A Book ! … A Message!

A good author leaves one message though they share a myriad of thoughts through their book…Here is a compilation in my own words ,some of the “one message(s)” from books that I have read recently…

Subroto Bagchi in his book “The Professional” :

A Professional is one who has the below two qualities :

1) Effectively needs no supervision

2) Certifies the completion of own work

David Allen in his book “Getting Things Done”:

The key to productivity, be it a small task or a big project, is to think for 10 seconds about it and determine what is that next physical action that you need to take up to move one step further.

Chris Guillebeau in “The $100 Start-Up”:

You could start-up too without big bucks,without MBA, without special skills,as long as you have the following :

Product or Service (what you sell) + People willing to pay for it (Customers) + A way to get paid (Ex., PayPal account).

Richard Koch in “Living The 80/20 Way”

You got to pare down your life the essentials and then focus all your energy into those

Steve Prentice in Cool down : Getting Further by Going Slower

Even the Ferraris need "Pit-Stop" breaks...Take that mental break at intervals to check the "tyres"

A Philosophical Rant!

• Life is an Optimization problem.We can help our self by focusing only on a few of those objectives at a time (< 5 , 1 would be best !)

• People who attained some level of success were the ones who knew what they wanted to do in Life irrespective of the age

• You cannot find happiness at the end,if you cannot find along the way

• You got to learn from others, but got to develop your own yardstick for  success

• Everyone is gifted with “box of tools” to be successful. The problem occurs when we attempt to drive a screw using an hammer

• All Progress stems from Action that in turn stems from Knowledge

• You day-today actions should connect to the higher level purpose...otherwise you are simply pedaling a chain-less bicycle

• Life is a glob of Intangibles...the sooner we realize the earlier we would reach the Tangibles

• I am called a Faker when I say that Money is a by-product

• We diminish what we have and magnify what we do not have

Handling crisis such as Bill payment!

“Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out”...Anton Chekhov


In the modern days, we all have mastered the art of procrastination to the extent that we have attained the expertise at the cost of getting stressed out. For example, let us take the example of saving money for Income tax exemptions. We know even in April that how much one needed to save. We knew even in April that it takes a bit of thinking to invest wisely in a good savings instrument. We knew even in April it would help to save systematically over the financial year. And, We knew even in April that my Organization asks for the proof of savings in January of that next year. Despite knowing these, How many of us rushed in the last moment to put money in dud investment merely for the sake of “producing the proof” of investment?

Our day-today living is nothing but a string of such projects or tasks in personal & professional life that we are aware of, but not willing to apply more thought to make them happen unless it becomes an emergency. If you ask my wife, she would tell that I am not fit enough to write this article because of my inertia to action...Nevertheless, I would like to share the solution that I learnt from the book “Getting Things Done”..by David Allen(in short GTD). I would suggest you all to read the book.

David Allen proposes the following process to effectively keep track of all your tasks to completion...Collect,Process,Organize,Review,Do (strictly in that order)

Collect :

You should trust your memory only if you want to fail. So, collect all your “To-Dos” to a trusted “Inbox”. As you remember about something to do, just make sure to record it outside of your brain that you can retrieve it later. I usually carry a pocket notebook and pen to record the things through the day and later I transfer it to my “Inbox”. I would recommend rememberthemilk or Todoist applications as your Inbox simply because they are Cloud based Apps. In my example above, I would record in my Inbox as Investments for Tax exemptions

Process:

“Process” phase is to determine what you needed to do with each of the item in your “Inbox”. So pick the item at the top of the “Inbox” & ask yourself the following questions ...

“Is this a Task or Project?” :… A task has a physical action associated with it, while a Project is a series of tasks with sequence and priority. So, the Investments for Tax exemptions is a Project that would need set of tasks such as Identifying the Savings instrument, Determining the amount to invest & When to invest? If it is a project ,it becomes all the more important to determine the set of tasks to be done.

“Who should do it?” : Is this task needing action from you or someone else?

“Is there a date & time associated ? ”

This is an important step, because, unless you drill down your project or task to a physical action (called as Next Actions) that you need to do your project may not move forward at all.

