Category: LifeHack (Page 4 of 4)

3 Steps to Becoming an Effective Listener

July 9, 2014 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

How often have you found yourself tapping your feet impatiently, as you waited for the another person who as speaking to either pause or wrap, before jumping in with your own point of view? if you are like me, you may even end up interrupting the other person. Never mind, if we fully heard let alone understood what the other person was saying, before we are countering or questioning, what we think they said. This can be very frustrating for both the speaker and the listener (or interrupter).

Being a good listener, somehow seems a hard trait to come by and with so many of us struggling with it, is it a surprise that few of us are effective listeners? Brian Tracy – sales trainer, inspirational speaker and successful entrepreneur talks of three steps to becoming an effective listener. In the video at the bottom of this post, you can hear him speak on the subject. For those of you who’s rather get the gist of what he says, here it is.

Pause Once the other person has stopped speaking, pause before you speak. This ensures, that you don’t interrupt the other person, in case they are just taking a breath. It shows that you are giving consideration to their words and you’ll actually hear the other person better! So pause first.

Ask Questions to achieve clarity. Open ended questions help the other person expand on their responses and this will help you in turn understand better, what is it that they are saying.

Paraphrase In your words, state what is it you heard them say. Usually a statement such as “What you are saying is _______”, helps demonstrate that you are paying attention and working at understanding what it is they are saying.

Brian also answers the question Why bother with effective listening?

It makes the speaker, be relaxed and happy which in turn will make them want to be around you. Listening builds trust and self-esteem in the speaker. It also helps the listener (you) achieve greater self-worth through the practice of self-discipline. Watch the video below to hear this in Brian’s own words.

notebook — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

“This week” – the secret to managing your time well

November 3, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 3 Comments

“Honey, can you make the insurance payment? ” my wife would ask me.

“Sure dear, I’ll take care of it,” I’d respond.

Early in our marriage there were often fireworks due to such seemingly innocuous conversations between my wife and I. It took me a while to figure that my wife meant, “Can you get the insurance paid NOW!” And it galled her no end, that my response meant, that I’d get it done one of these days.

Fortunately for us, we arrived at a compromise that all such conversations, especially ones where I needed to get something done, meant I’ll get it done that WEEK! Twenty years on, we are still on talking terms largely due to this one agreement.

Each year, as I work on new projects and often with new team members, I learn a thing or two about managing my time better – even if it’s only what not to do. From my early Franklin planning days of the early ‘80s through the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People all the way through Getting Things Done and Wunderlist, I’ve tried my share of tools and methods to be more productive and get more of the right stuff done in less time. Truth is that it’s still a work in progress and I continue to struggle with procrastination.

As the parent of two teen girls, child of an aging, recently widowed parent, as a slightly overweight middle-aged man trying to get in shape, the operational head of a non-profit and spouse of a professional musician, my to-do list is overflowing. Even when it’s incomplete.

If you are like me, your to-do lists are ambitious – maybe more hopeful than practical. The very act of opening them is daunting. But we still put too much for a day on ‘em. It finally dawned on me to apply the lesson I’ve learned in making commitments to my wife. Seek balance over a week – and not try the impossible of trying to achieve it each day.

Plan your to-do list for a week. Yep – not just for the day. The reality is some days you’re going to get only one thing done, if that. On other days you’re going to be on fire. By keeping your to-do horizon to be a week, rather than the day—things will be a whole lot less stressful. Sure the first week you’ll over commit, but very soon you’ll get the knack of it.

Now say after me, “I’ll get it done sometime this week!”

3 Things That Great Speeches Can Teach You

July 21, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.”

As I read Julius Caesar with my fifteen-year-old, I wonder what it is about Mark Anthony’s speech that’s made it a keeper. Sure the Bard had a way of words and it is him speaking rather than Mark Anthony. Yet the words alone, however powerful, fail to explain their hold over us.

Each of us across nations and times, have our own favorite speeches — often cutting across generations — Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” June 1940 speech, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” August 1963 speech, Steve Jobs commencement speech in May 2005 at Stanford, Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture in September 2008 and Barack Obama’s “Tuscon Memorial” speech in 2011.

