Meet short term goal or minimise long term pain

Every day of our lives, be it professional or personal, we’ve got to deal with situations that require us to deal with it now with quick solutions or come up with a better solution and taking the time to implement it to minimise long term pain.

Ideally, there should be a balance between the two but reality tends to force us into coming up with an immediate solution to deal with the current pain. Usually, it’s because someone above you, your customer or that a life depends on it made the issue a high priority.

And it takes someone with experience in certain situation to be able to make a decision that seemingly strike a balance.

As a software creator (I don’t call myself an engineer or developer but that’s a story for another day), I lost count of the times when I have to sacrifice the solution that’s good in the long run to deal with something that the customer wants it now. And then there’s always this “we are behind schedule” speech by the management. So much so, it makes you want to roll your eyes. It can make one feel like the management is always reacting to something and not preempting and executing on a plan.

Of course, perspective matters here. More time spent in doing something means more money spent. The manpower could be better utilised to work on something else that deliver on more value (money) to the company. Not to mention, to the customer, it’s like they don’t get their money worth of goods or services on time.

However, cutting corners on a solution just so that you can deliver on time can lead to long term pain that ultimately translate to time and money wasted.

Let’s take something that I’ve experienced at work as an example.

The system my team and I are working on requires a constant patching of data in the database. It can be either to insert new records or to fix old records with updated information. As the system is still undergoing development and deployment, the data is constantly in flux. And the customer will send us spreadsheets of data for us to do matching and patching.

And instead of spending maybe a week to build the user interface and implement the business logic that not only validates the data but to allow us to upload those spreadsheets and update the database in a few clicks and change existing data all from one UI window, my colleagues have to take the time to review through those spreadsheets. Sometimes, two persons are involved. What any one of them will do is use their eyeballs to scan through the records in order to determine whether to match and update existing records or to insert. Then they will manually write the SQL scripts to insert or update the data into the database.

No doubt the scripts run fast and the database will be patched within seconds.

However, what the project lead and management didn’t take into account of the time and effort needed to validate the data manually every time, prepare the scripts and run them. And that’s not forgetting humans can make mistakes. If the data is patched wrongly, the whole system may not work as intended and then we will need to “rush” someone down to the customer office to fix that issue. Time spent at customer office is time not spent on delivering features.

And if you are someone who panics very easily, and you have to deal with such high pressured situation, more mistakes will happen.

The management of course have a defence. Their stance is that this kind of data patching doesn’t happen often. By my last count, it has happened five times since the project started and we aren’t even at the end yet. And I suspect this data patching will repeat several more times until the end of the project. How many more, I don’t know. In fact, I’ve just recently spent half an hour to de-associate the relationships between two datasets because it wasn’t patched properly. Mind you, those de-associated relationships need to be rebuild again once the data has been reviewed and cleaned up again.

I may not be in a management role but it’s obvious to me that taking the time to build that user interface and implement the necessary business logic to help us match the data, validate the data and update the database in as few click as possible is the better option here.

And given what I know about the future plans of the company with regard to this project, the current way of doing things is just not scalable. Oh, I raised the point a lot of times but I’m always overwritten. Well, mostly.

This is what I mean by meeting short goal or minimising long term pain. There are many other examples that I could think of but this is the clearest one to me.

In conclusion, always strive for the mid-point between meeting short term goal and minimising long term pain by evaluating as much data point as possible before making a decision. It’s especially the case if it’s something that affects your persona life and you don’t have a higher up to answer to. And depending on the culture of where you live and work, you can either fight to the death for what you believe to be the right course, find a compromise or swallow your pride and let the other party win. In an asian context like the one in Singapore, you are better off choosing the last approach if you are an employee at the bottom of the ladder or an underling. Or management will make your life miserable.

Time is painfully limited but…

We all got the same 24 hours.

It is easy to lose track of time when we are busy or when we aren’t being intentional about how we spend the time. For most of us, we probably are like that. And so, we would probably complain about the lack of time to do the things we want. It’s painful for us to realise one day gone just like that.

By we and us, I mostly refer to myself.

And that probably will get a certain judgmental look from highly-productive people because they are able to get more things done during that 24 hours and get sufficient sleep to repeat the cycle the next day.

But you know what?

