27 May 2012

Getting things done

I may have figured this out. There are two keys to making life simpler & better.

1. Automation - Automate everything. Bill pay? Automate. How often do you need to look at your bill and dispute charges? (Look at it anyway). Rent? automate. Dividend reinvestment? Automate. Morning routine? Automate. Become that robot so everything goes smoothly. Make a checklist and follow it religiously.

2. Tolerate (and be good) at things you don't want to do but have to do - This is crucial. I'd rather be reading about family medicine or gliomatosis cerebri or something, but I have to do these evaluations. Or clean my place. Or cook for tomorrow. Or think of a schedule for later today. No thanks. Maybe one day I can automate all of that too.

I just finished reading Better by Atul Gawande. It's a good book. Reflects that quote 10,000 hours to mastery? I believe that.

A few years ago, I was roaming around my dad's office, looking at posters, pilfering sodas and coffee creamer and I came across a poster, most of which's details I don't remember, but I remember there was a huge picture of an aircraft carrier and it was advertising "carrier class" reliability (with respect to server uptime).

I looked it up a few days ago, and here we are (wiki):

In telecommunication, a "carrier grade" or "carrier class" refers to a system, or a hardware or software component that is extremely reliable, well tested and proven in its capabilities. Carrier grade systems are tested and engineered to meet or exceed "five nines" high availability standards, and provide very fast fault recovery through redundancy (normally less than 50 milliseconds).

 99.999%. That's a goal worth shooting for. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Beautifully said.