Oratory seems to be a skill that politicians and lawyers (many of whom end up as politicians) have cornered the market on. Starting from Cicero, a lawyer turned politician from Julius Caesar’s time to Barack Obama, yet another lawyer-politician in our own, the power of a well-rendered speech have moved nations. Actors and clergymen, who’ve relied on the gift of their gabs to succeed have just as assiduously cultivated their oratory. In trying to understand what it is that makes their speeches memorable, worth transcribing, passing on through word of mouth from the dawn of time through the age of YouTube, three things stand out.

Content, Context, and Cadence.

Content What is said in a speech is clearly the biggest contributor to its success. No amount of skill or theatrics can salvage an empty speech. The content needs to be clear, concise and compelling. Like poetry it needs to be able to stand alone — complete in itself. Try reading the transcript of any speech you feel is well done and you’ll see why it works. Mark Antony’s speech is an excellent example as is any good tale, be it To Kill a Mockingbird or Cannery Row, content still trumps all. But you knew this.

Context When your spouse (or in my case my teen) wakes you up and say’s “I had a dream,” or when an interview candidate tells you “I have a dream” it doesn’t evoke the same sense of Dr. King’s words at the Lincoln Memorial. Context is important. When four men carrying a funeral bier in India, utter “Ram, Ram” or as Gandhi calls out “Hey Ram” when he was shot or in the epic Ramayana, when Rama’s father calls out after his exiled son “Rama, Rama, Rama” — the same words mean very different things. So context is what makes what’s ordinary and makes it extraordinary. The words “a more perfect union” when used by Barack Obama yesterday in the context of the Trayvon Martin case takes on a whole new level of poignancy than in his original speech titled “A More Perfect Union” in 2008.

For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men

Mark Antony’s words taken out of context lose their power.

Cadence makes the difference between a good speech and a great speech. The pauses and silences of a speech often can and do say more than the words themselves.

When English teacher Taylor Mali narrates his poem, “What teachers make?”

“I decide to bite my tongue……..instead of his” his pause adds emphasis.

When Jesse Jackson in his speech at the Democratic convention in Atlanta in 1988, says “With so many guided missiles ……… and so much misguided leadership, the stakes are exceedingly high” his pause serves to highlight the irony not unlike Mark Antony’s literal “And I must pause till it come back to me.”

Repetition is the other not-so-secret weapon of powerful orators.

Here’s Dr. Martin Luther King speaking at the Lincoln Memorial:

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

Later in the same speech, the phrase I have a dream is used ten, yep ten times in consecutive sentences as is Let freedom ring nine times in his closing words. Cadence.

Content, Context, and Cadence.

Make sure your next speech covers the 3 Cs.

Occam’s Razor – Keeping it handy

June 18, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“The VCR is not turning on!” says my wife over the phone. We often have short phone calls along these lines. At other times it’s the laser printer or the washing machine not working or turning on. My first question usually is “Honey, is it plugged in the wall?” followed by “Is the switch on the wall socket turned on?” Sometimes we find that the kids have used the electrical socket for something else and just unplugged our device. At other times they left the outlet turned off or forgotten to turn the UPS back on, after switching it off when it last squealed.

While I’m sure your spouse (or room mate or sibling) and you never have such conversations, we certainly have to thank William of Occam (also Ockham) who lived eight hundred years ago. His eponymous maxim (aka Occam’s razor) states “in explaining a thing no more assumptions should be made than are necessary.”

In other words the simplest explanation for any observed phenomenon is likely the right one. This is the reason when we show up with chest pains, they check for heartburn or gas first rather than rush you into surgery. As entrepreneurs, managers and leaders, we are often faced with issues that seem to baffle us.

Why can’t I seem to hire anyone?
Why didn’t that VC call us back – the meeting went so well, we thought?
Why is the customer not prepared to commit?
Why is the network slow?
Why does our product crash often?

For most of theses instances, Occam’s razor is worth keeping in mind. Before you explore more complex reasons, look for the simplest ones first and those are the most likely ones.

Of course it’s worth keeping Einstein’s caveat in mind

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

If you’ve come this far, you might as well read what physicists have to say about Occam’s razor here.

A is for Asana – Tool Thursdays

April 4, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

In a hat tip to one of my favorite bloggers Fred Wilson, who’s got a steady publishing schedule such as MBA Mondays, I’d like to share with you Tool Thursdays. While I’m no Tim Allen-like tool man, I find myself spending enormous amounts of time, than any job warrants, on trying out software and online tools. So I guess I must enjoy it. I reckoned I’d share some of these, so others who are looking to find tools for their small (or not so small) businesses may benefit. Hopefully I’ll hear from you and we can learn from one another.

