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The first time I created an email account, I subscribed for newsletters, turned notifications on all the accounts I created in the net and was happy to spend time reading the emails I received, still the number of emails were manageable. Fast forward to now, emails have grown to be a necessary evil. Lots of people whom I meet are finding it difficult to handle the volume of emails they receive. Since it is easy to create digital copies and apparently costs nothing to include another person in the email for Just FYI, people are given an information overload through emails. It is not uncommon to hear people saying they have 10,ooo+ unread emails in their mailbox.

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Here are some simple rules I created so that my Inbox shows ‘Inbox (0)’ at regular intervals. It also helps me to quickly act on only the important emails when I check through my phone.

Newsletter subscriptions – Most of the sites where we use our email id, will by default have the newsletter option checked, we should make sure to uncheck it before creating new accounts. In case we accidentally subscribe to one it will still carry an unsubscribe link. Some email systems do not unsubscribe well, ruthlessly mark them as spam. It is our inbox and we have every right to deny entry to it.

Forums – These have to be filtered into a bulk folder like ‘forum/abc’, ‘forum/xyz’ depending on the no of forums and frequently read ones.

Notifications – Twitter, facebook, linkedin and many other accounts have email notifications, if we have the habit of using those accounts directly and frequently then we do not need the email notifications to be turned on.

Projects and distribution list – We will be part of the distribution lists of projects and business units, filter those into appropriate ones like the ones created for forums.

Finance – Create a filter for all financial transactions like payslips, transaction advices, statements. It should be a one stop folder to view the mails for all the transactions.

CC – The mails which we are CCed are an FYI which do not need any action, people also have a tendency to just add another person to CC; which we can read the subject line later and choose to read or drop.

Bookmarking – Time to time we get interesting links and forwards, instead of leaving them in the inbox to read later use a site that is helpful for bookmarking so that you can read them later.

With the above filter we can drastically reduce the number of emails that arrive at the inbox and we will be able to manage the lesser number of emails. The filters should be such that only the mails which are addressed to us in the ‘To’ field should be delivered in the inbox. Spend time at a manageable frequency to glance through the filters to triage them. Maintenance of the inbox is not an one time act, it is an ongoing activity

“Image courtesy of Patchareeya99 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net”.

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I have always shunned the idea of hiring people only from the top institutions at my workplace. The reason for that was my observation; that there were people from many relatively not so top institutions ending up top performers at the organization compared to their peers from top ones. This was not an one off observation, I had been observing this year on year that recruits from top institutions and not so top institutions were many at times on par with each other and there were few exceptions on either sides.

My school was a very competitive place to study, scoring in the 90s out 100 just meant that you are in the 50th percentile. It was getting increasingly tough as grades went higher and people were merely looking to outscore each other without gaining deep understanding of the subjects studied. Parent’s pressure on the ranking meant students had no choice but to play in the rat race getting stressed out and not learning much except scoring marks. There was a shuffle of groups happened after grade 8 and that was a breather in my school life, the competition eased out and it was so easy to be at the 75th percentile. This sudden ease of pressure made me learn subjects like science and maths with greater depth in understanding without worrying about optimizing learning only from the exam point of view. I could see that depth of understanding eventually helping me at my college and work place and I feel the positive effects of that even now. Had I been in the ultra competitive environment, I would have given up on learning.

I stumbled on the talk by Malcolm Gladwell which had rekindled my memories while I kept nodding at many his points in the talk.

Top institutions always gets the brightest of the minds, there is no doubt in that. But increasingly these institutions are getting competitive that people in the lower percentile in these places may face too daunting a task to accomplish something even though they were the best among their their peers in the country. It will favour the ‘smart gets more smarter’ culture. So as mentioned in the talk it will be better if we recruit the toppers from multiple other institutions rather than focussing on getting talent from top institutions. This may apply to organizations which forms A-teams as well.

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One of the common answers a developer gives when s/he notices a bug is that “it works in my machine”. This was so common and always boils down to the configuration difference between the testing environments and development environments. It is not so easy to keep the development and testing environments very similar but lots of those could be scripted and made automated such that it is an executable document. There are also lots of development hygiene practices that needs to be strictly adhered to avoid these kind of bugs.Confused

Where could things go wrong?

There are many things that could go wrong, here are some of them in no particular order.

  1. Poor version control – Either the code is not checked in(sometimes extra files locally modified for debugging) or the branching/merging is mismanaged.
  2. Incorrect dependencies and libraries – The dependencies/libraries are manually copied to the servers. Example – copying some jar files to tomcat, could easily go out of version between different machines.
  3. Testing only in debugging mode – When testing at the developer’s machine, developers have a tendency to run in debug, breakpoints in the code will give ample time for the application so that synchronous issues do not crop up during developer’s testing.
  4. Not testing at all – This sounds silly, but when the pressure is high chances are that the code is committed without tests and then bugs have to appear to give time to finish the coding.
  5. Incorrect environments and test data – Large projects have a tough time managing test data and environments, developers could be pointing to an outdated external environment or using only a narrow set of test data.

“Image courtesy of Grant Cochrane / FreeDigitalPhotos.net”.