ishan_chhabra

Thank you for doing this.

A slight variation of this is a very common model in New Delhi in India.

Builders contact Single family owners proactively to convert their residence into 4 units at 4 levels with a car parking at the 1st floor.

Builders: 1. Find an equivalent rental unit for the owner, relocate them and pay their rent for a year. 2. Finance and build the 4 floors. 3. Owners relocate back to one floor and rent out 2 floors. 4. 1 floor is taken by the builder as fee for the project.

Builder got paid, owner has a new home, and has lifelong rental income as well. All round win-win situation.

This is what happens when governments and local authorities get out of the way and let capitalism work.

For seed stage startups (< 10 employees) filing H1-Bs, what kind of approval rates have you observed in the last 1-2 years? (Given the USCIS crackdown under the Trump administration).

Are you seeing a change in approval rates after the recent USCIS-ITServe settlement for startup H1Bs?

From first principles, as a manager at any level, your output is the collective sum of your team's output. You maximize your effectiveness by finding the right balance of things to do that (a) can contribute directly to the team's output and (b) improve the team's capability to produce.

Managerial activities fall into 3 key categories: Strategy, People and Habits.

Let's contrast these activities for a Level 1 manager and a Middle manager.

Level 1:

Strategy - The projects that the team needs to do are defined bottom up and top down, and the Level 1 manager's role is to split it into right chunks, allocate them and make sure they get done. The operational aspects of tracking and ensuring things get done is more important here.

People - You have 1:1's with team members to make sure they are at their personal best and are aligned with the company.

Habits - You ensure that the team is following the right practices in their day to day that help them be effective.

Middle manager:

Strategy - You try to make sense of the company (or Business Unit) strategy (both product and Go to market) and then boil it down to the key projects that your teams needs to accomplish. The important aspects here are high level definition, prioritization and allocation. You make sure that you allocate the right projects to the right teams based on their capabilities and past projects and that they are crystal clear on the the 1-2 big things they need to deliver per month/quarter.

People - You are heavily involved in hiring and staffing the teams and making sure that your managers are being effective through skip level 1:1s.

Habits - You ensure that right habits (also called processes, but I don't like that word) are being followed by teams. eg. Is the weekly planning meeting happening properly, is work getting tracked, are their development practices that helped one team which could help other teams, and so on.

I hope that gives you are better picture.

Biggest use cases for me has been events and groups.

1. Events: Facebook's provides a streamlined experience for hosting events and all my friends use it for birthday parties, house warming and so on.

2. Groups: Facebook's group experience is quite good and I am a part of 4 groups of like minded people that I get to have conversations with quite frequently.

Use Facebook News Feed Eradicator (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...) and use it only on the desktop (no mobile app).

You'll get the benefits of Facebook (real identity with almost everyone on the platform, events, groups, etc.) without loosing hours reading crap on the news feed.

No. Instead, I use Facebook News Feed Eradicator (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...) and use it only on the desktop (no mobile app).

I get the benefits of Facebook (real identity with almost everyone on the platform, events, groups, etc.) without loosing hours reading crap on the news feed.

Thanks. Taking a look.

You can DnD on the fly, but the goal is to have at least two 2h blocks booked before hand so you know there is protected time every day. You can always spend more focused time at your discretion.

This gives you at least 4h of deep work each day, which Cal Newport heavily supports in his book "Deep work" (http://forimpact.org/4-hours-deep-work-day/)

There is nothing worse than days when you are completely distracted and at the end of the day you ask yourself "What did I even do today?". This system prevents that from happening.

It doesn't, there seems to be a bug or some misunderstanding.

Can you drop me an email at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com about where you are seeing this. I'll resolve immediately.

1. Do you keep the notifications on, or shut them off completely?

2. How do you create the discipline to only open / look at Slack every x hours to go through the unreads?

When a teammate tries to reach you during your vacation, they have an option to leave a message. When your vacation ends, you get a list of all messages that were left for you.

This help page clarifies the workflow with screenshots: https://help.oliv.ai/getting-started/how-does-the-slack-auto...

The two highlights of your comment for me:

1. Morning time is easier to focus as one has more will power earlier in the day and reduced distraction from family/work.

2. Routine / consistency is key.

Thanks for an elaborate description of your experiments Tushar.

See related https://github.com/Unrepl/unrepl for some more context on how this would be useful.

I really like the idea around "ambient awareness". I'll look into it.

Currently, I've built a slack bot for personal use that integrates with my calendar where I can create stretches of times as "Focus" events and during that time, the bot helps me establish an async communication model.

The bot sets my status to "Do Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody tries to message me, they get a message that I am in heads down mode. They can then leave a note on why they were contacting me or if I they need me urgently, they can click a button and I get an immediate notification. When my focus time ends, I get a list of notes from my team on why they needed me and I can answer them one by one.

Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the times when you need it.

You can try out the slack bot at https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv

In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.

> I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult.

I have personally suffered from this far too long, specially when my work has been a hybrid of maker and manager. It becomes extremely hard to create pockets of maker time.

My solution has been to schedule 2-3 hour blocks of focused time around a project (Feature X) or responsibility (customer support) once or twice a day so that at the very least, I can create focus during those times. The key is to not over do it and get hung up on scheduling every minute, but just a few hours per day like this.

To facilitate this, I've built a slack bot that integrates with my calendar and I can mark these events as "Focus" events. The bot sets my status to "Do Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody tries to message me, they get a message that I am in heads down mode. They can then leave a note on why they were contacting me or if I they need me urgently, they can click a button and I get an immediate notification. When my focus time ends, I get a list of notes from my team on why they needed me and I can answer them one by one.

Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the times when you need it.

You can try out the slack bot at https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv

In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.