further, it isn't the act of writing alone that makes a blog post fit to publish. Lately I have been spending a non-trivial amount of time editing what I have written. Editing makes you take a critical look at your work before anyone else takes a critical view of your work! And I have found that almost every time I have had to make a number of corrections to the text before I consider it fit for public consumption.

Committing to writing every week will also make me more observant of my surroundings, as I will always be looking for things to write about! This is never a bad thing in my opinion. More observations -> more material -> more content!

Man this is going to be hard. My mind likes to explore new things everyday. It cannot just sit at one place and do what it's supposed to do. I'll have to push myself to the very limits to make this work. But I will. I will, definitely.

So yeah. I'm not a fucking retard to think that by writing twice a fucking week will make me a fucking superstar. It won't, for sure. But I'm not here for superstardom. :)

This post contains spoilers. Please don't read if you haven't watched the Netflix series or haven't read the book, and would like to enjoy the story with all its twists and turns.

Ganesh Gaitonde is dead. Ganesh Gaitonde, once one of the most ruthless and feared gangsters of the Mumbai Underworld, has killed himself while hiding in an impenetrable fortress he had built for himself.

Ganesh Gaitonde is dead, but in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, he continues to speak from beyond his grave. He talks about his birth as a gangster, the people he killed, the power he acquired over the years, his atheism, and his subsequent religiousness when he met his guru. Then he talks about his insecurities, his escapades, his time in jail, his lost family, his friend Jojo and his mistress Zoya. He relives his entire life through such recollections from beyond.

Sartaj Singh, on the other hand, is an ordinary police inspector, thank you very much. He is divorced from his wife, and spends his time catching small time criminals along with his constable Katekar. He's not very ambitious, this Sartaj Singh. He is content with his life. He does not want any more excitement in his life. He's had enough. Perhaps his apathy towards his job is what makes him a favorite of his superior Parulkar, who doesn't find himself threatened at all by sharing his secrets with him, and even once gifts him a pair of ridiculously expensive Italian shoes.

However, an absurd twist of fate brings him face to face with the formidable gangster. Gaitonde called him, of all people, to tell him the story of his life while holed up in a nuclear fallout shelter (really). Sartaj is impatient. He wants Gaitonde and he wants him now. So he hires a bulldozer to slice through the ramparts and goes inside. Gaitonde, clearly wanting to keep talking, commits suicide to escape capture.

It is evident that Chandra has done his homework while researching for the plot and the characters. Instead of simply opting for black-and-white personalities, he has worked hard to imbibe shades of gray to each person. By conveniently failing to mention any date whatsoever (the only hints are the mentions of the Babri Masjid demolition and Mumbai blasts, and later, references to contemporary Bollywood movies), he has managed to create a timeless masterpiece of a book.

Not all is hunky-dory with the text though. At 925+ pages, Sacred Games is not a small book by any measure. For an action-packed thriller, the novel moves with a leisurely pace of A Suitable Boy rather than the highly energetic one of Gone Girl. There are too many subplots, too many irrelevant characters, and too many superfluous words... One wonders whether the story arcs free of such fluff would have been much better? (The answer is yes.)

Chandra has worked hard writing this book. A little too hard in my opinion. He has written elaborate back stories for each of his characters... even minor ones like Sartaj's mother and Anjali Mathur's mentor at RAW... and has felt the need to include everything in the text. None of these stories add any weight to the main plot and only serve as needless distractions. Personally, I feel that there is enough material in Sacred Games for two, totally independent novels.

Two of the most underrated characters in the book have got to be the Mascarenas sisters – Jojo and Mary. (None of whom, sadly, find much mention in the TV series.) Jojo is easily the one with the most spunk in the entire novel. This multitasking, foul-mouthed, cracker of a woman ostensibly finds herself in a long-distance platonic relationship with Gaitonde. Her unfiltered conversations with the gangster are crucial for some of his hardest realizations in the story.

Mary's budding romance with Sartaj in the later part of the book provides a welcome distraction from all the violence happening all around, and for once does contribute to the overall story.

The climax, again, is a sluggish, sordid affair. The police surrounds the bungalow, the culprits are caught, and the threat to national security is eliminated. That's all. After reading more than 900 pages of boring text interspersed with action-packed sequences, one is certainly left wanting for more.

There's more, no doubt. But hey, it's the entire backstories of yet another couple of minor characters. :(

Sacred Games is a fine novel, but sadly nothing more. It is an ordinary Magnum Opus, completely run-of-the-mill. Enjoyable yes, but only in parts. There are many sections in the book where you either want to rush through, or simply skip altogether. And it's not your fault!

