My early school life started with underpaid teachers who were so cold about the subjects they taught that their passion was hardly infectious. Most of them were faking it, frustrated, depressed with life or were not even decently deep in their subjects.

By high-school, thanks to their combined effort, I had been convinced that there was something majorly wrong with the way I saw the world. Of course, I had my experiences with a few good teachers. Most of the other things that school taught me however, was just through some strange isolated incidents that changed me, rather than a long cultivated respect or admiration for any of the teachers or the school in particular.

One of my high school English teachers for example, was the first to give me amazing grades and break the stereotype that English essay writing in high school was all about how many stellar high profile words you could cram in that essay. That incident to an extent told me that essay writing can be fun, that I could be really good at it and that I could even just write for the fun of writing.

This however, was an isolated incident and if I sit down to look back at the amazing teachers who worked for my school and who have had a lot of influence on my life, I hardly find any. By the time I started college, I had pretty much come to the conclusion that those who seriously, cannot do, teach.

It was then that while continuing college I also landed up with my first job as... a part time system administrator and a part time computer science teacher. It was payback time! Like a rebel I set out to break all rules of teaching.

If someone felt like dropping a class or if he didn't understand something I was teaching, it was all my fault. I knew that back from my own days at school. But even these were just games a teenager plays. I was nowhere close to seriously dissecting and understanding what makes a really good teacher.

It was not until later parts of my career that I met a very different kind of mentors. These were people who were so passionate about their subjects that their passion would transmit over TCP/IP, come off the other end of your monitor and infect you.

These were kick-ass teachers. Not a bunch of underpaid non-doers, but the best in the industry, who were so successful they could not even give you their free time and so thoughtful, that they actually made it an effort to share their experiences with you.

These guys knew how to learn like a teacher and teach like student.

To a large extent, I had completely stopped believing in training programs by now. Anyone who was good at what he did, was online. Sharing his experiences. Teaching you stuff through his writing, podcasts and videos. Others, were just not worth wasting your time or your money on.

It was not until recently that I started taking up a couple of language classes that I started dissecting the difference between an amazing teacher and a mediocre one, who might even be an underpaid non-doer.

My French Lessons

The classes happened in a brightly lighted class room of a plush building, belonging to a very famous organization, which shall remain unnamed. On the very first day the person teaching us French had an issue with some of us not carrying a proper notebook and a pen to take notes. On the second day, we were told that just weekend classes were not enough and that we should study French at home as well.

On the third class, we had already pissed the teacher off by the lack of our involvement. But then, the feeling was mutual for some of us. The teacher, as it turns out, had pissed some of the students off by her slightly intimidating approach to teaching. Things were written on whiteboards. People copied them and then people tried to memorize French. She would read things out from grammar books and then people would take notes.

By the third lesson I had already found a lot of rather amazing French learning tutorials online which were way better than my French class and was having a ball with those. I was hooked to the idea of learning new languages and I was just using the classes as a means to check my progress and see where I was.

The ones who were actually expecting to learn something out of that classroom however, were utterly disappointed. By the fifth class, we had been reminded more than a dozen times that French was a very difficult language and that we must give in hard work to learn it. By the fifth class, a good thirty percent of the class had got intimidated and had either dropped out or just stopped coming.

With all due respect to the person who taught us French, she was a nice person and she was truly trying her level best to teach us French. She was amazing at French too. It's just the 'teaching' part where she was... well... just as mediocre as some of my school teachers.

My Sanskrit Lessons

For those of you who might not know what Sanskrit is, it is a ancient Indian language. Languages for me are a medium of expressing intent. I speak over four of them very fluently and somewhat understand a few more. For me every language has a use. If English is the language of communication, French is the language of romance, Sanskrit is the language for the intellect and the soul.

So when I was asked if I wanted to attend a one day session on Sanskrit I promptly answered 'yes' and attended it even though I had been able to grab just five hours or so of sleep that night.

