4 things learnt in the pandemic

The Pessimist Sees Difficulty In Every Opportunity. The Optimist Sees Opportunity In Every Difficulty.

2020 has been a special year to everyone. Despite losing opportunities to travel across the world, meeting people, and attending physical conferences, I was lucky to grow with tremendous learning through the challenging yet enjoyable life. I summarized what I cherished the most in my learnings as below.

I did the acrylic painting to inspire myself as well as the people who see it with an anticipation of good things to come (the light in the center of the overcast).

Get The Innovative Ideas Implemented

I worked in the industry that progresses pressingly and rapidly. Innovative mindset had occupied my head for quite some time. Inspired by the famous “creating the future” quote, I pushed myself to be up with the most advanced technology to make sure that I am always cutting the edge. I realized the importance of “implementing” the idea when I found it hard to find the value proposition of just innovating after I started to work more like a product developer than a scientist. Many times implementation is more pivotal than, or at least, equally important to, innovation. Sparkling a new idea may cost research, dialectic, critics, etc., which can usually be achieved by an individual. Implementing a good idea, however, requires inspiration, execution, collaboration, operationalisation, and maybe even more. All of these constructively force the stuff that is being built move towards something that is really useful and meaningful to its audience. And, this can only be achieved by a team. From innovation to implementation, it is not just a switch of mindset and/or skill set, cognitively it is also a transfer from self-centeredness to open-mindedness. Being a part of the team helps boost the process of implementation.

Keep The Communication Going

Pandemic makes it hard for people to collaborate effectively due to reduced chances of face to face meeting. The key to being collaboratively efficient is that whoever is involved in the work together should keep the communication going. One of the techniques for developers to keep good communication rolling is “Pair Programming”. Broadly, the communication may refer to either the conversation in the pair programming session, discussion offline in the GitHub issues tab, or messages in the communication platform. A pair programming session often involves at least two people joining into the same session, where one can take the drive of development while the other can help review it. I can be fully productive with the help of the tools like Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Visual Studio Code with a remote connection to the server, etc., to conduct a pair programming session with my colleagues. The code assets can be either lively shared or synchronized offline with the peer in the pair programming session conveniently. Pair programming keeps a proper level of tense and flexibility in the session. It catalysts the interaction between the developers in the same meeting and products positive feedback to each other. It helps spot and resolve challenging technical issues quickly even if people involved in the session do not meet at person, and therefore it maintains the agility of software development practices.

Be “AIM”

Even though communications can be kept frequent online via the collaboration tools, in-person meetings definitely do better in building trust. A lot of times, without eye contact, the messages in a talk cannot be precisely conveyed. Therefore this leads to misleading and thus downgrade of efficiency. I always appreciate working with people who are willing to place themselves in others’ situations. It’s not easy but quite essential to behave considerate when collaborating with others under the constraints of a virtual workspace. I personally suggest and apply the “AIM” principle that a personal should stick to for delivering the best communication efficiency, that is, Adaptive, Inclusive, and Mindful (taking the first letter of the three words it becomes “AIM”).

• Adaptiveness requires one to adjust the way of thinking of and/or approaching a problem when having obstacles to move forward. The general ask for being adaptive is that, understanding the difficulties created by the pandemic, a person should consider changing the conventional working styles he/she is used to. Such change may cause some disrupt degradation in terms of efficiency but in the long-term run it may create opportunities to re-gain the loss.

• Inclusiveness plays a vital role in an virtual environment where people live and work in total different conditions. For example, I don’t have kids so it may not be very good to schedule meetings with my colleagues with kids in early morning because it is usually when they take care of their kids.

• Being mindful is being aware of not just oneself but also the people (physically or virtually) surrounding him/her. Mindfulness is always considered as an effective way for stress reduction. I have to say being mindful is not that easy a lot of times. Many great people I have worked with seldom talk (they prefer spending more time on coding :D) and it is therefore hard to get their mind. This does not mean we don’t have to be mindful with them. Instead, people who have a more outgoing characteristics should create conversation for breeding mindfulness in the relationship.

Be Sensitive About Time Management

It is far easier than one can imagine to waste time when working from home. I tried hard to establish a healthy discipline when I used to work in the office - I got up early in the morning, had breakfast, took the train to get to the office, started to code or have meetings. Perfect. Since the pandemic, I have stayed at home most of the times (I still go to office once a week). The biggest challenge I found is that working-from-home soften the boundary between life and work. I often have conference calls in the night, and very often, this becomes the excuse to get up late in the next morning. As a consequence, the priorities next day need to be pushed back due to the waste of the morning. A sensible management of time is therefore important to keep oneself disciplined while maintaining the work-life balance. It is apparently not-trivial to create a completely similar environment at home to that in the office. But one can still do something to make a difference.

• Use tools to keep yourself organized. I try to use software (e.g., Microsoft To Do) to manage my “to-do” list with prioritization.
• Learn to say “no” to the meeting schedule at an irregular base - this greatly helps build the routine of work at home and thus improves the efficiency to get things done with the time frame as expected.
• Break the tasks into small ones so that time to spend on each of them can be easily managed.
• Build a strong willpower to stay resilient by “wasting” some time. Take on some tasks that are easy to tackle with, pet your cats, gaze at nowhere for a few minutes - these all contribute to emotionally strengthen the will to stay focused when back to desk.

References

Find some further readings in the following about the topics discussed above.

1. Andrei Paleyes, Raoul-Gabriel Urma, and Neil D. Lawrence, Challenges in Deploying Machine Learning: a Survey of Case Studies. NeurIPS Workshop: ML Retrospectives, Surveys & Meta-Analytises (ML-RSA), 2020
2. Cockburn, Alistair; Williams, Laurie (2000). “The Costs and Benefits of Pair Programming” (PDF). Proceedings of the First International Conference on Extreme Programming and Flexible Processes in Software Engineering.
3. Kabat-Zinn J (2013). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. New York: Bantam Dell.
4. Jane McGonigal, “Building Resilience by Wasting Time”, Harvard Business Review, 2012.