Month: September 2011

When I think of multi-tasking, we can borrow ideas from the world of software and operating systems. What we need is a sort of stack and “swap” area where the context of what we were doing when we got interrupted gets saved. That makes it easier to resume after the interruption has been dealt with.

So, when an interruption happens, it is good to take an extra few seconds to save the state of what we were doing/thinking, and then deal with the interruption. It means asking the person who just walked in to wait a few seconds, letting the phone ring a little longer, not hurrying to reply to the SMS, and so on. I have found that if care can be taken to preserve the context, then it is much easier to speed up the resumption and continue from where one had left prior to the interruption.

Keeping a notebook and pen always handy helps in saving the context in multiple scenarios. Also, it helps in making notes of actions that need to be done for the tasks.

So, multi-tasking is going to be a part of life. We just have to figure out our own solutions to become better at it.

We have all been forced to handle multi-tasking given the nature of modern work – whether we like it or not. Phone ring, SMSes come, Skype messages pop up, emails arrive, people walk in to check on something, and so on. Every study shows that interruptions are not good, and it takes time to get back to what we were doing prior to when the interruption occurred.

So, what’s to be done? I don’t think we can wish away interruptions. They are a part of our daily life now. How much ever we wish for a different era, that is not coming back. So, what we need to do is to see how we can become good at multi-tasking.

We will still need our chunky hours of deep thought when we don’t want interruptions. And we must create that space. But for the most part, we need to figure out how to deal with interruptions and multi-task.

Continued tomorrow.

 

It is fascinating how the past few months are changing the political game in India. Many things that were thought improbable are happening.

I think all of this is for good. India needs a much deeper debate – that goes beyond the thin veneer, but probes deeper. We need to discuss the governance models, we need to engage on the best ways to get hundreds of millions people out of poverty, we need to see think hard on how we are going to create tens of millions jobs rapidly for the emerging young workforce, we need to make decisions on how rapidly we are going to build the infrastructure, and so on.

For the most part, we are not getting this. But my feeling is that as the political game shifts and aspirations of people rise, this debate is going to start. And from there will emerge openings for a new language in India’s politics. 2011 will go down as the year that served as the inflexion point for making this happen.

I have written multiple times in the past about the ill-thought out TRAI guidelines on allegedly combating spam. If ever there was something that was not good for both consumers and businesses, this is one such set of rules. They come into force from today, and I am quite sure they are going to disrupt plenty of people’s lives when they realise a lot of the good things that SMSes did are no longer going to be available to them.

In India, SMS has become a part of the business processes of many organisations – and consequently, a part of life for consumers. Yes, one of the side-effects has been that of spam, as the price of SMS has fallen rapidly, and businesses have realised its utility. At the same time, most consumers have also learnt to deal with the increase in spam. Phone displays have become better showing the senderID and first few words in the message, so it is as easy to ignore as it is to open.

Putting arbitrary constraints on what are important tools for customer engagement and acquisition is just not done.

I have been off the Do Not Call list for 9 months now, and I can assure now there is no problem dealing with the increase in messages (or even calls). The good things SMSes deliver (news updates, alerts, PNR info, movie tickets info, etc.) far outweigh the ‘unsolicited commercial’ messages. My reco: get your number off the list!

Note: I am an interested party because my company offers SMS services to enterprises.

I must be Skype’s nth millionth user! Just started using it a few days ago. And it is quite a utility tool – primarily its IM, file transfer and group interaction capabilities.

I always thought of Skype for the VoIP calls, and since my international calls were not that many, I didn’t bother much about it. When some of the things I was doing necessitated interaction that needed rapid responses and email/sms/calls weren’t the best option, I started using Skype. And was duly impressed by its utility.

Microsoft, having paid $8.5 billion for it, now needs to figure out how to make money from me!

From my series on Gov 2.0 a year ago:

India needs to create a Challenge Portal.

