I always thought taking notes were important. I’m a overdrive note taker. I believe it reinforces your thought and drills down the basics when you read it. It also helps that you can often reflect back on the single most important point. Over the years I have gotten better at taking notes and I’m currently compiling a post to give you my best practices. Here Caterina Fake, the co founder of Flickr, gives some wisdom into her productivity and thinking.
On the importance of notes.
I think it’s a sickness in business to always try to do more things in less time. I try to spend more time. People read all this information and think they’ve accomplished something, but what have they really taken in? What can you take in that’s important in 140 characters? I read books and articles, and I take a lot of notes. I put stickies in passages I find interesting, and later I write them into my notes, because that reinforces them in my memory. And I’ll make a point of going back and rereading them. Otherwise it’s like cramming for a test in high school where you don’t retain any of the material.
On prioritizing tasks
I have a to-do list so I don’t forget things. But I don’t prioritize tasks. I just know what needs to be done, and I check tasks off in the order I do them. Sometimes I feel like checking off all the little things. Mail this letter. Respond to this e-mail. Sometimes I want to figure out the entire strategy for 2010. As long as everything gets done, it doesn’t matter in what order.
On innovative meetings.
Interaction should be constant, not crammed into meetings once a week. You just turn around in your chair and bounce an idea off one of the other 10 people in your office. Keep the floor plan open so people can talk to each other. As the company gets bigger, keep dividing it into smaller and smaller groups. Follow Jeff Bezos’ two-pizza rule: Project teams should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. At Hunch, we don’t have meetings unless absolutely necessary. When I used to have meetings, though, this is how I would do it: There would be an agenda distributed before the meeting. Everybody would stand. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone would drink 16 ounces of water. We would discuss everything on the agenda, make all the decisions that needed to be made, and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom.
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In a commencement address to the students of Princeton, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, had some very interesting things to say. I have written about him before here, but I urge you to read the full transcript. Here are my takeaways.
1. What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
2. I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that
3. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice. Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.
4. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer.
We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.
We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.
Steve Jobs’ has always fascinated people with the clarity of his thought. But more important if there’s one thing that most people have to notice about Steve it’s his ability to weave a story into whatever he’s saying and elucidate his points across very clearly.
That was clearly seen today when he decided to blog his thoughts on Flash. A great read if only for the clarity of his thinking. I took some notes on what I observed about his blogging and am sharing it here.
1. Every story starts with a “once upon a time”.
Writers call this laying the premise down. Joggers call it warming up. Essentially you start with what it was back then and then bring someone up to speed. You do this because you don’t want to throw in the facts right away because most people don’t get the “context” of what you say.
He begins with, ” Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years.”
That immediately softens the tone. Apple and Adobe were friends. Apple supported Adobe. But then…
2. Lay down the intent clearly.
Quickly after the intro he talks about what people are thinking and what the real thought is. “Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.”
3. Clearly list out the items.
Lists are usually killers. This is how Steve does it. By laying them out in a new line so it’s clearly remembered.
To most people who don’t get the context of what he’s saying and why it’s important after you lay out 6 solid paragraphs. You might have lost the audience OR you might want to remind them on what exactly you started with. So you add in a conclusion paragraph.
5. Clearly state your point across.
If you read any paragraph of Steve’s posts, they aren’t cluttered with jargon, they use simple language and they come straight to the point. Here’s an example
“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”
A 6th Grader would understand the logic but perhaps not the context. That’s the real power in Steve’s talk. Mass appeal. Dosed with impeccable charima and clarity of thought.
Did you notice the cute way they put this up on “hotnews”?
[update] – Some interesting links you can read on this.
If there is but one passionate evangelist of the Microsoft company, it’s GOT to be Steve Ballmer. Current CEO of perhaps the largest company in technology.
An interesting thing is Steve Ballmer was employee number 24 for Microsoft. And his birthdate? March 24th. Seems like an astrological connection there. In 2009 he took over the reigns as CEO from Bill Gates.
