Mohit Aron session on Oct 24, 2024

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

All right. Now before we jump into the questions, I was actually very curious. What are the challenges that you all face in the audience with your own personal productivity or in general managing your time and things of that nature? Does anybody want to volunteer in the audience or online? Should we pass on the mic?

All right, so let me first start by saying a few things. Whatever I'm going to talk about today is not theory. This is stuff that I practice myself, and I've been a passionate student of this area. I've read a lot of books, I've tried a lot of techniques, I've discarded a lot of stuff. So whatever I tell you, number one, I know it works. The second thing I want to say is that whatever I tell you, you don't have to practice all of it in entirety. Even if you take a few things and apply them, I can almost guarantee they will work for you. So please don't think that unless whatever is discussed today you apply in entirety, things will not work. Right? So you can take a few nuggets, apply them, and then maybe take a few more later on, apply them. So there's no need for you to apply the whole thing. And the last thing I would say is, look, let's also be a little bit human. You know, imagine for instance that you have a goal that you want to accomplish. Maybe you want to ace an exam, maybe you want to train for something. So you know, you follow a regimen, but once in a while you cheat. But the important thing is to get back on the regimen. So what I'm trying to say is that it's not essential that you work on this stuff like a robot. Once in a while you want to be spontaneous, you want to cheat, it's okay as long as you get back on track. Right? So whatever we discuss, please don't think it's such a hard line that you drop it for one day and boom, you're not able to do it. Whatever, just get back. Right? So apply those techniques and if once in a while you miss out on them, that's okay, but get back to using them whatever you commit to. Right? So with that, let's begin. So we want to keep the session interactive, so I don't want to be the one speaking all the time. I would want audience participation. But let me start by saying that I'll divide up this session into three parts. The first part is managing yourself. Right? You can't manage anything else unless you know how to manage yourself. The second part is when you personally engage with others, managing that aspect, in particular managing maybe the projects that you're working on. And last of it, some of you hopefully here are doing companies and you're running, you know, even if you're not doing a company, you're probably managing some sort of an organization. How do you manage things when you're not personally involved? How do you manage stuff that you delegate? So those are the three things that I would like to break things into, starting with how do you manage yourself. Right? So does that sound good?

All right, so let's start with managing yourself. Right? Again, the goal, let's keep an eye on the goal. The goal is high productivity. So let me first say this. Right? There are roughly, you know, two kinds of people in the world. One is people who just take things as they come, right? And one is people who actually have a mission to do something. Anyone that you see, let's take some examples. People like Einstein, you know, they are so fixated on what they're after, right? The moment they wake up, that's what they think about. That's one way to operate. Right? So people who just take things as they come, they likely will just get average, very average results. Right? On the other hand, if you work like Einstein, and there are other examples, right, whether it's Michelangelo or whatever, all these people, they actually were so fixated on accomplishing something that they forgot the rest of their life. Right? If you look at their personal lives, their lives are a little bit of a mess. So we want something in the middle. My goal always has been to excel, but not in the Einstein kind of way. Although that's great, but then everything else in your life is topsy-turvy. So the pursuit has always been how can you get excellent results and yet have some balance in life. There's a... I'll also quote books. Right? There's a good book that you should read. It's called The One Thing. It literally is what it says. Extraordinary results are actually achieved when you go all out on something. Right? But then if you go all out on something, then you may also lose on other aspects of your life like family and whatnot, and those are also important. So I've come up... the first thing, if there's one thing you want to do, you want to do the following. Right? You want to balance your life or decide what's the counterbalance in your life. And I'll explain what that means. If you just go the Einstein way, if you just go for that one thing, you will get phenomenal results in whatever you're doing, but like I said, the rest of your life will be topsy-turvy. So the first thing I advise is you use time blocks. So you divide your life into three parts. Right? And let's start by very simple: 8 hours, 8 hours, and 8 hours. The first 8 hours is for your, let's say, your personal life. That includes everything that you do personally: taking a shower, eating food, spending time with family, anything else, any hobbies, meeting friends. Those are those 8 hours. The second block is your professional life. Right? And so right now we're talking about balance, so it's 8-8. Right? And the third 8 is your sleep. Now you decide how much you want to counterbalance. Should your personal life become 7 and not 8? Should it become 6? Whatever that is, decide on that. And that balance can change, that counterbalance can change over time. But once you decide on that, set your schedule. So let's say you set up your sleep schedule for maybe 7 hours. Decide that you want to sleep at that time every day and wake up in the morning at that time every day and stick to that. If you just do this, you will achieve phenomenal results. Right? So suddenly I think now we start addressing things like, I think people asked, you know, how do you take time for other things? Right? Well, this is how. How do you think somebody asked guilt-free relaxation or something? Well, guess what? If you balance your life this way, even if you allot, let's say, 6 hours to your personal life, there's no guilt after that. Right? If within that 6-hour period you decide to spend one or two hours on having fun, maybe watching TV, meeting friends, going to a movie, there's no guilt because those 6 hours are meant for your personal life. So bottom line, start scheduling your life, start deciding. And the easiest way to schedule is to do the same thing every day. So the same hours you go to work, the same hours you go to sleep, the same hours you spend on your personal life. And then your personal life is your personal life, you enjoy it guilt-free. So if there's nothing else you want to take from this, just do that. Right? So I'll stop there, see how people react to that. And like I said, we want audience participation. Any comments about that?