About a year ago is when I first encountered Asana – a project management tool for the rest of us – or at least the Facebook generation. As someone who’s lived through dreaded Microsoft Project – I found Asana possessing the simplicity of the best to-do lists out there such as Wunderlist or Remember the Milk married with the life stream of Facebook. The coolest feature is that it’s free for up to 30 users in a project.

Asana has a very simple structure – there are Workspaces – think of them as different parts of your life or job. I have separate workspaces for each department I work with – within each workspace you can have as many projects as you’d like. Projects – began as simple to-do lists, with (all optional) an owner, description, due date. You can assign Tasks (or to-dos) to folks who are NOT on Asana and it asks you for their email address and invites them – you can confine such invitees to the task assigned or the entire project. You can also invite/assign followers for a task, such as other team mates. Once a to-do is assigned, the owner or any of the followers can comment on it, obviating the need for emails to multiple folks – within these comments you can (in the current version) insert twitter like @person, @project tags which helps folks in the loop. This life stream feature alone makes Asana worth using. While Asana doesn’t support dependencies – it allows you to make links to other tasks in projects – and these days allows sub-task assignment as well.

One of the nicest features of Asana (which could easily become irritating) is its email notification service (of updates, completion of tasks, overdue tasks) – however as you can update Asana by replying to these updates – everyone on the team or task gets to see the conversation thread without a zillion emails from team mates. Once you figure how best to manage the mail notifications, Asana truly becomes your friend rather than that nagging person you want to avoid.

Another cool feature of Asana is the concept of the Inbox for each project – so in case you’ve been gone a while or been busy with another project, you can start with the Inbox, which shows the updates for each project – without drowning across a variety of projects. Also it lets you see tasks by person (across projects) and tags all of which makes things quite manageable. The biggest advantage of Asana I’ve found is their Facebook like paradigm, for a life stream, so even the most technology averse person can get rolling pretty fast. While you may not manage the building of the next Boeing plane with Asana, for most projects we are likely to encounter it will do just fine.

Pros Simplicity, multi-user, free, email based management
Cons lack of dependency management and absence of Gantt views

For the power and price, the downsides are niggling. I’d run out there and try it.

3 Steps to More Effective Emails

April 7, 2012 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Several years ago I read an article by Esther Dyson on making email effective and it’s stayed with me to this day. Granted some of its resonance stemmed from the insights Esther shares in her article (you can read the original here) But more of it is due to the fact that I see badly written emails nearly every week. And this is particularly galling when it is someone who wants you to do something. They need a favor, an introduction or your time but can’t be bothered to write short, specific and clear emails. Things get worse in a corporate setting, when various political considerations come into play and more time is spent on figuring who’s on the To:, CC: lists than even the body of the mail. Of course the worst mails are the ones written by our inner reptiles without a human editor or better sense intervening before the SEND button is hit.

Despite numerous claims otherwise, email is here to stay and continues to grow from strength to strength. But here are three simple steps each of us can take to make email more effective and less painful.

Here are the three steps:

SPECIFIC – keep your emails specific. If you can’t state why you are writing an email is 10 words or less, you shouldn’t be writing the email. Usually an email is a call for a specific action by the reader – in which instance it helps to call out the fact that an action is required (I use the initials AR in the subject line) and the action itself in the subject line. The more specific the mail the greater the likelihood that it will be read and acted upon. It’s not the family christmas letter where you pile in all and sundry information whether pertinent or not. By keeping the mail specific, it also usually cuts down on the number of people who need to be copied on it.

CLEAR – having decided to be specific, it is critical to be clear. Far too many of the mails I receive require interpretation and often help from my colleagues to decode or my having to ask the sender, what it was they were trying to say – which generates even more emails. And no this doesn’t happen only with Japanese writers, who can be excused as non-native speakers of the English language but nearly every corporate email writer, who perpetually seem to be in a hurry to get as many emails out as possible. The problem of clarity is compounded in emails that are not specific to one topic and things go from bad to worse in no time.

