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#reflection

Everywhere we look, be it blogs, articles, TV, printed media, books ... everyone is talking about increasing productivity, self-improvement, the best health plan we have to try, next gadget that will make our life easier ...

Isn't all of this there just to further fuel the modern capitalist consumerist machine?

Are we setting the wrong goals and priorities in life?

After my family suffered a great personal loss last year, I started asking myself some important but very uncomfortable questions:

• You are in the second half of your forties, how much time is left?
• Are you happy with your life?
• What did you achieve until now, is it enough?
• What is the meaning of it all?

I didn't find answers to all of these questions, but I think I found a most important goal of them all.

Prime Directive: I want to live at least 90 years and enjoy this time with the people I love.

Put against the other goals I had until now:

• How do I earn more money, to be able to afford a vacation in Japan?
• Get a grip on the new technologies, that could make you obsolete.
• Speed up, organize yourself better, improve presenting skills, ...

it makes them look pale and unimportant.

I have a feeling that most of my “old” goals were dictated externally, by a society that is itself driven by the agenda of capitalism (constant growth and increasing consumption) and doesn't have the benefit of the individual in mind. Even though some of the thinkers, influencers, bloggers ... think that they are actually doing and preaching something “completely different than the evil capitalists”.

I am currently in the process of rethinking all my goals and actions, that do not align with the prime directive from above. Let's see where this brings me ...

#leadership #reflection

This is it. Final post of the series, as I think the transition is now over. In this post I will try to recapitulate what I achieved, learned and messed up in the last 48 months.

Achievements

Of course one of the perspectives on being a successful team lead are the things you contributed to the company:

• I have hired 15 people to work for me directly and on-boarded 4 offshore engineering teams (6-8 people SCRUM teams) in order to be able to reach the project goals.
• Under my supervision the teams have defined testing processes and methods that successfully passed the ASPICE assessment.
• We also build a testing infrastructure including some 50 HiL benches, integrated some off-the-shelf testing solutions and developed additional tools, pipelines etc., needed to “run the show”.
• Last but not least, we delivered the results needed from us and helped the project reach it's first carline SOP.

The fairy tale of managers not needing technical experience

There is this misconception that in order to be a manager, you just need to be able to create some sort of a plan for your team and then push them to reach that plan. In order to do this, you have to set up KPI's and track them daily. You do not need to understand what they are doing in detail, as your KPI's will give you insight if something is going wrong and then you correct it. You should empower your team to do their technical work and make decisions, which will keep them motivated and performing.

In my experience it doesn't work like that. If you are working in R&D and are leading technical teams, you need to understand at least 70-80% of the technical work and ideally you have done that, or similar work, yourself before. This is why:

• Your employees will need on-boarding, guidance, understanding, help ... with their technical tasks. It's not possible to delegate all of these things to other technically more skilled people in your team. Of course you should get seniors to onboard and mentor your juniors, but if you exaggerate, then your seniors will at some point complain that they can not do their own tasks.

• Your employees will need help in setting priorities and making decisions. This is almost impossible, if you do not have enough technical experience to do this properly. Let's take for example that your team is responsible for testing some software:

  • If everything is 100% passed (which I would highly question 😆) , decision making is trivial.
  • If a test report shows 80% – 20% rate, they will probably come to you to make a decision. How will you do this, if you do not have either the experience to make the judgment yourself or know someone, who can help making the judgment?

Manage expectations

Before I started this job, one of my mentors told me to get prepared to be a complain box. This is a sentence I repeated a lot of times in my head in these 4 years and to other people, when they asked me about my key learning's.

Basically a lot of people (your employees, your boss, your colleagues, employees from other teams, people from the company you didn't know existed ...) will try to dump their complaints, problems, requests, tasks etc., on you. They'll call you up, invite you to meetings, come to your desk, send you E-Mails, message you ... put your communication channel here ..., and try to somehow engage you in stuff that's bothering them, that needs solving or demands your support.