Given all its shortcomings though, is Sacred Games a masterpiece? Funny as it may sound, but I have to say yes. It's a great story, only that it's narration has fizzled out a bit. But it doesn't mean that you can't apply the power of your imagination and enjoy it up to the hilt.

Give it a shot!

In totally Vikram Chandra style—Inset. What prompted me to read this book, and write this review.

The first I heard about Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (rather, the first I heard about Vikram Chandra) was when Netflix came out with a series with the same name, and which opened to rave reviews from critics and viewers alike. I binge-watched it during a train journey to Amritsar last year and generally agreed with the majority about its gripping plot, its vivid characters, and its portrayal of Mumbai as a gangsta-heaven of the 80's. The show was a hit. It made the likes of Ganesh Gaitonde and Sartaj Singh household names, spawned a new string of memes on social media, and for me personally, increased the respect I had for Nawazuddin Siddiqui as an actor. It was great.

Now, whenever I watch a screen adaptation of any novel or a short story, I just have to read the text too. I find reading a lot more enjoyable than any visual medium. The experience of watching a movie or a TV show is limited by budget allotted to it, but when you read a gripping story, there's no limit to your imagination! So I checked out how the book was received when it had been released in 2006. I was surprised to find out that even though the book was highly anticipated (and had got Mr. Chandra one of the highest advances ever by the publisher), it had flopped. There was no denying it. It had a rating of less than 4 on GoodReads, and its online reviews were less than flattering. I was terribly confused.

I was casually browsing twitter a few months ago when I came across a new app that was making waves all around the social media, called — Notion. I wasn't much intrigued at that time because I didn't really need any other note-taking app. Or a reminder app. Or a to-do app. So I summarily dismissed it as yet another fad and moved on to the next tweet.

You see, I use a lot of apps in my daily workflow. I write my blog posts on a distraction-free editor called ghostwriter. I use Evernote as a sort of dumping ground for all my notes and ideas and other tidbits. If I need to write a more structured document full of tables and diagrams, I use this awesome markdown editor called Typora. It is more feature-rich than ghostwriter but an overkill for a simple blog post like this. For simple notes-on-the-go I use an android app called Squid, or sometimes even Samsung Notes. For keeping track of my tasks and shopping lists and what not, I use Remember The Milk. Again, an overkill but it gets the job done! And lastly, for keeping track of my bookmarks I simply save them to my Instapaper account.

I know – too many apps! However, I have developed this system over a period of many years after trying out so many app combinations. It really works for me now. I have got accustomed to the different idiosyncrasies of all these apps and everything is nicely ingrained into my muscle memory.

And then came Notion! It came back on my radar recently when I was perusing an online discussion about a blogging workflow. Someone casually mentioned that he used Notion to write the actual post and then copy-pasted it onto the CMS. The intrigue came back and I found myself watching some YouTube videos about how it combines multiple apps in one and really makes life simple. I ended up making an account.

And boy was I hooked or what!

When you open Notion for the first time, it feels as if it is a yet another online note-taking application (like Evernote). But once you dive it, you find that not only you can enter text on a page, you can also organize whatever you want into multiple pages, add tables and run formulas on them (think Excel), drop your tasks into a kanban-style board (think Trello), embed a real calendar on a page complete with appointments and reminders (think Google Calendar), write stuff and annotate it with embeds like tweets, YouTube videos, Spotify playlists, GitHub gists (just like in Medium), use their web-clipper to dump all your bookmarks at one place (think Instapaper) ... the list goes on!

Some enterprising folks have also set up a showcase website called Notion Pages that gives you so many ideas for you to set up your own workspace. People have created bullet journals, account books, college notebooks, personal wikis and so much more using Notion.

Here's the kicker though. Notion is not free :(

Although you can use it for free forever, you can only store 1,000 blocks in your account. (In notion-speak, each page is made up of multiple blocks. A heading is a block, a text area is a block, and so on). Mind you, 1,000 blocks is a lot! But if you really get hooked to this stuff, those will be gone in no time.

Good thing is that it is really easy to earn credit! If you click on this link and sign up, you will instantly get a $10 credit in your account. After that, you can complete some simple tasks (like downloading their desktop and mobile apps, using the web clipper, etc.) and earn even more credit. I was able to get $30+ credit quite easily. It costs $4 a month.

