I recently watched the series Ragnarok on Netflix. I am sucker for mythology – be it Indian, Greek, Norse or any other. I think the show does a great job in depicting how the Norse mythology would play out in today’s world and what role Gods and Giants would have in it.
Typically, we tend to see Gods as good and Giants (anti-Gods) as bad, but the show highlights that this separation between Gods and Giants is more nuanced than Good vs Bad. Giants represent Chaos and Gods represent Law and Order. And, in our lives we need both chaos and order.
It reminded me of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s books “12 rules for life” and “Beyond Order”. One might argue, that a good life is lived on the edge of order and chaos. Too much order and you may not have any progress. Too much chaos and you might go insane.
All progress actually comes from chaos, and the show depicts that quite aptly by showing Giants as a family of Industrialists who are generating jobs, providing employment but also polluting the environment and poisoning the water without the regard of lives or the planet.
There are instances where show further blurs the lines between Gods as good and Giants as bad. Some Gods use their powers for nefarious purposes e.g. getting free stuff or beating up people. While Giants use their influence to bring about positive change such as Women Empowerment
Lots of other interesting parallels between the Norse Mythology and modern world, with Thor losing his powers, Loki giving birth to the Midgard Serpent (a tapeworm). But show also disappoints at times. Overall an interesting show, worth checking out if you haven’t already.
There’s a common saying Practice makes perfect, well the saying is wrong. If you are practicing something in a wrong way, it won’t make you perfect. It will make you remember the wrong thing perfectly.
For example, if you started playing cricket, and you are holding the bat wrong. Or you started painting and you are holding the paintbrush wrong; the more you practice the worse it will get as you get used to that grip.
Whatever you practice doesn’t necessarily become perfect, but regular practice does make things go into your memory and become permanent. So, a better quote would be, “Practice makes Permanent”.
In order to really get better and move towards perfecting your craft, you need to look into Deliberate Practice. Deliberate Practice involves monitoring the aspect of your craft you need to improve and practice that specifically. This is also related to the idea of Continuous Improvement or Continuous Experimentation.
So instead of just practicing the same thing over and over again, think how you can make your practice more systematic, more deliberate, more mindful and that way you can actually improve your performance.
If you are starting work on a new product or feature, where should you start? Idea or the Problem?
Before going any further, let me tell you this is a trick question. Both the answers are wrong. You should not start with the problem, and you should definitely not start with the idea. The best place to start with is the customer.
Most common starting point – Idea first
Most of the time people / product teams start with an idea. Typically it may start with someone saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool, if …?” and others chime in and before long you are all excited about building the next cool thing.
In this situation what you typically end up with is a solution, looking for a problem. This is typically a result of Inside out thinking.
Better starting point – Problem first
To avoid the idea-first approach, you may think that maybe you should start with a Problem. A genuine problem that people are trying to solve and would be willing to pay you for solving it.
This would definitely be a big step forward and you would be in a much better position for likelihood of success compared to most products/features that start with the “Idea-first” approach
But still there is a challenge! Many times, even when you end up solving a problem for the customer, you don’t see product adoption, or customer satisfaction improve. Why is that?
It would typically be because you ended up solving the wrong problem. Problem that was not significant enough for the customer.
As a Product Manager you may be doing your best and talking to customers and uncovering details, working with engineering and coming up with the best solution, but the adoption of features would still be lacking if the problem is not worth solving.
What you are missing is a Significant Problem.
How do you find a Significant Problem
Finding a Significant Problem requires you take a step back from “the problem” and look at the multitude of problems your customer faces.
There’s a few different approaches that you can take to evaluate which problems are worth solving
Size vs Frequency
Des Traynor (co-founder Intercom) talks about the idea of being in a Significant Problem space in his talk on Product Strategy. I do recommend you check it out here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-498BBUJJE.
