This is one of the best pieces of career advice one can give, and I’ve had my fair share of experience that this works very well.
Most people wait to be promoted to the title/designation to do the work of that role. However, if you want to avoid friction when asked, “Why should I promote you to this role?”, you should already be doing the job and proving you can do it.
I once saw a QA tester tinkering with the front-end code, fixing the bugs himself, then went to the engineer and pointed out where to fix. When asked if he wanted to become a front-end engineer, I realized he was waiting for an opportunity to be promoted. So, I repeated my usual advice: if you want to be promoted, be already doing that role. He started learning, and work on front-end work besides his QA work. When he asked to be promoted, it was just a title change and a pay raise. He went on to lead the Product Design Team at a major oil company (at a branch in Bangalore, India). A Good photographer, and always has an eye for design.
Similar story of an engineer waiting to be promoted to a Lead Architect. Advised him to start doing it way before talking about his promotion. I don't remember his promotion in the team I was working but heard back that he was easily gotten to that position and a big salary jump at a new company (a new city). I once saw him working in the plane we were flying together, while I was sleeping. I think he deployed when we landed.
In touch with both, and lot others. None that I had advised on doing the role above them have regretted.
Here is a fun story. Just like you, I too live in a “gated community”, and we also default to MyGate. We have a founders group in there, and the things with MyGate and its irritations would sometimes come up. We all would wink and go about our days. The founder of MyGate is in the group and is one of the neighbors. We sometimes teased that we would just camp out outside his home, asking him to fix these excessive notification issues and bugs, and to add/edit features. ;-)
Another founder friend lives in a different mid-sized community and was using MyGate. He got pissed not just at the ads but at the massive data gathering—contacts, camera, flashlight, and everything. He ended up creating https://dobermanapp.com
That doberman site feels kind of sketchy. It doesn’t say anything about the hardware required or how someone would integrate this. Also it says it’s free but then one of the five top level pages is the SLA which says it doesn’t apply to free plans. I really don’t understand if this is just a random landing page that someone created to gauge interest or what.
Can you suggest that over in the GitHub issues? I will do it if it's simple to do in Hugo. A long time ago I set the summary as default in Drupal, and since there's no ads on the site or anything like that, the main reason to not do it is bandwidth, maybe, depending on how much traffic that URL gets (I was seeing like 5-10 requests per second for that URL earlier today, much more than I'd expect!).
I decided to go check my website’s PageSpeed and I do have a 100/100/100/100 with pretty lots of content on the homepage including 6 separate thumbnails.
My site is on a straight path, no tricks — Github Pages Served to the Internet by Cloudflare.
All the time. I read an interesting thing about someone online, and that name strikes me as someone I have interacted with. I search my email archive, then reply to that thread or start a new one to catch up. All of them have been super happy, “wow! You replied to our email from 10 years ago!”
I do have “Clean Inbox”[1] because I don’t see or interact with them, but I keep them. The only emails I see are the actionable “Unread OR Flagged.”
For emails, here is my current simple backup setup. Of course, I’m also looking to do this without having to open Thunderbird, or I might have an old laptop running it. So, work-in-progress.
For the email accounts I want a backup, I set it to spew out POP3 without doing anything (don’t mark read or delete). I set up Thunderbird with that POP3. It has a backup copy of all the emails. I’ve had searchable emails since like 2004/2005, and I’ve occasionally replied to people and gotten back in touch with very old friends from the Internet.
I saw an open-source tool sometime back (I think, here on Hacker News) that backs up your IMAP mails with a nicely done interface. That would be nice to have.
Edit: Perhaps Bichon,[1] mentioned somewhere in the other comment threads[2] was the one.
I love hearing stories from a people way senior my age and I love befriending them. Here is a story from one of the seniors I occasionally helped out with their tech/phone/internet. He was once stationed in a rural part of India to lead a team for a once-popular phone service provider. There was a local person who would barge into their office and complain a lot, arguing about the quality of the connections and the drops in areas around the town.
Eventually, he became the benchmark of their team’s work: “What would he say? We need to fix that. What were his complaints?”
