Hi there! It’s about a month now since I posted here. Last one month had been very busy with frequent client interactions, deliverables, performance discussions (ahem!) and what not! I had a couple of weekends where I worked more than 40 hours and I realized the importance of sleep first hand! Number of incidents happened in the past month – some of which I will blog about in the coming days and some more which I wish I could blog. But I wanted to post couple of quick life lessons that my boss preached me casually in good intentions.
Managing expectations
We have heard this number of times. The projects are about managing expectations as much, if not more, as technical work. My boss explained this with simple example. You are supposed to deliver something on Friday. You work heads-down the whole week and on Friday, you say you need one more week. This puts people off. In another scenario, you inform on Monday itself that you can’t deliver this by Friday and need one more week, people think you have the issues under control and appreciate it. Basically, the amount of work you do through the week is the same. The fact that you are not going to deliver on time stays the same. Just because you managed the expectations well in advance, people think highly of you instead of getting pissed off. Absolute truth. I am thinking I should tell the government right away that I wont be able to pay the taxes next year!
Clean the poop
One of my pet peeves is doing documentation work. As much as I love to write, I hate documentation. May be because they have structure and purpose. During a casual chat I told my boss that doing a documentation work puts me off. So boss started explaining nicely. When you have a baby, poop is inevitable. But if you clean the poop, the baby is awesome. So get the poop cleaned out from your task list. Hey, that’s brilliant. It took me minute to understand the metaphor. Before my brain processed this completely, it prematurely started thinking of cleaning the baby’s poop using the documentation. Close shave!
More to come! Hope I keep coming back to post and catch up on some reading! Cheers!
Pointless & Prosaic 
Every day I look for you and get disappointed and pray God to keep you in fine mettle.
Seen the reason; it is a part of official life. I am sure when you become of my age -after 75- you will have plenty of time to devote for your attractive blog postings.
This is a great preaching for all. Thanks for sharing. Look forward for more. Wishing you all the best.
N V Subbarman
thanks for the concern. I appreciate it. 🙂
May God bless you.
Oops! I read your About first, so when I started reading this post, I remembered you saying that you’re a serial procrastinator. I chuckled…
I suspect that you move when you want to. You make time your friend when it suits. There are actions you make that are easy and fun for you. One day, all of your life will be like this, and procrastination (even the thought of it) will fall by the wayside.
🙂 thanks!