Yeah, the question is when I was building Cohesity, did I follow some of this? So, you know, a lot of these things I've learned over time. Initially when I did it, I was not, and I also got the imbalance in my family life. But now as I have become wiser, I actually do follow it. So now I will not do it the way I did it earlier. So earlier I was doing it more the Einstein way. It was one thing. I just... so I realized I was doing something wrong when my son said that we are lucky to have a father who actually stays at home, but we are unlucky because he's never really there. So because I was always, even when I was with family, I was always thinking about my companies. Right? And you don't want to do that. There was no need. Remember, if you are so fixated on that one thing that even when you're with others, you're actually not with them, trust me, you're actually inefficient. Because you keep thinking that you have five more hours before you go to bed and so the time right now is going to be inefficient. But on the other hand, if you know that at 8:00 p.m. it's family time, or at 7:00 p.m. it's family time, and beyond that you only have maybe one hour to spend on your professional life, then you'll just automatically be more efficient with your time. Right? So that's when I realized that you need to start time blocking. So sometime in the middle of Cohesity, I started applying this and have kind of stuck to it. So it's actually very productive. Right? Trust me, spending five or even if you spend five or six quality hours on your professional life, that's better than spending 9 hours that are not efficiently spent on your professional life. So do that time blocking and you can counterbalance. You can make your professional life 9 hours, it's okay. But whatever time you allot to your personal life and to your sleep, then stick to it. Don't cheat. Right? Once in a while if you want to cheat, like I said, we're all humans, but then come back to your commitments.

Yeah, so the art of saying no is something that people need to learn. So I'll give you a tip on that. It's a productivity tip actually. Someone from my company actually asked precisely the same question. The person was having a hard time saying no. And I said, look, normally when someone comes and approaches you and asks for something in their, you know, face to face, you normally feel embarrassed to say no. So what you should... you know, if you are that kind of person, I'm not that kind of person actually, I can say no. But if you're that kind of person who has a hard time saying no, all you can say is that let me get back to you. Right? That's everyone can do that. And then later, you know, after maybe some time has passed, you can text them, email them, whatever, right? That you know, you've considered it and you either don't want to do it or you will do it 4 hours later or the next day or whatever it is. It's much easier to do that when you follow that approach. Right? And the other thing you can do is you can set expectations. So let's say you set boundaries on your time, you set your time blocks, and then once you tell people that look, whatever, 7:00 p.m. is your family time, they start learning that no matter what, Mohit is not going to take a call at this time. So there's so many ways to do this. Set expectations up front. You tell your team that these are your hours and these are the hours that you don't want to be disturbed. You can set Do Not Disturb in your phone or something. If somebody does approach you, you can tell them I'll get back to you. So there's some of these techniques you can use to protect those time blocks that you have.

