Constantly thinking about work doesn’t focus my brain it scatters it and makes it difficult to focus. So I’ve split my days into three two hour chunks. Scientifically the brain can only work son intensely for a short burst of time. An hour and half seems to be about he max but I given myself a buffer of 15 mins on both sides to get going.

A problem I have faced is a guilt for not studying the shastras on a daily basis. A guilt for not studying that doesn’t lead to any positive outcome other than stress. Sometimes I want to study something else other than shastras. So I am reframing my Work schedule to learn, work and study with a focused intensity.

This means the most important spiritual tasks are my meditations. The true culmination of Bhakti and Karma Yoga. While I do want to study the shastras I will read them in focused intense manner similar to the other tasks that I have in mind. I think this will mean I can focus on finishing a complete text instead of just reading a couple of pages a day. I keep forgetting what I read if I just read a couple of pages a day.

So my work is going to be focused intensely on specific tasks:

• Study intensely a book or topic
• Memorize shastras
• Work on business tasks

I wrote previously that I wanted to cultivate devotion as pure meditation was not providing me with the Brava that I wanted. Further, just sitting in meditation all the time was leading me to get a bit antsy. Meditation creates focus, but if Bhagavan isn’t in focus, then the carnal pleasures become the objects of focus. So I decided that I want to focus more time on devotion as part of my day that takes on various forms not just meditation. What I came to realize is a few things:

1. Meditation time should be considered Devotion time. Whether I am on the meditation cushion or not I need to develop a love of Bhagavan. By focusing only on meditation I am limiting myself to potentially other forms of Bhakti. Further, 10-20 minutes of deep meditation is much better than 30 minutes of spacy meditation. I am focusing more on quality as opposed to length.
2. This devotion time I can use for other things. I need to get into the shastras more deeply and this time spent throughout the day is time I can use for this focus. Further, I can use it as a time for prayer, sastra reading, meditation, and hatha yoga study, and reading of some classics.

In order to simplify my life even more I have divided my day into two buckets: Devotion and Work. Yes, I include time for exercise, family and cleaning. But for the most part the day is simply broken into 2 hour work chunks and 30 minute devotion chunks. This radically simplifies what I need to think about at any given time. This also gives me ample time throughout the day for devotion and thinking about Bhagavan to center myself.

I still hope to meditate about 30 minutes a day, but it also gives me 2.5 hours to dedicate to studying other things.

Lastly, the Devotion time should be focused on improving one of the 8 Limbs. This is a significantly important point. By improving the 8 Limbs I am focusing on progressing spiritually not just arbitrarily reading things.

While I am reading a great many texts at the moment the end goal for all of this is to get to liberation. All this reading isn't for fun, there is an end goal in mind. There are better things to read than how to discipline yourself.

As I read these texts I am overcompensating by reading more than I need to with the assumption that I incorporate the best ideas into my Sadhana, move on from the texts that didn't provide much, and then largely focus on the sastas and the texts that were exceptional.

So if the texts in svadhyaya seem like a lot, it's because I am trying to read a lot of texts to find the best ones.

To prioritize my read texts in the following order according to the teacher:

1. Swami Dayananda Saraswati
2. Swami Chinmayananda
3. Swami Vivekananda
4. Swami Sivananda
5. Others

This order is based on the cummulative knowledge of the teachers and in many ways the teacher's ability to communicate to me through the language they use. While I do like reading Swami Sivananda, the language is a bit more dated than the jokes that Swami Dayananda Saraswati uses. In this way the texts just feel more alive and relevant to me.

I am no trying to say that the other teachers aren't good, but I am trying to prioritize my ability to understand the texts and incorporate the ideas into my Sadhana quickly.

While I love Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda’s teachings, the Vedanta Societies of the West seem to be tailored to whites and Bengalis. While I have no problem with these institutions being devoted to developing Vedanta for those who are not from Indian backgrounds this poses a limitation for myself who is from an Indian background.

The Vedanta Societies seem to have taken on a very church like demeanor which is not something that I grew up with going to Hindu Temples. While I will continue with reading and thinking about Ramakrishna and Vivekananda I think in terms of a sangh I will focus on the Chinmaya Mission. Vivekananda is modern India’s spiritual father and if I were in India I would follow the tracks of the Ramakrishna Mission. However, the Ramakrishna in the West seems to be about promoting Vedanta among non-Indians. It sets aside the Puranic literature.

While I do believe in the universality of Vedanta to all religious systems, I am Indian. The Puranic literature with the plethora of devas and asuras plays an important part in the Vedanta teaching. The Puranic texts form a moral compass from which we can then move to the more metaphysical aspects of Jnana Yoga. Unfortunately, it seems the Hindu smriti texts are not a core teaching of the Ramakrishna tradition. In this regard the Ramakrishna tradition seems to be lacking. By trying to be universalistic in its teaching of Vedanta, it limits the focus on any specific Bhakti outside of Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Sarada Devi’s teachings. While the teachings of Ramakrishna are quite illuminating I do want to study more of the smriti’s which don’t seem to have a strong focus.

So I think the natural lineage of Vivekananda in modern Indian context is the Karma Yoga ideal built into the RSS. While I will continue on reading the texts of the Ramakrishna Mission as they are quite good in terms of practice I will center on the RSS as the Vivekananda lineage.

While Chinmaya is a primarily Jnana Yoga path, the beginning of Jnana Yoga is Bhakti and Chinamayanada does seem to cover a lot of the early teachings of Adi Shankaracharya. Further, while Vivekananda built the Ramakrishna Societies in the West when there were not many if any Indians, Chinamayananda started in the 70s when more Indians were in place. So lots of the traditions that I grew up with are in place.

