isheyelens

Tag: zettelkasten

  • CV, STARs, and (Personal) Sales Pitches

    CV, STARs, and (Personal) Sales Pitches

    It seems to be job hunting season for my friends and family. And I’ve been helping them write and polish their resumes and curriculum vitae (CV). I often find myself repeating the same information – how to approach a job search, how to write a cover letter and a resume so that it helps you find the job, how to keep a log of your accomplishments at your job – so I wrote up a few pointers that I send along and refer to as I walk people through the job search process.

    It is a process. And each step of the process should hopefully take you to the next one, with the goal of eventually getting you a job that you are excited to work at. Your cover letter should convince the reader to look at your resume or CV. In turn, that should make them want to bring you in for an interview, where they decide if they want to offer you the job, and you decide if you want to take it.

    First things first: CVs and resumes are different beasts, even though the terms are used somewhat interchangeably. A resume should be 1-2 pages. It should highlight your most significant achievements in each job. A CV is much more suitable for academia – it should encompass all your professional achievements – papers, presentations, jobs, et cetera.

    The flow of a resume is fairly straightforward. You want the reader to very quickly grasp that you are capable of doing the job, and how you’ve done your jobs in the past.1

    One of the smartest ways that I learned to highlight my achievements was the STAR method of bullet point-writing. The STAR method is a simple formula for your bullet points that I learned while doing my MBA at Bayes Business School2. Each bullet point should be a sentence built using the following guidelines:

    • (S) Describe the Situation,
    • (T) Define your Task,
    • (A) Say what Action you took, and
    • (R) What the Result of that action was.

    Situation, Task, Action, Result will give you a succinct sentence that fits a bullet point. Whenever possible, use concrete terms and numbers for the results, and use active language to describe it.

    As you start doing this, you’ll see things that you’ve done that are outside what your job description stated or what the job you’re applying for needs. That’s fine. Keep them in the vault for another application. Or to bring up when you’re asked in an interview to "describe a time when you…" showed conflict management skills, or collaboration skills, or client management skills. This becomes your story bank. You might remember some difficult patches or conflict – note them down too, and what you learned from them.

    Understand what a CV or resume is meant to do. It’s job is to get you an interview. Be clear in what you’re putting in the document. This is a sales pitch for you.

    And don’t just do this when you’re looking for a job. Once a week, or at worst, once a month, look back on your work and add relevant points to your STAR bank. It helps to have this information on hand when you’re discussing your performance or negotiating for a raise. If you keep at this, you’ll wind up with your own career management document. You’ll see how you’ve grown and never dread an annual review because you won’t have to wonder what you’ve accomplished in the last few months.

    1. Pasting your job description here is not the way to go. It shows nothing of what you have accomplished in the job, and in the worst case, can come off as lazy. If you’re not putting in the effort to remember and show off your accomplishments, why should anyone else? ↩

    2. Thanks, Bayes Career Team. ↩

  • All Systems Go

    All Systems Go

    For the most part, I’ve got by so far is having systems. Systems for everything. It can get annoying for the people around me – not everyone thinks in systems. I like systems – we had a lot of them in school and I’ve tried to keep them around as I’ve grown older. They really helped me stay functional before I was diagnosed with ADHD. So let’s talk about some of them.

    Since I wrote about hoarding information, that sounds like a good place to start.

    Information Management

    In my previous post, I mentioned that I didn’t really have a working system for separating the information snacks, productivity porn, and anything useful that was input in my information diet. I’m trying to figure that one out, but right now, I don’t have much of one. Which isn’t to say that I’ve given up on it. On the contrary, I have a focus on what needs to be processed, and what’s junk.

    For collection, I’m using:

    • The Old Reader, and Reeder on iOS for RSS,
    • Raindrop.io for saving bookmarks,
    • Saved threads on Twitter, downloaded videos and playlists on YouTube, and a small list of podcasts that I’m subscribed to, and
    • Drafts for collecting random thoughts.