Check the US challenge.gov portal. It involves putting out some of the challenges that government departments face, with an offer of reward and recognition. It gets people involved in thinking about the problems the nation faces and gets them to work to solve them.

India needs to do something similar. Every government department has some key challenges. They should put them out on a common Challenge.gov.in portal. This will help capture the imagination of Indians. For the first time, we will have a government actually doing something more than random “open houses” to get citizens and experts involved in thinking together about the problems we face, and then coming up with innovative solutions.

This requires government officials and ministers to have a mindset that they are not the experts in every area, and are not blessed with the wisdom to solve every problem – and there are people out there who are smarter than them. If we can get the Challenge contests going, it will be a great step forward.

This week’s links:

• The Social Wars: by Seth Sternberg. “If history’s any guide, the social networks will compete for site distribution through traffic referral and cold, hard cash.”
• What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? from New York Times Sunday Magazine. “Why our children’s success — and happiness — may depend less on perfect performance than on learning how to deal with failure.”
• Big Tent called Shveta Chhatra: by Shashi Shekhar in Pioneer. “From Rama to Akbar to Shivaji, the Shveta Chhatra has been a non-theocratic symbol of the sovereign power of the State. The Shveta Chhatra envisioned a ‘Strong Republic’ but with a minimalist Government. From Kautilya to Gandhi and Ambedkar, we see glimpses of that tradition of political thought. It needs to be revived.”
• EBDITA: A Fred Wilson tutorial. “EBITDA is the pre-tax cash earning power of the business.”
• Blogging Reinvented: by Om Malik. A short piece, with lots to think over. “The next generation of blogging systems needs to account for the fact that information — and most importantly, conversations — flow via email, Twitter, instant messages and other formats.”

During a recent customer meeting, I realised that when talking (pitching), I needed to separate what I saying into two:

• The first part of what I was selling was effectively a commoditised set of products (email, SMS, etc.). Many other companies could offer the same set of products. Here, our pricing had to be competitive, and there is always some pressure on margins. While we could claim some technological superiority or better service, these would not be enough for us to charge a significant markup as compared to competition.
• Then, there was a second part to the meeting. Here, we were discussing ideas and innovations -things which could become “gamechangers” for the customer. They were expecting ideas and innovative solutions to solve the challenges they had in both customer acquisition and customer retention (or engagement). Here, there was no discussion on pricing. Budgets were infinite if we could come up with the right solution. Competition wasn’t even talking this language.

I came back and shared these thoughts with my sales team. We needed to do both. But, increasingly, we needed to spend more time on the second – thinking hard about the customer’s business, and how the “Lego blocks” we had could fit together to make a big change for the customer.

I have written about this before, but it is always good to add a few additional points on what I think is a useful personal productivity tool.

I like to make notes in meetings. The notes service five purposes for me:

• They help me stay focused on the meeting. When I make notes, I am not distracted.
• I do not have to remember thoughts in sequence. The notes help replay conversations if needed. I can keep the mind free as I listen, and not have to worry about making mental lists as the conversation flows.
• Often when I am in back-to-back meetings, it is easy to forget the actions that need to be taken after a meeting. The notes work as a short-term reference to ensure that follow-up is done.
• I find that there are good ideas that come during conversations. So I make a note of them in the same flow of notes. These I prefix with a bulb so I can refer to them later and think more.
• If I need to refer back to a conversation and the specifics of what was discussed, I now can go back to the notes.

I have been doing this for many years, and find it very useful. My tools: a 240-page spiral book (which lasts about 15-20 days) and a pen.

Another board game that I picked up during the US trip was Blokus. Like Qwirkle, the learning takes barely a minute. And the game can be played in 20-30 minutes with 2 or 4 players.

Games like these are fun time-fillers, and also make one think differently. They require much less thought that something like Settlers of Catan, which also I like a lot.

Somewhere, amidst all the distractions of TV, computers and mobile, we have lost the joy of playing board games. Games like Catan, Qwirkle, Ticket to Ride and Blokus bring that back.