He swears by this and has repeated the story a few times. One of the angriest customers becomes the benchmark for the team and the service. There are no bad customers; there are only passionate ones.
Big fan for a very long time and still appreciate his work. His domain changed to follow his life choices.[1]
Later in life, I realize that too much reliance on tools is not something I’m fond of. DSri’s tools (printables) are good and I usually do it when I’m helping out team members, and others looking for guardrails for their productivity. For me now, the tools are too tool-focused and I no longer need them. I have printed and used them for product groups, and even a few times for my daughter’s projects with her friends.
These look great for people who like to plan their tasks. I found that when I plan my tasks and plan my day and plan my time bubbles, I spend so much time planning that I don't have time left for doing. This planner explicitly encourages having only three planned tasks for the day. What's wrong with just doing those tasks without writing them down?
I ask in full seriousness, as someone struggling decades with how to plan and then do personal and professional tasks. I ask as a question, not as a criticism.
Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.
Otherwise, you were working on a task and something fail in your terminal; by evening you realize you spent the last 4 hours fixing your entire dotfiles, fixing environment, shell, and what-not to move easily between machines smoothly (you also realized you are not moving machines anytime soon).
The Frog to Eat that you wrote down yesterday for today, and the other tasks that has to be done today is there for you to see - bright, and clear - helps you steer back when your minds starts to wander, phone distracts, and HN is tempting for more comments.
> Writing down is a sign-post for you to stay in your lane.
I think I get it now. When I'm developing a feature, I'll first write a commented git commit message. I'll refer back to it every so often to ensure that whatever that commit message says, that's what I'm doing. Everything else that I want to do should go into an Org mode file that is not committed.
> #git commit -m "Foo the bar"
Is what I'm debugging now directly related to fooing the bar? If not, write it down and get back to fooing the bar.
As we have come this far, here is another POV for writing things down, when it comes to “NO” or “Not Now!” items that get streamed in our lives.
You are working on something, but a cool/new/interesting thing pops into your brain or someone pings/calls/texts to tell you about something; your default is to do that first lest you forget about it. No, Don’t Do That. Instead, write it down so you don’t forget, but no need to worry for now. Empathetically, if that item was from someone (even in person), seeing you writing it down suggests to the person that you care about it and will definitely come back to it.
At the end of your day, during your break, or after your task-at-hand is complete, visit and “decide” when/how you want to do it, whether you need to do it, or if it has solved on its own in the time you have ignored.
I do use Project Managers, Calendars, Apple Notes/Obsidian, Phone Apps, etc., but if I use that as “defaults” (not on physical pen/paper), I might get tempted to finish something else along with it. That note-taking in the same format as my primary work will likely tempt me to do more and make it look like work or productivity.
With a physical pen/paper, it is a clean, minimal, simple UX that never distracts. That is how it is. I’m still learning and experimenting, but so far I write as usual in a notebook and kinda bullet-journal[1] backwards (mine is simplified), starting from the last page of the same notebook for tasks and to-dos. That one notebook is the one that I carry around.
Neat! I think I've done a similar thing in Jujutsu VCS, which enables you to start a new commit and add a message (description) to it well before you make any actual changes. As you described, it's a really useful way of keeping on track.
I feel like the entire productivity thing is broscience. There's no study for it (the 'three items' idea), it just feels like the right thing to do.
Quite often the people making these tools are not particularly productive themselves. And nobody I know has ever stuck to one productivity system for very long outside of "todo list text file"
The idea is not about One Perfect/Right solution/tool. Explore them and modify them to how you react and which ones work for you. Use multiple tools (plain-text as default, another App with the team, Notebooks for yourself), etc. For someone struggling with too many options, perhaps a little nudge to some direction is what they needed. At the end of the day, It Depends. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/it-depends/
Do it while you’re doing something else. You can plan when you have your morning coffee, or while you commute or walk isn’t Apple voice memos and then copy the transcript and paste it into ChatGPT and have it make you a todo list from that messy memo
It shouldn’t take you any additional time if you don’t want it to.
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