I am lazy. I hate using my brain too much. I believe in doing the least amount of work to get max output.

Here is how I have perfected a life of 80/20.

  • My personal life run on OKRs which I plan during the beginning of the year.

  • Professional based on weekly goals set with my Manager on Monday mornings, and with team on Tuesdays.

  • I have created frameworks so that my team can arrive at decisions with or without my help.

  • Frameworks for everything: Career, Personal life, How to learn, Even learning football.

  • Templates for everything. I hated sending out product update mails earlier because I always ended up spending a lot of time on the mail template. Now that I have a template which I can reuse for all my mails, I just copy paste the content and I am done in an hour instead of taking days like earlier.

  • After templates, and frameworks, comes processes. I love optimising my workflow. Link to how I run retrospectives at work.

  • Whenever I get more than a dozen questions on the same topic, I write a blogpost so that I don’t have to reply the same thing again and again.

  • My goal in H1’2020 is to complete all the templates here: How to run a product team, so that I can productise my job and get involved only in high leverage activities.

  • You might think coming up with the templates above took a lot of time. Nope. I just saw how PMs in my company run their processes. Which templates they use. How they send mails. Their work practices. Then I mixed the ones I liked with dozens of processes/templates from my previous companies, and suddenly, without putting in a lot of effort, I had my own processes, templates and frameworks. Just copy shit. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.

  • This website? I have been following various personal blogs for years now. I just kept bookmarking the ones I liked into a folder called ‘Personal Website Ideas’. When I wanted my own site, without putting in a lot of effort, I just mixed the look and feel of a few of my favourite ones, to come up with one I liked. I had the blog ready in days.

  • Content which I post here as well as social media?
    • Blog: I just think of things I would have liked to read when I was starting out in my career, and I just write about those things on my blog. Keep it simple.
    • Twitter jokes: I just go to Linkedin, see people do dumb shit, and share my own take.
    • Twitter threads: I just make up those on the go. I have no idea how they would shape up when I start. If I like the output, I will put it on my blog.

  • I barely edit my tweets before posting. It is something which is a waste of time.

  • Some people think I put a lot of time on Twitter. TBH I don’t. I wrote this entire thread in 5 mins, and now I will move on to my next meeting.

  • This is the beauty of optimising on processes over tools.