As far as I am concerned, I'm really trying to get my entire life organized inside of Notion. At the moment I have made a skeleton of a personal homepage that lists out my books queue, my bookmarks, my habit trackers, and a list of my favorite quotes. It is still a major work in progress, and I will share progress once I make some.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big is one hell of a book. As I have said before, in some of its chapters, about every other sentence is an actionable advice. As much as I would love to write a comprehensive review of the book, I am slowly coming to a realization that it won't be possible for me to do complete justice to it. The subject matter is too vast to look critically at everything and not end up writing another book!

To escape this conundrum, I have decided that I will try to incorporate much of the book into my life and document the process. This will give me a somewhat larger canvas to explore different aspects of the book and also space out my writing so as not to get overwhelmed. So... in several different blog posts in the coming months I shall be exploring different facets of the book one by one and try to assimilate Adams' suggestions in my day-to-day schedule.

The facet that I want to explore in today's blog post is this:

Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners.

He argues that if you do set a goal for yourself, work relentlessly towards it, and then one day actually achieve it... You tend to stop working towards it any longer. After all, you did lose that 10 kgs in three months. You don't need to eat healthy anymore do you?

Turns out that achieving one goal is only a small step in your road to success. To really arrive you need to start working on a bigger goal as soon as you achieve a smaller one.

Seems like a lot of work no? Make a goal. Achieve it. Then make another one and start all over again. In addition to working towards your goals, you also have to manage the setting and resetting of those goals, tracking progress, celebrating every now and then... ;)

What if, instead of all this you had a system instead? Like instead of having a goal to lose 10 kgs, having a system of always eating healthy?

How is it any different you ask? Well it makes a whole lot of difference.

Having a system of always eating healthy frees you up from making elaborate diet plans every time you decide to lose some weight. It frees you up from the chore of tracking your progress, and from the stress it invariably induces if you find you're not on track. A system won't make you complacent when you finally lose all that weight and won't make you eat ice-cream by the tub when you're depressed.

Having a plethora of goals is like running multiple 100m sprints. Having a system is like running a marathon that never ends. You keep going further without ever stopping. Slowly and steadily.

Sure, having a system is boring. You don't get to measure each waypoint on your path to success. There is no cause for celebration along the way. Instead of making a grand entrance on successville, the town creeps up on you and one fine day you realize that you have already been there for some time.

Today I finished reading "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" by "Scott Adams". Even while reading the first few pages I was convinced that this was no ordinary book. Usually a "self help" book has a theme around which most of it is written. It tries to explain its central idea by many examples in its numerous chapters. You can easily follow along and be convinced of whatever idea the book is peddling. Not this one though!

The Adams book does not have a central theme. Every chapter talks about something different. In some chapters, every other sentence is actionable advice. It has so much material in it that you really want to make copious notes while reading it if you ever hope to keep up. I guess I'm reading it again some day. Studying it again rather.

Anyway, this post is not a review of the book. A full review will have to wait for another reading. What I really want to talk about today is a specific statement I read in the book, which made me very skeptical at first, but then something happened recently that made me do a double take. It said:

Mediocre skills can make you valuable.

I mean... really? It seems so counter-intuitive isn't it? After all, we humans are wired to reward excellence over anything else. I for one cannot even imagine that I can keep anyone with only mediocre skills in high regard. After all, anyone can pull off mediocre skills. In order to stand out of the crowd you need to be exceptional at what you do. And so goes the conventional wisdom.

But what we fail to realize is that while anyone can pull off mediocre skills, not everyone does. People are lazy. They don't care. Even pulling off mediocre skills takes some effort and not everyone wants to do it. By comparison, it makes even a low-effort mediocre task look like an exceptionally crafted endeavor.

So this is what happened. I took an Uber yesterday, and my driver had a rating of 4.9.

At face value, a rating of 4.9 doesn't really tell you anything. Maybe the driver was just starting out and had done only a few trips? Everyone starts out at 5 on Uber after all. What really got me intrigued was when I saw that my allotted driver had completed around 7500 trips and still had his rating as 4.9. My first thought was that he might be gaming the system somehow. I've seen drivers who ask their passengers to give them a 5-star rating at the end of the trip. (Me? I always give those people a 4).

Anyway. My interest was already spiked as I was waiting for the cab to arrive. I don't know what I was expecting but it certainly did not turn out to be that.

The car was old but impeccably clean. The guy himself was dressed smartly. He wished me good morning the moment I stepped in. Even on bumpy roads he managed to drive super smoothly. And at the end of the trip he wished me a nice day.

That's all he did. It didn't take him too much of an effort to exchange pleasantries. It's all good manners right? Manners which our parents doubtless taught us when we were young. But how many of us remember? And how little does it take to make an ordinary man stand out of the crowd?

