Oh, wow!
I'm gonna tell you about how I'm learning this new thing…
Okay…
Hey dude, I am recording, okay? So, I'll call you back
yeah yeah I'm doing learning the new thing.
Yeah yeah yeah later later later
not right now later later later later.
Sorry about that.
Okay, as I was saying, I'm going to tell you all about
how I'm learning this new thing.
Ooh, Sacha Chua's Emacs newsletter is out.
Maybe I should spend some time…
Oh, wait a second. I have to learn this new thing.
Haha. Okay, so I'm going to tell you
how we can learn new skills in the middle of
so many other wonderful things that you want to do
and to speak to wonderful people that you have to speak to.
My name is Bala Ramadurai and I'm going to be talking about
the Survival of The Skillest, that's what I call it, okay?
Survival of The Skillest. Thriving in the Learning Jungle.
Here I'm going to give you some tips and techniques
as to how you can learn skills, new skills.
I'm going to give you a quote from a multi-talented teacher.
He was the second president of my country, India.
S. Radhakrishnan, he says,
“When we think we know, we cease to learn.”
That was his quote.
What is a skill?
A skill is the knowledge and the ability
that enables you to do something well.
There's the knowledge first and the ability
and you have to do it well.
Right. So why should you learn a new skill?
Now if you can pause this video,
watching streaming part of the video,
then come up with your own reasons.
I'm going to give you my top three reasons
that you might want to learn a new skill.
Get ahead in your career.
Look good or cool in your community or peer group
or someone forced you to.
Now, what skills should you learn?
Ok, there could be a whole list.
Let me take a stab at some of the ones
that I think could be cool: bungee jumping,
teaching your pet to pick up the newspaper
without tearing it to shreds.
Perhaps with Python rearing, I meant coding, coding,
you can do learning coding.
So you could list your own skills that you have to learn,
you want to learn.
But what stops you from learning new skills?
The most common reason that I've heard
in the past is lack of time.
“Oh Bala, I have to do so many things.”
“I don't have the time to learn any new skills.”
Lack of motivation could be another reason.
Or you're just a rebel.
Who is he or who is she to tell me what I should learn?
I'm going to learn things like that.
So then it stops you from learning a new skill.
But there's even more fundamental reason
for why we don't learn a new skill so easily.
And this comes from the story of scholar in the teacup.
I can pass on the link later to you.
You can watch this, my own version of the story.
The ultimate truth in this story
or the moral in this story is that
we are filled with preconceived ideas
and the Zen master in the story says,
it's like a full teacup.
In order to learn new skills, you have to empty your teacup.
Now, how do you empty your teacup?
You just can't pour everything out of your head, right?
So how do you really empty your teacup?
So the way to empty your teacup,
simplest way to do it is write down your thoughts.
As simple as that.
Just take a piece of paper and write it down.
Or if you are on electronic means,
use Emacs Org Mode and type out your thoughts, okay?
There is a task for you right now.
What you have to do is to create a folder
in your documents folder called Inbox.
Create one and create a new file called todo.org.
If you are paper based,
you can use a notebook or any other forms of the same file.
In that, write down all your unfinished tasks
personal and professional.
Write down some things that have been worrying you,
whatever worries you right now.
just write it down, the whole thing, okay?
Write down some tasks or actions that
you are waiting for somebody else
that could also be part of your list here.
Great. Now that you have emptied your tea cup,
I'm going to tell you the origin of these ideas.
These come from “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.
It's a great book. I've read it multiple times. Fantastic.
And he says, your mind is for having ideas,
not holding them.
You have to hold on to this idea in your mind.
Keep it in your mind.
saying it's for having ideas, not holding them.
Alright, perform one of four actions on your task list.
Okay? The one that you just wrote down.
You delete them, okay? As simple as that.
Strikethrough the task, hit the delete
or change the state to cancel, okay?
Alright, If you don't want to delete it,
you want to defer it, do it later.
Add it to your calendar.
Add a reminder to it if you want.
Or in Emacs Org Mode use C-c C-s to
schedule it to a different time that you feel
you would be able to do that task.
Or just delegate it to somebody else.
Maybe you are not the best person to do it
or you probably won't find time to do this.
Send it to your colleague, student, assistant,
maybe even your favorite LLM to do this.
LLM being large language model.
Or just do it, right? As they say, just do it.
Set a timer for two minutes and do the task.
Finish the task, right here right now.
Nothing is stopping you.
Finish it. Oh, great, I'm going to do this
but set yourself two minutes
because sometimes it may spill over to half an hour
and you still haven't processed through your list.
That's why the timer for two minutes.
One tip I'm going to give you is:
Don't skip any of the items from your list
because it's tough work you've been trying to avoid it,
don't do that.
Be rigorous and finish it off, processing at least, okay?
Now you can do the absolute same process
on your email inbox.
