isheyelens

Tag: getting things done

  • Photographs, Essays, and Fear

    Photographs, Essays, and Fear

    I think that I want to talk about fear today.

    I’ve been trying to write more, and share photographs, and every time I do, I feel a twinge of terror that whatever I’m going to write1 is terrible. I think that what I’m writing right now is terrible. My heart rate is through the roof, and I try to find any and all reasons to not write.

    "My fingers hurt."
    "My keyboard doesn’t work very well."
    "I have no idea what to write."
    "I’m a slow typist."

    And on and on. I feel this all the time. And it’s a problem because I want to write. I want to write a lot. I want to write essays. I want to tell stories. I want to make movies. But this fear – of speaking up, of being heard, of failing, – just won’t go away. And in the end, I don’t know if it matters.

    It’s the fear that keeps me collecting. Keeps me from focusing long enough to put down what I want to say2.

    None of this is good when I’m trying to write posts here, write short stories, or write accompanying blurbs with photos. Not to mention helping Vaidehi with her writing and marketing, and working on building a presence for UAKC. It’s all a lot.

    Anyway. I’m scared every time I sit down to write something. And I think that the only way to make the fear go away is just to do it more.

    1. I’m trying to write something to go along with every photo that I put out, and have a photo accompany every piece of writing.  ↩

    2. Or dictate. I’ve been practicing dictation with the new iOS 15 update. It’s weird to hear myself speak out loud, but it’s getting better. The worst part seems to be holding a train of thought without giving into the urge to correct errors.  ↩

  • 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.  ↩