Productivity tip

Productivity tip I discovered in high school and have not discovered a better one since:

Just start doing it. Inspiration will follow.

411 Fail

I am sometimes utterly amazed at the inability of behemoth tech companies to get with the times. A recent conversation I had with a 411 operator:

Irina: Hi, I am looking for a hair salon in San Francisco. It is on Bush and Kearny and its name starts with an “F.” I do not remember the full name.
Operator: I’m sorry. I need at least the first four letters of the name.
Irina: Try “Fes.”
Operator: I’m sorry. I’m not finding anything.
Irina: Um, okay. Could you check on Google, because I checked half an hour ago and it found it without a problem.
Operator: I’m sorry, ma’am. I do not have access to Google. I only have access to my database.
Irina: Okay. Thanks.

For nothing.

AT&T, I hate you.

Google, I love you.

User experience is everything in a competitive market. Unfortunately, AT&T is a monopoly. They do not have any incentive to improve their notoriously bad customer experience. In addition, they have a monopoly on the iPhone. I really hope Apple strikes a deal Verizon soon. It will benefit their market share!

Welcome, New Brazen!

A year ago in August, fresh out of college, I started my first job. I was scared, a little awkward and hungry to learn. I needed not good advice, but a day-to-day guide on how to act, what to do and what to say in the work place. And that is when I stumbled upon Brazen Careerist.

From the beginning, I was drawn by the honesty of its contributing writers. As I read the early posts, I extracted lessons for myself on how to act at work and how to learn to become a valuable employee. Brazen Careerist was a daily destination, along with Gmail and Google Reader. Instead of bugging my friends for advice, I had Brazen. And via Brazen, I received more targeted and customized advice.

Then I overdosed a bit. The discussions were fascinating, but had so much content and so much depth that reading Brazen over my morning cup of coffee became emotionally exhausting. I felt the need to comment on every post. I bookmarked each one and came back to them after work. It became a chore and I needed a break.

And now Brazen is brand new and shiny. It continues to innovate and draw in its contributors and its audience. The introduction of groups and Twitter-like conversations was a great addition (and addiction!). The Ask Penelope Trunk group had me hooked for a while. And watching Brazen Careerist take on a sleek new look is absolutely exciting! The network is living and breathing high quality content. The ideas are abundant. Any question can be answered. And even better, your voice can be heard by a group of smart and enthusiastic people who are eager to help out and share their ideas! I am not sure where Brazen is headed, but it seems like a successful somewhere.

Now all that is left is Brazen Dating.

I Send Them Waltzing

Once in a while a song comes along that touches you to the core. Last Friday I stumbled on a 1996 song by Zazie, an amazing French singer. I loved her ever since I discovered her in France in 1999. She is quirky, she is real, she is sexy and her music just seems so genuine (while remaining edgy) that I always feel a connection listening to her. Her music just strikes a cord for me.

And since last Friday, I cannot get “J’Envoie Valser” out of my head:

It is a song about love, but oh what a song! Perhaps it is the folksy tune that reminds me of Russia. Or perhaps it is her feminine voice of an 18-year-old girl. There is such optimism in her voice that I want to call all my friends and tell them I love them. The lyrics are so simple and so powerful. Here is my cursory translation:

I see them who give
Give each other jewelry right to the neck
It is pretty but
But nothing but pebbles
Stones that roll
Roll and that roll down cheeks
I like it better when you love me
Without spending a penny…

But I, I do mock
I send their way
Jewelry-junk
The gilded cage
You when you hug me so strong
It is like treasure trove
And that, it is worth gold

I see them who fire
Looks and flowers
Then who leave each other
Somewhere else
Between roses and darlings
I know so many
Who would do better just loving each other
A bit, a bit like we love each other a lot

And to send their way
Elsewhere to waltz
The rings and the hearts in strings
For when we love each other strong
It is like treasure trove
And that, that is worth gold

Forevermore
I send their way
The proofs of love
In gold-plated gold
For when you hug me so strong
It’s right there, my treasure trove
It’s you, you who are worth gold

Ok, so I definitely took some artistic liberties in this translation (and it still sounds stupid, that is my fault, not Zazie’s), along with some Word Reference help. What is most important for me are not the words, but the rhythm with which Zazie tells this simple story and how much life she breathes into these words. Oh what a song!

P.S. I really need to move to France soon.