He suggests that you need to ask two questions
How big is the problem? Big, Small
How frequently does your customer face it? Frequent, Infrequent
You don’t want to be solving “Small”, “Infrequent” problems and ideally you want to be solving “Big, Frequent” problems.
The product I manage – “Compensation Management” is solving Big and Infrequent problem. Managing merit, bonus, stock planning for your entire employee population is a Big problem, but it typically happens only once a year.
If you think about SAP SuccessFactors overall we solve the “Big, Frequent” problem of helping companies manage their employees.
Importance vs Satisfaction
Another approach that you can use to determine if the Problem is worth solving is based on Importance vs Satisfaction. This is what the Jobs-to-be-done approach uses and Dan Olsen also talks about in his Book – Lean Product Playbook.
As, you may have guessed, the two axis in this approach are Importance and Satisfaction
You don’t want to touch the problems that are not Important, as you can’t create much value for customers there
Ideally, you want to be solving a Problem that is High Importance and Low Satisfaction and that is where you have the highest likelihood of success.
Starting with the customer
The challenge of evaluating if a Problem is whether something is Important or not is that it can’t be done in isolation.
You can’t look at one problem and ask the customer if that is the most important problem for them. It’s like asking your customer – “Would you like this feature?”, then answer invariably would be “Yes, of course”.
When you have already identified a problem to solve and are focused on it, you are being subject to Focusing Illusion. As Daniel Kahneman puts it –
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”
To find problems that are really important for customers and where the satisfaction levels are low, you need to take a step back and think about all the problems that your customer has, which you have the capability of solving.
Get the feedback from a large number of customers, and then try to stack-rank the list of problems that the customer is facing, and pick which one you would like to attack first.
Jobs-to-be-done provides a formula for calculating the Opportunity Score which is –
Deep understanding of your target customer is critical, because your business is not about your product or service.
It is also not about the problem, especially in the long run. In the long run, your customer won’t necessarily face the same problem
It is all about the customer. You are in business because you have a customer.
Acquiring new customers is hard. The cost of acquisition is typically 5-6 times more than the cost of retaining a customer.
If you have done all the hard work of Acquiring the customer, it’ll be a criminal waste to let them go once they have solved their problem. It is much easier to sell something to a customer, who already purchased from you. If you build a deep understanding of all the problems your customer is facing, that not only gives you a better chance of solving that one problem, but also opportunities to expand the product footprint into other areas in future.
Once you have solved one problem for the customer, you can then go to solving another problem, from the list you already generated. This helps you in increasing the Customer’s lifetime value
Amazon started by selling Books. Now they sell pretty much everything under the sun.
SuccessFactors started by selling Performance Management. Now we have a full suite of HXM solutions.
So in summary, don’t start with the idea, don’t start with the problem. Start with the customer. If you are working as a Product Manager, I assume your company has already identified a customer. If you are thinking about starting a new venture and haven’t identified a customer today, I’ll discuss how to choose the right customer in a future post.
Where do you start your feature development today? Idea-first, Problem-first or Customer-first? Leave a comment.
It’s interesting to see the rise Substack as an alternative to Medium. Many popular writers are shifting base. The benefits for writers are that they own their audience and don’t have Medium as a gate-keeper to how they reach their audience.
This is an example of a typical Business Model Innovation, just that it’s not really an innovation, as-in it’s not a new business model, but an application of a proven business model to a new area. The differences from a product stand-point for a writer are minimal, but how you reach your audience and potentially generate revenue from them is the difference.
Following two business models can be seen in each area –
One subscription with lots of content from lots of creators using a Bundling to create value for end-user
Pay-per-use – Provide a platform to creators and charge certain fees for usage.