No. He was not gaming the system. He was really that good. Obviously I have him a 5-star rating. Anyone with a right mind would. His low-effort endeavor of simply exchanging pleasantries with his passengers elevated an otherwise boring ride into an exceptional experience. And that made it trivial for any of his passengers to give him a 5-star rating.

This is not some stuff of legend. Any Uber driver could make the rider experience better. He chose to do it. That made all the difference.

There was a time, a few years ago, when I was a lot more immature than I am now. I used to be very particular of how things should happen around me. I could not tolerate any departures from the normal, or the routine. Responding to the unexpected always took the wind out of me, and I would often react by channeling my surprise into frustrations I took out on others. For example, if I was waiting for somebody and I expected someone to be there by 9:00, then that guy should better be there at 9:00... or I would chide him till the end of his life! No wonder people called me a stuck up back then.

I guess I did that because I used to have too high of an opinion of me. I was a genius. I could do no wrong. I sat my ass at the fucking center of the universe and nobody had the fucking guts to unsaddle me.

Needless to say, I used to be miserable all the time. And why not? After all, the world was not my oyster. To make yourself worthwhile in your life you need to shed all ill-conceived notions about your supposed greatness and get to work. There is no substitute to burning the midnight oil.

But I was young and I was restless. I did not understand that success won't come to me served in a silver platter. I believed that my inherent talent will trump ceaseless practice and expected everyone around me to fall in line and bow to me already. All that internal hooplah about my supposed greatness showed me my destination alright, but distracted me from undertaking the long journey to achieve it.

How immature of me!

Of course, as time has progressed I have come to realize that having an unusually high opinion of yourself and just waiting for good things to happen to you never works. The realization was gradual so I did not wake up one morning and decided to change my life. The changes were subtle, but now that they have added up I've got a unique perspective on my life and its tiny problems.

I appreciate failure in a better way now. I have understood that failure is not something to be afraid of. It is to be embraced instead. Even the biggest failure of your life cannot put you down permanently. You can always get up and fight. And fight again. And again. Failure can only wear you out... never defeat you.

More importantly, you cannot be successful unless you have tasted failure first. Each time you fail, you get one more chance to make yourself better, stronger, more resilient. These chances make your experience add up like compound interest too.

A younger me would never have published this post, because he would have found a lot of things wrong with it. It's too short, he would have said. It can use better words, or I can rewrite it better. All of them would have been excuses of a perfectionist. Today, I know that I could have written this better, but I'm still going to publish it... in hope that my next post will be slightly superior.

Earlier I used to be all about making a sudden, big impact. Today I'm happy to walk the path slowly and steadily, and win numerous tiny victories along the way.

Self improvement is a long and arduous journey. It isn't impossible to do, but it does demand a lot of resolve to stick to what you've committed to.

One of the best ways to stick to what you've committed to is by a mix of positive and negative reinforcement. You applaud yourself for doing the right things, and let your wrongdoings stick it to your face. It's a classic carrot-and-stick method for accomplishing stuff. Once your achievements and failures are carefully tabulated out in the open, you can get a unique third-person perspective of your life and your progress towards your goals. In a single glance at a piece of paper you can know what is going right and what is not, and makes it really easy to correct your course for the near future. Constant feedback and improvement.

After reading a bunch of books and fantasizing about trying to improve myself, I have started taking some baby steps towards my goals. To this effect, a few days ago I started a bullet journal for myself... and one of the first things I created in it was a habit tracker:

For February, I'm tracking around 15 habits, including:

Getting to bed and waking up on time

Reading and writing

Walking and staying hydrated

Less of social media and TV

No frivolous spending

Three days in and I'm already able to see a slight difference in my outlook. Just because I have to fill a square with a diagonal line, I make it a point to do things I have set out to do. It gives me extra motivation to keep going no matter what the odds.

Of course, this is hard. After a day's work I come back tired and not much in a mood to read anything, much less write. Yet here I am... typing away at 9PM... really excited about an additional box that I get to tick in the tracker today.

I have a feeling that only the beginning will be tough though. If I keep doing good things day after day, it will become a habit. Then I will feel weird if I didn't work on a personal project everyday. How awesome will it be!

This is somewhat in continuation of my last post.

Malcolm Gladwell has written a very famous book called Outliers - The Story of Success, in which he mentions something known as the "10,000-hour rule":

The key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of 10,000 hours.

On surface this makes complete sense. I remember back in school when I had trouble with math, my teachers made me practice the same concept again and again and again, until I could get it right. With weeks of deliberate practice, I developed muscle memory to solve algebra problems at the drop of a hat... so much so that even after many years now a sixth grade math book does not feel alien to me. With a cursory glance I can easily recall the concepts and apply them today.