Yeah, I don't have a hard and fast rule. I think it's more on demand. I mean, I don't change it every week, but every few months. And I'll talk about that. Every weekend probably you should look at the way you're doing your time management. Right? And I have about half an hour that I spend on the weekend that I look at it. And then one thing as we progress in this session, I'm going to ask you to do is spend 15 minutes before you go to sleep on your time management. Just 15, no more than that. And we'll talk about what you do there. But in some of these times, you will realize... so these are times when you're taking a step back and looking at what's working, what's not, and what you want to tweak. Right? And in some of these times, you may realize that you may want to tweak your time blocks. You know, maybe give less or more to your professional life, whatever it is. Right?

Absolutely. So that's the next thing. So we are progressing, right? So I gave one tidbit, you know, time block your time between personal, professional, and sleep. Right? By the way, sleep is very important. Please remember that long-term retention happens during sleep. So you can also tell your kids this. If your kids actually take the time to sleep 7 or 8 hours, they'll actually do better in their courses than if they were not. It's a common mistake that kids make when they think they can sacrifice sleep for everything, because it's the sleep that takes short-term memory and moves all that into long-term memory. Right? So if you don't sleep enough, you're actually sacrificing that aspect of your studies. So anyway, let's move on to the question that was posed. So I'll say the following. So first of all, you know, you've heard people talking about burnout. I contend that burnout does not happen based on how much you're working. Burnout actually happens based on how much you're carrying in your head. Right? So what does that tell us? You want to not carry stuff in your head unnecessarily. Ideally, you should only carry stuff in your head that you are dealing with in the present. Everything else that belongs in the future should be parked somewhere, and you'll get to it whenever the future comes. But the only thing you should carry today, right now, is stuff you need to do today. That's it. And so, you know, we'll talk about a system for achieving that. Right? So that's next. So this system that I'm going to talk about is, again, I will reference books. So it is derived from a book called Getting Things Done. Right? So let me describe it. So what I'm going to describe is a digitized version of what you'll find in the book. Maybe the guy has... I've read the book a long time back. Right? So I have my own tweaks to this. But the bottom line is that you need to divide up... well, first of all, whatever is the incoming, I think somebody mentioned how do you deal with lots of interrupts. Right? So whatever interrupts are coming, whatever is... if you can just park them somewhere. So have a few places to park them. One of the places where I park my interrupts, actually I don't park them, they get parked automatically, is my email inbox. Right? Anything that comes, it just parks them. The second place where I park incoming stuff is, you know, you can use different things, but I use Todoist. And again, I'm not endorsing it in any way. You can use a number of tools out there. Trello is another one. I think there's something called TickTick or something. I use Todoist. It's very easy. Open, you know, if somebody says something that I need to do, I can just add a to-do item and that's it. But this is incoming, okay? That's not how it's going to stay. So basically you take your incomings and then you need your processing time. So periodically during the day, you take all the incomings. The idea is to clear out your incoming. And yes, your email inbox needs to be zero or nearly zero. Right? Please don't let emails sit in your inbox. So how do you process stuff? So I process stuff in a few ways. First place where processed stuff goes is my calendar. Right? So some email comes, you know, I need to do something at a specific time in a specific day, I put it on my calendar. So now when that day comes, I will worry about it at that time. I don't have to worry about this stuff any sooner. So it's gone. Right? Another rule is that while I'm taking that incoming stuff and processing it, if something can be done within 2 minutes, just do it. Don't park it somewhere and then come to it later. If it's just as short as 2 minutes, just do it right there. The third thing is actually... so I already spoke about the calendar is one place where I take the incomings and park them. Another place is what I call to-dos by context. So context means, you know, if I'm at home, I have some to-dos, so the context is my home. If I'm talking to someone, let's say I'm talking to my CTO at my company, I need to talk to him about some things, so I have some to-dos. Similarly, you can have to-dos for various... like if you're in your home office, you have some to-dos. If in your office, you have some to-dos. So these are things that are now processed. So you take basically unprocessed list of incoming and you park it in a bunch of to-dos. Then some things you might just want to delay or delegate, so assign to someone, or you know, you say that you'll put it in a future someday, maybe you don't want to deal with it right now. And last but not the least is what I call projects. We'll talk about projects extensively. Projects are something that you don't just get done in a few hours. You need multiple days, months, weeks to get it done. So some things may be parked into projects. We'll talk about that. But the important thing is you arrange your life such that there is a bunch of incomings that come and then you batch process them periodically during the day, not all the time. Every 3-4 hours maybe you look at your incomings and process them, so as to park them in one of these few places. Right? And once they're parked, now your mind is free. Right? Your mind knows that you will get to all that at some point. Every night, remember I said you need to spend 15 minutes on your time management. You look at everything parked and you decide the next day what exactly you want to do, which of those items you're actually going to attack the next day. Right? And you pick those items, record them in some place or maybe a log, and that's your next day. Now the next day, you only worry about those other items. Right? That's the only thing that needs to be in your head. Everything else that your life has, all the worries, all the to-dos, whatever is parked somewhere, you don't have to think about it. So if you do this, I guarantee you, you'll become very efficient with your time because all you're thinking, you're staying in the present. You're not constantly worrying about what might happen in the future. Right? The important thing is if you follow, you know, what you need to do every day, eventually you'll get those results. Right? You want to, you know, run a marathon? Well, just decide to do what you want to do the next day, and as long as you keep doing that day after day, you will successfully run a marathon. That's the idea. Right? So that's how we do stuff. But I'll pause there, see how people take that, and if there are any questions about that, then we'll say more.