Examples
Movies
Netflix
App Store, Play Store – Buy/Rent a movie when you need it
Prime – doing a bit of both
Learning –
Skillshare, Coursera, Lynda – Bundle courses
Teachable, Udemy – buy as a you want
Blogging
Medium
Substack
Video
Youtube Premium
Vimeo
A typical dynamic in an area is to start with bundling and attract users to the platform. Over time though the bundle seems to become excessive, the price users have to pay (or the number of ads they have to see) for the bundle tends to go up with the increased content. Users start getting a feeling that they are paying too much for excessive content that they are not necessarily consuming. Top creators start feeling that they are not getting a fair-share. This creates room for a Pay-per-use platform, where top creators can post their content and move their fans to.
Curious to hear if you are able to think of examples in other areas where you have seen the same dynamics play out. Can you think of an area where you can use such business model innovation to start your venture?
I recently finished reading the book How to take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. The book proposes reading with pen in hand which I found to be extremely time consuming. But then I realized the important distinction between Time consuming and Time Wasting activities.
Reading with Pen in hand is extremely time consuming I had to work on this book for months. But not reading with pen in hands is time wasting I hardly remember anything from Sapiens or Thinking Fast and Slow that I read last year.
We tend to avoid time consuming activities, but happily go about doing time wasting activities. This is a kind of a unconscious bias that we need to be mindful about.
Trying to work on a detailed summary of the book, but that is a time consuming activity as well 🙂
As part of the Product Management team for Rewarding solutions at SAP SuccessFactors, my colleagues and I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to build solutions that help our customers motivate their workforce.
Recently, I revisited the book Drive by Daniel Pink which talks about “Motivation 3.0” based on factors such as autonomy, purpose and mastery. He makes a case that carrot and stick rewards are no longer effective, especially for the creative or conceptual work that many of us engage in. He argues against the If-Then awards, and towards Now-That awards.
You can hear his 2009 TED Talk on the topic here –
Being a smart guy, he is quick to point out that first you need to “take the issue of money off the table” which basically means that these motivators – autonomy, mastery, purpose – only come into the picture once money is no longer a worry for employees. He refers to these kinds of rewards as “Baseline Rewards”.
Let’s try to understand the different types of rewards that he refers and how these can be aligned with your company’s Total Rewards Philosophy.
Baseline Rewards
These are the rewards that Dan Pink is referring to when he says, “take the issue of money off the table”. In the Total Rewards world, these are aligned with an employee’s base salary. To take the issue of money off the table means that employees are being paid sufficiently and fairly. It means that the employee doesn’t have to worry about meeting the basic needs such as – food, rent, kids education etc. In addition, the employee feels that he or she is paid fairly compared to their peers and the market.
If-Then Rewards –
These awards are pre-defined; if you achieve x goal, then you will get y reward. In the Total Rewards world, these align with classic short term incentive payments. These are the kind of awards that Dan Pink argues against. These awards have also earned a bad name in recent times with an argument that they work well in the manufacturing world when employee output is easily measurable – produce x units, but with more conceptual and creative work these awards may actually have a detrimental effect. Dan argues that instead of If-Then awards, employers should focus more on basic human motivators – autonomy, mastery and purpose.
This is where I disagree with Dan Pink (with all humility) and here’s why –
The goal of having “If-then Rewards” is not just to motivate employees to create more output. It is also to help everyone in the organization move in the same direction. Even though giving autonomy to employees is great for motivation, having too much autonomy can also be detrimental. Imagine everyone in the company making progress in a different direction. The company as-a-whole doesn’t make progress in any direction. The goal of If-then rewards to align people on the same goals. If the company does well, your bonus payout would be high, and within those constraints if your performance was high, your payout would be even higher.
Dan further qualifies that If-Then rewards can work well given that rewards offer a rationale on why the task is necessary and offer people autonomy on how to execute the task. I think this advice is what organizations can improve on, rather than abandoning the If-Then Rewards entirely.
Now-that rewards
What Dan suggests using instead of If-Then Rewards is Now-that rewards. In the Total Rewards world, these can be aligned to Spot-Awards/just-in-time recognition.
