The years 2011 to 2016 were when I went to college and later on started working. These were also the years that I bought the most amount of stuff that I ever owned in my life. I joined Flipkart in Bangalore in May 2015 as a software developer. If I remember correctly, I told my parents in the first week of the job that I would quit working there after 1 year as I didn’t really like Bangalore. That’s exactly what happened after an year. August 2016 was my last month at Flipkart.
Bangalore as a city has a lot of flaws (I might write about this someday), but has one good thing, its weather. Moving away from Bangalore, I decided that I wanted to move to a place which had similar weather with less flaws as compared to Bangalore. I finalized on Pune which is 900 km away from Bangalore. In the first week of September 2016, I moved to Pune.
I hired a Movers and Packers agency to take all of my stuff to Pune. The entire packaging process took almost 5 hours, the output of which was 4 large boxes that had all of my stuff. This was the first time that I realized I had a lot more stuff than what I imagined. I had not even used most of the things living in Bangalore that I had bought over the years.
I have lived in Pune for 4 months by this time. Over these 4 months, I bought a table, a chair and some books. I didn’t have a job in Pune for the first 4 months, so I didn’t really spend much during this period.
December 2016 is when I got a remote job. It was in a US based company. Now I wasn’t bound by location anymore. All I needed was a laptop, and I could work full time from anywhere.
In the months that followed, I traveled to Bangalore and Mumbai to meet some friends, while working full time for my remote job. My base was still Pune, so all the stuff was still there. But since I was moving around a bit more, I had to pick the things that I wanted to carry around with me. It didn’t take much time for me to realise that all I actually wanted could fit in one backpack. That’s a couple of T-shirts, shorts and some other essentials. I usually also carried a few books with me.
I constantly moved around for the next 3 months with this one backpack. I was living in my friends’ place, mostly in their living room on a mattress with a small backpack by my side. I can’t remember if I ever felt that I wanted all the other stuff that I had left behind in Pune.
I left Pune and moved back to my hometown Jalandhar (1700 km away from Pune) to live in my parents’ house. That’s another session of Movers and Packers. Now I’ve added a table and a chair and a large box for books to this session. This is the second time I realized that I had a lot more stuff than what I used. What was different this time was that I had already lived for the past 3 months out of a backpack, so I now knew that I didn’t need most of the things that I had in Pune and that I had to give away all that stuff to not be in this position of packing large boxes again. I reached Jalandhar and threw most of the stuff that I had not used in Pune. I worked from Jalandhar for the next couple of months, until I got hired by TradeGecko in Singapore.
I packed again. This time, it was only one big suitcase and one backpack. I had already gotten rid of a lot of stuff while living in Jalandhar and travelling around in India. I was moving to Singapore (6300 km from Jalandhar), but I had a lot less stuff with me. The packing session lasted 2 hours, and did not involve any Movers and Packers agency. Way easier compared to the first two times.
Singapore has a very unique location which is well suited for travelling in South East Asia. I traveled a lot during this period, a lot more than usual. I was carrying only a laptop bag for travelling, even for a 10 day travel to Bali. I had a few T-shirts, a pair of shorts and some other essentials. I also bought a Kindle, so I wasn’t carrying heavy books around with me.
A few months later, I went back to India for Diwali. I brought my entire suitcase back home, and didn’t bring it back to Singapore. This is the almost the moment where I’ve reached the peak of not owning a lot of stuff.
By the month of September, I had only 2 T-shirts, 2 pairs of shorts, a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, a pair of shoes, flip-flops, 1 bedsheet, 2 towels and 1 suit (just in case I have to attend a formal function), some notebooks, some pens, a sketchbook, some sketch pens, some toiletries, some under garments, 2 pairs of socks, a pair of climbing shoes, a water bottle, one spoon, one knife, one plate and you know what, that’s about it. All of this could easily fit in my laptop bag.
However, I was supposed to travel to New Zealand in September. So I did buy a new shirt, a new pair of black pants and a down jacket (it is cold in New Zealand they said). All of this while still can be put in a laptop bag, I decided to buy a 40L backpack and put everything in it. This became my new go to bag for travelling.