I walked into the class without a notebook or a pen to write stuff on and then when the memories from my French class flashed back, I thought, since I was there I might as well show some respect to the teacher and go grab a notebook. So a colleague of mine and me went out and grabbed a notebook along with a pen.

There was something interesting about the teacher however. He started the class by asking us how many of us had never studied Sanskrit in our entire lives. I raised my hand promptly. Then he smiled and asked us which language he had asked us the question in.

Dumbstruck the folks who had lifted their hands looked at each other. The guy had asked us the question in Sanskrit. We had not just understood the question, but responded to it. This was a wearied mix of funny and creepy both rolled into one. We smiled in amusement.

Then there were some philosophical statements that were made, all in Sanskrit, with a little bit of English words inserted in every now and then, to give us the context and help us understand what he was talking about, but during most of the class, we felt like young kids learning how to walk, stumbling, falling, getting up, falling again. It was fun. Serious. Raw. Fun.

Notebooks. We were asked to not use them if possible, because chances were, you were going to lose your notebooks the moment you left the class. We were asked to just listen, sit back, enjoy and have fun.

In the one day boot camp, we were not just taught Sanskrit but that the secret behind any language is not to 'learn by translation'. It is to learn by LSRW which stood for Listen, Speak, Read and Write. You start by just listening to a language like a baby does. You do that for days. Then you slowly start understanding and speaking. The reading and writing are supposed to come in much later.

By the end of the day, two random students from the class got up and did a small situational play in Sanskrit. As we rolled over laughing at their mistakes, our minds were engaged in picking up on every single mistake each one of these guys made. Our minds, were learning. Unlike the French class, we were told over a dozen times in this class, that Sanskrit was easy and the general stereotype that it is really hard is just a myth.

Half way through the training a wearied realization dawned on me. I thought of my French classes we had stopped half way through and had never gone back to attend those. If our French teacher had used a teaching style that was similar to the one this guy was using, we would all be speaking fluent French by now.

The One Thing

If there is one thing I was told to pick as a difference between this Sanskrit teacher and the French teacher, it would be one little word that means the difference between your being a good teacher, your being a mediocre one or your being a lousy one.

Empathy.

No seriously. That is one quality a lot of my underpaid school teachers lacked as well. It's easy to put someone on the spot. Easy to ask him questions and feel frustrated when he is unable to answer questions. Teaching is not about any of that. Teaching is about connecting to other human beings, understanding their minds and giving them the best freaking environments where learning can be a fun and rewarding experience.

After all we are creatures who want to learn. The real question is, are you man enough to teach us? Do you feel strongly about your subject? Is your passion for your subject so strong that you can actually infect others with it? Can you simplify? Can you make it fun?

So, the next time you are planning on conducting a class or a small knowledge sharing session for your organization, here is a piece of advice: keep your frustrations at your home before you leave for the class and don't forget to load your bag with loads of patience. If your students feel bored, you are not entertaining enough. If you have to tell them to read up the subject at home, your passion for your subject is not infectious.

If they are not laughing and having fun, you are boring.Oh and yes, if you feel that your topic is very difficult and complicated, you might know your topic really well but you just might not be qualified enough to teach it yet.

Even if you forget everything else you read in this post, if you are ever going to teach people, whether it be professionally or for a small knowledge sharing session you are going to conduct in your organization, you cannot forget empathy. Now go, infect someone with your passion for a subject or a topic.

I dare you.

You could be a young and budding programmer fresh out of college or a veteran who has had a very long career. One fine morning as the birds flutter outside the office window and you stare at them, you realize a strange thing about the culture of your organization.

You realize that your organization is a safe, non-political environment where no-one is out there to screw you in particular.

You are safe. You are protected. You don't need to fight it.

And then you realize that all you need to get your job done are the few basic programming techniques you slogged hard to learn during your college days. You get a few pats on the back on a job well done, life moves on and you move on to the next assignment. Once again, the skills you picked in engineering school come handy. A project well done and on time. No one is complaining.

