87 posts tagged with "sadhana"

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.

The niti are 4 principles that seem to be a part of not only business but also religious doctrine. Every religion says to serve others. What they don’t give is the blueprint for how to serve which I believe the world of business actually gives us which is a process of standardization, removal of wasted acts, and continuous improvement. These four principles are there whether we are developing ourselves or the world.

Yoga can mean Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Raja Yoga or Jnana Yoga. There are different paths. A synthesis of the four is a balanced path. I think these four paths are described by a deep understanding of the Hanuman Chalisa, Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. These three texts give a strong basis internally. Further taking the acts of what these say is lifetimes of work.

Third is that there needs to be a baseline knowledge between every team member. When two people are talking they need to know what each person is talking about. A core language needs to be developed between members so that everyone is speaking and thinking in a similar way. This is the process of the training a sevaka.

Fourth is the individual business units that are run. These units are small, focused on a singular problem, and execute based on a standardized methodology. My goal is to make my work better society by promoting and reforming Santana Dharma. We must do the same process of niti into society removing waste like caste and creed and continuously improving society with by strengthening dharma.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” - Peter Drucker

I have failed as a businessman because I have focused on strategy instead of culture. To win is not to get a bunch of mercenaries and tell them what to work on. It is to create a common identity, a common epistemology. The common culture defined through epistemology leads to the creation of strategies and the eventual execution. The strategy continues long past the individual who created the system.

In business then the goal is not to just work on something but to have an epistemology on how to understand the world and how to then execute upon it.

A sevaka is the base unit of that epistemology. All sevakas needs to have a common culture a common way of understanding the world and a common purpose that leads to the desired outcome. This supersedes any individuality that a person may have. It requires a common culture and understanding and thinking about knowledge.

There is a lot of prophecies in the West about Biblical End Times and such and I always freak out a bit about it, get depressed and genuinely feel like I am contributing to evil. Then I realize I am a Sanatani and it doesn’t matter. Brahman is everything, if Brahman wants to set in motion something the let Brahman do so. In Sanatana Dharma the cycles of time are endless. There is no real end. There is just change. The end of one age is the start of another.

Death in the Vedanta sense doesn’t really matter. For the end goal of all souls in to attain God. Freaking out about a potential end time based on a different theology doesn’t help much. While there will be immense violence and a depression, and more are coming soon I am not worried. We need to take it one step at a time and assume that spiritual growth happens when there is suffering as it shows the true nature of oneself. Hopefully, my true nature is good and is not a coward.

So the “end times” we will face will a period of spiritual growth as material wealth fades. So the point is not to cling to life, but to grow spiritually. It means that we have to give our best.

https://samraja.substack.com/

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.

One of my favorite apps is the Notes app. With 18,883 notes in my Done folder. It is more a todo system than a Notes app per se. However, one of the problems I have with the Notes app is that I just don’t seem to define a full project. They are always half assed and I have to continuously revisit projects. This just makes things feel like they never get done. There is no measurement of the number of projects actually completed. Basically, it is a rolling spec that always changes and is not really defined. Lastly, this all lives within my Notes app so the actual goal is never communicated to the broader team.

If you were to ask me how many company projects I have completed this year and how do I know if they were successful the answer to that question is I don’t know. I am just at a loss for the outcomes because I honestly don’t know the outcomes. The baseline for using the Notes App is I can move fast with the consequence that my team doesn’t really know what to expect next until I tell them.

The main reason that I moved to the Notes app was Notion was slow and became unweildy and to be frank I wanted a simpler system. But the problem with the Notes app is that I am the only one who has access to my notes so others aren’t really able to access them.

I completed a migration of all the websites to Cloudflare Workers from Cloudflare Pages. We were using a combination of Cloudflare Workers and Pages and deployments were starting to have issues. These include the different ways that Pages treats branches versus Workers. Anyways, seems like there are more features on Cloudflare Workers and this will simplify our deployment capabilities.

As I setup my day I find that my intellect works better in the morning and midday and by the end of the day it is spent and I do more things based on the heart. That is I don’t have much willpower by the end of the day. My routines need to follow a similar pattern in that they need to rise and fall with my energy levels throughout the day.

Currently, I have a lot of tasks that are both intellectual as heart filled mixed and matched. I need to figure out which are more based on heart and which are based on intellect. As I get tired though the day the intellectually taxing tasks are difficult for me to focus on.

Why have this difference between heart and intellect? They focus on different outcomes. When you are thinking with the intellect I need to be rational and scientific with a process defined. When I am working through the heart I need to be more sensitive and see things through love and devotion. These two modes conflict and continuously context switching between them is not ideal. So the day needs to be setup to be either Heart based on Brain based.

Based on this I am changing the order of some of my routine:

• Start the day with Bhagavad Gita
• Study Yoga Sutras
• Study Sanskrit
• Study Vivekananda, Sivananda, Chinamaya, and Dayananada
• Study Hanuman Chalisa, Ramakrishna, Ramayana and Puranas

I have been using Makefiles as long as I can remember. When I was using Ruby I was fond of Rake. I have largely stayed with Python as my language with opsZero. Using Python the ecosystem while large and diverse has the problem of being a pain to get consistency.

With uv that has changed. It is really easy to invoke binaries, have multiple Python versions and in general the speed of running things is just great. With uv a core install I am moving from make to invoke as my process manager.

Why now?

Well uvx invoke works well and I don’t have to worry about random breakages.

uv init --bare
uv add --dev invoke fabric
uv run invoke

As a process oriented person my orientation is a process oriented organization. Within these processes are certain output goals that we have that allow us to have a sustained growth. But we use process to continuously grow the business. One of the problems is that processes and measurements tend to live in different places making it confusing to understand how a business is doing. Our businesses had different methods of measurements or no measurements at all. This has lead to a businesses and employee development that to be completely frank were shit.

I am implementing Standard Operating Procedures across the existing businesses starting with DiscountCloud, Kubespot, PolicyCop and opsZero. The goal of these SOPs is to have a common process standard across everything I do. The approach I am going with this is to do more actionable tasks first then go back up the stream to the more higher level ideas.

So the standardization I intend to work on will be done in phases in this order:

1. Feature / Bug. Standardize Feature and Bugs
2. Kanban
3. SOP.
   1. Value Stream Map
   2. Routines
      1. Deming
   3. Reports
      1. WBR
         1. Output Metrics
         2. Input Metrics
4. PRFAQ
5. Assign Owners