Declaration of Intent — 2018

1. No Bullshit policy. I will make a conscious effort to make sure that I am not bullshitting to anybody and I don’t deal with people who bullshit.
2. Read at-least 10 good books in the next five months.
3. Document everything you do. Whether it is reading a book or learning a new concept.
4. Share as much as possible.
5. Try to organise learnings as you go instead of doing it as an action item post learning.
6. Instead of waiting for the perfect output(say a blog about some learning) publish a decent enough draft and then improvise it.
7. I don’t claim to know everything. In fact with every passing day I am realising that I know less. I will strive to learn from feedback provided by others. Please provide brutal feedback in a gentle way.
8. Plan to make exploration self sustainable. I will be using referral links whenever I come across good or seemingly good services.
9. For the year 2018 I am trying to keep my time limited to learning and understanding more of the following. Javascript, React, Blockchain, Linux and Cryptocurrency.
10. Reduce Netflix Binge watching. Keep it to a max of 2 hours per day with some exceptions.

It was sufficient to keep this in a draft as it is for personal use. But I am calling it a declaration and I putting it out in the public so that I attach more seriousness to this.

Report of 2018

This is my report of 2018. Helps me identify what worked and what didn’t work for me.

No bullshit policy

No bullshit policy has helped me be upfront about shortcomings and I see that it has helped me have better conversations with all the stakeholders whether it is my team mates or others.

Reading Habits

I have read many good books in 2018. I just didn’t keep the track as I felt it is not more important to keep how many book I read. But for the numbers sake I must have read around 8 to 9 books. That is close. Of all the books that I have read I would highly recommend Sapiens.

Documentation

I have improved my documentation by leaps and bounds. I have shared most of my learnings in the form of tweets, tweet threads or medium articles. Using my rules 4,5,6,7 from the above I have overcome my insecurity of not knowing enough to share. I add the disclaimer in my articles and share all my learnings. This has helped me share more often. I am open to feedback and have learnt a lot from it. When I learnt about Promises in javascript I thought everybody else might already know it and hence I was not sure if I share my article about it. But after writing it I understood that there were many people who had similar questions.

Writing and sharing

As I decided upfront to keep my focus on “Javascript, React, Blockchain, Linux and Cryptocurrency”, it helped my avoid Jaywalking. I read articles on other topics as well but that is just more for the entertainment or keeping up-to-date. I spend very little of my energy on it. In the next section you can checkout the articles I created on these topics.

Learnings

Creating Intent for 2018 helped me layout some ground rules for myself. This reduced my decision making fatigue. I did make some changes to these rules but overall it set the direction for me. I realised the tooling was not sufficient for creating good habits that I had intended to inculcate in myself. In the process we ended up creating a couple of hacks and a product.

In the last two quarters we created a product called Highlights. This has been really helpful for me personally. This might sound like self promotion and it is to a certain extent. But I feel it can help you as well. So read on further if you want to know how it helped me.

It has helped me organise my thoughts, learning and reading. In short it has helped me declutter my mind. I no more use a long list of products/services. I just use our Highlights extension for organising my thoughts, highlighting important things in articles, take notes in the context of reading, random notes. The search in our dashboard helps quickly find my highlights and notes. This has helped me reduce the time I take to convert my learnings into articles. Do give it a try and would like to have your feedback.

List of articles I published

Following are the list of articles I published in last one year on Medium. I have categorised them based on the topics I had set for myself. After making this list I have realised that I have published only one article on React. The reason was that I spent less time on React and more time on other. For the next few months I will concentrate more on React and share my learnings.

Javascript

React

Linux

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

Publishing