SHORT – keep your mails short. This is one I’ve struggled with for a long time myself. Brevity requires clarity on our part and focusing on one topic or subject should ideally make it easier to keep it short. All too often long emails are a result of both lack of focus – trying to cover a lot of ground in a single email – as though we are charged by the email and lack of clarity – not sure what is we are saying or worse yet laziness to take the effort to say it as precisely and concisely as it can be said. This is also the most misunderstood piece of email etiquette in my opinion. There as those who take brevity to an extreme, that you are not sure if this was a SMS you received – there’s neither a greeting (who’s it addressed to? was it meant for you or others on the cc list) nor a close – almost feels like you are being shouted at (even if it’s not in ALL CAPS) – worse yet you are not sure what it is they are saying. And others who haven’t yet left the previous century and their notes are filled with both flowery language or overly obsequious greetings and the use of big words (such as obsequious) when shorter words would do and anything less than two pages is short.

The good news is that short emails have to be specific and clear to be effective. Each of these attributes builds on the other and you will find your emails will not only be more effective but hopefully acting as a model for folks at the other end of the line to emulate.

10 Tips for Writing Better Email (grasshopper.com)
Long or Short Emails? Part 1 (betterwritinginbusiness.com)

Top 12 Free Apps on Mac OS X for ex-Windows users

October 31, 2011 / Sri Srikrishna / 3 Comments

Image via Wikimedia

Recently at a startup meeting that some fellow Angels and I hosted, I was amazed to see nearly every entrepreneur at the table (yes, there was a rather large oval table in the room) had a Macintosh (Powerbook or Air). Having made the switch (back) to a Mac just this last February, I realized how the last ten years of using a PC had ingrained certain habits, which were hard to break.

Surprisingly the transition to a Mac OS X after a decade of Windows usage, went extremely smoothly with the only initial hiccup being able to find a good replacement for Notepad++ which had been my primary text editing/composing tool! In the weeks that followed as I got down to actually working, I slowly began identifying the holes in my work flow and began filling them with free apps or utilities for the Mac. Here are the insights that I gained from that journey and hopefully some of you will benefit from it as well.

Note: I have focused on primarily things that I felt made my transition from Windows to Mac OS easier and were holes in the software that came along with the MacOS. Clearly there were apps or utilities that shipped natively with the Mac OS and I have tried to mention them where ever appropriate.

TextWrangler By far the best (free) text editor on the Mac – from Bare Bones Software the makers of BBEdit – whilst the Mac OS ships with TextEdit (ala WordPad for Windows) – for any serious HTML coding or even plain unhindered text creation. If I were to add only one piece of software to my Mac OS X it would be this.

Business bundle

OpenOffice (now from Oracle) has been a staple of mine the last three years and was the first business app I downloaded. It gets far greater use despite my having bought the iWork package from Apple. Even for heavy users of MS Office, you will not skip a beat IMO with OpenOffice.

Skype – Despite the excellent iChat that ships in the Mac (allowing Jabber, gmail or AIM chats) – much of my business (or even personal) chat, video-calling and VOIP is done on Skype. So this made its way on to the list.

Wine – Nearly everyone I know has one favorite utility or application on Windows that has no real (or acceptable) equivalent on the Mac (if you can believe it). In my case it’s Quicken for Windows and The Journal from David RM software. Wine (& Wine Bottler) are great to run Windows apps under your Mac OS X. Loving it!

Media Management

Picasa As father of two girls and owner of at least two SonyEricsson phones and one Sony T-90 camera (thanks Yogesh!) I get a fair number of pictures taken (mostly in dubious focus). Having used Picasa on my Windows machine and despite the occasional twinge about Google’s reach into our lives, I’ve opted to stay with Picasa as my image importing, (minimal) photo manipulation tool. It’s face recognition feature is pretty cool. iPhoto that comes bundled with the Mac OS X is something that I am yet to play with – this is an instance where inertia won over

GIMP A year ago, I still found GIMP complex and intimidating – however sustained use over the last year, particularly for FlipSide, our nearly weekly cartoon, has made me rely on this as my primary image composition and image authoring tool. I am told this works reasonably well as a photo retouching tool, but never having used Photoshop or GIMP for such use, I cannot comment. This is amongst the most heavily used tools on my Mac (not bad for a X11 app 🙂

Audacity For all the audio recording, tape/CD clean up and audio blogging needs, nothing beats Audacity and thankfully the app is truly cross platform and my daughters who do most of the ripping/editing didn’t miss a beat in using Audacity for most of our audio recording/editing needs.