What you don't hear however, is that no one is clapping like they did last time either.

This is the start of the loop.

You are using the same skill-sets to product the same output for the same kinds of project month after month.

You are boring to the rest of us.

To you however, office seems like home. It's safe. It's warm. It's cozy. And look, you have made a few friends too!

For you, your friends are people you can take to conference rooms with you and chit chat about process and 'resources' and shit like that. You know, things that seem like work, but are not really work.

For you, friends are people who you are comfortable with. For you friends are people who you do not challenge you. For you, friends are people who you do not challenge either.

Put simply, your friends are in the same shitty loop of safety as you are.

Neither of you have ever brought yourself close to getting fired. Neither of you guys have tested your limits. You have looped your skill-sets, done just enough to get your work 'approved' and then have serious kick-ass chit-chat in meeting rooms.

Then one strange day it happens. You get an email from your customer telling you that your module has done no major feature releases for the last five months. You are not really working. You are just talking about work and whining your time away. Your customer is calling out on your bull-shit. Your customer just told you that the work you are doing lately is fu@#ked up.

Now you are just going to have to deal with it.

It feels like being punched on the stomach doesn't it? Your bit fat hundred pound ego shattered to the ground. The guilt of f@#cking around in meeting rooms for hours when you should have been doing some real work seems like a heavy burden on your back, doesn't it? What do you do? What do you do? They clapped at your work three years ago. They sent you special appreciation emails back then.

F@#CK!

It CANNOT be your fault.

Your first gut-based-knee-jerk reaction? Fire up the mail client. Hit the reply to all button and poop all over with a truck load of shitty jargon that you were busy learning in the last three years.

Resource Planning needs to be done properly... Blah.... Blah... Requirements need to be elaborated and frozen... Blah... Blah... The Quality Approval process needs to provide suggestions on what needs to be improved which they are not doing... Blah... Blah... Yeah.

You review that, pat yourself on the back and whisper to yourself, "Yeah. That aught to set things in perspective."

Thinking of hitting the send button?

Here is my humble advice: Don't.

There are multiple reasons why you need to stop. Now.

First of all, you have just been criticized. You need to give that some soak time.

Secondly, by hitting that send button you are taking your first step at becoming a fully qualified whiner. What ever amazing talents that were bestowed upon you by your engineering college, the ones you have been flaunting for years, even those might slowly start fading away if you walk down that path.

Thirdly, people are going to see your shit and laugh at you and here is the worst part, they are going to do that behind your back, because now they have seen how you defend negative feedback with aggression and lame excuses.

If you ask me, I'd start by telling you to just shut the F@#CK up and apologize. Then when you have done that, realize that words mean nothing. So when the next sprint begins get your ass out of that meeting room, logout of your yahoo messenger and focus on shipping. Then, go ahead and ship. Remember, goals win matches, fouls don't.

Are you still reading this?

Well, it probably means that you have made it through the entire blog post. The irony with a post like this one however, is that if you are reading this, it probably does not apply to you. The mere fact that you subscribe to a blog that talks about self improvement and reflection probably means that you are open to the idea of criticism. I agree, you are probably not the 'you' I talked about during the entire post.

But then, humor me on this one. What if (and I am just saying), for whatever reasons, what if you got distracted and could not produce anything in the last couple of weeks. What if your manager calls out on your shit and tells you that you have been producing horse shit in the last three weeks.

How would you react to that?

Will you try pampering your ego of being the alpha-geek who knows it all? Are you going to defend your guilt of that distraction by pooping all over in the email which you send out as a response?

Or are you going to be man enough to come out and say it, 'Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. Give me some time. I'll fix it'.

Once you have done that, are you man enough to actually go out there and fix it.

If you aren't, you are a whiner in the making.

If you are, we would love to work with you irrespective of the fact that you do go through a few random distractions in your life. We all do.

Our biggest problems are not your distractions. It is also not how you deal with them. It is what you do when we call out your shit.