Mine is 8 hours. What did you say? 8 hours. Again, it's how efficiently you work on those 8 hours. Right? So, max, if I look back, 9 hours is actually more than plenty. You're probably including, you know, lunch hour and a bunch of other things in your profile, the commute and whatnot. I push all that into my personal life. So 8-9 hours of quality work is plenty every day, even at the building stage.

So there were times when I was spending 12 hours, but I will tell you I was inefficient. Right? If I had done it efficiently, 8 hours was plenty. But that said, look, everyone is their own person. If some of you feel that you cannot survive without 12 hours, okay, then it's 12 hours. But then make sure you time block the sleep hours and the personal hours to not fall below that amount. Right? So let's say your personal time falls down to 5 hours, then make sure it doesn't go below 5 hours. Right? That it is actually 5 hours and not less. And your sleep is, let's say, 6 hours, whatever it is, then it doesn't fall below that. But if you introspect and look at those 12 hours that you spend, you will find ways to streamline it and cut short.

So it is quite possible if you pick up a list of daily things you need to do, and once you're done with that, you're done with that. Right? The problem happens when in your mind you have an infinite number of things to do. Right? Then even if you get done with 3 or 4, you pick up the next 5. But once you decide that today I'm going to do these 3 or 4 things and that's it, you'll actually be very peaceful in those time that you spend in your personal life.

So first of all, whatever tasks you decided to do every day, right? Some of them are obviously your transactional tasks, but some of them are meant to be working on that vision or that bigger project that has hopefully already been well thought out. That's the reason you're doing it. So you can't be having doubts again and again. So get done with the doubt thing earlier. So we'll talk about that. Right? So let's say you want to do a project, and yes, if you have not carefully thought about the project, if you start doing it, then you probably have doubt: should I go this way or should I go that way? But if you methodically think about how to do the project, and then it's execution time, and we'll talk about that stuff. Now, the task that you do, there shouldn't be any doubt. If you do, then I would suggest you reopen the brainstorming for the project until the doubt is gone. Right? But the goal is that you pre-decided that to get this project done, these are the list of things that need to be done. You park them somewhere, and now you're just picking up those things and executing them. Right? So hopefully now, even if you're wrong, by the way, you should just go execute. And on the side, you can reopen the brainstorming or what have you if you have doubts. But there should be no doubt in getting that executed, even if you feel it's wrong, because you committed to it earlier. Right? So that's my answer to that.