The most visible thing about Steve Ballmer is his spirited energy. He’s not a quiet guy. He’s not a small guy either at 6′ 4″. Thus makes for fascinating stuff. If you haven’t seen his developers talk or the interview with Guy Kawasaki I’d urge you to have a look.
This post however talks about the wisdom he imparts to the students of Stanford, a school which he dropped out of in the 2nd year, on the stages of Business a company goes through. He began with saying that Microsoft is a two trick pony. They have mastered Desktops and Servers. Google, on the other hand, is a one trick pony -Search and Advertising. What most companies do is to get that one trick right and then have development areas around that. Ballmer calls these “cute things” that businesses do.
1st is the Idea and its implementation Get an idea, implement and execute it. Get it to ship-it ready.
2nd is is the scaling of the idea (getting it to critical mass) Taking the business from 0 to 100 (million dollars). That’s the sort of idea you start with.
3rd is milking the idea for all it’s worth (cashing in on the idea). This is where you cash in on the idea which is at the stage Google is at according to Ballmer.
4th is fostering a culture to get new ideas (exploration) Build on other ideas. Which to Microsoft was Server Enterprise after Desktop.
I thought those were great insights. Watch the full talk here.
I’m really excited that I got myself the Kindle. I was this excited when I got the iPhone I believe. Sadly I had to sell the latter. I know the Kindle’s staying with me for a long long time.
So one of the first things I did, obviously, was to get myself a book. I got Seth Godin’s Linchpin, which is hailed as his best book yet. But being in India where the net is slow and the only way to connect to the amazon store is via GPRS/Edge, you know you are in for a lot of frustration. But I spoke to the Amazon customer service people (very nice people!) and they quickly brought me up to speed.
So to get a book to you in India you can run the Wireless and connect, but that didn’t work for me. So the next option is to go online to the amazon store and register your Kindle. You’ll have a 16 digit serial key at the back and that basically registers you to whatever your device is. Once you have that then the you can do a “1 click buy” option which usually comes on your right. Once you choose to do that (enter your credit card details etc) you’ll basically have it linked to your store. Now there are a couple of ways you can get the content on to your Kindle.
a) Go to Manage Kindle.
b) Scroll all the way down to the screen and you’ll see the books you purchased. The standard Kindle guide comes prepackaged so you don’t have to do anything there.
c) On the right where you bought your book you can choose couple of options. Download to your PC. Download to your Amazon for Kindle or Deliver to your Kindle.
d) I chose download to pc which downloads the book in an .azw format. You can alternatively download their Amazon for Kindle PC option and get the book thereto your store (or you can do both).
e) Once you have the book you then plug your kindle via USB and it opens up a folder which has three options, audible, documents and music. Just put the file (in this case linchpin.azw) into your folder, eject the Kindle and voila you have the Book with you!
What about PDFS and other files you want to read on the Kindle?
Well Amazon makes your life really easy here. When you register the kindle you get an accountname@kindle.com as a free email address, for all purposes this is your account name. You send an email to amazon by typing accountname@free.kindle.com with the PDF as an attachment and they’ll reply back with the file converted to the .azw format. Then you do the same steps mentioned above and you should have it in your Kindle. I think that’s pretty sweet!
Before I leave though, being a semi self fashioned geek, I wanted to know what all I could do with the Kindle. And boy there are many many things here’s a round up.
Keyboard shortcuts
Global keys
Alt-Shift-R reboot Kindle
Alt-Shift-. restart GUI
Alt-Shift-G make screenshot
due to an implementation bug, screenshots can only be stored on SD card, not the main storage. A gif file is saved in the card root.
Alt-Shift-M Minesweeper
Alt-Z rescan picture directories
Alt-T show time
Reader
Alt-B toggle bookmark
Alt-T spell out time
Alt-0 enable/disable slideshow
Alt-1 start slideshow (if enabled)
Alt-2 stop slidehow
Alt-PageForward/PageBackward go to next/prev annotation or one “chunk” (1/20th of a book) forward or backward
Settings
411 show diagnostics data
511 run loopback call test
611 diagnostic data service call
c/e/s
126 Lab126 team members
Font List
J show/hide justification options
Picture viewer (To view pictures you have to make a folder in the Kindle)
Alt-Shift-0 set current picture as screensaver
F toggle fullscreen mode.