Organize :

For Organizing your tasks, you got to have the placeholder for your Calendar & Next actions list. Then you need to organize your tasks using the “4D Rule “ ….Do It ; Defer It ; Delegate It; Delete It;

If a task is no longer relevant you just Delete it off your list

If a task needs to be done by somebody else, you need to Delegate it;

If a task requires 2-minutes of your time to do, such as calling the Investment consultant you should Just Do It(Nike!) ;

If it requires more than 2-minutes and is going to happen at a specific date & time, it goes into your Calendar (Defer It); If there is no specific time date & time and it has to be ASAP , it goes into the Next Actions list.(Defer It)

Review:

This is the periodic review (at least Weekly) of your “Inbox” & process/organize to be focused only on the relevant stuff. This step cannot be overemphasized as without a periodic review ,the “Inbox” becomes defunct & useless. Please set aside at least 1 hour every week to review all your meeting notes, Calendar ,Next Actions list & “Inbox” to ensure that your tasks don’t fall through the crack

Do:

As surprising as it may seem, Doing is the last phase. And Please, no more daily To-Do lists. You may then ask : “It is 9:00 am…What do I need to do?” … You just go through the Calendar to look for an appointment; If none of them exist, you pick an item from the Next Actions and do it;

This is the essence of GTD. And yes it is a bit longish and requires discipline / trial & error till you hit upon the sweet spot of doing things on-time ,every time…Nevertheless I guarantee you will not feel disappointed ..Why not try it?

Power of the Point

             I have a big-time problem with PowerPoint. Let me clarify something at the outset…PowerPoint is a great presentation tool …probably the greatest invention of the digital era! However, the problem is that ,for people with attention-span challenge like me,  the focus goes on “decoration” aspect of each slide rather than the content itself. As a result, I keep adding content only to delete later and even after an hour I would be nowhere with the slides. I would  then be feeling  as much helpless & forlorn as the Hero ditched by his Lady Love in a Bollywood Cinema.

Fortunately, It looks like there is a solution…To deliver an effective PowerPoint presentation ,worry less about the PowerPoint !. Before you get perplexed further, let me jump straight to the point...

Content is King ! : So you have a presentation to be delivered…Think about the following and note down the following on a piece of paper (Okay Okay…I can allow you to do it an MS-Word not on the PowerPoint though!)

What do you want to convey ?:

 At the end of a presentation, what do you want the audience to take away ? Is it an Information, Update ,Call for Action, Persuasion / Influence ,Coaching or Pure entertainment ? For a 10 minute presentation , I would  prefer a maximum of 2 take away.  So, write the purpose boldly on the piece of paper. Every time your mind wanders, the Purpose should be screaming back at you …

Who is the Audience ?

You should also be aware of whom you are going to deliver the presentation. Obviously , the content of your talk would be different for an expert group vs the learner group. If you do not know the audience, better run away to an Island without single cell phone tower rather than delivering a presentation.

What is the time allotted ?

I was at a Technical conference  long time back where in the Presenter(a man of substance) overshot his allotted time of Half-an-hour by 100%. As any sportsperson would say, you should know when to quit, in this case,a presentation, before the Organizers are planning to introduce squeaky noise in the audio system.

Prepare the Speech

Imagine that the Supreme Force banned the PowerPoint from Earth & you well know that  we all still need to deliver presentations to earn a living. So, behave like Socrates who did not have the PowerPoint …write out the speech you want to deliver the audience; with an Opening, Body and Conclusion. If you nailed this step, You have crossed half-the Ocean. You should also rehearse this speech for the way to deliver to the audience.It will also be a good exercise for time check. If you are way over the allotted time, you have to cut down some points. This is important, also because, these are the words that Audience would be hearing not the ones on the PowerPoint slide…

Now Open the the PowerPoint

Now it’s time to open the Pandora’s Box …or time for the Face-off with Fire…or simply put, time to open a new PowerPoint document. Based on your Opening, Body & Conclusion of the speech, create each slide with just the Title of sub-points you want to discuss on the major purpose. This would be your outline of the presentation.

Now add the Glamour to the slides:

Add bullet points in each slide about which you want to talk ; Add pictures / Graphs as much as possible. Add your speech for that slide into the Notes section. This may take sometime, but should hopefully be not so painful as you know what you want to talk about ! 

At the end of this exercise, your Visual Aid should be  ready…You would absolutely need to rehearse your speech along with the PowerPoint presentation. As you may see, the PowerPoint cannot replace the presenter .If you want to make it stick on the mind of the audience, the Animation or the Cartoon capability of the PowerPoint wont help…only your Ideas will !

As I heard a CEO say to the Presenter, “Let us focus on the Power of your Point, rather than the PowerPoint” !!

Happy Presentations !