Scaling Yourself – Do More in Less

The motivation for this post was a question by Indrani on The Test Tribe Community’s Discord Server. The question was as follows:

I always wonder how you get time to go through above all every day besides your official work?

Indrani

Here are some of the things that personally help me in doing more in less:

1. Invest in Productivity – Be it Tools, Processes, or Methods, there is always a way to improve it by investing your time in productivity.
   • Ex: I know and practice, Touch typing. It saves me a lot of time every day.
   • There are a lot of such areas in whatever we do. Find them and improve them. Some examples:
     1. Using keyboard shortcuts for the operating system, or browser operations
     2. Using CLI over GUI
     3. Using appropriate note-taking tools that can quickly transform data in other formats. I use XMind <3
     4. Using dual monitors, etc.
2. Using suitable tools and knowing how to search for tools and the resources. Check this for curation of such tools: https://testingtitbits.com/wanna-be-super-productive-check-this-out/
3. Ajay Balamurugadas (@ajay184f) told me once that there will always be someone whose 60% will feel like your 100%. So work towards being that person who does the same stuff in putting only 60% of their energy /time.
4. Write a lot and use writing as your local cache. Whenever, someone asks me a repeat question that I have answered below, the answer of it would eventually go to my website in form of a blog post so that the next time someone asks me the same question, I can instantly save 500 characters + 5 mins of time. Also, arrange your data in ways that it is easy to find data back.
5. No Zero Days: I define zero days as days where there is no learning, or reading, or writing, or blogging. A habit that I have developed over time is to avoid any zero-day. If there is a tough schedule, I make sure to do some light reading even if it is possible for 10-15 mins. This habit has drastically improved my learning rate and consistency. Eventually, this helps a lot in doing more in less 🙂
6. Find Suitable Accountability Partners: I prefer to pair with people who are (or are interested in) also going along a similar path journey. It helps me to stay focused and complete my learning/work journeys with fun 🙂
   I have a group of accountability partners whom you can find here: https://bit.ly/rptestingcircle. Want to join my club, just click on this link. It’s FREE 🧡
7. Move your body: Very important if you are a remote workers / WFH person. Doing some physical activity can boost your overall energy and focus to a huge extent thereby improving your work productivity. I do these activities:
   • Dancing
   • Walking
   • Yoga
   • Exercise, etc.
8. Know what you don’t want to do, and don’t do that: Trying out things is fine, but there are always some things or areas where you want to work. Similarly, there are areas where you don’t want to work at all. Once you know what you don’t want to do, just don’t do that. Invest that time in doing what you like to do. I regret a lot of time wasted doing things that I didn’t like doing because I was not comfortable with the idea of saying NO 🙂

Hopefully, this was helpful! Bye 🙂