Until May of 2019, I was wearing the same 1 black T-shirt and a beige shorts for almost 90% of the time. This has been my uniform for almost 1.5 years now. That’s a long time for wearing the same clothes every single day. Recently, I switched to wearing the shirt and pants that I bought for the New Zealand trip and made it my new uniform. This change led to a lot of people asking me a lot of questions about clothes and minimalism in general. In the next section, I’ll cover some of the questions that I get and some other questions that I ask myself in this process of minimalism.
My wardrobe used to be 1 T-shirt and a pair of shorts for the last 1.5 years. Recently my shorts tore off and the damage was not repairable. The only other clothes I had in my closet were the shirt and the pants that I had bought for the New Zealand trip. Hence I went for it.
Since its only 2 clothes, I can’t use the washing machine for these. Hence I reverted to washing these by hand every alternate day if not daily. They usually dry up overnight and don’t really cause any issues. I do use the washing machine over the weekends where I put these with all other stuff, bed sheets, towels etc.
Three. I realized that shirts don’t fully dry up overnight, so I bought 2 of the same shirts that I had. I now wash them mid week once, and once over the weekend. I think variety in clothes is good , but not needed. However, if everyone around me started wearing the same clothes everyday, I’d probably switch to wearing a larger variety of clothes just to balance the aesthetics of the world around me. I call this “a global variety with localized monotony”. Its a balance that will be maintained.
Over the past 3 years, I have come to realize that the less I have, the more free I feel. I am now not bound by location and not affected by any sale going on online or offline which is targeted to consumerism. My room isn’t a mess anymore, because there isn’t anything that can cause it. This is some good amount of time saved on managing stuff and its also better to return to a cleaner room than a messier one. The more I own, the more time I have to spend on the management of that item. Owning less gives me back a lot of time which I used to spend just cleaning up, managing, buying new stuff. Having less forces me to take care of my stuff even more. I understand the value of things more and waste less. The entire process is also financially liberating. The time and money that I save goes into me either learning something new or travelling somewhere new.
To sum it up, I think it boils down to financial and psychological freedom.
I rarely get bored of the monotony. I think it might be because the benefits of monotony far outweigh the psychological effect of boredom. I’ve also realized that whatever dopamine I get from buying new stuff fades away pretty quickly. E.g. I bought a MacBook in 2016. I was pretty excited about it and it was a big purchase decision, given that I had just quit my job and wasn’t planning to get another one for a while. I was trying to recall recently that within the first month of that purchase, the excitement of buying a MacBook had faded away and it became just another thing I had. I recently sold my MacBook and switched to a Windows machine. Its like getting out of the slavery of Apple.
I hardly even think about buying anything anymore. Over the past 1.5 years, I have bought 1 kindle, clothes for New Zealand, one camera and a watch. I was trying to come up with a method to make better purchase decisions and after thinking and reflecting back for a while, I think it comes down to frequency of use. If I think about buying something now, I make sure that the frequency of its usage is pretty high. If its daily or even weekly, I do spend money on it and I try to buy the best version of that item (e.g. earphones, laptop), even if it comes with a premium price. If its monthly, I have to make sure that it’ll be with me for at least the next 5 years, regardless of where I am. If the frequency is half-yearly or yearly, I never buy that item (e.g. a weighing scale)
Personally, I feel it would not have worked for me. An overnight change is not sustainable. The human mind would always try and push the change away and revert back to habits. It took me almost 3 years to reach this point. I don’t think the Marie Kondo method would have worked. It was a process, and that’s how it should be.
I love reading hard cover books as opposed to reading on a Kindle. I like the tangible feel that I get from the books themselves. I still have the books that I owned. They are right now in a mini cupboard in my parent’s house. I read on a Kindle now, but if there is a book that I really like, I ship it to my parent’s house to add to my mini library. If I do get to settle down one day at one location, I feel I’ll build that library and revert back to owning actual books and not just their pdf versions.
