Beauty of Zettels I've tried various tools and systems for online writing, but nothing beats the power of Zettels.
What are they, really? You may ask....
knowledge Balancing work, time and focus Have you head of the Eudaimonia machine?
Imagine a one-story, narrow structure, a straightforward rectangle divided into five rooms, in succession. There's no quick escape route here. This design insists that as you move through, you're plunging deeper into the world of intense productivity....
productivity Design Manifesto This thought was inspired by the book _Design Expertise_ (Lawson & Dorst, 2009) which includes an interview with the architect Ken Yeang where the author mentions: “I give every new member of staff the practice manual to read when they join. They can not just see past designs but study the principles upon which they’re based”.
In other words, what would be the ethos behind your own unique design practice? When every designer is different in their own way, what would be one’s own **philosophy of practice**?...
design Task management for product managers In the book **Inspired**, Marty Cagan talks about dividing one's day-to-day tasks into three major buckets: people, process and product. I'd experimented with categorising my tasks into similar such buckets based on the framework by [Shreyas Doshi](https://shreyasdoshi.com/):
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product-management World's most ancient public health problem From the place I come from, in Kerala, a baby is not given a name until he/she is 28 days old. And for marginalised castes/communities, the naming ceremony is delayed to 90 days. I never really questioned as to why this was the case. I let it become a ritual system until I overheard a conversation between some of our family members. This was mainly because the chances of a baby surviving was very low in our previous times. So our forefathers temporarily delayed the naming ceremony to avoid the emotional downpour if things go south. And for marginalised communities, the mortality rate was even more low owing to the difficult circumstances.
Knowing this reality shocked me. We might have more complex challenges facing the world right now — AI taking people’s jobs, climate change induced shock waves, food insecurities, refugee rights, future pandemics etc. But I believe that the cause of addressing maternal deaths requires the most urgency. When a mother dies during childbirth, the future dies with her....
health Virtuoso Guide for Personal Memory Systems Forgetting concepts is good for your memory. Forgetting them for a certain duration, and thinking about them again, actually makes the memory more concrete.
This could be best illustrated by the repetition curve graph below:...
memory Writing in Future Past We lack frequent usage of the **future past tense** in modern discourse.
When I was recently drafting my new year resolutions, I noticed the use of 'I can', and 'I will', and found myself questioning the format, especially when I see that I'm good at making promises, but end up being miserable at keeping them....
writing Design that's so bad it's actually good Recently, a relative sought my help to tweak a badly designed poster on Microsoft Paint.
This was meant to be circulated on Whatsapp as an advertisement for the handyman services his friend was offering in his locale....
design How to spot human writing on the internet? In the classic Turing Test, a computer is considered intelligent if it can convince a human that it’s another human in a conversation. At that time, human-generated content dominated the internet.
But that was a decade ago. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically. AI-generated content now rivals, and in some cases outpaces, human-created material....
writing Brew your ideas lazily Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa achieved through the painstaking application of countless gossamer-thin layers of oil paint over the course of many years, many months. The _sfumato_ technique which Da Vinci popularised, involved applying more than 40 layers of paint, each only 10 to 50 micrometers thick, using fingers to blend the colors and create the depth of illusion. The creation process was "perpetually unfinished" — He began the portrait around 1503, but didn't complete it till his death in 1519. And it would be foolish to dismiss him as a 'master procrastinator' — _What if the attribute of delayed procrastination in itself had some merit?_ I'm beginning to suspect that this was the hidden reason behind the genius of Mona Lisa. The art of brewing ideas lazily.
In 2009, a review of three dozen studies conducted by researchers of Lancaster University concluded that setting aside a problem was helpful in improving the performance of divergent thinking tasks....
ideas The soul searching years There are choices we make because we desire them deeply, and there are choices we make because the inertia of the world carries us into them.
In the small towns and cities across India, engineering had quietly become not a profession, but a rite of passage. It wasn’t a decision that needed questioning; it was a given, like gravity. By the time I finished 12th grade, I, like so many others, stepped onto that conveyor belt, not with passion, not with rebellion, but with a quiet surrender to precedent....
entrepreneurship Rapid Journey Prototyping As a product manager who also pitches in as a service designer at [Noora Health](__GHOST_URL__/Noora%20Health), i sometimes do wonder how I could use most of the design methods I'm applying at my day job for myself.
Let's take the methodology of [Service Design Blueprinting](__GHOST_URL__/mapping-interconnections-through-service-design-blueprinting) for example. It involves outlining the front stage and back stage elements of all the actors involved in a system to make it lead to the intended action. For example, if you're heading to a shop to buy medicines, the act of buying medicines is the front stage process. And the act of stocking the inventory with the required medicines from time to time is the backstage process....
design Use code only if no code fails > UPDATE: **The landscape right now looks so different with the recent evolution of "vibe coding". I don't touch no-code tools such as Bubble, Softr etc for any of my prototyping needs for eg. I just shoot directly from the hip. For reference, read my essay on this topic** — [[Vibe coding]], [[Idea in the shower, testing before breakfast]].
Use code only if no code fails. It is that simple. I can assume that there might be counters, attacks and pushpacks to this heavy statement. Bear with me on this. Before we address the house on fire, let me take you on a quick detour....
code Read writers who operate We have more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds, and books on ornithologists written by birds. Taleb eloquently describes this as the key problem of knowledge, or in other words as _epistemic arrogance_. Strong corollary can be drawn with various disciplines, including entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs simply spend more time doing entrepreneurship rather than writing about entrepreneurship. It's very difficult for successful entrepreneurs who are in the thick of action, to be talking about action....
writing Compound Interest of Private Notes Strongly recommend everyone to keep private notes about people.
These could even be some random jotted keywords: "served in the navy", "capuccino lover", "biker", "loves going on long walks", and so on. When private notes accumulate over time in the form of a database, they start showing emergent properties....
knowledge Writing is thinking My blog has had a median of ~2 visitors per day for almost two years (nowadays, it's only a marginal improvement). And I don't care.
Writing is thinking. And this blog has served as a public notepad well enough....
writing Methods are lifejackets not straight jackets Design methods are life jackets. Not straight jackets.
Structures, whether they're processes, frameworks, or plans, are excellent tools to navigate complicated problems. They bring efficiency, reduce ambiguity, and offer defaults. ...
methodology Breaking the fourth wall of an interview ****Intended audience:**** For leaders interviewing candidates for product or other tech leadership roles
A group of men eating ice cream during peak London summer started drowning in large numbers....
interviewing I was wrong about optimal stopping If you were tasked with a need to find the tallest mountain, and went searching in a far away land surrounded by a series of mountains, how would you finalise the tallest mountain, especially when you could still go farther, and find even more taller mountains (only if you explore even more).
There are various ways to term this, some call it the travelling salesman problem, or the "secretary problem", or just as the "optimal stopping" problem, which attempts to come to a mathematical decision on when to actually stop in such explore versus exploit situations. ...
mathematics