    I’m not doing much processing, but when I do:

    • Drafts and Zotero for longer thoughts, and notes

    And finally, for output, I use:

    • iA Writer for writing posts like this and anything longer,
    • Notion for working with Vaidehi on UAKC, and
    • Google Docs and Office 365 when we’re collaborating remotely with other people.

    I’m not building a Zettelkasten or anything like that. The thought of it appeals to me, but I have to get over the mental hurdle that everything in my backlog needs to be processed before I can produce anything1. I might get around to creating one, but it will be something I build as I work on things, not before.

    There are days when I feel like I’m like a dragon that hoards information candy2.

    Productivity

    I’ve fallen off the GTD wagon more times than I can think of. I’ve tried text files, email reminders, scheduled Telegram messages, spreadsheets, bullet journals, web based apps, and premium apps like OmniFocus. What can I say? I love making lists.

    What I struggle with is crossing things off lists.

    There’s an idea in my head that if I can just get everything into a perfect list, it will all be better, and I will be more productive and prolific. It’s bullshit, of course. By the time I’m done brain dumping and sorting things out, I’m too tired to do any of the things on my list. And if I rush in to just do it3? I’m simultaneously paralysed by all the options and terrified that I’m forgetting more important things.

    We’ve (Vaidehi and I) tried using a LOT of apps, especially since we work across Windows, iOS, Android, and the Internet. We’ve currently settled on a bulleted list inside a Google Doc. It’s not very high tech4, but it’s been the best fit for us.

    Time Management

    I’m time-blind. I rarely register time passing, and I certainly can’t estimate how long has passed while I’m working on something, or how long something should take. I occasionally brush my teeth while heating my coffee because I know that I’ve set that timer for 2 minutes. I’ve also taken hours to write and send an email because I didn’t think I spent a long time figuring out where the comma should be placed.5

    For a long time, I relied on my calendar – all appointments went on it. If something wasn’t on my calendar, I wouldn’t do it. But over the last year, we’ve been time-blocking a lot more. It’s a lot of work up front. We had to take a hard look at what was on our plates, and the kind of life that we wanted. Then we budgeted the time we had against everything that we wanted and needed to spend time on.

    It’s certainly not a system for everyone. Friends who’ve asked about it are speechless when they see our calendar and spreadsheets. But it works for us.6 And that’s all that matters.

    Finances

    YNAB has, without a doubt, been one of the biggest changes in my life. I tried to budget in the past. It never went anywhere. I had “new YNAB” for almost 2 years before it finally clicked.

    As soon as we got married, we created a joint budget. Then, we figured out what was important to both of us. We caught that I was engaging in collecting tendencies outside the internet as well. It’s helped to curtail some of that, and I can engage with my hobbies more proactively.

    We paid off my credit card. I carried debt for a while because I earned enough to pay it off. But I wasn’t disciplined with my card usage.

    Vaidehi even worked there for a season. It really helped us to get a lot more comfortable with using the service, and budgeting in general.

    We’re using it for company finances as well, but haven’t quite dialled that in. I’ll write more on that when we do. In the meantime, I’m going to be listening to Beginning Balance, the YNAB podcast about using YNAB to run your business.

    The secret ingredient

    Some of these things work for me now when they didn’t before for a simple reason – my wife is involved in them too. Things we struggled at doing individually became significantly easier when we were doing it together. We do what’s hard for the other person but easier for us. We keep each other accountable, so it’s not easy to say, “I’ll do that later” or stop doing things because it’s hard.7

    I mentioned at the start that this setup isn’t for everyone. I know this because that’s the answer we get after we show people our systems. These aren’t the only ones either – we have them for our home, health, and pretty much everything you can think of. It keeps us functional.