This simple strategy should help you not overload yourself and actually focus on delivering what you are responsible for:

• Who is the person contacting you? If not on your priority list, ignore them in a friendly way 😝.
• Listen or read carefully, but do not respond directly no matter how many URGENT, ASAP, CRITICAL keywords are contained in the communication.
• Take a minute to think about the content and ask yourself “I am the first responsible for solving this?“.
  • If your answer is a definite YES, then add it to your TODO list.
  • If your answer is a NO or UNSURE, just don't do anything and wait it out. If it really is your responsibility, it will come back again either with more details or more push by people payed better then yourself.

You can not solve all the problems that your team members, projects or company have. This is what the over-excited and over-motivated me from 4 years ago had to painfully accept, when I moved into stress levels that could have led to a burnout. You have only 24 hours in a day and 8 of those you should sleep. The rest needs to be divided between work tasks, private obligations, quality time with your loved ones and time for yourself. If you do not take time for yourself, you will burn out.

Accept errors

During my tenure so far not everything that I wanted to do or implement in the team worked. Sometimes I did something and it worked, e.g. team accepted it and it started bringing positive impacts. But a lot of times I also had to give up on something that looked good to me, but the people just didn't want to accept it. Of course you could try to push it thru with all the might, as you sometimes really have to do, but you should really be careful what battles you want to fight this way. At the end, you should not become a dictator ...

Accepting that something didn't work and openly saying “Hey, I wanted us to try this but it didn't work because ...” has two positive effects:

• You show the team that their opinions matter, dictators never last long.
• You show that you are human and make errors, which signals your people that it's OK to try something and fail, which is a path to continuous improvement and innovations.

Also important ...

There is a ton of other stuff that is important and you probably read it somewhere else as well, so I'll just list it and not go into details:

• Build yourself some sort of productivity system like GTD or Second Brain. I used the Brainiac. You will have more tasks, projects, notes, E-Mails, messages ... than you can process in your head. Make sure they do not get lost and you can surface them when needed.

• Treat peoples private life with respect and understanding. Any sort of stress or problems in personal area will directly influence the employees performance. Give them space and time to deal with it and signal that you are fine if they temporary cut down on their tasks in order to sort out their personal life. They will (mostly) come back stronger and more motivated to push things forward.

• Panic and stress are infectious. Of course your employees will see that you are under stress, as we are all humans. But try to control yourself and openly communicate, e.g. like this “It's hard currently, too many things going around. My TODO list is bursting. I need some time to go thru all of this, maybe I will not be as reachable as usual but bear with me, we'll get it done.”, to keep the panic from spreading.

• Keep a keen eye on the small changes in peoples behavior and communication, they will give you valuable pointers on what is happening in your teams. People will mostly not talk openly in a team meeting, if something dodgy is happening on the personal level in the team. But there will be some side looks, strange comments etc., that will give you valuable pointers for your next 1:1 sessions.

What lays ahead?

There is a lot of tasks, projects, problems, errors ... laying in front of me in the future. But I am not over-excited, over-motivated, scared, overwhelmed, inexperienced ... anymore.

During my tenure as a team lead, as well as in my previous roles as project lead and developer, I gathered experience and confidence needed to tackle those things.

Will I get it all done correctly? Definitely no, but this is also part of the journey and a possibility to learn something new.

#emacs #brainiac #emacscarnival202506

I am glad to announce that my custom Emacs configuration Brainiac has reached release status. I am now using it without major changes since a couple of weeks, so it's time to freeze this version if other people want to use it.

Introduction

Why do I aim to have a minimal configuration? I am a perfectionist and tend to get lost in details. When a configuration gets larger, I loose time by tweaking it over and over again. By keeping the configuration minimal, I reduce the danger of going down the Emacs rabbit hole and increase the probability that I will focus on more important things in life.

Brainac is aimed to be a simple and easy to understand configuration for task management and note taking. It's not aimed at programmers, but at people trying to implement a workflow like GTD or build something like a Second Brain without overcomplicating the process, e.g. connection graphs, AI support etc.