The difference between the two is that for the Now-that rewards there is no up-front expectation from the employees about receiving a reward. The task is not being done for the reward but for the joy of the task itself. The task is being done for the intrinsic motivation that comes from the activity.
Let me try to illustrate the difference with the help of an example – If I wanted to introduce piano to my daughter, I could ask her that complete this lesson or play 1 song and I will get you a gift. This would be an example of If-Then reward. You can imagine that she would learn the song for the reward but not for the joy of playing piano or learning music. Such motivation would be short-lived and it’ll be detrimental towards learning piano in the long-term. Alternatively, if she plays piano and completes a lesson by herself and then I give her a reward for completing a song and working hard towards it, that would be an example of Now-that reward. In this case, there is no detrimental impact on the intrinsic motivation to learn piano because she didn’t have to give up her autonomy in this case for the reward.
Such rewards are an example of Positive Reinforcement, which is among the most powerful and effective methods for shaping good habits and behavior.
Companies can use these rewards to encourage employees to display behaviors that align with company values and shape company culture.
What Dan suggests moving from If-Then rewards to Now-that rewards, is something I think has been happening in the industry as well. As the budgets for base salary increases or bonus payout has stayed flat, we see an increase in the adoption of Recognition (Spot-Award) programs.
We have you covered
I am proud to say that whichever combination of the different rewards types that our customers want to use, we’ve got you covered. As part of the SAP SuccessFactors Rewarding suite of solutions, we offer tools to manage all 3 types of rewards. You can manage your compensation planning (Baseline Rewards), Bonus Planning (If-then rewards), as well as Recognition programs (Now-that rewards) as part of one solution and one license. As far as I am aware, we are the only product to offer this range. Other solutions allow you to manage base and bonus, but require a third-party solution to manage recognition.
Hope you found this post useful, and would love to hear how you think rewards/incentives can be used to motivate people.
Originally Published at – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-rewards-motivation-play-together-ritesh-chopra/
If you are looking for serious advice on Habit formation, then there are lots of good resources out on internet. One of the best books on the topic is Atomic Habits by James Clear. You could also look at the works for Prof. BJ Fogg including his Ted Talk or his book Tiny Habits. This blog post is probably the wrong place for professional advice.
In case you are looking for advice from someone more average, and someone who has struggled to incorporate health and mindfulness into his routine, but still somehow figured out a way, then you may find something useful.
Bit of History
Before Corona Virus hit, I had worked hard to build a good routine, I was going try to do different 30-day challenges with a bunch of friends e.g. Cold Shower Challenge in January 2020, I did a 100 push-ups a day (spread over all day not in one session :P), etc.
But when the lock-down hit everything changed. All routines fell off track.
Watching kids and staying on top of office work was taking up all the time, and that was ok, it was more important to get the house in order. But as a result, I started experiencing a severe back pain.
As the paranoia around Corona Virus has subsided, I’ve been meaning to build some exercise routine again.
I have been slowly trying to rebuild some exercises and meditation into my routine. After multiple failed attempts and frustrations, I have reached a place where I am moderately satisfied with where I am.
If you are in a similar position and would like to figure out to build healthy habits in these difficult times, then the following tips might be helpful –
Start small
As I was experiencing back pain, I thought stretching would a good thing to start with. So I started by just doing 3 surya namaskar in the morning. Plus, whenever I experienced back pain, I’ll do a few back stretches during the day.
As this was only taking 5 mins, I didn’t feel that it was taking time out of anything else that I could be or should be doing.
I did the same thing with Meditation, I started using Headspace 5 mins sessions in Basics (free course).
Problem with healthy habits is that you don’t see the results in real-time. The feedback loop is too slow. The joy of drinking a Coca-Cola or eating an ice-cream is real-time – in the moment. The corresponding dopamine release is instant. Whereas, doing an exercise is painful in the instant, you will see the results in loooooong-term. It much easier for you to convince yourself to skip exercise than to say no to ice cream or binge watching Netflix.