    1. This website, and what I write here, is pretty clear proof that I don’t need to do that to make something. I just need to make the thing.  ↩
    2. I imagine myself like one of the dragons from Iguanamouth. ↩
    3. Hat-tip to Nike. ↩
    4. We’re trying out Notion, but very slowly. It’s a wonderful tool, until it’s not. You can read more about it on The Sweet Setup – especially the part about using it on the iPad. ↩
    5. Narrator: It was a very long time. ↩
    6. If nothing else, we go to sleep on time. Unless I lose track of time while watching an episode of Critical Role… ↩
    7. More realistically, because it’s more fun to watch Netflix than it is to make the bed.  ↩
  • The Collectors Fallacy: How I Hoard Shit And Don’t Produce

    The Collectors Fallacy: How I Hoard Shit And Don’t Produce

    I feel overwhelmed all the time. I know that a lot of people feel like that these days, so at least I’m not alone in this. I try to do a lot with UA Kathachitra and my personal life. And sometimes, I can fall into what some in the productivity porn1 circles call “the collector’s fallacy”. I came across this way back in 2015 (I think) on zettelkasten.de.

    Now, I know Zettelkasten are the rage these days. There’s Roam Research, Obsidian, Tinderbox, Devonthink, Drafts, Taio…to name just a few apps that I’ve seen. Not to mention Emacs, Orgmode, and all the wonderful tinkering that accompanies them2. All of them promise that you will be able to produce things faster and better. That you will become a creator.

    There’s just one problem: you still need to do the work. And be confident in the work that you are doing. Now, I have an ADHD fuelled brain that is sure that it will remember everything 3 combined with some perfectionist tendencies. So I want to hoard ALL THE INFORMATION.

    Let’s get a glimpse into how my collection (read: hoarding) problem works. It looks like this:

    • Hundreds of open tabs in multiple browsers4 (I’ve maxed out my phone’s maximum allowed on more than one occasion),
    • Nearly 4000 bookmarks in Raindrop.io (mostly unread, or read and unprocessed),
    • My RSS reader (The Old Reader & Reeder 4) regularly acting as a holding space for things I want to read,
    • Outside of Raindrop and Reeders, in several other places, I have saved to read/listen/watch:
      • tweets and twitter threads,
      • reddit post and comments,
      • YouTube videos, and
      • podcasts, and
    • A constantly growing backlog of media to explore between all the streaming services.

    You remember the list of apps I threw up before? I try to test ALL THE APPS. This drives a constant search for the next shiny object that will help me DO SOMETHING with all this input5. I’m pretty sure that I’ve paid a lot of money for apps and services for notetaking and productivity that I have never used.

    Really though, all of – the hoarding of information nuggets, the switching of apps, the quest for becoming more efficient – it’s procrastination. Procrastination driven by fear. Fear of forgetting. Fear of not knowing. Fear of getting it wrong when the work is out there. Fear of… who knows?

    The first thing that Christian and Sascha write is “Collectors don’t make progress.” That hit me hard. It hit me hard when I first read it, and it hits me hard today, when I’m writing it here. There are times when I don’t feel like I’ve made any progress on turning information into something that I can use for my entire life.

    Over the last few months, as Vaidehi and I have been finding better ways to work. We’ve been forced to. So, it’s time to simplify and let a lot of things go. I promise you, this isn’t because I’ve read Cal Newport’s new book (I haven’t, and I’m not adding it to the pile).

    But how do I simplify? And how did I cope this long? That’s for another post.

    1. Productivity porn (or food porn, home improvement porn, or travel porn) is like regular porn. You watch someone else do things instead of doing it yourself. I look at how other people do things efficiently and think about how to apply those tactics to my own life. But I don’t actually do that – because that is hard. It’s also hard to figure out if something is useful for me if I haven’t settled into a system. Spoiler: I never do. So it’s a hamster wheel of the next system, the next app, the new hotness. It’s exhausting. ↩

    2. The two reasons I haven’t fallen down the Emacs rabbit hole is that it isn’t available on iOS and it’s not good at working collaboratively. ↩

    3. Spoiler: it doesn’t. ↩

    4. I’m ashamed to say that there was a time when I lost my shit on a poor QA tester who borrowed my phone to test a webapp our company was working on. He cleared the cache as part of his process, and I went nuclear because I had lost a few hundred open tabs. The sad part is that I could reopen most of them from memory… ↩

    5. I vaguely considered writing tech reviews, but honestly, I don’t have the money, nor the energy to keep up with all the services that I want to explore. And if I did explore them, I would be dropping the ball on my life, and the company that we’re trying to build.zettelkastenzettelkasten method ↩