A couple of years ago, I went back home and was going through some stuff I had from my childhood, toys, cards, notebooks etc. Most of it, I would never use in this lifetime again. My parents suggested getting rid of all this. My brother said something at that point which I feel is a perfect answer to the above question. He said that “We lose a piece of history when we throw stuff away. Keeping some stuff intact is a step towards preserving and building history.”
I fully agree with this. My minimalism is more about having things that are essential to me, than about throwing away all the stuff I own. I love things to be tangible, like photographs, which are better kept printed than in a hard disk.
For things like these, being emotionally attached is fine and I do keep these intact. For a lot of things that someone might have given me, I think I try to keep the smallest portion of that stuff and get rid of most of it. The process might be emotionally a bit tough, but I’ve gotten a bit better at filtering the things that I really am attached to.
Minimalism started getting more popular after The Minimalists started talking about it on public forums. This concept of minimalism has been around for quite a while. In fact, the Japanese culture is the closest to a minimalist society that I’ve found. The term “Ma” in Japanese refers to an emptiness that is full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled. The Japanese Zen philosophy also promotes simplicity over clutter, which is what minimalism is.
In short, minimalism is not about getting rid of all the things that you own, it is more about owning things that really matter.
Cheers !
]]>If you are from India (could be true about other places/cultures but I can’t say for sure), chances are that you’ve had atleast one encounter with your friends or family where the discussion involves questions like “What is it that you want to do ?”, “How much does your company pay you ?”, “When are you getting a promotion ?”, “Can you go to a better company to earn more ?”, “Look, that guy is earning this amount, why cant you get it ?”, “You should try to grow and be successful. How do you think you’ll do that ?”, “You studied from this X college, you should atleast go to this Y company. Why don’t you try that ?”, “You should try to get to this X college because then you’ll be successful”, “You should do this X degree because that will bring you close to success”
There is no end to this list and this list differs from what background you come from.
Now why these questions are asked or why these situations happen is a separate topic that I won’t touch in this post. What I will touch though is how I think about the answers to these questions. A common theme of such situations is that they revolve around one topic in general, i.e. “Being successful”.
We might like to be in a better place in life, like to be in a better home, like to travel to a lot of places, like to do X and Y and Z and this list is endless. But we try to proxy all of these things by using just one word, i.e Success.
To answer these questions in a better way, I decided to actually go a bit deeper in this topic and understand what success actually means. Thinking about it for some time, I came to a point where I thought maybe I should start with the dictionary. Success is infact just a word, and dictionaries define what the Society(The Beast) has accepted as the meaning of a word, not really to be opinionated about it, but more to create a way to express a certain situation.
So assuming(I’ll come back to this assumption later) that dictionaries are not opinionated, I searched for the meaning of the word “Success”. And how the dictionary defines it goes like this:
“Success is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.”
Oh, wait. All this time, the way people use the word success is quite different from what the lexicographers(people who compile dictionaries) thought it meant. If you just read that definition, you’ll understand that it never said that you have to go to this specific college, or work for this specific company, or create a company, or earn an arbitrary amount of money to be successful. What it really says is that there is an aim or a goal that you want to achieve and if you achieve it, you are successful in that one particular event. Thats it.
Often people also confuse being successful to being happy. Two very different things which might be related, but certainly are not the same. It is totally possible, and historically proven that a successful person can be unhappy.
As of writing this post, I am 26 and have talked to enough people and debated with them my definition of success. At this point, being successful (in terms of what most people think being successful is) takes a lower priority in my life as compared to a lot of other things.
For me, success is nothing but a status of a task that I tried to do. If I finish it as intended, I was successful. If I didn’t finish it as intended, I wasn’t successful. Thats it. It does not define whether I was happy about it or sad, whether it was the right thing to do, whether other people should do it or not.
Success is a very personal metric that has to be tracked by you and not others. The definition changes as soon as your goals change. Others might have different goals that they consider are important to them, which does not mean that not achieving those goals makes you unsuccessful. You might have some other goals that you want to achieve, you definitely have gone through situations which are unique to your life, which shape you in a way that defines what these goals that you want to achieve are.