I know, I know some of you have 55,000 emails in your inbox.
How am I going to process all of them?
Well, Tiago Forte, whose method
I'm going to be also talking about, says:
Archive them all and pull out the top 100, okay?
The last latest 100 and process that.
That's a cool way to do it, okay?
So you're not stuck to those 55,000,
but just the top 100 of those.
You can do the same,
absolutely the same thing
to any of your messaging apps as well:
WhatsApp, Matrix, Slack, whatever you choose.
Even to your physical inbox,
you can do the absolute same things.
You lift your items and
see if you can need to process them, okay?
What if the email or message or task is something
that you might need in the future?
Great! Archive them
or move it to a place you may refer to later.
So, you have plenty of storage in your cloud space,
in your email space, in your computer space.
Use that. Archive it.
You can refer to it later. Not a worry.
Don't want it right in front of you.
That's the only thing here, right?
Now another question that pops in your head is:
What if something that requires multiple steps, right?
not all steps are created… not all tasks are created alike,
There are multiple steps to a task.
That's when a task becomes a project, ok?
An example or few examples of those
are finishing a course on say Coursera or NPTEL or Udemy,
teaching a course if you are a teacher
in your college or school.
If you are organizing a conference
such as the Emacs conference, it's a huge project,
you will need to use… it's a project.
Arranging a birthday party for your spouse, that's sweet,
but it's still a project, you will have many tasks in it.
So these are examples of projects.
Here's how one can handle projects.
Create a folder for each project.
Create a text or word doc or title it as todo.txt
or todo.docx or todo.org.
I prefer .org and you can do it.
And in that, write down the success criteria,
the goal or the deadline of the project.
Write down all the tasks that need to be done.
You don't have to think about all of it,
but whatever comes to your mind,
just put it in there
as some tasks that you need to get done inside this project.
Now, identify the immediate action that needs to be done
for the project to move forward.
That's usually something that's stopping the project
from progressing.
So identify that and say:
“That's the next thing I'm going to do.”
An example of a project is right here.
Goal of the project is to deliver a talk
about my organization system,
make it like a workshop with pauses for activities.
You can see that this is the talk
that I am delivering right now.
And right now if you see recording the talk, okay?
Of course, the next one I'm going to do after this
is going to be sending the recorded talk,
the file and the PDF for the talk.
Now, if you want, you can add some sub steps and all that
also into this.
Of course, I'd like to thank the coordinators for their
absolutely wonderful work that they're doing
throughout this, okay?
Now, tasks for you.
You can take your time.
And first of all, think of a project
that you have to absolutely get done.
Create a folder on your computer or phone
with the name of the project.
Create a todo.org.
If you want to use a notebook, you can use a fresh leaf.
Write down all the tasks associated with this project.
That's going to be how you handle it, right?
Now, what if you have multiple projects?
Not many of us have only one project.
In fact, many of us have multiple projects.
What do we do in that situation?
Well, the answer is simple.
Create a folder for each project.
Add this Org file called todo into each of those folders
and write down the task for all of these projects as well.
Write down all of these tasks and mark one of them as next.
There can be only one next action.
It can't be multiple next actions.
That's the immediate thing that has to be done
to take this project forward, okay?
What if the project stops before completion?
There are possibilities sometimes you lose interest,
sometimes your collaborator loses interest.
What do you do in those situations?
Have a folder in your computer or phone
for abandoned projects called resources.
Oh, by the way,
for your projects folder, create an
overarching projects folder and inside that are
all the project folders.
I forgot to tell you that.
Same way, on the same level, create a resources folder.
That's for all your abandoned projects
or even could be on your research material as well,
which you are not currently working on.
Move this particular project that's abandoned or stopped
somewhere in between to that folder.
Now, there's a possibility you might successfully complete.
I hope all your projects end up being successful.
But there are quite a few which will end up in this,
quite a few which will end up abandoned as well.
Now, I write an end report so that I can learn from this.
What did I enjoy most in the project?
What could have been better?
What did I learn from this particular project?
Now, you will need to move that folder
to a folder called archives.
This is the final resting place for the project,
completed projects because if you come up
with another project which sounds similar
to the archives one,
you can pick that out and create that as a template,
use that as a template.
Now, why would I have one folder per project
when there's only one file sitting in it called todo.org?
Well, most projects also have some project files
and this folder can be a storehouse of all of that
and you can access all of them at one shot.
That's the advantage.
What if the project is ongoing and doesn't really end?
That doesn't seem to have a deadline or an ending point.
That's called an Area. This is now an Area.
Examples of Areas: gardening, paying bills, never stops,
bills never don't stop, blogging.
These are all some examples of Areas that really
don't have a definite deadline.
For Areas also, create a folder for each of them, right?
You can create a parent folder called Areas
and under them you can have those areas, okay,
and have a todo [file] in each of those folders.