Using a Habit Tracker can help you build a substitute for the long feedback loop. Seeing a streak on a calendar is win and putting that ‘X’ against a day could give you that instant dopamine release as well, and the feedback loop of checking the box or not is real-time as well.
Loss Aversion –
Habit Trackers are also useful for another reason that they build on the idea of Loss Aversion, that human mind prefers to avoid losses. Once you have a streak of a few ‘X’s on the calendar back to back, you will feel invested in it and you will try to avoid breaking the chain. This strategy is also known as “Seinfeld Strategy”, as popularized by the famous comedian, Jerry Seinfeld.
If you need a recommendation on a Good Free Habit Tracker, check out Loop Habit Tracker (only available on Android).
Even after using Habit Tracker, you will still have missed days. And it’s important not to beat up yourself for those missed days. Instead on these days, it’s important to remind yourself of the Two-day rule. Two-day rule is another popular rule around habit-building that basically says, “No two missed days together”.
If you miss the exercise one day, then make sure you don’t put two missed days on your Habit Tracker back to back.
Layer things on top
After I had gotten into a bit of routine with the small setup. I felt a bit adventurous and thought I’ll add some body-weight exercise to my routine e.g. push-ups, sit-ups, crunches etc.
So, I added another set of 5-min exercises following the Surya Namaskar.
So now my routine looked like 10-min exercise and 5-min meditation
Slowly over 2 months, I’ve added a third-set of 5 mins as well and now I have a more respectable 15-min morning exercise routine
Combining Two-day rule and layering
I think this is where the Layering becomes beneficial. In case I feel like I skipping some day, I’ll tell myself may be I’ll just do Set 1 – 3 Surya Namaskar.. No harm in that.. that’s easy.. just stretching.. Basically, I’m tricking myself into moving
Once I start, I’ll tell myself ok may be I can do one more set and skip the last one. Both sides of me win, the good side feels like that I got in some exercise, and the dark side wins as I didn’t do all the sets.
But next day, I’ll myself of the two-day rule and get all 3-sets in.
Remind yourself Why you are doing this
Another thing to note is even though I have been doing this routine for a while, it’s not something I look forward to. It’s like eating vegetables, you eat them because you know they are good for you. Instead if you had an option to eat chocolate all day, or chips with coke and some Jack in it (actually masala peanuts would be better than chips with that), you would look forward to that.
Why I mention this is because every morning I have this urge to skip the exercise today.
Doing exercise is hard, and I don’t know if it’ll ever be something I look forward to, but you still need to do it.
I tell myself this will give me more energy during the day, and get more done at work, and I won’t experience back pain
It comes down the idea of Pain and Pleasure driving your actions. As the famous Jeremy Bentham quote goes, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do”.
So on the days you are don’t feel like exercising (which is everyday for me :P), remind yourself of why you are doing this in the first place.
July 21, 2020 is my 21 day streak of doing exercise and Meditation everyday.
It’s debatable whether you need to do the habit for 21 days or 66 days to make it stick. But I feel by doing I have earned my right, to brag about this on internet, and pretend to be an expert who can advice you on what to do. Take it or leave it :).
Re-posting my re-phrased re-sponse on that thread he-re. (Have you seen more re’s in one sentence? 😉 )
Multi-tasking vs Multi-focusing
In my opinion, multi-tasking is a must but it gets a bad name for no good reason. Actually, there is a good reason; we all confuse multi-tasking with multi-focusing.
Human brain isn’t good at multi-focusing but it is pretty decent at multi-tasking. I think everyone is good at multi-tasking. Don’t agree? Think of the last time you drove your car with music on, or had food while chatting with your family at the dinner table, ate popcorn while watching a movie, sing while taking a shower? In all of these examples, you are focusing on one thing e.g. while watching the movie your focus is on movie and not on the popcorn necessarily.