We are all different, have different strengths and weaknesses. So it’s okay that we probably won’t be able to be as effective at certain task as another person. In fact, it’s stupid to compare ourself with another person. Always do you. If not, you are going to make yourself miserable as fuck.

What you can do is to be very aware on how we spend the time and where did we spend it on. Then seek to improve on your efficiency at doing some of the tasks if necessary. It’s important to take ownership of what you have done and your failures. And never ever complain about your lack of time.

P.S. I was inspired to write this because I found myself spending way too much time on my Nintendo Switch playing Diablo 3, watching Netflix, and then realising I got about ten books that I bought but never got around to read. But it’s the holidays season. So I guess it’s okay to let loose a little.

The moment you realise…

As individuals, we are all unique. We got our own way of seeing the world, approach the world and behave. Due to that uniqueness, it can be quite hard to find someone you can connect with. When you do find someone who can, you wonder where has this person been and why he or she hasn’t enter your life earlier. And then, there are some people for some reasons just hate you as a person and their obnoxious interactions with you can make you wonder why do they exist. They just do and have their own clique in life.

And what’s my point?

I’m getting there…

Throughout my life, I have lived a pretty sheltered life and taking very little risk when it comes to my finances or education. As much as I tried to make my life my own, trying to be a trailblazer of sort, I kept falling back to making the “safe” decisions or choices because it all boils down to: how did it make me feel? And usually, after I made the decision, I feel like crap. When that happens, I had to backtrack to make another one. In part to make me feel good again. It’s especially so if it is a brand new decision that has repercussion on my life and it requires me to use information that I have yet acquired through experience.

For people who are more rational and has been through enough adversity tend to be able to stick to their guns and follow through on their decision. No doubt they have fears and anxiety of what the future holds, but they are better prepared mentally to deal with that due to what they have been through.

In my case, this flip flopping nature of my decision making process causes a lot of misunderstanding with people around me. And I don’t blame them. I simply don’t have the life experiences enough to toughen up my mind or gave me enough data points to make a good decision. And my mind never fails to worry about thousands little things that could go wrong…this is why I can suffer from insomnia relatively easy.

So if you don’t call that neurotic, I don’t know what to call it.

But that’s not to say I have not make decision that make me uncomfortable and then following it through. It’s just that I’m a little slower than most.

And you see what I just did?

Explaining myself to the world. Apparently, this act tend to piss people off. I have been told to just shut up and stop.

When it happens enough time, I have to wake up and realise I’m the square peg in a round hole due to my life circumstances stemming from nature and nurture. Most people, which isn’t a lot, I know found it irritating or frustrating when interacting with me. But that it’s all in the past. I have the power to change that.

For a start, I’m going to make a conscious effort to catch myself before I go on explaining my thinking to another person. It’s my life and I don’t need to justify the choices or decisions. No one wants to hear it and it’s not their fault. Everyone is a little busy dealing with their own crap in life. At the end of it, I only have to answer to my eighty-year-old self. As long as I don’t regret the choices I made (and I have that a lot lately but I can’t change those), I’m fine.

The other thing I also realise is that I have to stop. Stop announcing decisions I made with my emotional centre to other people. I’ll admit it will take a great deal of conscious effort not to make that mistake. Emotional decisions are fickle and can change very easily. In this hyper-pragmatic, rational world (roll eyes If it’s rational, we won’t have wars or that the stock market won’t fluctuate like it does), decisions have to be made with clarity and assertion. Once made, the person has to follow through till the end. The action taken has to either result in a success or failure before making course correction. Failing to do that, you don’t get to command respect.

And I’ve done emotional decision making for so long and often over the last few years that I believe I lost my credibility with people. It’s fine. No one is at fault here.

There are people who call me a fake news now, putting me as part of the global phenomenon just because of my emotional decision making process. But hey, it’s cool now that I have gone global.

Now, if there’s a genuine desire to understand me better because you care, then I will help you understand me better. And that’s if you ask me. Otherwise, I will keep my mouth shut. Or we can go on the journey together because I don’t understand myself fully either. But if you feel like the journey is taking too much of your time or energy, you are free to go. And I won’t blame you afterwards if you continue to misunderstand me or my intention.

All this realisation is actually pretty freeing and I finally can start being myself without worrying too much.