The configuration is very opinionated, as it's based on my workflow. I am not trying to make it generic, just clean and easily extendable. I stick with the built-in packages in order to reduce dependencies and complexity.

Short description

Noteworthy stuff: – I picked up some sane defaults from multiple sources, like turning on the revert mode, enabling smart parenthesis, tuning of built-in completion engine etc. – The tasks and notes should look nice and readable, because of this I use the modus-operandi theme and style some things additionally to either push them to the background or to make them stick out more visually. – You can easily capture tasks, webpage links/quotes (using org-protocol) and screenshots (using org-download, org-attach and flameshot). – A simple journal with timestamped entries is configured in the capture templates. – Notes are also captured over a template and you can assign categories to them. Format is inspired by Denote. – You can export the notes to HTML (uses custom CSS) or Markdown. From there you can print to PDF or other formats. – Additionally to normal org-clock functionality, you can define a special task and clock in it per default with C-c j w. I use this to clock my work time.

I will not go deeper into details of the configuration, go thru it and explore. Most of the stuff can be understood by reading the help on variables and functions.

Currently I am using the configuration with Ubuntu Linux LTS 24.04 KDE and Emacs 29.3. If you use something else, you will probably have to tweak it.

Structure and install

The configuration consists of two major files: – brainiac.org which contains the configurations that will be tangled to early-init.el and init.el, – brainiac.css a simple CSS for the exported notes.

Unpack the zip file from here to your HOME folder ~/brainiac. You will get the structure like this:

~/brainiac/
    -- config/ <- this is where the configuration files are
    -- notes/ <- this is where all notes go
    -- attach/ <- this is where the attachments land
    -- export/ <- this is where the exported files are
    -- main.org <- this is the main org file to use for tasks, projects etc.

After unpacking open the brainiac.org and tangle it.

External apps needed are: – Org Capture for Firefox – Flameshot

Workflow

I provide a template for main.org that is based on the workflow I use:

• Top level headings are categories in my life.
• Under top level headings I create tasks and put them thru the states TODO, PROG, WAIT, DONE or CANC to track their progress.
• I use tags to provide more context to tasks, e.g. work, names, project relation etc.
• If a task comes from an Email I deal with this by using the following form TODO @ "Subject_of_the_Email", then it's easy to find it in my Emails when I need extra information on the task.
• Your daily agenda is at C-c a n. That will show you scheduled tasks for today and deadlines coming up, I work on that first.
• Every task that is not scheduled or has no deadline, is shown in a backlog below the day tasks. I use priorities to sort this backlog and give me clarity on what to work next.
• Use PRJ tag to mark your projects that will be broken down to tasks. I usually use statistic cookies at the end of the name of the project to show me an overview of tasks in the project.
• You can have a look at your projects with C-c a P. I inspect the projects once a week during the review, to see if some of them need attention, e.g. they are stuck C-c a #.
• When showing notes to other people I usually do a quick C-c C-e h o which exports the note to HTML and shows it in Firefox.

Open for feedback and improvements

If you have feedback, improvement propositions etc., just reach out to me.

#emacscarnival202506 #brainiac

Somewhere during the COVID pandemic I started checking out #emacs, because of a talk I saw on #orgmode that tickled my curiosity.

In the beginning I didn't dig into the manuals, as you should do, but started using the editor directly and customized stuff by integrating code snippets from different posts and blogs I stumbled upon, while looking for solutions for problems I faced.

Over the years as my proficiency grew, so did my Emacs config. Although I regularly removed packages I didn't use, at some point in time I did task management, note taking, blogging, news reading etc. with Emacs and kept on bringing in new packages into the mix. I didn't really reach the state of bankcruptcy, but I gathered some #elisp snippets I didn't understand or simply didn't remember why I got them at all.

So in order to force myself to finally start reading the manuals and to learn some proper Elisp, I started hacking on a new configuration for #emacs ... as this is what you do as an Emacs user.

The goal of the Brainiac configuration is to minimize the configuration to the bare minimum I need (e.g. tasks and notes) and try to stick to the built-in packages as much as possible. If I need something extra, I would try to implement it myself.