We multi-task all the time, the problem starts when we are trying to multi-focus e.g. Open your social media feed when you should be listening to the other attendees in that important meeting. Now your focus is divided and that’s when you end up doing a crappy job at both the things.
Good vs Bad Multi-tasking
To get more nuanced, Multi-focusing isn’t technically possible. No one can focus on more than one thing at a time. So may be the Multi-tasking vs Mutli-focusing isn’t a good differentiation. May be we should talk more in terms of Good Multi-tasking and Bad Multi-tasking. When you are multi-tasking, what you are actually doing is switching focus from one topic to another. This is called context-switching.
Context-Switching is a popular term in Computer Science and there are many different algorithms that can be used on how to optimize your computer’s performance. But here we are going to talk about how you can use this idea of context-switching to determine when is it ok to multi-task.
Cost of Context Switching
The first thing we need to be aware of and acknowledge is that context-switching is taxing for your brain. Every time you context switch you are paying a cost. It is depleting your mental energy and adding to your fatigue. Following image provides a good understanding of the “Cost of Context Switching”
By now, I think you may already be starting to understand that when somebody says “Multi-tasking is bad” what they are actually mean is that “Context-switching is bad”. I would say in the modern world it is more of a necessary evil. You need to understand how to optimize it, much like the computer science algorithms meant to optimize performance.
How to determine good vs bad multi-tasking
When it comes to multi-tasking there are tasks that make a good combination and tasks that make bad combination. Use the context-switching cost as a metric to determine which tasks can be combined.
In the multi-tasking example I took earlier of watching a movie while eating pop-corns, the context-switching has a long cycle. Your concentration is primarily on the movie and you may briefly switch context to the taste of pop-corns if something unusual happens e.g. a bad pop-corn, but after that you can quickly return to the original focus item – the movie.
But lets say if you were eating pop-corns after one year, and your goal was to eat those pop-corns mindfully, while enjoying the smell and feeling the texture and the taste of salt and butter and so on, then you need to be paying much more attention to the act of eating. If you were doing that while watching the movie, you would neither be able to focus on the movie nor the pop-corns as you would switching contexts too frequently.
In the other example of driving a car while listening to a podcast, same idea of context switching can be applied. If the traffic is smooth, and the podcast is on a topic that you are familiar with the context switching costs are low. But if you are in a bumper to bumper traffic or the topic of the podcast is novel or arcane and you need to take notes to fully understand it, then it might be better to pause the podcast and focus on getting home safely.
The Social Media Problem
I think part of the reason Multi-tasking is getting such a bad name off-late is because of Social Media. It’s quite likely that if you that the other task in the multi-task is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Youtube, TikTok, Texting or the likes. And that is a problem. It is also quite likely that you are not even aware that you are doing this other task and just doing it out of habit. And that is an even bigger problem.
Social media is really deceptive at hiding the true context-switching cost. You may think that just browsing through the news feed is quite harmless and you are just scrolling without really paying attention.. But that is until you see an interesting post or read an interesting comment and then you are sucked in. Your focus is on the comment and not on the meeting that you were supposed to be listening to, and the context-switching cost becomes too high.
The costs and consequences are even more severe and immediate when social media is combined with driving..
Summary
To summarize, I feel bad for “Multi-tasking” getting a bad name. I recall a time when “Multi-tasking” was something looked up on. To it’s credit, multi-tasking has helped us and continues to help us get more shit done. What we need to do is be more conscious of the context-switching costs and try to make educated decisions on when it is ok to multi-task and when it is not.
How many times in this past year did you sign up for a subscription service looking at the free trial and then forgot to cancel when the trial ended?
Many times when new services are launched, companies will make an enticing trial offer to you to sign-up with for 7-days, 15-days, 90-days, with the hope that you would either get so used to the service that you will sign-up as a paid member or be too lazy/forget to disconnect. It is quite possible that you are paying for one already that you are not actively using today.