Seriously. Stop feeding your ego and your guilt.

Now.

I dare you.

You walk a couple of miles into office. Brain Rules and Spark tell you that brisk walking or any exercise before work produces a supply of BDNF and Dopamine to your brain. It's healthy. But this is not a post on fitness. That one is here.

This is a post on 'Doneness'.

Pretty much like fitness, doneness is a state of mind.

Jack is at your desk as soon as you get into office.

A client seems to have reported a critical bug in the application. A bug that triggers a firefighting Endeavour consuming about fifty minutes of your time.

You check your email... ten minutes slip by.

Fred  is a little lost about the his purpose of life and needs mentoring (spelt: psychological pep-talk). You cringe. Another thirty minutes slip by and Fred is completely pepped-up now.

There is an interview you need to take. The candidate has arrived.

F@#CK!

Can't time move a little slower?

Someone on the transmission team needs your help. The dev working on it is stuck with some IIS configuration issues and is getting cryptic error messages. You show him how to change the Application Pool settings to allow Win-32 applications to run in IIS on a 64-bit machine. As you get up, you look outside the window. It's starting to get dark. It's evening.

F@#CK!

By now you have already moved to a panic state. The three items on your TODO list are staring at you straight in the eye. Your manager is calling you for another meeting. Improvise. Make a decision. Pick between the three items on the TODO list or the meeting. You are scared of the monkey taking a stupid decision which might come back to bite your team.  That monkey. Or maybe your team just needs some cover-fire. You decide to attend the meeting.

By the time you get out of the meeting your task list is still snarling back at you and you have a headache from the meeting.

F@#CK!

What happened to your true, fun loving self which used to get things done and ship? You take a pause by the office window to do some serious soul searching and reflect on today. The noise has dulled your brain out and there is a gentle silent voice whispering from deep down within.

"You did not get anything done today."

You feel like shit.

Michael Lopp describes this feeling rather articulately in one of his posts. He explains:

This sensation will appear at the end of the day when you ask, “What did I build today?” The answer will be a troubling, “Nothing”. The days of fixing ten bugs before noon are gone. You’re no longer going to spend the bus ride home working on code; you’re going to be thinking hard about how to say something important to someone who doesn’t want to hear it. There will be drama. And there be those precious seconds when there is no one in your office wanting… something.

It's an important realization. That and the fact that you actually did get a few things done. That interview you took, those three bugs you were able to close during the afternoon. That small class which you refactored while you were eating lunch. Those client emails you responded to while the meeting was going on. You just feel like shit because you are focusing on the three TODO items on your list staring back at you for the last three days.

You are planning, not coordinating.

Even more importantly, you are waiting for a big productive evening instead of celebrating small minutes or hours where you can squeeze time out and get stuff done. Next time you have fifteen minutes between meetings, see if you can look at the bug-list, pick up a small bug and close it. If you can, go ahead, pat yourself on your back. In fact, might I suggest that you celebrate the fact that you #gotdone on Twitter.

And then, when the TODO items on your task list snarl at you in anger, you have another list to throw back at it and not feel like shit.

Productivity is a state of mind, and much like exercising, even when it comes to work, you begin by understanding your basic limitations, working with contains and willing small battles instead of aiming for one large war.

Go ahead, be loud about what you got done today. Doneness is a good thing. It's healthy. It brings you happiness.

Celebrate your moments of doneness with the #gotdone hashtag.

I wish you good luck.

For those of you who might have read this blog post, you probably know my stand on the whole stupid you-follow-me-I-follow-you game that is played so frequently on Twitter.

If you remove that game out of the equation and then consider the amount of chatter and noise on twitter, the real question you start asking yourself is this - is twitter even worth spending any time on or is it just an elaborate version of Yahoo Chat or Yahoo Messenger, depending on if you want to meet interesting strangers or catch up with friends.

My recent activity on twitter however seems to have shot up drastically in the last few days. The rise in activity is a based on a simple realization about Twitter after 'not using it for months'.