So actually, let me address that head-on. You know, I used to, for the longest time, when I didn't have people reporting to me or didn't have a big team, I actually, believe it or not, I used to go for the longest time to work at 12. Right? So in the afternoon. So I used to start my day at 12. I used to come home at about 7:30. I remember 7:30 was my dinner time. And I would spend about 1 to 2 hours extra at night before I went to bed. So that is not 12 hours. And my team felt I was the hardest worker. So it is not even correct that you need to work 12 hours. Right? So I was spending what, maybe max 9 and a half hours. And that was my... you know, I didn't plan for it explicitly, but even when I was thinking that's the only thing I do, I was working 9 and a half hours. So that's, in my mind, plenty. And you know, just to answer your question more directly, people should worry about the quality of your work, not the quantity of your work. If they're actually looking at the number of hours you spend and not the quality, there's something wrong. So with everyone, you should probably, you know, get away from that company if they're counting the number of hours you work.

Yeah, so now let's move on. We spoke about managing myself. This is stuff nobody else is involved in. Yeah, we'll come back to you. Just one... then we'll now move on to, okay, now how about the projects I'm involved in? This is where other people also come in, right? So you're starting to engage with other people.

I don't know where it's coming from. I think normally startup culture, people think that, you know, all startups do is work, work, work, and nothing else. I think it's a fallacy. If you look at the best companies, that's not how the founders work. I've never worked that way, even when I was not time blocking and whatnot. In hindsight, that is not how it's working. Right? Yes, I would maybe carry my work in my head because I was not so organized, but I was not working 24 hours a day or even 12 hours a day.

Yeah, a rough rule of thumb: whatever you decide to do during the day, look, we all have... you know, I do too, I will write too many tasks that I think I can do during the day. But that's okay as long as you prioritize it. You know, you have the most important one at the top, and then if I don't get through everything, it's fine, right? Big deal, they just move to the next day. So the 80/20 rule should apply to that prioritization. What is the most important thing, that task you should do, and everything else, if it gets done, that's great. If it doesn't get done, it'll get done some of the time. So apply that 80/20 rule to that. So you know, be maniacal about your most important stuff and do that early in the day. Right? So when you start your day, the professional day, try to do your most important things earlier. If you push it to later, it may not happen.

I think prioritization is very personal, also involves your team. So I think between your team, you should know what projects are the most important. Usually people tend to do stuff that is very transactional and they tend to prioritize that. You shouldn't do that. Stuff that is actually, you know, there's something called the Eisenhower Matrix where you have urgency and importance. Right? So people tend to... yeah, urgent you have to do, but important but not urgent, people tend to push that forward. That's the one that actually will define your career. I'll say it again: stuff that's important but not urgent, usually that's the one that needs to be prioritized the highest. Everything else doesn't matter. Right? So if you can just put down your tasks into the Eisenhower Matrix, that might be one way you can use to determine what the priorities are. And I do think that, you know, we do have a question later on, we've planned to cover where we talk about planning, brainstorming, and all that. So a lot of this will be covered then.

