Why getting started is the real battle

We sometimes think of ourselves as lazy. In reality we are not. It is the starting that is difficult. Whether it be due to fear of failure, fear of unknown or sheer intertia, it is sometimes the starting that is tricky.

Fear of Failure

Many of us want to write, but don’t start because we are afraid it won’t be good enough. Or we are afraid we will realize we don’t think deep enough. Or that we have nothing to say.

Fear of rejection is very similar. With failure you are judging and rejecting yourself. Fear of rejection is when someone else rejects you. We feel like it is better not to even start. Or we think it is.

Fear of the unknown

I am afraid I won’t know how to ship a side project since it is not just about coding, I need to market it, support it and I might now know how to do it. I will have to learn new skills. And I might fail multiple times learning those skills. It goes back to rejection, fear of failure. Not laziness.

Intertia

It takes effort to do something new. It means going into the unknown. Sometimes we want to, sometimes we just want to not change and continue what we are doing. That is not laziness though.

But getting past the roadblock is worth it. Writing a blog post is more energizing that watching a movie. Doing some warmups and working out feels better than lying on a sofa after you do it. The reality is the consumption is easier and feels better while doing it; but creating something, while doing it is harder, but it feels better after and makes you rich.

Two powerful productivity tools

I spend a lot of time trying out different productivity tools and methods. Productivity for me is a way to keep track of things I want to do daily so that I do not miss important activities or reminders. I hate having to put in the effort to remember things or to try to recall them. The feeling that there is something that needs to be done and I might forget what it is gives me a constant sense of anxiety.

In the past year I tried out various tools. Starting with Evernote, other simple note taking tools like rememberthemilk.com and more complex ones like Obsidian I finally settled on Omnifocus.

Obsidian is amazingly easy to use. Easy here for me means, I can quickly switch to it in the middle of a meeting, add a task with a due date and get back to the conversation I was in. It comes with much more advanced functionality too – tags, repeating tasks, projects and views. Two convenience features I really love is that it is great at keyboard shortcuts and it allows daily views with some tags displaying each day even if they are not due on that day. that allows me to keep strategic tasks visible daily even if they don’t have deadlines.

The other productivity tool I acquired is the remarkable 2 electronic notebook. Writing on it feels like writing on paper, it has an E-ink display, is very light and doesn’t run out of paper. It allows relatively easy editing (cut, copy, paste) and after my phone and my kindle is a device that I always carry around. The fact that it does only note taking means it allows me to focus without any distractions. I have found myself thinking deeply without being distracted as I use the device.

Of course, these tools are not silver bullets. The hard part is being disciplined enough to remember to note down action items with due dates, be disciplined about deep thinking time and going back and rereading notes you have taken previously, all of which takes time and dedication. These tools definitely do help though.

When outages are good

A colleague in the Data Science team did a talk today about how an outage in a feature from a couple of weeks ago was a natural experiment. His started by saying that even though outages made most people sad, for him it was a great moment because it helped him validate the theory that ‘notifications led an increase in engagement across other parts of the product’ and use the outage as an experiment. In this particular case the experiment would typically be hard to run primarily because it would have material impact on product metrics (if the theory was true). This was a theory that was not often tested, in other words it wasn’t clear if there was a causal relationship between notifications and engagement and if so how much.

It got me thinking about how outages might lead to similar learnings –
1) If a feature has been broken for a month and no one noticed, is it really important?
2) If you had a site speed regression try to see if there was is a meaningful drop in any product metrics you care about, or in other words does site speed matter

I am sure there are other lessons to be learnt when outages occur and this presentation will remind me to keep my eyes open for them.

Spring Cleaning your Features

If you have worked on any product at all that has seen a few winters, you would have run into that strange feature that almost nobody uses. It was built a long time ago and has been quiet and well behaved so nobody has noticed it. It might even be refactored now and then as others touch pieces of functionality close to it. Nobody notices it is there till someone asks – why is this here? Nobody uses it and it seems to be taking up space that it doesn’t need to. I call getting rid of such features, spring cleaning.

Here are a few reasons why it is important

It adds complexity to your technology – there is always the possibility of bugs being introduced as new changes are made and just the fact that something exists makes it harder for new folks to understand the code or project
It complicates the product – the fact that there is a functionality makes it easy to be reused and leveraged. If the functionality is old and not thought through, it is possibly affecting how new features are being built. For eg. if a UI element has a certain animation (which hasn’t turned out to be very useful), it is going to be mimicked in new designs and implementations and continues to add cost to development.
Features accumulate. One of these old features may not matter much but the lack of a culture of spring cleaning usually means that there are more than one of these features scattered in your product. These translate into a hard to measure but gradual drag on progress.

Despite knowing all of this it is still hard to decide to do it. Here is why

It is hard to quantify the benefit easily
Building new things is more fun – same as buying new stuff is
Fear of a backlash – There is a risk that someone somewhere cares about it enough to complain and you are afraid that it will put you in an awkward spot.
Fear of a mistake – You might break something essential when ripping out unused pieces

Despite all of these risks, it is still important to spring clean regular so you don’t end up with a product that is the equivalent of the following house

3 ways to remember what you read

I used to read a lot of books when younger. At a certain point I got frustrated with the whole routine because it was hard to remember and use lessons from a book I head read earlier when I moved on to a new book. Now that I have started reading again I have been learning a few strategies to remember what I read.

Practice what you read – The most obvious of all yet the hardest. It is most effective for books which you can tie to direct action (leadership books, technology books, self improvement books). It does mean you either need to practice a multitude of skills if you read fast or you need to slow down you reading to a rate at which you can practice.
Change how you read – Reading the classic ‘How to read a book’ by Mortimer J Adler was eye opening. It revealed certain aspects of reading that I hadn’t considered before. My typical reading was starting from the beginning and reading to the end. For harder areas I marked sections I didn’t understand to come back later. However, Adler’s book introduced me the following steps
1. Skim through the table of contents to understand structure. Look carefully at sections (groups of chapters) to understand the goal of the book
2. Read or skim the first and last page in each chapter to get a deeper understanding of the structure. Dig a bit deeper into chapters that interest you
3. Read the book end to end really fast
4. Read the book again, critically thinking and asking questions

The above exercise forces me to think about the structure and also think about reframing the books contents into my knowledge or worldview by first trying to understand what the author is thinking.

Recollect – Summarizing key points of what you have learnt after a short delay is effective in actually helping you absorb the material read. Incorporating this into your process of learning is another way to help remember things you learn. For example, after you read a book, recall important points from memory and take notes. After a lesson, take 5 minutes to note most important learnings. (A 2011 study indicated that students learnt better by trying to recall something they learnt from memory than by rereading the material)