If I don’t get to live in a beach villa and I wanted to, sure I was unsuccessful in that endeavour. It does not really define whether I should be happy or sad about it. It just means whether it was done or not, a mere status of a task. If being in a beach facing villa was super important to me and I looked at that goal for most of my life, not achieving it will make me sad. But it does not mean that not having such a place by someone else makes that person unsuccessful. Chances are that the person doesn’t have that villa on a higher priority in their life.
I mentioned that I looked up the word in the dictionary. I also mentioned that I am assuming that the dictionary compilers were not opinionated. So should I believe what is written in the dictionary ? Maybe the person who wrote the dictionary was biased about the idea and defined it in a way that seemed right to that person. To find an answer, I searched a bit more. Here’s what I found:
The Oxford English Dictionary(OED) was one of the first crowdsourced projects, way before the term crowdsourcing was coined(sometime in 21st century). One of the key lexicographers and the also the Chief Editor of OED was Professor James Murray who asked for volunteers to submit words and meanings and started compiling them in a large list that finally became the Oxford Dictionary. When he dug deeper into the submissions, he realised that almost 10000 words were submitted by just one person, Dr. W. C. Minor. The committee insisted on honouring him. What came to light was that Minor was an American Civil War veteran, who was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane. The Surgeon of Crowthorne is a book written on this account.
Regardless of what the details of the story are, it is important to note that questioning a bit more about what appears to be common knowledge and a widely accepted truth can reveal facts which almost feel incomprehensible. The word success has been defined in a certain way today, and it will change as the society starts to use it in different ways.
Today, the word questions you about your goals, and that is the only important part. I have defined my version of success based on what my goals at this point are, and it is a moving target which will change as and when my goals change.
And I encourage you to do the same. Figure out what your goals are and define what this word means to you.
Cheers !
So what does it take to learn something ? First, you have to get it, then make sure you dont forget it.
Slow down. The more you understand, the less you have to memorize.
Design Principle: Program to an interface, not an implementation.
Design Principle: Identify the aspects of your application that vary and separate them from what stays the same.
Design Principle: Favor composition over inheritance.
Pattern: The Strategy Pattern defines a family of algorithms, encapsulates each one, and makes them interchangeable. Strategy lets the algorithm vary independently from clients that use it.
Patterns aren’t invented, they are discovered.
Pattern: The Observer Pattern defines a one-to-many dependency between objects so that when one object changes state, all of its dependents are notified and updated automatically.
When two objects are loosely coupled, they can interact, but have very little knowledge of each other. The Observer Pattern provides an object design where subjects and observers are loosely coupled.
Design Principle: Strive for loosely coupled designs between objects that interact.
Design Principle: Classes should be open for extension, but closed for modification.
Pattern: The Decorator Pattern attaches additional responsibilities to an object dynamically. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing for extending functionality.
Pattern: The Factory Method Pattern defines an interface for creating an object, but lets subclasses decide which class to instantiate. Factory Method lets a class defer instantiation to subclasses.
Design Principle: Depend upon abstractions. Do not depend upon concrete classes.
Pattern: An Abstract Factory Pattern provides an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes.
Pattern: The Singleton Pattern ensures a class has only one instance, and provides a global point of access to it.
Pattern: The Command Pattern encapsulates a request as an object, thereby letting you parameterize other objects with different requests, queue or log requests, and support undoable operations.
The NoCommand object is an example of a null object. A null object is useful when you don’t have a meaningful object to return, and yet you want to remove the responsibility for handling null from the client.
Macro Commands are a simple extension of Command that allow multiple commands to be invoked.
Pattern: The Adapter Pattern converts the interface of a class into another interface the clients expect. Adapter lets classes work together that couldn’t otherwise because of incompatible interfaces.
Pattern: The Facade Pattern provides a unified interface to a set of interfaces in a subsystem. Facade defines a higher-level interface that makes the subsystem easier to use.
Design Principle: Principle of Least Knowledge: Talk only to your immediate friends.
Pattern: The Template Method Pattern defines the skeleton of an algorithm in a method, deferring some steps to subclasses. Template Method lets subclasses redefines certain steps of an algorithm without changing the algorithm’s structure.
