I have been observing what affects the level of energy I have to work on something, and how to optimize it.
My first “Equation” was that, we had a long term base level formed by good / bad habits (health, inner peace etc). Our “state of mind” then acted as a multiplier on short term modifiers like level of sleep, hunger, coffee and so on influence the amount of energy we had at any point. But after some discussion with friends and observation, I realized that this is only our store of “potential energy”.

One of my thrusts this year is to understand myself better using data and objective analysis. 

The way I am going about this is to collect whatever data I can, look for patterns, form hypotheses, and then try to verify them.

Online activity, Phone calls, location are some relatively easy ones. RescueTime can help you track your computer activity, phone logs can be obtained (with difficulty) from phone companies, and location data from foursquare or a similar API. Fitbit tells you how active you were. These require little effort,  but might not give all the information you need to measure performance.

I think there are 2 types of innovation - The pull, and the push.

Pull is more lean-startup. Look for the lowest hanging fruit, pluck it as fast as possible, and iterate. A consumer problem creates demand for a solution which pulls development of solution. Like Dropbox. And I think Amazon was pretty lean too.

Push, on the other hand is more like traditional research. Someone feels Solution X will benefit the world, builds it and pushes it into the market. Like Tesla, SpaceX.

I have written about the need to consolidate the crazy amount of information available at our disposal these days. In fact, companies like Google make their living from analysing and “understanding” the ridiculous amount of information they gather, and this has led to some pretty powerful techniques and tools being implemented.

On the other hand, there are also instances where there is not enough data to analyse. Or worse, there is partial or incomplete data. Two instances of this are the medical industry (we are working on this at Klinify). The other is personal information.  Sure, there is enough information to track a person (and have everyone screaming about privacy), but if I want to objectively understand myself using data, do I have enough information to do it? There is a lot of focus on this and we are making progress with the surge of wearable technology, but the data gathered isn’t really enough. I think it is something worth exploring!

We just raised our seed round at Klinify (http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/03/klinify-raises-600k-seed-round-to-build-an-evernote-for-doctors-in-south-asia/). It has been in the works for a while, nice to make it official now!

So what has changed?

1. I can stop freelancing / borrowing / begging to pay my bills and focus full time on Klinify. This happened a while ago, and it is very liberating to be able to put all your brain power into the 1 big thing you are building.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend.html

This is very interesting. She says the effects of stress depend on how you think about it. I completely agree. I believe our mind has a way of controlling and influencing our body. A lot of these responses are unconscious but it is possible to reprogram it to our benefit. Stress is a beautiful example.

I am sure we have all had scenarios where a little bit of stress has increased our performance dramatically and also helped us feel better. At the same time stress has also crippled our ability. The difference is in our attitude and how we think about the stress - which is very  much in our control even if its seems difficult to tame at times.

To continue on the previous point on black and white, consider this announcement:
http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries/

Buffer has decided to be completely transparent about their salaries. This is pretty extreme. We do not know what the repercussions will be or whether it will pay off in the long run.

But what is inspiring is that they took a stand and took it all the way! It shows their commitment to transparency, and it will attract more people who value transparency and further strengthen their culture.

The world is almost always grey, is it not? Events are relative, opinions are relative, and Einstein says even the most basic “facts” are relative. So, is there any use of having strong absolute opinions?

I think the purpose is to trick our brain. Absolutes lead to conviction. And conviction, I feel has led to greatness. A lot of people who dramatically changed the world were completely convinced of their ideals and approach and this gave them the push to change the world. If they had doubts, they suppressed them. Or convinced themselves that the doubts were unwarranted.

Seems like “studies” show that open offices don’t really work.

From my experience playing around with our open office structure, they promote spontaneous interaction and help generate ideas which can be quite important in a small company.

However, precautions need to be taken to maintain balance and avoid disruptions, especially to people in the maker’s schedule.

Strategies that worked for us:

1. Passing the cost of disruption to the disruptor. Post-it notes passed on with a “Need 5 mins for X” do this nicely. The “disruptee” can then attend to X when convenient.
2. Split offices, one for each kind of schedule (we are beta testing this). Interaction needs to happen in other ways though. You don’t want to completely separate your team.

A beautiful description of the scientific method:

He doesn’t say, “if it agrees with experiment, it is right!”. He says, “If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong!”

We make this mistake many times - finding some pattern in the world that matches our hypothesis and then accepting it as “proven”. To gain true understanding, we ought to look for patterns that go against our hypothesis.