Anyways, from a sangh and a family standpoint the Chinmaya Mission seems to be closer to what I want to be a part of in terms of community.

The path of yoga that I have been exploring is focused on devotion (bhakti/karma), discipline (raja), and knowledge (jnana). But what I realize is that before anything can be done on the discipline and knowledge path a firm foundation of devotion needs to be established.

This I don't have yet. I have it then I lose it, I get distracted, my ego takes over. I plan for the future! The devotion aspect is quite missing or not deeply rooted and it gets pulled into the whirlwind of life.

The problem I see is that devotion requires always being in the present whereas the ego is always scheming for the future or ruminating on the past. The past is gone and the future is uncertain. But the ego always wants something or another.

I also get caught up on history, economics, politics, and all these external things that are not in my control. These are transient things. They are unreal and fleeting. The only thing certain about them is that they will occur over and over again.

What we are about to face is the Bronze Age Collapse, or a collapse of a civilization. This has happened before and will happen again. So why worry about it? Getting pulled into these things is a distraction.

The only focus should be on devotion and doing the work. Whatever happens, happens.

So I am going to focus on devotion first. The question is how to cultivate devotion.

While I have been practicing meditation and have enjoyed the technical aspects of it, after all that is what the Yoga Sutras are, the problem is that it is not cultivating devotion. I am getting mindful, but without a firm foundation of devotion, my mind is restless and distracted.

It needs to be rooted which I don't have yet.

So while I will continue developing my meditation practice, I am primarily going to focus on devotion. In one way meditation is easier once you do it a while, but devotion is harder because it requires surrendering the ego.

What I realize is that devotion is based on stories. While meditation is a process it is stories that we remember and that we need to connect with. Bhakti is pure duality, Raja is about bridging that duality, and Jnana is about non-duality. So in devotion the first step is to just love Isvara without ego. The way to love Isvara is through stories.

So the goal for devotion is to:

1. Read stories of devotion from various traditions. (Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Puranas, etc.)
2. Read the classics from various traditions. (Iliad, Odyssey, etc.)
3. Read stories about saints and devotees from various traditions. (Tulsidas, St. Augustine, etc.)
4. Practice how to cultivate devotion through rituals, prayers, and other practices.

But the focus is stories. To read stories and immerse myself in them.

I am deprecating Deming incorporating those features into this website. The core features should not live separately. Further, I am putting Deepfacts, DBAZero and PolicyCop on hold. I am trying to reduce the number of projects I am working on to focus on the ones I think I can deliver the most value with. With DiscountCloud and Kubespot, I think I have enough to keep me busy for the foreseeable future.

Deming was a good experiment but I think it is better to have everything integrated into one platform. This website can serve as the hub for all my thoughts on business so it is better for that to live here.

So the projects I am going to focus on are:

• DiscountCloud
• Kubespot
• Surya Health
• Yerra Realty

Everything else is on hold or deprecated or merged into this website.

As I mentioned before my role has changed to Organization, Process Management, and People Development. What this actually means in practice is a few very specific things.

• Organization. Constant cleaning and standardization of the organization to ensure that it is optimized for learning and growth.
• Process Management. Constant review of processes to ensure that they are growing linearly.
• People Development. This is the most important part and what I realize is that people development is the core of everything. If I can develop people well then the organization and processes will take care of themselves.

What I am finding is that people development is to not focus on the company but developing the character of the people. The goal is to not extract from people, but to develop them such that they fit a higher purpose. So 80% of my focus will be on people development.

This changes things quite a bit because I have essentially become a teacher. My role is to teach people how to be better versions of themselves. The way to do so and the way I feel like I have become a better version of myself is through the study of shastras and the classics.

So People Development will entail:

1. Practical Training
2. Work Reviews
3. Shastra Study

So if my focus is on people development then what I focus on is how to teach people to be better versions of themselves. This means that I am largely focused on lesson plans and how to structure learning. This means a large part of my work is study.

We are standardizing on Github Actions for all routines. We are doing this by running self-hosted runners and migrating a lot of the tasks that we run on Kubernetes jobs over. While Kubernetes is great, one of the problems I have found is that when the entire team is developers having a common hook into Github makes it a whole lot easier to see what is happening. Since everyone already uses Github, having the actual job processing be in Github is not a bad idea.

Further, since we are a services first company, using Github Actions workflows to manually run tasks basically creates custom workflows that make it really easy to build pipelines.

As much as I like Github Actions one of the main pains is that the cost of it is very high. So running within a self-hosted environment seems like a good way to go. However, there does seem to be a new cost model coming out that may make it more expensive, but we will see what happens.

I have migrated completely to Github Issues for all my task management. This means that all my todos, tasks, and notes are now in Github Issues. This allows me to leverage Github's powerful issue tracking, labeling, and project management capabilities to manage my work more effectively. While I do not by any means think that Github Issues is the best task management system out there, it does connect to the Git repo and Github Actions which makes it a lot easier to automate workflows.

Further, as a services company, having everyone on Github makes it a lot easier to manage tasks and collaborate. Every company is on Github so the collaboration across companies makes it exceedingly easy. While I do think that Github is getting enshitified over time AI and all, it is still a powerful platform. While I do hope that I can move to Forgejo in the future, for now Github is the primary platform for everything.

We now have a basic SOP for sakhas. The idea is to have standardized processes for each sakha that sevakas can follow. This will help in scaling the sakhas as we can onboard new sevakas and have them follow the SOPs to run the sakhas.

The initial set of SOPs are:

• Daily Routines. Daily routines that sevakas should follow to keep the sakha running smoothly.
• Basic Flywheel. The engine that each business has to keep improving and growing.

With this start we can now start to improve the SOPs over time by focusing on the input metrics and hope we can generate the appropriate output metrics.