So let me give you a few techniques. Right? And again, I totally stand by these because I've used them again and again. They work like magic. So the first concept is collaborative alignment. Right? It's a phrase I find... it basically consists of those two parts: collaboration and alignment. So collaboration. Imagine that you're having a tough decision to make and different people have different opinions. Right? The way you should go about coming to closure on that is you start a phase called collaboration where everyone goes... imagine that you're sitting on a table and you go around Robin, everyone gives their opinions. No opinion is wrong. I actually, when I start a collaborative alignment session, I even announce that this is a collaborative alignment session and I want you to hear... I want you guys to say opinions that are contrary to what I say. I want to hear all the data. In fact, I say that imagine there's a virtual basket in front of you and you're putting your opinions in that basket. Once the opinion, fact, story, whatever you have lands in that, it doesn't belong to you anymore. It belongs to the whole group. Right? So the idea is to enrich that basket as much as possible. So you keep going around and people keep putting their opinions, data, facts, whatever they have in that basket, right, that virtual basket. And once that basket is not getting enriched anymore, which basically, by the way, means nobody's allowed to repeat themselves. Right? Just by repeating yourself, things don't become true. Once the basket is no longer getting enriched, you move to the second phase, which is alignment. And we call it alignment and not agreement because this is disagree and commit. Everyone doesn't need to unanimously agree. You align in a certain direction. Right? And there are multiple ways to align. We'll talk about them. But once you've aligned, everyone moves in that direction. Right? So a lot of the complex decisions, I think there were earlier on when we started the session, people were like, how do you decide this and that? Well, you decide using collaborative alignment. It's magic, trust me. It just works. Even if you make a wrong decision later on, you can do a second collaborative alignment to fix it. Right? So it allows you to not be in an analysis paralysis mode, overthinking, what have you. Right? If you have doubts, do another collaborative alignment, but decide one. You know, use collaborative alignment to decide a certain path and then go follow the path until new data presents itself and you need to maybe course correct. Right? That's one way to engage with others. So you basically base what you do with others on collaborative alignment. Right? And I said there are multiple ways to align. Easiest way to align is to unanimously agree. If that happens, great. If that doesn't happen, then the next way, the next priority order is the leader in the room makes the decision. That's why we hire leaders. That's why this is not a democracy. I tell in my company, right, whoever is the leader in the room, they make the decision and explain to others why that person made that decision. The third one, if there's no clear leader in the room or if the leader doesn't want to make a decision, you can put it to vote. That's the third way to align, right, or to disagree and commit. And the last way is for a leader who's not in the room to veto what was decided. Right? That's the last one. Hopefully the veto doesn't happen too often. But these are basically the ways to disagree and commit or align. So you collaborate and align. Okay? So with that, so this is the way to make any decision. There's no point if two people are fighting, if they're in conflict. You know, those two people probably are smart people. They have good points in support of whatever direction they want to go in. Call a few other people in the room. You can do collaborative alignment among two people. Right? But call a few more people and collaboratively align, and that's the direction everyone is going in. Right? So that's the first rule when you engage with others. Now you use this framework to do brainstorming for your projects, and we'll talk about that in a second. But again, I want to see how that landed. Any questions, thoughts about that? By the way, people ask me, so when does collaborative alignment not work? Like, it doesn't work when you didn't follow the process. It always works. Right? If you followed the process, it always works.

The land and so you go around Robin, no idea is bad or sorry, no opinion is wrong. So you just lay down and one person acts as a mediator and writes down what people are saying one by one. And we've done that, so everyone talks about what's kind of not working without blaming anyone.

Then once people have exhausted themselves, you know what's not working or the lay of the land, even what is working, then you move on to the ideation phase. In the ideation phase, the idea is to generate a lot of ideas without debating. Right? The moment you start debating is when ideas get... so debates are not allowed. You're not allowed to say I don't like your idea. So you go around Robin and everyone is supposed to either say pass or offer an idea. You can build on somebody else's idea, that's okay, but you cannot say somebody else's idea is wrong, and that's just not allowed in that case. So again, I'll repeat it: the goal is to generate a lot of ideas, even if those ideas are wrong, but you're not judging there. You're not judging that those ideas are wrong. You generate a lot of ideas. Once you've exhausted that second phase, once you've exhausted, you go around Robin and pretty much everyone starts saying pass because they don't have any new ideas. Now you have a bunch of ideas, some of them might be good, some of them might not be good, that's okay, we don't know. You move on to the third phase. So notice, in the first two phases we have not done any debate.

Right? We first one was lay the land, you lay out what the problems were without debating anyone. The second one was you generated a lot of ideas without debating anyone. The third phase is where you start the debate. So you go through all the ideas that were generated in the second phase and you basically do collaborative alignment to figure out which ideas you're going to keep. So you either keep that idea or you tweak the idea or you reject the idea, whatever you want to do, you do it using collaborative alignment. Right? So you take each idea, right, bullet by bullet and go around the table doing collaborative alignment. And so at the end of the third phase, you basically have a bunch of ideas that the whole team has aligned on that this is what we're going to pursue. The fourth phase is you take those ideas and build them into a plan. We'll talk extensively about plans, it's very important, right? And then you go execute the plan. But again, I'll wait and see how that... maybe you remember you also made us do a prioritization.