With Software as a Service (SaaS) becoming the norm in the software world, more and more applications are moving their licensing models to recurring per month charges. This applies to a number of services that you may be using already –
Video streaming services — Netflix, Youtube Premium, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video…
Audio streaming — Spotify, Pandora, Youtube Music, Amazon Music etc.
Books/Audiobooks — Audible, Kindle Unlimited etc.
Health/Fitness services — Headspace, Calm, Fitbit Premium etc.
Productivity software — Office 365, Google Suite, Notion, multiple Task Managers etc.
Learning — Coursera Plus, Udacity, LinkedIn Learning (Lynda), Skillshare etc.
$10/month may seem quite harmless, but it quickly adds up $100 — $150/month with multiple different services. Combined, you could be spending hundreds of dollars every month on these. Keep in mind the above list is not even close to the complete list of categories in personal space and I haven’t gone into the subscriptions that you may be using for managing your business.
CoronaVirus Impact
Due to lock down enforced by CoronaVirus a number of services have come out and are very genuinely looking to help people with free one-month, two-months trials. These could be very useful if you are looking to utilize the new found time that you may have at your hands (assuming you don’t have little kids like me, in which case I empathize with you :P).
But at the same time, there’s an increased realization that you shouldn’t be overspending and saving every bit you can for the tough times ahead.
So even though there are many apps in Learning, Productivity, Meditation, Audio Streaming, Kids Education categories that are offering free services, the fear of forgetting to cancel may be holding you back from signing up for something interesting and possibly life-changing.
To remember — Don’t trust your brain
I’ve been using a rather simple solution using my Google Calendar that has helped me get the best of both worlds i.e. try out new services, and always remember to cancel on time.
Those who know me well, know that I’m a forgetful person, so I believe that if this system has worked for me it would work for you as well.
This system has been built using some trial and error and in its current form it is quite fool-proof (at least if the fool is me).
Basic idea is that you can’t trust your brain to remind you to take action on time. If you try to keep such a thing in your head, one of these two things is likely to happen:
You will carry this load on your mind throughout the day/week/month and that’ll lead to unnecessary stress.
Your brain will remind you of the task at the most inappropriate time e.g. just after you lie down in the bed and are ready to doze off.
As the author of Getting Things Done, David Allen says, “Your mind is for having ideas, not storing them”. The idea is to externalize your memory by using a Calendar and setting up the reminders in a particular way.
Detailed Setup — Step by Step Guide
Tools: Google Calendar
I’m using Google Calendar for this system, you might as well use any other calendar. The are two major benefits I see with Google Calendar –
I can set up multiple reminders — multiple emails, multiple push notifications — which I haven’t seen in Outlook or iOS calendars. The more reminders the better in my case.
It is cross-platform, I use windows laptop, android phone and an iPad. I need a system that works across devices so that there’s no friction when I am setting up the reminder and I can be notified on all devices, when receiving the reminder.
Process:
The moment you sign up for a service, you need to set up a reminder to cancel it. I create this as an event, and not just any event, but a recurring event with a frequency of “Daily”. This is the reason why “cross-platform” is important, you need to be able to set this reminder in the moment, if you delay it you’ll forget it.
The event needs to be set up for the day that is typically 7–10 days before you need to cancel. For example, if I got 3-months Kindle Unlimited free today i.e. 3rd May, I’ll set a reminder to cancel it from 25th July onwards
Time of the event isn’t that important, but you can choose one when you think you’ll be most likely to act e.g. 9 AM or 5 PM.
Setup multiple notifications to remind you of the event. I use two email and two push notifications. This way I get the task in my email + on my cell phone as well.
Let’s say it is 25th July now, you will start getting reminders to cancel the service, but given you are very busy it is quite likely that you may ignore these reminders when they first pop-up. This is where the beauty of recurring “Daily” reminders comes in. Even if you forget to cancel the service the first day or two, you will find time to cancel the service eventually.