Design Principle: The Hollywood Principle: Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
Pattern: The Iterator Pattern provides a way to access the elements of an aggregate object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation.
Design Principle: A class should have only one reason to change.
We say that a module or a class has high cohesion when it is designed around a set of related functions, and we say it has low cohesion when it is designed around a set of unrelated functions.
Pattern: The Composite Pattern allows you to compose objects into tree structures to represent part-whole hierarchies. Composite lets clients treat individual objects and compositions of objects uniformly.
Pattern: The State Pattern allows an object to alter its behaviour when its internal state changes. The object will appear to change its class.
Pattern: The Proxy Pattern provides a surrogate or placeholder for another object to control access to it.
Pattern: The Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a compound pattern consisting of Observer, Strategy and Composite patterns.
A Pattern is a solution to a problem in a context.
Estimation should be treated as an unbiased, analytical process; planning should be treated as a biased, goal-seeking process.
In 1986, Professors S.D. Conte, H.E. Dunsmore, and V.Y. Shen proposed that a good estimation approach should provide estimates that are within 25% of the actual results 75% of the time.
The CMM (Capability Maturity Model) is a system defined by the Software Engineering Institute to assess the effectiveness of software organizations.
The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project’s outcome; it is to determine whether a project’s targets are realistic enough to allow the project to be controlled to meet them.
A good estimate is an estimate that provides a clear enough view of the project reality to allow the project leadership to make good decisions about how to control the project to hit its targets.
In the 1970s, Fred Brooks pointed out that “more software projects have gone awry for the lack of calendar time than all other causes combined”. A decade later, Scott Costello observed that “deadline pressure is the single greatest enemy of software engineering”. In the 1990s, Capers Jones reported that “excessive or irrational schedules are probably the single most destructive influence in all of software.
Managers and other project stakeholders sometimes fear that, if a project is overestimated, Parkinson’s Law will kick in - the idea that work will expand to fill available time.
The penalties for underestimation are more severe than the penalties for overestimation, so, if you can’t estimate with complete accuracy, try to err on the side of overestimation rather than underestimation.
DeMarco’s common definition of an “estimate” - the earliest date by which you could possibly be finished.
What top executive usually value most is predictability.
The only way to reduce the variability in the estimate is to reduce the variability in the project.
One implication of these variations among individuals is that you can’t accurately estimate a project if you don’t have some idea of who will be doing the work - because individual performance varies by a factor of 10 or more.
So, although I prefer other methods for estimation, I do recommend studying Cocomo II’s adjustment factors to gain an understanding of the significance of different software project influences.
The best estimation techniques for small projects tend to be “bottom-up” techniques based on estimates created by the individuals who will actually do the work.
Extreme Programming is a highly iterative approach.
Scrum is iterative.
If you can count the answer directly, you should do that first.
When estimating at the task level, decompose estimates into tasks that will require no more than about 2 days of effort. Tasks larger than that will contain too many places that unexpected work can hide. Ending up with estimates that are at the ¼ day, ½ day, or full day of granularity is appropriate.
A technique called the Program Evaluation and Review Technique(PERT) allows you to compute an expected case that might not be exactly in the middle of the range from best case to worst case.
A standardized estimation procedure is a well defined process for creating estimates that is adopted at the organizational level that provides guidance at the individual-project level. Standard procedures protect against poor estimation practices such as off-the-cuff estimation and guessing. They protect against changing estimates arbitrarily because a powerful stakeholder doesn’t like a specific result. They encourage consistency of the estimation process.
The LOC measure is a terrible way to measure software size, except that all the other ways to measure size are worse.
The effects of compressing or extending a nominal schedule and the Impossible Zone. All researchers have found that there is a maximum degree to which a schedule can be compressed.
The consensus of researchers is that schedule compression of more than 25% from nominal is not possible.
For team sizes greater than 5 to 7 people, effort and schedule both increase.
In short, planning addresses “how” to conduct a project, and estimation addresses “how much” of a quantity to plan for.
Your most powerful negotiating ally in estimate discussions is not your estimate; it’s your ability to generate planning options that non technical stakeholders have no way of knowing that.