VLC Media Player – Sure iTunes is nice, as is QuickTime Player both of which ship natively with MacOS X. But it helps to have a media player that can play your VCD, DVD, audio CD, play practically every audio compression format that’s out there (3gp anyone) and do some other stuff, such as stripping just the audio, which I am yet to fully figure out. And again like GIMP and Audacity it is a great endorsement for the Open Source software.

Utilities

Alfred This was the first utility that I downloaded from the Mac App Store and more importantly the one I use the most. In their own words “Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web.” I use it as my primary launcher and am slowly beginning to prefer it over Spotlight (which it leverages). There is so much to Alfred (the free version) that it requires its own review to do it any justice.

EasyFind This is another utility that I find particularly useful to locate files who’s actual (or full) names I can’t recall. It supports Unix wild cards – doesn’t require indexing and works fast. It also can be constrained, to search in specific locations (or sub-folders or paths) or on file or folder names or within file contents. Also its ability to peer within packages and hidden files is a sweet benefit.

Wunderlist The newest addition to my Macintosh (surprisingly spurred by my purchase of an Android phone). It’s a great to-do list creator/tracker that syncs across my phone, Mac desktops, the cloud. It even allows my wife and me to maintain (and assign one another) to-dos across our separate Macs/calendars. Much like Alfred, it comes with a great yet simple interface with several GTD features and keyword (or labels) support.

Disk Inventory X & Grand Perspective Both of these are disk usage utilities that shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called “treemaps“. It was particularly useful while planning to move or back up files or as has happened all too soon, when my hard disk space seemed to be disappearing rapidly. Again not only useful but cool looking too. I prefer Disk Inventory for reasons I’m not too sure myself!

5 Things to Do When You Lose Your Job!

December 14, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo Credit: myCAES via Compfight

Last week, I began getting a flurry of invites to connect on LinkedIn from ex-colleagues, all of whom were at the same firm — a sure indication that pink slips were in the offing! Alas, I was right, as the entire location got the axe on Monday. I suspect the first day every engineer in the place was in a state of shock, not to mention folks in finance, admin and marketing. It was hard to see folks that I admired, liked and even loved, struggle with what to do next – even as I counseled some, made calls for others and helped with resumes.

As a veteran (survivor, victim and instigator of) numerous layoffs stretching from my first week at work in August 1988 through the mid 2000s, I thought I should share my learnings on the Top 5 things to do when you lose your job. ~~Not s~~ Surprisingly my first list looked very similar to the Top 5 things to do while you still have a job! Further thought and reflection helped refine it. So here goes….

Plan: Write down a set of objectives for next 90 days
As the man said, when you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there or NOT! So it better to know where you want to go first and then we can figure out how to get there. So get a plain piece of paper and a pencil and write down a set of 90 day objectives. This could be as forward looking as “I’ll figure out what I want over the next three years” to “I’ll have at least six/twelve/twenty four interviews.” Break this down into what you will get done in the next 5 days, 15 days, 30 days, and every two weeks beyond.
Create Collateral: Get your resume re-done
With the 90 day objectives in front of you, create at least two versions of your resume/curriculum vitae
- The first one is a plain vanilla, one pager (or one sheet, if you have to go to two sides of a hardcopy resume) that highlights your skills, summarizes accomplishment and a quick employment summary. This is useful firstly for yourself to hone in on what you want to highlight and particularly for headhunters to get a sense for who you are.
- You can do a second, more detailed one (build on the first, don’t waste time), that adds an objective up front (what are you looking for) and expands on specifics of what you have done or skills you possess to make you the right person for the stated objective. This you tweak for each company/interview that you appear for. Feel free to bring in an updated CV to the actual interview, particularly if there’s been a phone screen.

Doing your CV also means making yourself easy to find – so update your profile on LinkedIn, Spock or other business networks that may be relevant to your business. Regardless of your feelings or advice you may get to the contrary, it is worth posting your resume to the job sites – be they Indeed.com, Dice.com, Monster.com, Shine.com, Naukri.com or whatever specialized job sites may be there. Don’t forget your alumni sites, regardless of how long ago you graduated or it was only an executive ed program you attended at that school.