You can follow how the configuration progresses here: Brainiac. It is already fully functional and I am using it daily for private and work related stuff. When it reaches v1.0, I will write about my workflow that defined the configuration.

#health #habit

As a lot of other peoples, I am interested in self improvement. So I read related blog posts, books etc. All of these sources are filled with examples of good habits one should develop, in order to be healthier and happier in life.
Here are some I tried and failed at over the years:

• Wake up earlier.
• Brush your teeth twice a day. (Yes, I know …)
• Eat healthy, e.g. less fat, meat and alcohol.
• Keep in shape by doing sport regularly.
• Reduce stress in your life.
• Read more books.

But this isn't easy and I failed sooo many times, which than led me to be even more unhappy with myself.
For example, multiple times my weight over winter or in stress periods increased above 85kg. That is 10kg more than it should be. So in the spring I would start doing some diet (joined my wife doing Weight Watchers program, did intermittent fasting etc.) and go cycling or jogging 2-3 times a week. This mostly led to me loosing those kilograms that were too much, but as soon as summer was over … I would start faltering on the diet rules and reduced, or even stopped, doing sports. This led to me gaining weight again and health issues like back pain coming back. The same applied for e.g. reading books. During vacation I would read sometimes 2-3 books in 10 days time, but as soon as I would come back home, I stopped.

Use productivity hacks to create habits

As I am also caught up in the productivity hamster wheel, of course I thought: “Hey, let's set some personal goals and then use Org to track them.”. It's working so good for me in the work environment and also for tracking personal tasks, so why not? I created a READ and READING keywords to track my reading habits, had a regular TODO of the style habit to remind me to do sports, had the same for brushing my teeth in the evening (morning was never a problem 😝), started tracking what I ate everyday, measured my weight every day, set my alarm 30min earlier then before … you get the picture.

What happened? First couple of days I was energized, pulling my agenda every day, writing stuff down, marking the tasks DONE … and then I started missing some of those tasks due to changes needed for family or work obligations … or didn't manage to get up earlier … so I pushed more and my stress level got higher, as I didn't get my planed tasks for the day done!! This didn't really make me feel better, as I think I have a mild OCD and there was that agenda view constantly reminding me that I failed.
At this point I was already falling of the wagon again, e.g. I started eating junk, my weight started going in the wrong direction again and I was burying myself in work (this was around the time I got my promotion). So I could say to myself: “Yeah, of course I do not have time to do those habits, look how busy I am? I just need to finish this project, then I'll restart the habit tracking again.”.

And then I had a doctor's appointment

After you get over a specific age in Germany, you are entitled to get some health checks that health insurance covers. Somewhere around beginning of 2022 I got a letter from them informing me, to schedule an appointment with my doctor and get my health checked. Of course I was going to the doctors before, but that was always when I was sick, e.g. a cold or similar. But this time it was different … I got my blood taken, weight and blood pressure was measured, they made an ultrasonic scan etc.
Couple of days later I was called in to discuss the results with the doctor. She wasn't beating around the bush: “You are too fat and your blood values show it. If you continue with this, you should start taking pills to regulate the fat in your blood.”. I was shocked and refused taking pills, assuring her that I'll get it under control.

I did try eating healthier and doing some sports, but my weight was not going down. None of the of the weight loss strategies that worked before, were working anymore. It's probably related to how the metabolism changes with age. It took me almost 18 months to figure out, that it's not working and that I need something more drastic.