Becoming aware of the neurotic mind and overwriting it for a happier self

Let’s imagine that you grow up in an environment where your parents engaged in negative self-talk in front of you, self-punishing behaviours, call you stupid or brainless when you do something wrong, or continue bring up the past mistakes you made every time they are not happy about something you did today.

Then as you got older, you engaged in similar activities without being consciously aware of what you did.

And that’s all because of nurture. After all, you were just a child and your only true role models are your parents. Even when you have friends, they won’t be there to influence your life every hour of your life. So you will just learn that what your parents do is normal, therefore correct.

As a result, you don’t question all these learned behaviours. Until someone pointed them out or came to realise it one day because of what you’ve read or heard people talk about.

And you know what?

Those activities I mentioned earlier actually examples of being neurotic. And it actually leads to poor quality of life. You are never happy. And it can actually contribute to the development of “perfectionism mindset” in a person.

I know because that’s the kind of environment I grew up in. I seek perfection in my work. Was never happy, constantly depressed. Hated the world. And it was during my research to understand myself better that I came upon various psychology articles and essays about being neurotic and the neuroticism personality traits. It was then I realised I’ve got a problem.

So over the past few months, I have actually pushed myself to engage in self-compassion and self-care. It was hard at first since it was unnatural for me. But if you keep doing it, practising those skills for a while, it’ll become easier. Just like training yourself to be able to lift certain weights or to run a marathon.

And it took me a while before I was able to catch myself before I engage in such behaviours. And these days, I can see my mind doing all the weird negative self-talks and punishment-type thinkings. But I will myself not to act on them. I simply acknowledge those thoughts and then push myself to focus on the present. Because at the end of it, you can’t control the events that happened but you can control how you react or respond to those events.

So I actually feel happier compared to when I was in my early twenties and late teens. I also recognised it’s still a work in progress because those negative thinkings and self-talks hadn’t been completely eliminated from my mind.

The other thing that I also realise is, I was actually able to focus more of my attention to creating the kind of life I want because my mind isn’t cluttered with all those bad thoughts. With that, the friction to complete the micro-goals that will put my closer to my destination is much lesser.

Knowing when to take a break

If you are a creator, there will be days when you know you just isn’t feeling it. No matter how much you push yourself and force yourself, you can’t seem to make that piece of work you desperately needed to get out.

And one of the biggest reason is pressure. You are forcing yourself to create something because you feel obligated to do so. I know because I am forcing myself to write at least one essay or post per day. I didn’t want my blog to die off for one day without new content. So I went and try to write a horror fiction. There was this idea that was stuck in my head for the past few days and I thought why not find a way to churn out a short story based on that idea. After nearly an hour, I only managed to get two hundred words out and started to feel so frustrated. So I stopped.

After that, I was thinking to myself: It’s fiction writing. It’s supposed to be my thing. The one thing I’m good at.

And that was how I killed my own writing. By pressuring myself.

Then a funny thing happened.

The idea to write this particular piece came to life. I just feel like I should share it.

And you know what’s the other thing that could just as easy kill your writing? It is your Input. An article written by Annie Mueller on Medium titled, “What’s Blocking Your Creative Output?“, talks about how the wrong kind of input actually kills your creativity.

And I’ll admit, these last few days, I have been feeding myself junk by reading a whole bunch of articles on Medium ranging from productivity to self improvement to business. And what the hell? Business? I actually have no intention of running my own business. At least not yet. So you see, reading junk actually stopped my mind from thinking about new stuff to write about.

So if you realise you are somehow stuck and don’t have any more creative juices flowing, maybe it’s time to ask yourself if there’s something wrong with your input. Maybe it’s time for you to purge those junks out of the creativity pipes.

But, I suspect you must be wondering how the hell I wrote the article, “Singapore, not as green as you think” if I’m out of ideas. Well, environment is something I cared about and it was stuck in my head for the last two weeks. I finally took the leap to write that piece yesterday and challenge myself to write an essay about Singapore. After all, I’m born and raised here so I thought I would know it better and not sound pretentious but it didn’t stop me from experiencing some kind of anxiety attack when I hit published.

And now I know, it’s time for me to take a quick break from writing and do something new. However, it doesn’t mean I stop completely. My mind is always churning out ideas. As soon as I encounter something novel during my day, it will send a spark to start the engine.