Reach out: Work the phone/email/fax
Be clear that you are in sales, regardless of what job you are looking for. Sales is a numbers game – so you have to set a clear target on how many folks you will call, how many mails you will send out and if you have to fax stuff, you’ll do it! Ten (10) is a nice round number, as are of course, 15, 20 or 25. Set realistic goals for the number of mails you’ll send or calls you’ll make EACH DAY. And then just do it every morning. Yep, start your day with this. Once you connect with someone, or when you can never connect with someone you are trying to reach, you’ll figure out what’s the best time, if it is not the morning. You don’t have the luxury of “I didn’t like how he spoke to me,” “Will she think I am desperate?” “I’m not sure I want to work there” – regardless of the truth of the these statements, they are EXCUSES – just move to the next call/email on your list.

Track
When you lose your job, the only thing certain is that you are going to have a few lousy days. The best way to keep these short, is to stay busy meaningfully which is best done by tracking two critical things.
I find using a daily diary or a notebook with one page per day is the best way to get this done. You can carry it with you and there is no boot-up time nor do you lose it because the battery died. I know folks who use MS Excel and a diary – choose your favorite method but do it!

Volunteer
Instead of sitting at home or in your cubicle (till your last day), get out and keep yourself busy. Volunteer to help out at your friends’ startup, at a local VC firm, at a non-profit – with your specific skills – be it letter (copy-)writing, programming, project management or basket weaving. Firstly this prevents you from moping around the house and bothering the spouse, kids or pets; more importantly it keeps your game sharp through practice at something real it helps you make new contacts, potentially learn a few new things and finally builds psychic karma for doing good. If it opens your eyes to new opportunities or insights about yourself, that’s icing on the cake.

5 Things To Do While You Still Have a Job

November 16, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 10 Comments

Photo Credit: kiwikewlio via Compfight

Last week I had called a friend, with the idea of pitching our newsletter services. However the conversation rapidly turned to the unhappy state of affairs in my friend’s company. Layoffs, spending cuts and a lock on the stationery cupboard (okay, I made that one up!) My friend was expecting the axe to fall again (& yet again, definitely on spending if not on people) and hoping that he’d survive. Of course having taken the job less than three months earlier, he was not keen to move — even if the job market were good — which it most definitely wasn’t.

While I commiserated with my friend on the call, it set me thinking. A little bit of calling around made me realize that my friend was by no means alone. There seem to be hordes of folks, just hanging in there — some who actually like their companies but are caught in semi-stasis and yet others would like to get the heck outta there, but can’t, till the market gets better. The shameless fellow I am, I urged all of them to quit and start their own business. Being good friends (at least one of them) they curbed their urge to lug something at me. For the rest of the folks that are hanging in there, here are five things to do, while you still have a job.

Read – no, reading this blog does not count (not you mom!) – read stuff that you had intended to; whether the speeches of Cicero, The Artist’s Way, Writing Down the Bones, RK Narayan or What Color is Your Parachute? The classics whether the Mahabharata, modern renditions of the Ramayana or Homer’s Illiad will also do nicely. Or the first book that you come across next. Do this with a clear and committed goal (tell a friend to keep you honest) – one book a week or whatever turns you on. But treat this as you’d a project at work. Before you know it you’d be one well read person or at least on the road to becoming one.

Share – the simplest is to write about the book you’ve just read. Or if that seems too heavy – write little things that others might find useful at work – first aid at home, How to get a PAN card, MS Excel tricks, FAQs, Employee Stock Options in plain English. Or if you are truly inspired convert the whole thing into a blog and share it with the world. Remember to teach is to learn! If you aren’t ready, start with a journal – doesn’t have to be a blog. Just a good old diary, of your thoughts, aspirations, desires and dreams and share with a friend to start with.
Track your time – this is as good a time as any to see where your time goes – how much of it is spent Googling Daniel Craig or Sarah Palin, or just checking email or gossiping at the water cooler (“Can you believe what she wore to work today?”) How much time do your kids, spouse or significant other get from you? How much of it could have been spent on a treadmill or a nice weekend hike? The sweetest thing about being in limbo, is you’d have all the time in the world — put it to good use.
Network In the past, whenever someone gave me this advice, I always felt slimy — like one of those multi-level marketing guys approaching you at the grocery store or gas station (Don’t ask!) But thanks to the Internet, you can now pass it off as learning about Web 2.0. So sign up on LinkedIn, Plaxo (they are getting better), get your family on to Geni and if that’s not enough try Spock, FaceBook and MySpace. However keep point 3 in mind and track your time. Kidding apart, a slow business environment is the right time to re-connecting with all those folks from your past and meeting new folks. Of course with all your reading and writing you’d have much to share, yourself.
Create three CVs It never hurts to keep your powder dry. At the least you will get a good blog post or maybe even a full fledged article on “How to write a killer CV” if you prepare three CVs. It can be a useful exercise to reflect on where you are professionally and where you’d like to head towards actively. So create a professional CV, much like you’d have in the past, create a personal CV, stripping the professional parts out or re-stating them as useful life-skills, as though you were going to run for political office and finally create one as you’d like it to look like five years from now. Of course the reading, ‘riting and reflecting you’d have done would make this a piece of cake.