At a very subconscious level, the 10,000-hour rule feels right. The more practice you do, the better you get.

But now let us look into the mechanics of practicing for those 10,000 hours. Assuming that your work is your true passion and you do it for 40 hours a week, reaching the 10,000 mark will take you 250 weeks. That's almost 5 years!

5 years of doing the same thing, over and over again, week after week, before you get to be world-class in it.

Now imagine if your work is not your passion. Imagine that you're stuck in a dead-end job just to pay the bills, while your real passion is something else. Let's say that after a 40-hour week you manage to spend another 20 working on your favorite thing.

Now it will take you 10 years.

Depressing, eh? Does it mean that you need to practice something for nearly a decade before it becomes worthwhile? Well... no.

The 10,000-hour rule wants to make you world class in your trade. If you practice for 10,000 hours you can become the Virat Kohli of cricket, the Shreya Ghoshal of vocals, or the Sundar Pichai of tech. And while aiming to be like them is a worthy goal in itself, one needs to understand that not everyone will reach their level. For every Virat Kohli there is a Sreesanth, for every Shreya Ghoshal there is a Neha Kakkar, and for every Sundar Pichai there is a person who just won a hackathon. They're not really world class, but successes in their own right.

There is very little space at the top of the pyramid, but the penultimate floor can house a lot.

It is easy to win a hackathon if you focus and practice for say 10 hours, which is nothing but a thousandth of amount of practice you need to become the CEO of Google. Maybe start with it? Maybe your first step can be to participate in a hackathon no matter whether you win or lose? Baby steps!

Perhaps it will help if you visualize your goals properly.

Even if you commit yourself to practice your craft for those 10,000 hours, remember that along the way you will achieve major success. No amount of practice remains unrewarded. It's rather sad, but the world is filled with people who have brilliant ideas but little incentive to act on them. They lack focus. They lack the willpower to see things through. YOU can be different. You can rise above them, simply by keeping one foot in front of the other.

There's a fire starting in my heart.

Adele's Rolling in the deep is about revenge. It's about a broken heart and it's quest for closure by hitting something. But when I quote a line from its lyrics, my meaning is rather different.

There's a fire starting in my heart.

The fire is my quest to make something. To do something extra than I am required to do in life. To become something else, something better than I currently am. That's the fire I am talking about.

But the kind of lazy bum that I am, I'm finding it rather difficult to choose a goal and then sticking to it.

I have long since realized that I'm not capable of introducing a big change too quickly in my life. Doing such a thing requires:

A lot of determination

A lot of patience

A lot of discipline

And I don't possess anything of that sort. I got very depressed when this hit me. I have always had better expectations from myself. I have always wanted to be fitter... better read... a better professional... better at relationships... Not that I haven't made any strides over the years. I can confidently say that compared to ten years ago, I have acquired a lot of maturity. I've gotten better at not-obsessing-on-lost-causes. I don't panic at unexpected situations anymore. I process information a lot better than I used to do.

Yet, self-improvement is a journey with no destination. You have to keep going, knowing that every step forward makes you an infinitesimally better person.

And then, one fine day, I had an epiphany. Every step forward... Infinitesimally better person... I should stop trying to make a leap forward, and take baby steps instead.

Picture a baby when she's learning to walk. How small are her steps! How many times does she fall down! And how happy she is to keep on trying!

Self-improvement is a similar journey. Nobody becomes a superstar overnight. They have to work it, piece by piece, bit by bit. That is why developing micro-habits to attain your goals is the in thing to do.

Now what is a micro-habit? It is the smallest amount of change you can make in your life that brings you just one step forward in your path to self-improvement.

Suppose you want to be fitter, but your daily corporate grind doesn't let you exercise. What do you do? You take the stairs instead of the elevator! Three flights of stairs everyday and you're already making progress!

But then you'd say... How is three flights of stairs everyday going to cut it? It's not enough exercise for one day. To which I'd say... give it some time!

Granted, just three flights of stairs is inadequate. But once you train your brain to do it everyday, your brain starts employing the same principle in other places too. You're on a metro station? You start gravitating towards stairs instead of the escalator. Slowly but steadily, climbing stairs is part of your life. It is ingrained deep inside of you.

And that's when it's time to take another step! Now you can train yourself to walk more. And when that becomes a subconscious habit... you can train yourself to get up early and jog!

Our brain is a creature of habit. Repeat something often enough and it starts directing you to do it before you even think about it. Plan your micro-habits nicely enough and you're well into the path to self improvement.