One of the beautiful things about Technology, to me, is that it boosts your productivity and promotes the “on the move and connected” lifestyle.
Right now, I am mostly wired at home (not THAT wired..), at work and on my mobile. Though I blame Vodafone’s shitty prepaid Mobile connect for not being able to access the net frequently it is generally only those 2 hours in transit that I’m not without the net. For everything else I’m wired.
And I know I have talked excitedly about gadgets before and what was enthusiasm to me turned out to be a showcase of tech gadgets to a friend who recently chided me saying, ” What are all these non liquid assets that you keep getting on all the time?”.
Well meaning, but perhaps uninformed. What is the value in drinking a concortion that ends up in your piss the next day and gives you a splitting headache? I try to think that what I invest in (after much consideration) are things of value and things that run their course of time in technology.
Right now the main reason I have the Kindle is because I have over a 100 books to read. I had a weird dream before ordering the Kindle. What If I were to be placed in Russia tomorrow where would I carry all these books to? Sell them? With great disappointment yes. Or give them away perhaps. Either way they wouldn’t travel with me so I decided that I should get the Kindle. I see it as a valuable investment to a kid who hid under the blankets with a light to escape mom and finishing that secret 7 or Hardy Boys novel. He has now graduated to darker grimmer stuff ofcourse, but the thrill of a new book has never left me.
But why not the iPad?
Let me indulge you with my reasons.
The first is that it’s a new product, it has to mature. The store on the iPad is far limited and this is also one of the reasons I didn’t go for the Nook. The nook was a fail with color menu and black and white reading, thats another matter.
The second is that it ties into the apple ecosystem. Which almost CERTAINLY means that I’ll have to use iTunes or some thing to install stuff on to it. I’m a huge fan of Apple and it’s design but I’m most definitely not going to be installing iTunes on a netbook that can run Firefox just barely. The size of the iPad as opposed to the Kindle and the cost made me reconsider it as well.
The third reason is I don’t need another email checking device. I play games on a desktop or console the way it’s meant to be played (outside of Facebook which is again on one of these devices). I have also no need to install 100 apps on my phone so that makes paying an extra $ 200 seem not worthy when you can invest into books which come out really cheap + a great reader.
The downfall ?
Well I have not even had it for a day but almost quickly I can tell you I notice a couple of things.
One is the black and white readership. Certain books have powerful moving images (think Alan Fletcher’s design) and that are forced to be desaturated to black and white.
I can’t take notes! To one of the biggest noteaholics in the world that is a huge huge thing. I don’t mark books because if I want to give it to someone else to read they shouldn’t have my scribblings all over the place. Plus I’m a sanctityrespect junkie.
Have you used a Kindle? What are your thoughts? What was your first book? I’m hoping to get Seth Godin’s Linchpin (I’m sad that ebooks can’t be autographed either ) as my first buy.
In a rather unnecessarily grand announcement, I mentioned that I would dedicate 3 days of the week to specific stuff. The idea is to enforce discipline into thinking and to get into a mode of actual productivity. Produce first.
What I write here are mainly notes to myself in the past. If I had known this, or a “oh this is how the world works” type of thing. I have seen this repeat over different companies and working environments. It’s not the guy with the hard skills that gets up, it’s the soft skills champion that wades his way to the top.
Hi there Karthick,
Our topic of discussion today is about Attention to Detail.
Know whatever you do thoroughly. Facts matter.
Recently we had a new person coming in to take care of things. The first thing I noted was his sharp attention to detail on something I took care of. He knew it to the last digit, something I didn’t think was important but something he considered so. If it is 354 people. It is 354 people. Not 300 or not 400.
This is where I have seen all my bosses excel in. They know exactly what’s happening across 10 different things. They know whats the status, they know what numbers matter. The most important ability here is the ability to filter signal from noise. Once you have it, you know you are one step ahead of the competition. So Karthick, get a tight grip on what you do. Know it so well that they can’t ignore your contribution.