Once you are done with these five steps, still have job and time on your hands, start over at step one. Good luck!

Top 5 Online tools – Life on the cloud!

June 3, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Last month, I wrote of my Top 5 utilities that I can’t live with. Guess the computer gods were watching and about five days ago my laptop gave up its ghost (of course tossing it on my bed and watching it slip down to the floor may have had something to do with it!). The loss was all the more untimely, as the first half of an overdue article was on the HDD! Frantic calls for sysadmin help, safe mode log on as admin and scraping the ascii text on to Zoho writer resulted in my getting the article out an hour after my Friday 6PM deadline! You can read it (“Selling Every Moment“) at Hindu Business Line here .

The good news is that even a couple of weeks before this tragic moment, I had made a beginning to go completely on-line, as in render my laptop a mere client and operate solely on the net — yep, store my data on the net and use apps on the net. So here’s my report from life on the cloud!

GMail & Google Apps pretty much the bulk of my time is spent with GMail and more frequently with Google Apps, as we try to get our new business (still in stealth) on-line. When I first began using GMail (from being a Yahoo! mail user and Eudora client) it seemed outright strange not being able to do folders. My current use pattern leads me to pray each day that Google actually means its “Do no evil” pledge. Pretty much sticking to mail and chat in Google Apps and only kicking tires with their Docs and Sites utilities.

Skype – and now with video. Skype is the only utility that gives gmail a run for the first place in my working life. Between chats, international calls, peer2peer file transfers and now video chat it gets a great deal of use. For several years we ran most of our internal business on AIM and Skype has pretty much replaced this for both intracompany as well as across company (and country boundaries). Now with utilities with the ability to record (not a feature I have used yet) it promises only to get more important.

Zoho (http://www.zoho.com/) pretty much replaces the MS Office suite and my experience is that ZohoWriter particularly kicks butt. Am using Zoho Project and as a power user of Microsoft Excel I am amazed at Zoho Sheet (though miss the work offline feature). Not having used Office Office, I found both Zoho and Google presentation tools not as productive as good old PowerPoint on the local HDD. Got my neighbor using Zoho CRM (free for up to 3 users). Personally found the CRM feature, even for a motivated user like me, a bit heavy! Likely switch to

BaseCamp – was using this as my primary project management, planning, newsgroup tool for the last six months with other conspirators as we prepare for our next startup. Simplicity thy name is BaseCamp! I must admit though I have, since writing this first, switched to Zoho projects, as I needed to be able to track a whole slew of tasks, milestones that are overwhelming BaseCamp’s simple(r) lists.

Blogger, Twitter and WordPress
For a while there, I had to physically abandon my computer, so that I could get over my growing addiction with trolling blogs. Now even without a self-help group, am doing better though Blogger probably gets more use than it should; planning to move this and other blogs over to wordpress eventually and so spending time there in installation and learning about it. Twitter, though my own contributions are bite sized, a fair amount of time is spent reading/tracking others posts & leads. The jury is still out on it utility beyond serendipity.

GMail Drive – in addition to using of course Google mail and their news alerts, I just learnt how to use GMail as a virtual Hard Disk Drive on which I can store my files. Of course this requires installing a Win Shell extension. But 2GB of storage on a virtual drive is not bad! There is a Firefox plug-in gSpace that does the same thing as well. As many of you pointed out this is not a lot of space – but I got my mom (yep, mom) to use it, so simplicity trumps all else (again!). In my case I also have a 500Gb Seagate drive on my desk, so I don’t pretend 2Gb is all I’ll ever need. But its pretty good to start with.

I realized that there are a whole lot more tools I use including RememberTheMilk and LibraryThing, but the first three above hog 80% of my time and effort. If like me you are poor at backing up, it might not be a bad idea to check these out.