Now what if we forget to visit the todo files
which in my case often happens?
I forget to visit those todo files
and see what the task net needs to be done.
You can of course add all of this todo.org
and into your org-agenda-files variable
so that when you pull up your Org Agenda,
all of them show up.
That's a good idea.
You need to have a weekly review with yourself.
Weekly review is essentially a weekly appointment
with yourself for you to stay
in control of your life or career. To keep things on track.
In the weekly review, you need to empty your teacup.
That's the first and foremost, okay?
Then process all your items in the TODO file.
Process all your emails from the last week.
Use the exact same structure of do, delete, defer, delegate.
These are the four D's that you can use.
Process all your messaging app messages from the last week.
So last one whole week, whatever has come up,
you need to process all of them, okay?
In the weekly review,
you also need to archive all your emails and
messaging app messages that you have processed.
You've already taken care of it.
You don't need to have it right in front of you.
You can move them all into archive.
Most messaging apps and email systems
have archives as part of their features.
Look through the project TODO files
to see if the next action is marked, okay?
Now look through the project folder list
to see if some of them need to be archived
or moved to resources.
Some may be abandoned, some may be done.
You can move them successfully to
all of where it needs to belong.
Now task for you, you can pause this,
of course, and do this.
Set an appointment with yourself, sacrosanct time,
only with yourself and title it weekly review.
Start with half an hour,
perhaps you can have it longer later on.
As you need more time,
you can have more time with yourself.
And make it repeating every week.
Now you can complain, I can hear you some of you complain
“Oh, this is such a microscopic view of my life.
What about the big picture?”
Well, there is quarterly review, once every 13 weeks
you can mark an appointment with yourself.
Right after your weekly review
to do your quarterly review, okay?
And also every year, mark yourself--
it could be at the start
or the end of an academic year or a calendar year--
mark yourself an appointment again with yourself
called yearly review.
And these contain some big life questions, okay?
Now I'll give you some examples but feel free to modify it,
have it as your own.
How much money did I make?
How much money did I save?
How many people did I help?
How many do I plan to help in the future?
What projects did I enjoy?
Look through your archives and resources.
Which one are best avoided?
I don't want to get on to this, okay?
You can look through a personal and private… I'm sorry…
personal and professional and
see how much is there a balance between all of these.
These are some questions you can answer.
Now that you know how to manage them now...
So far we have looked at the now,
how do you plan for the future?
like really into the future?
Well, I have a trick called nine windows for you.
Nine windows are essentially,
it's like a tic-tac-toe grid
and the left column is your past,
the middle column is your present
and the right column is your future, okay?
and the bottom row is your skill set,
the middle row is what you do
and the top row is whom do you work for
or whom do you serve, right?
So you are doing something for an organization
so those could be in your top row.
Let me give you an example from my own life.
This I made about 10 years ago, okay?
So the middle column is the what I did 10 years ago.
So that is the now let's keep it as the now, okay?
So five years before that, I used to work
for General Electric (GE).
I was a research scientist for them
and the skills that I had was:
I had a PhD which was used in this profession.
I had writing skills,
I had some teaching skills,
and I love to interact and learn from my teammates.
Then I joined Mindtree, which was the current job
when I did this, software services company.
I co-founded TRIZIndia also.
These are two organizations that I served.
And facilitator, that was the main profession that I was in.
And the skills I had was:
TRIZ [Theory of Inventive Problem Solving],
interacting with people outside of my team,
and I could align well with my organization.
I knew exactly where they were going
and how to align myself, my goals with that.
Now, I said, five years later,
I want to be an entrepreneur and an author.
And I want to do this for,
I want to really work with academia and corporate companies.
That was my goal.
So the skills I needed to have were:
marketing, writing, sales, hiring, people management,
all of that I needed to have.
And I had to plan that so I used
the PARA structure [projects, areas, resources, archives]
to manage how I'm going to learn all of these skills
and imbibe those and get better at it.
So that's where I use this.
Ok, your turn.
You can pause this video and build your own nine windows
to plan for the future.
So in summary, you need to empty your teacup
before engaging with the work in front of you.
Use the PARA structure: projects, area,
resources and archives.
Create this folder structure and use reviews regularly,
weekly, quarterly and yearly.
Use the nine windows to your advantage
for your future career planning
and of course, apply PARA to your future plans
to plan for those as well, ok?
Now, these are the references I have used.
heavily borrowed upon Tiago Fortes' PARA,
David Allen's “Getting Things Done”
and Tasshin's way to implement this in Emacs and Org Mode.
These are some acknowledgments.
I used some generative AI for this.
And this is a question to you:
What parts of this talk are you planning on implementing?
Please write this in the Etherpad.
Thank you so much. If you have any questions,
let me know in the Etherpad as well.
Good luck managing your tasks,
emptying your teacup, and planning for the future.