If you have been using Twitter regularly, you probably do one or more of the following:

1. Talk about your product or service.
2. Catch up with friends.
3. Paste useful (or useless) links.
4. Collect followers and flex your mussel power.
5. Talk about a global event like the #worldcup for instance.

And depending on which one or more out of the above makes you happy, doing either is perfectly fine. After all, twitter was actually supposed to thrive on activities like these.

What you might be missing out on, however, is an opportunity to observe things around you. If you have been following me on twitter you might have noticed that this is what I have been doing a whole lot lately.

Here are some of my recent tweets that aught to give you an idea of what I mean along with a context of where they were done from:

Isn't it sad that #socialmedia guys are making so much noise about #socialmedia on #socialmedia sites? blatant self promotion.
(While searching the social media tag on twitter).

Amazed at what anger can do to you. Was about to file a complaint about a rude call center guy. Waited and decided against it. #happy.
(While having a bad time with an Indian call center).

Wonders how to give an interesting talk and constantly worry about someone feeling bad or disagreeing at the same time.
(While reading the GNU speaker guidelines).

A girl learning how to drive. wonder why people become so serious and worked up when learning anything new. smile. learning is fun.
(Walking on the road, as I watched a girl learn how to drive).

School uniforms are a disrespect to diversity. every human being is different and so is what he wears. can we please stop raising sheep now?
(In a bus in India where I saw a few students in uniforms get on and act like a flock of sheep being herded into the bus).

Word of advice: when you don't know what you are doing find people you can trust and who know what they are doing. set them free.
(While watching a new budding manager managing people).

Honking on Indian roads is a reflection of general Indian personality. loud. interesting and at times downright obnoxious. #toughlove.
(On Road in India).

Have you ever tried actively keeping a track of the days as they slowly pass by? The velocity at which time moves is rather scary.
(On a slightly depressed moment).

If there is one word you can block from your company's vocabulary what would that be? For mine it would be calling people "resources".
(As I heard the word 'resource' getting mentioned over a dozen times in a meeting at work).

The food joint where I am eating with brother and nephew has been around since 1939. the point: small businesses with a niche can work.
(While enjoying a snack at a small joint near home with brother and nephew).

The point, is that these are all events that pass us by about a dozen times a day. How frequently do you see a serious girl, looking all worked up behind the drivers wheel with an instructor equally worked up and worried? How often do you get turned off by the responses from an Indian call center? How often do you hear the term social media as if its the next best thing since slice bread? How often do you eat out at a small joint you love?

These are all perfectly 'normal' event. What twitter does is that it gives you an opportunity to turn these into 'abnormal' events by adding your perspectives and by adding a little bit of yourself to these events.  It then allows you to share your perspectives with the rest of the world and more importantly, archive them for your own future use.

What better way to end this post, than with a tweet that I first posted when I realized and started doing this:

Tweeting is about having a abnormal way of looking at perfectly normal things. Now give us meaningful content. I dare you.

See if you can make your different, weird or opinionated perspectives fit in that hundred and forty characters.

I wish you good luck.

Side Note: If you are still not there on Twitter, here is quick starter guide.

Hell has broken lose at Multiplitaxion Inc. The sky is falling. The shopping-cart of a production system seems to have developed a glitch in a live website and apparently, it seems like people cannot buy things from the website.

I know what to expect next.

Throng of emails start flowing in on the support system.

Then comes a few emails from the client, with a little bit of tough love, directed at all of us.

It looks like there is a minor configuration glitch in Jack's code which is causing this awkward moment for all of us.

I hear the soft whisper in my head. My first instinct, the hidden, sedated asshole within me, whispering in a gentle, seductive and powerful voice.

"Call up Jack! Ask the incompetent idiot to fix it ASAP. Tell him it's CRITICAL. Absolutely fu@#king critical."

And then the veteran who has been there, done that and knows that it not work in the long run takes over.