Slowly Make Change Part of Who You Are

The following two sentences are from a post that is part of the “Inconvenience of Change” series, hosted during the month of May and little bit of June by Matt Cheuvront at Life Without Pants along with New Day Revolution (and I shamelessly adopted this introductory paragraph from Jenny Blake at Life After College).

Go to Life Without Pants to read the full post!

I still keep failing at change regularly, but sometimes I succeed. What makes those change “projects” successful?

Call and Text All Your Friends When You Are Happy

Becoming an adult sucks. It is really hard. Graduating from college, leaving your parents’ house, managing finances, being good at your job and generally learning how to be on your own is very emotionally taxing. And then there is the task of figuring out how to lead your life on your own. I find a lot of recent college graduates subconsciously afraid of being alone, so whenever they have free time, they schedule meetings with their friends, picnics at the park, happy hours at the bar and attendance of countless parties. Six months later, they find that they have had little time with themselves to really think about what their lives now mean.

And what they mean is that there is no set course anymore. Life is now a free current (direct translation from Russian). In high school you worked hard to get into the best college. In college you worked hard to get the best job out of graduation. Now that the preparation for your life is over, you suddenly find yourself living the life that you prepared for during the last 8 years. But how do you actually live it? Is it worth going out to bars or to parties twice a week? Is it more valuable, in the grand spectrum of your life, to work 8 or 10 hours a day? Should you write a blog post or get 8 hours of sleep? Is it worth reading that really interesting article to educate yourself on a topic?

When I started working, I asked my mentor “How do I live my life now that I have a structured 9 to 5 work schedule? Where do I find the time to discover myself?” He answered: “You get really good at managing your time. And you learn to spend time on the things you actually want to be doing.” You learn to only spend time with people you actually want to spend time with. Instead of reading everything, you read only those articles and blog posts that will teach you something new and spark a new thought, resisting the urge to read everything because you are hungry for an understanding of this world.

And then you go through sad and down states. Because transitioning from college to adulthood is emotionally unstable and you will feel this emotional instability if you dare to stop and think for five minutes. And when you feel sad and scared, you might snap at your friends, the friends who will be there for you no matter what and who tolerate your post-college-transition emotional ups and downs. But you do not want to push it too far and alienate them.

So when you feel a pocket of joy amidst the emotional transition, immediately call and text your friends. Because that pocket of joy might pass in 5 minutes, but the positive call or text will last them longer. And because those happy calls remind your friends of who you really are or the person you strive to be - the best and happiest version of yourself.

Maybe Business School Is Not Crucial (Part I)

I have been thinking a lot about business school lately. Working in a consulting firm, I am surrounded by people who choose to go to business school. The choice is almost unanimous and seldom disputed. That is what you do when you work in consulting. You get a prestigious job after college, spend 2-4 years working, do well by your managers, take on some in-firm leadership opportunities, spend your free time volunteering at a non-profit and gear up for business school applications. Then you paint a holistic picture of your accomplishments, send in a few (hopefully) strong recommendation letters and sail off into the sunset in your top 10 business school sweatshirt.

It is almost undisputed. It is just what you do.

And business school always loomed on the horizon. Until I recently started to actually think about it. The impetus was going to XX Factor conference at Stanford GSB a few weekends ago. A well-orchestrated marketing event, it nevertheless provided gourmet food for thought. As you think about your applications, the hosts recommended, think of what you want in life, which skill sets you enjoy using and what kind of career path you want to pave for yourself. Think about what you want to do.

And then I had to think about it. Without holding myself back. What do I want to do? I want to make enough money so that I do not have to worry about it (and not have any reservations about buying a $3,000 plane ticket to go see my grandparents in Ukraine). I want to find a job I enjoy doing so much that I cannot wait to get back into the office. I want to not be in $150,000 or more debt even before I buy my house and (probably) get married. I want to move to Moscow and work there for a year and prove to the world that I can make it there.

Why do people go to business school? At the conference, satisfactory answers from my fellow attendees were scarce. I asked an ex i-banker turned private equity banker:

“Why do you want to go to business school?”
“Well, I want to start my own business and I do not think I have the skills to do that.”
“Well, why go to business school? Why not just talk to entrepreneurs who have started their own businesses?”
“Well…um…”

Her eyes got shifty. So I let her move on to people with whom she could talk about how much she liked the presentation and how the students on the student panel seemed to really have a great time at the GSB.