Once you have taken action, now it is time to remove the reminders and clean up your calendar. I tend to go to the calendar of that day and delete the event using “This and following events”. This way the reminders are gone, and I also have a history of when I took the action, in case I need to go refer to it again.
So that’s the simple workflow you can use to stay on top of your subscription trials.
Credit Card Cashback — Use Case
As a Product Manager, I can’t avoid thinking in terms of use-cases.
There is another use-case where I have been able to successfully use the slightly modified form of the above system to set up reminders in order to help save $$$.
In US, many credit card companies offer 5% cashback on certain categories but these categories will change every quarter. Discover will give you 5% cashback on Amazon Oct — Dec but Chase will give you 5% Jan-March. The hope from credit card companies is that you will start using that card more often and forget which categories you signed up for.
In order to maximize the savings you can set up recurring reminders as described above with a slight variation. For this use-case, instead of daily events I use Weekly events.
When I get the email that here are the categories for this quarter, I open my calendar and set up an event recurring on every Sunday 11 AM with the title such as Discover 5% cashback — Gas stations.
I don’t need to set up any reminders for this, as I don’t want to remember this information.
Now the next time I am at the Gas station, all I need to do is pull out my phone and check Sunday’s calendar which will tell me to use Discover to get the maximum cashback.
Again, these may not be huge amounts per transaction. The difference in 1% cashback and 5% cashback on a $50 transaction is only $2.00, but depending on your credit card spend over the year it could add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Bonus Use-cases:
Annual Health Checkups
Doctor or Dental appointments
Annual Free credit report
Return Library Books
Monthly review/reflection reminders
…
I hope you find this system of setting reminders useful. If you know of other use-cases where this system could be handy or have come up with some creative hacks that you think I could benefit from, please do share in the comments.
Last year (2019) I had been big on listening to audiobooks. I talked about it in my previous blog — How I read 52 books in 2019. Although listening allowed me to consume a lot more content and make use of “dead-time” e.g. commute or doing chores around the house, one thing I found lacking with that approach was the ability to take notes and thus limited retention of the text.
This year I’ve been trying to improve my reading habit and use my Kindle more. As a result, I’ve been highlighting a lot of stuff on my Kindle. Yesterday, I tried to move my Kindle Highlights to RoamResearch, which is a Note Taking tool that I have been exploring recently (and Notion has been taking a back seat as my note-taking tool).
To my surprise, there is no quick, easy and free way to export your Kindle highlights to the note taking tool of your choice. Here are a few choices that you may find available out there, which are either paid or didn’t provide the formatting as per my needs —
Paid options —
Most popular option seems to be Readwise which charges $7.99/month for Evernote export feature.
There is also Clippings.io which charges $2.99/month for a browser extension.
Free options with limited formatting —
There is also a free browser extension from Bookcision that seems to do the job for free, but the output was not in the format that I want.
You can plug in your Kindle into your computer and copy the myclippings.txt file, but in my case that sti
As I am still new to Kindle reading, I didn’t want to spend $8/month on a service that I wasn’t sure how much I would use. So I tried to come up with my own hack and that worked quite well for me. My approach is more focused on Formatting and builds on top of any of the free approaches listed above.
If you are interested in exporting your Kindle highlights for free, feel free (pun intended) to give it a try. Here’s the step by step approach —
Use Ctrl + H — Find and Replace to Replace all “Yellow Highlight | Page: ” with “”
This leaves just the page numbers in the column
Copy the first text line below the page number line and hold shift scroll down all the way. Basically, copy whole document except first page number line.
Copy this to the next column, so that the Page numbers and comments are aligned.
Sort the document by page numbers, this way we’ll have the comment and page number next to each other.
You can delete the extra rows after this.
Create a new column and use a concatenation formula =Concetane(“Pg “,A1,”: “,B1). Apply this formula to each row.
Copy paste this new column to Roam under Kindle Highlights section in a book or to which ever note taking tool you prefer.