I smile inwardly and decide to wait, answering the emails to the best of my abilities and sitting down to fix my own share of bugs, reminding myself that I am just as incompetent and just as big an idiot as anyone else.

Jack has already received the email. Jack is a mature human being with brains to understand that when shopping carts go down, companies lose money. He is probably looking at the problem right now and trying his best to fix it as quickly as possible. If he does not respond in the next hour or so, I will causally check with him. I respond to the seductive voice in an equally commanding tone and shrug it aside.

A few minutes later, another email lands on my inbox. It's Jack. The issue is resolved. The cart is up and running again. Life is back to normal.

The next morning, Jack is at my cubical. He wants to apologize about the issue and all those emails everyone had to reply.

"Nah. Don't worry about it. Shit Happens." --- I respond with a smile.

That is it. End of discussion. We go grab a cup of hot chocolate, talk about latest phone that I have been drooling over and discuss my intent of buying it.

I am happy. My life as a 'manager', 'development lead' or whatever it is that you want to call me, is a happy one.

It was a zero-touch operation or me. I now have a self sustaining team that functions perfectly well without me and I would have never found that out if I would have intervened on that and many countless nights before that.

Yes, there have been a few accidents. A few bumps while the teams I worked with in the past were in the drivers seat and I was in the back-seat, looking out and admiring the view, but nothing bad enough to get us killed.

Here is the interesting part however.

Every time the sky starts falling you will have a temptation of taking the drivers seat. Ease out of it. Let your team drive.

Because if you let them drive, they might get into a couple of small accidents and maybe even a couple of big once, but then they will learn how to drive, really fast and really well.

And once that happens, you can just take the back seat and admire the view or just find bigger challenge for yourself.

You know, the "professional growth" crap they talk about in seminars. This is how it happens.

Try it.

It actually works.

I wish you good luck.

I just promised someone I'll do a talk in their conference. He wants a copy of the presentation I am going to deliver at the conference. I have two unfinished drafts of blog posts sitting in my drafts folder. There is a side project that I need to be working on.

I am out with my family, eating in an amazing Italian restaurant. There is some shopping that I need to do. The book that I started working on is on a stand still, unfinished, grabbing me by collar and asking me to give it the finishing touches it deserves.

Put simply, I am on a thread dead-lock as I desperately try to figure out which thread to take up and process next.

It is something fairly similar to your machine's processor choking with too many applications running and each ALT+TAB takes you seconds to switch.

The conference cannot wait, neither can the blog posts but it is time to choose between the book or the side project. A decision has to be made,  a thread needs to be ended and a door needs to be closed. At-least temporarily.

Dan Ariely in his absolutely amazing book, Predictably Irrational talks about the inherent fear that we as human beings have towards closing doors. He used experiments which included observing students while they played a computer game designed specially for the experiment to observe how human beings react to the idea of closing doors. He explains:

To find out, we changed the game. This time, any door left unvisited for 12 clicks would disappear forever. SAM, A RESIDENT of the hackers' hall, was our first participant in the "disappearing" condition. He chose the blue door to begin with; and after entering it, he clicked three times.

His earnings began building at the bottom of the screen, but this wasn't the only activity that caught his eye. With each additional click, the other doors diminished by one-twelfth, signifying that if not attended to, they would vanish. Eight more clicks and they would disappear forever. Sam wasn't about to let that happen. Swinging his cursor around, he clicked on the red door, brought it up to its full size, and clicked three times inside the red room. But now he noticed the green door—it was four clicks from disappearing.

Once again, he moved his cursor, this time restoring the green door to its full size. The green door appeared to be delivering the highest payout. So should he stay there? (Remember that each room had a range of payouts. So Sam could not be completely convinced that the green door was actually the best. The blue might have been better, or perhaps the red, or maybe neither.) With a frenzied look in his eye, Sam swung his cursor across the screen. He clicked the red door and watched the blue door continue to shrink.