 The final straw came when I met Brandusa. Both Eastern Europeans, we found a common language within five minutes. Brandusa stated explicitly the thoughts I was afraid to think. Maybe business school is not the right answer. Maybe, as Fran Maier mentioned, “momentum” is just as important. The momentum to do what you are doing well and make enough money in that way.

So I got home from the conference jaded, but relieved. Suddenly, I had two years “back”, two years free and business school looming on the horizon just a little bit less. I tweeted my thoughts out into the Twittersphere and received a wealth of responses. To be continued.

Waging Wars Against Your Habits

This is a guest post by Katya Zorina from Social Petri Dish. She wrote this as a response to my post on adapting desired habits, in which she was mentioned.

I have many ideals, most of which consist of admired habits that I picked up on the road called life. I observe, I like, I try to adapt. The latter only sounds easy to your mom, who always gives you hell for drinking milk out of the carton. What she forgets it that habits have their own control mechanism, and it’s not your rational, conscious self.

A habit can be your best friend or your worst enemy. So how do you train your brain to unconsciously do what you want it to do? Clearly, the trick is to transition your desired behavior from being the product of willful effort into a knee jerk reaction. But how do you do it?

Unfortunately, I don’t have a simple answer to this question. I’ve been waging multiple wars with myself for years. I won some, I lost some; but I’m not giving up, because I’ve developed a habit of thinking that anything worth having will never come easily.

Here are some of my recent victories:

• Beating the alarm I realized the true value of this habit when I started my job. Coming to the office early allows me to catch up on the news and remind people of my existence through Twitter. And what would life be without Twitter?

• Hitting the gym consistentlyI used to be a couch potato and I hated myself for it.
  I am not like that anymore. The key is to have your workout in your calendar…with a reminder. It still sucks having to carry a gym bag around, but it’s so worth it.

And some failures:

• Balancing cookies and saladsI like my cookies. But I also love looking and feeling great. However, I am still trying to figure out a way to trick myself into thinking that celery tastes AWESOME.
• Updating my daily planner…dailyI noticed that I get a lot more done when I have my to-do list on paper. But that means that I will have to do more if I write it down. Battle in progress.
• Remembering that the Floor of My Room is NOT My ClosetHmm. But it’s so much easier to find stuff when it’s laid out in front of you!
• Battling caffeine addictionWho isn’t?

Even though my list of bad habits is long (this is just the tip of the iceberg), I am still a strong believer in the power of my conscious self. If I can win once, I can certainly win again. It just takes effort and the realization that it will not come overnight. Going to bed thinking that you will start exercising everyday starting tomorrow never works out. Take it easy on yourself – start with jog.

Don't Tell Me That Was "Only $8.33 per Hour"

This post is kind of long, so here is the main point for the most impatient of you: considering just the dollar hourly return of an activity is not enough. Read on to learn how to properly assess the value of an activity.

The Last Straw

I am going to a concert of a Russian artist this weekend. I am going with a friend and the tickets cost $25 each. ? few days ago, I logged into the concert hall’s website to purchase tickets for the two of us, happily filled in all the fields and proceeded to checkout. The total was $63.50 with a total of $13.50 in service fees!

Um, what?! Are you serious?! I am not being stingy here or anything, but I was completely outraged by this website’s (who shall remain nameless as I do not wish to give it the honor of advertisement) fees. So as an indignant consumer and avid advocate of financial responsibility, I made the trip to the concert hall and bought the tickets in person. Hours spent = 1.5. Dollars saved = $12.50 ($1.50 was spent on bus ride).

As I got home, I happily tweeted the news of my accomplishment out into the world. My new Twitter buddy @PaulTran92 quickly calculated that this project earned me $8.33 per hour. Not so great, is it?

Paul’s tweet was exactly the impetus I needed to write this long-overdue post. Listen up, people, you have to learn about yourself to learn how much your time is worth.

How People Tend to Think About the Value of Their Time

I encounter people making this mistake all the time. When my dad deals with annoying things like health insurance reimbursements, fixing something around the house, etc. he always says “I have already spent too much of my time on this. My time is worth a lot of money. I could have just paid someone $200 to fix this and made more money in those two hours I just wasted.”

This is flawed reasoning. Really, you can only use this reasoning if you are actually getting paid by the hour and you have a project that is just waiting for you to spend your time on that could generate you positive earnings. Then, yes, the trade-off is between the money you generate through cost saving and the money you could be generating by working on the project. Otherwise, you are comparing apples with oranges!