One of the things that sickness does is give you much time to think about when you are in the bed. There was only one constant though reoccuring in my head.
This was inspired by the Mark Pincus’ (who has a nice new blog redesign here), CEO of Zynga, video where he talks about how he started Zynga and what he did for revenue amongst other things. But the most important line that hit my head was (paraphrased here).
“You have to take control of your life. You can’t wait for the next big thing to happen. What are the three macro trends you are betting on? You have to choose those three early on and then do everything in your work and career to progress/read and work on those three things”.
For some reason, besides the rest of the talk. Those few lines have been imprinted on to my head. And I did some serious thinking on the macro trends of the future. I pretty much have a rough idea on what they are going to be. There will be a lot of Social in it for sure and somevery smartpeople are thinking a lot about it. I’m also heavily invested time wise into technology and it’s rapid progress so that’s an area I see developing a lot.
Everyone’s talking about Energy as the next best thing. I can’t quite say that’s my thing though, but if Bill Gates, Al Gore and Vinod Khosla have their eye on it, you know it’s going to get big.
There’s another important part of it from another interview that Mark gave on the reason why you would want to do something,
You weren’t trying to go out and make money. There was something else. When you achieve things, you start to realize those weren’t your real goals. Then I thought I wanted to build a great company. So I spent a whole bunch of time and I accidentally built this company Support.com. I won’t bore you how I got there. We created this service that nobody wanted. We luckily figured out that no one wanted it. John Doerr talks about this idea of failing fast. And that’s important.
So here’s my question to you. What trends are you betting on? Why?
For most of us who have been brought up in India, there are certain hardships we face. Daily rigours of life, not having/seeing a lot of wealth, constantly facing the hardships of weather, lack of electricity and water. Yet we strive.
What a lot of us don’t face are racial abuse, slurs and physical and emotional trauma. I’m not saying it’s non existant, I’m asking how racist can you get with another Indian? But the real question is how many of us have used this to fuel ourselves? How many have taken this and used it as positive determination? I haven’t. I’m pretty sure that’s the average crowd.
So it comes as a great surprise when an Indian, fostered by a family that had $25 dollars as savings wins a lottery ticket and heads to America and 12 years later has a son that bears them millions of dollars.
That family is the Chahals and that son is Gurbaksh Chahal. He was a sardar who was constantly ridiculed for his appearance and is now one of the youngest millionaires (guys a year younger than me) “on the planet” as Oprah puts it. He started 2 companies the first selling for 40 million dollars at the age of 18. The other BlueLithium selling for 300 million dollars. He’s written a book called ”The Dream” which you can order at Flipkart here.
I have ordered the book and I plan to check out more on him as well. But here’s the show that I found very inspiring (Oprah always inspires) in which he’s featured and talks about his stuff. Well played G. Well played.
Incidentally, I got another link (mp3) that was very educational from Andrew Warners website, Mixergy (which is a must follow for entrepreneurs or those dreaming to be). You can follow Gurbaksh’s blog here and say hi to him on twitter. Notice how great men use the first letter of their name and then the family name (like kgopal? gchahal) etc.
Here’s Gchal’s take on his journey.
Twenty-Three years ago when my parents first came to America – they had a strict agenda in mind for me. No surprise here, but they wanted for me to either be a doctor or engineer. They arrived with $25 in their pockets but their hearts were full of dreams. “Education is the key that opens all the locks to all the doors in the world. My four children will become doctors and engineers. Maybe even both!” my father would say. That didn’t necessarily happen – but with God’s blessings– we all became very successful.
When I was 10 – my Dad even made a “janampatri” (astrological life story) of my life. And when he had it read, he wasn’t too happy. The first question he had asked was, what will my son be when he grows up? The reply wasn’t what he hoped for. The person reading it said, “He’s not really an academic so he won’t do well in school. His options will be limited but he can always just start a business” Shortly after that reading, my dad stopped believing in this form of astrology.
As many of you know, I dropped out of high school at 16 to embark on my journey as an entrepreneur. And the rest, as you know is history.
) as my first buy.