After a few clicks in the red, he jumped over to the blue. But by now the green was beginning to get dangerously small—and so he was back there next. Before long, Sam was racing from one option to another, his body leaning tensely into the game. In my mind I pictured a typically harried parent, rushing kids from one activity to the next.

Is this an efficient way to live our lives—especially when another door or two is added every week?

I can't tell you the answer for certain in terms of your personal life, but in our experiments we saw clearly that running from pillar to post was not only stressful but uneconomical. In fact, in their frenzy to keep doors from shutting, our participants ended up making substantially less money (about 15 percent less) than the participants who didn't have to deal with closing doors.

The truth is that they could have made more money by picking a room—any room—and merely staying there for the whole experiment!  (Think about that in terms of your life or career.)

When Jiwoong and I tilted the experiments against keeping options open, the results were still the same. For instance, we made each click opening a door cost three cents, so that the cost was not just the loss of a click (an opportunity cost) but also a direct financial loss. There was no difference in response from our participants. They still had the same irrational excitement about keeping their options open.

As human beings in general and as programmers in particular we are hugely attached to the idea of keeping our options open, keeping multiple choices in our lives and getting involved with multiple projects. On one hand, we have programmers who cannot program and 501 developers. On the other we have folks who are working on so many different things and trying so hard to keep all of these efforts alive that none of them ultimately see the day of light.

For me, it was this secret project of mine, that would have to wait. I am closing a door for the time being, so that I can focus on another one and so that the book can reach a meaningful logical milestone.

If you are getting bogged down with too many side-projects to work on, too many speaking engagements, too many things to do and you find yourself handling multiple threads even on weekends, maybe its time to take a pause, evaluate and close a few doors. The least you can do is close them temporarily and then come back to them at a later time.

Prioritize.

Focus on what is really important to you, even if it means closing a few doors of your life so that you can focus on the ones that mean a lot more to you..

Go ahead, pick a few assignments or projects that can wait and either end them or put them on hold temporarily.

I wish you good luck.

This idea of this post started off with a mail thread from someone who has a knack for sending amazing links which nudge you to do some serious soul searching every time you click one of his links. This one was a post about the iPad.

To be honest however, it was more than just an iPad post. Peter Bregman in his post on why he returned his iPad in less than a week, talks about the importance of boredom in your life. He explains:

The brilliance of the iPad is that it's the anytime-anywhere computer. On the subway. In the hall waiting for the elevator. In a car on the way to the airport. Any free moment becomes a potential iPad moment.

The iPhone can do roughly the same thing, but not exactly. Who wants to watch a movie in bed on an iPhone?

So why is this a problem? It sounds like I was super-productive. Every extra minute, I was either producing or consuming.

But something — more than just sleep, though that's critical too — is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose.

Boredom.

Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that's where creativity arises.

My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These "wasted" moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital.

They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They're the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen.

To lose those moments, to replace them with tasks and efficiency, is a mistake. What's worse is that we don't just lose them. We actively throw them away.

"That's not a problem with the iPad," my brother Anthony — who I feel compelled to mention is currently producing a movie called My Idiot Brother — pointed out. "It's a problem with you. Just don't use it as much."

Guilty as charged. It is a problem with me. I can't not use it if it's there. And, unfortunately, it's always there. So I returned it. Problem solved.

Go ahead, click the link and browse through the entire post if you haven't done so already. The valid point Peter seems to be making here, is about slowing down. Giving your brain some boredom so that it can figure out creative, genuinely fun and innovative things to do to avoid that boredom.

It's more than just the iPad.

I have talked about this before. Firefighting for instance gets you in a mode where you are least creative.

With a zillion gadgets, MP3 players and twitter on our phones, we are insanely connected to random people all around the globe but it does the exact same thing to your brain that firefighting does. It gives you an easy convenient way to make yourself busy and indulge in activities which are 'seemingly productive' but result to nothing other than a truck load of time getting wasted in the long run.