Drastic times need drastic measures

In June 2023 we went on a vacation in Greece. Beautifully country with a lot of great food. I am a foodie, part of being happy is eating delicious food. So I indulged in the sun and good food. But me and my wife had a plan. When we come back, we want to go on a 11 day fasting based on the food package from this one guy from Serbia (that's where my wife is from), who had a pretty convincing story of his life.
Normally I am really cautious about this stuff, but my wife was insisting we try it and see if it helps. So we did. You get a package with food and a menu for 11 days from this guy. The food is basically grains, rice, beans etc. and then you add fresh seasonal veggies and fruit to it. So basically you shock your system to Vegan food, as there is nothing animal related inside. Everything is measured and weighed, so all you need to do … is keep at it for 11 days 😆.
The first couple of days, we joked a lot about it but kept on cooking the food and preparing the tee (multiple times of day, you have to drink different pre-mixed tees). Then the crisis hit. It was Friday and Friday's we make and eat pizza in my family. As my wife didn't want to make it, kids got one from takeout. As this thing came, I was just coming from a heavy day in the office … and I flipped out 🐯. I just wanted a piece of that pie … and it was so hard not to take it, that I went to bed straight there and then. As I was tired, I fell asleep very fast and as I woke up in the morning, I was so proud of myself!!

We kept at the diet for the rest of the time and lost a couple kilograms with it. After I saw that I can eat good without eating meat and animal products, that I actually had more energy to go out for a run then before and that I didn't have any digestive problems anymore, I never went back to my old diet completely.
I moved gradually. After the shock-diet, I allowed myself to eat the old diet with meat maximum of 3 meals a week (e.g. around 15%, if I count 21 meals per a week). For over year and a half now, I am mostly eating vegan or vegetarian food and I went down to maybe 1-2 week to eat something that contains some meat. I kicked out salami and all other processed meats of my plate. But I am not 100% vegan or 100% strict on it. When I cook, it's mostly vegan and vegetarian. When we go out, if there is a vegan or veggie alternative, then that's what I'll have. But if my mom made something from my childhood that has meat inside or I get a nice piece of a home made cake, I won't refuse it.
I have “messy Friday evenings”, where anything goes. If I see e.g. something with meat I would really like to eat it, then I keep myself back and say “you can have it on Friday”. When Friday comes and I still want it, then I go and get it. But mostly I do not want it anymore and home made pizza is my go to junk food on Friday. The same applies, if we are on vacation. I would then eat more food, that I usually do not have but as soon as I get back home, I return to my V&V diet. I also try to keep a 16:8 intermittent fasting schedule when eating, which in the meantime is not a problem at all. Sometimes I go over 16 hours and don't even notice it, if I was concentrated on something.

Some 2 months ago I had my repeated check up. Standing there with 10kg less on the scale and getting the blood values back that were all in green areas, I just felt happy and proud of myself. My doctor compared them with the last results and just gave me a surprised nod 😃.

And what about other habits?

As I saw that I managed to completely change my diet, everything else looked easy.

First I stabilized doing sports, mostly jogging, twice a week. Then I started doing some stretch and body weight exercises a couple of days in the week, when I felt like it … in the meantime I do them every day and I go either for a 5KM run or walk five to six times a week.
Over the years I reduced my internet usage a lot, but after I read Digital Minimalism, I figured out that Netflix (I love movies!!) is the reason why I do not read books at home or why I can not get up earlier. So I decided to watch movies only on the weekends and after a couple of days, I started reading books every night and due to the fact that I do this in bed … it felt only natural to clean my teeth before going to bed 😝.

What now?

In order to keep track of the stuff I am doing, I have a checkpoint on my weekly review list to gather statistics (yes, I use Org for this of course), e.g. how many days I did sport, how many days I ate something with meat, did I finish a book etc. But I do not track this daily, just reflect for a minute or two on it during the review. This moves my mind in the right direction to say to myself either “Great work man!” or “This week you were lazy, but it's fine. You'll do better next one.”. Reading some blog posts from Leo Babauta put me on the path of being gentler to myself, that helps as no one is perfect and we are ours biggest critics.

Some habits settled down, some are still weak but I keep at them. One important thing I learned is, that there is no stopping. You can eat more e.g. on vacation, but this is a limited time that will end. If I would start allowing myself more of it during the normal week, I would definitely fall back. It's just how a mind works. But on the other hand, after these almost 2 years with the current diet, I do not feel that I am missing anything. I still enjoy every meal I take and I even think I enjoy it more then before. Also the other habits I have in the meantime reinforce my wellbeing and trust in myself that I will keep the healthy habits I have and even create new ones.