How People Should Think About the Value of Their Time

Let us face it - most of us do not get paid by the hour (neither does my dad). We are salaried employees. Therefore, we simply would not make more money during the time that we spend on time-consuming cost saving projects. So stop thinking of it in that way. That is not reality!

The good news is that you can think of it in the correct way by slightly adjusting the perception of the value of your time. But for this, you have to invest some time in getting to know yourself and learning what you value.
Let us review with a real example:

During my 1.5 hours spent saving $12.50, I spent:

• 15 minutes of it walking around San Francisco. This allowed me to breathe some fresh air and enjoy my “outside time” of the day.
• An hour on the bus, where I read up on a great explanation of the economic crisis by Robert Solow.
• The remaining 15 minutes I spent waiting for a bus. I called my mom, had a quick conversation and assured her that I was alive and well.

All these things I would have done if I had gone home directly (and it is questionable whether I would have been that productive at home due to all the distractions such as Twitter, Facebook and my comfortable bed), so really the hourly payoff of this activity was higher than $8.33 per hour since I did not waste any of it by chasing the $12.50 cost saving. This is because I know that educating myself on the economy and family talking time are valuable to me.

Now, I am not going to put monetary value on those things because I am a practical person and assigning dollars to intangibles has no place in my personal financial infrastructure. But what I will point out is that this is the real trade-off you should be considering; the trade-off between what you “earn” by engaging in cost saving and what would ACTUALLY be doing if you were not engaging in it. It is NOT the $8.33 per hour vs. the $30- or $50- or $80 per hour that you have mentally calculated you earn from your yearly salary and anticipated year-end 2009 bonus.

In my case, I got lucky since it was not a trade-off at all because I was able to save $12.50 and do all the things I would have been doing during that time anyway.

Conclusions?

1. Learn about what is truly valuable for you to spend your time on.
2. Be real about the value of trade-off activities on your time. If you are not actually earning an hourly rate, do not make one up based on your salary and then compare that to the hourly rate you “get” by engaging in an activity that results in actual positive earnings (savings = earnings). Those are apples and oranges.
3. Only then, weigh the trade-offs and make the right choice between activities. One that you will not regret because you were real about the value of each to you.

Trick Yourself into Developing Your Desired Habits

The Inspiration

A few days ago I wrote about a some of my tips and tricks to overcome my laziness in life. Well, I just came back from a workout, during which I thought of fifteen new ideas for a follow-up post. I forgot thirteen of them of my way back, so here are the remaining two before my brain stops working completely:

1. The more I observe the people around me and monitor my own behavior, the more I realize that humans are creatures of habit. It is truly amazing how powerful habit is. Humans can adapt to pretty much anything, so the question for young people is really what they want to adapt to and what they want to make a habit of.

 

2. You are who you spend your time around. That is, you will adopt the spending, eating, drinking, working, etc. habits of the people around you, especially if you are good friends with them. Therefore, you should surround yourself with people whose habits you like and admire because they will almost certainly pass on their habits to you.

 

3. This is a not a third point, but a synthesis and conclusion:  if there are people in your life whose habits you do not like and do not want to adapt, you should either limit the time you spend with them or explicitly voice your concerns so that they can curb those habits or behaviors when they are around you. For example, you can say something like this: “I am really trying to save money right now and you are buying $200 leather purses (for guys: cameras), so will you please not parade them around me because that will either make me really jealous and hate you or spend my hard-earned money on something I do not value? Thanks! I love you, girl! Cute shoes!”

The Habit I Adapted

In addition to general laziness, I am also very lazy with working out. Seriously, I hate working out. Exerting any kind of physical pressure with my body is usually very hard for me, so getting ready to go to the gym is a nightmare.

However, I have been adapting to the gym habits of a very good friend of mine, who is also a co-worker. She is gym-crazy and recently told me that she was not always like this. In high school, she felt the same horror towards working out as I do now. However, she persevered with it and made a habit out of working out. And by “made a habit”, I mean it became one of her habits that is now hard to shake (how you frame it is important).

So by watching her go to the gym every day after work for two months, I could not help myself but start going to gym. And when I do not want to go (every time), I still do because it is becoming a regular habit. With each after-work gym trip, my brain learns the act of going to the gym and reinforces it as a habit (I just made this neurological process up, but that is how I feel it happen). The more I go, the more likely I am to continue going. Every trip counts.

My Habit That Was Adapted

Curiously enough, I also made her stop spending so much money on clothes, open a Roth IRA and cut back on morning Starbucks. God, I love strong Pareto efficient exchanges.

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