If you work in a field which involves creative work or are connected with the process of building software that is supposed to make big or small dents in the universe, the first thing you need to do is slow down and give your brain some boredom.

Boredom is important,  because when your brain experiences boredom and feels restless, it starts thinking of productive ways to keep itself busy. That's when some of the best ideas and solutions emerge. The last time I checked, ideas and amazingly interesting solutions to complicated problems, typically don't emerge when you are watching an action movie or a soccer match for instance.

Go ahead, slow down.

Experience a little bit of boredom today.

Use this boredom to let you mind wander and come up with a genuinely innovative idea or two.

I wish you good luck.

Folks at Multiplitaxion Inc are gathering in small groups and talking every time I walk through the cafeteria. There are whispers all around. It's in the air. You can quite literally feel it. There is drama in the air and it looks like the drama has a drama queen.

Or should I say, a drama king.

It seems like Fred just had a hugely vocal argument about why he cannot be working from home on a certain day. Fred it seems is not willing to accept the fact that HR isn't comfortable with the whole idea of working from home. Fred is also not willing to have a logical objective conversation with the HR folks and convince them of the benefits of letting folks work from home at times.

He chooses the vocal loud revolt instead, creating a loud conversation which turns into a heated argument.

Very soon, every single engineer, in every nook and corner of the office knows the incident and is talking about it.

Fred's intent is pure. His approach however is destructive because it involves a simple ingredient which single handedly is capable of destroying teams and organizations.

Drama.

A few days later, one of our scrums, begins with a joke involving a senior manager. Everyone in the scrum takes a stab of cracking a joke at this manager. Soon, a decently normal scrum now involves a lot of talking. It has almost turned into one of those meetings where nothing gets done. This dear manager of ours, has fired three innocent hard working programmers and has given us something to discuss.

More drama.

Some idiot somewhere has sent condescending emails with a threat to one of his managers at the time of his resignation. The email seems to have gone to everyone in the group and a truck load of people seem to be involved in discussions on the topic.

Insanely massive drama.

During my early days at Multiplitaxion Inc, I loved going to office every day, but then there was a part deep down within me which wished that there was no drama the next day. It was stressful. Seriously stressful and non-productive.

But then, to be honest, there was also a deep dark secret part of my brain, which uncontrollably liked observing drama as it unfolded. Like everyone else in the organization, I often got involved in discussing the drama as it was unfolding.

That, to an extent, is what we all do. At different levels. When there is drama unfolding all around, you are likely to get sucked in. The spice of the drama, happens to be much like the oil in the McDonalds French fries. It surely won't kill you in a shot or two, but then when it sneaks up on you, you hardly know what hit you. That is exactly what drama does to your productivity, your work ethics and your professionalism.

It turns you from a productive programmer to a drama queen before you even know it.

I have talked about this before. Relationships and circles based on criticisms don't last long. Work relationships based on dramatic situations are even worse. So I totally understand that you had nothing to do with Fred sending out that flame email to his manager and copying the entire group while he was at it, but even then, might I suggest that you disconnect from the drama and focus on being productive.

Might I suggest that when a colleague takes you to a cup of coffee and then starts bitching about a mutual boss, you gently change the topic and focus on what you can do to fix the situation rather than whining together like babies.

It's hard.

But I didn't become a programmer because I wanted to bitch, whine, moan, cry or experience a lot of negative drama. If I wanted that, I would have given my shot at the films or television. I joined programming because I wanted to work with the sharpest, smartest, wildest, wittiest and some of the most creative people I could find and then join forces with them to build stuff or tell stories about what they do or how they do it.

The lesser drama you see on a day-to-day basis, the more you will get done, the more productive you will be, the happier you will be, the more flow you will experience and above all, you will be able to build more stuff and get more done.

Go on, the next time you start experiencing random negative drama, say no to it.

Seriously.

Start saying no to it.

Chances are high that you will get much more innovative, creative and above all productive, instantly.

I wish you good luck.