Relentlessness Consistency As System

That Narendra Modi is an icon hardly needs be said after his public record — for those that agree or disagree. But leaving the politics apart, his utter focus on relentless , constant, continuous execution where all the dots through a large iconic long term goal seems connected to initiatives and tactics over smaller time frames until seemingly daily actions.

Its a giant choreography project that he runs, a massive orchestration system. And it’s this orchestration as a personal system of effectiveness , that has become of interest to me.

Before I dive into what I’ve devised though, an aside.

The biggest hurdle to any such system is lack of one mind through myriads of personalities within you, each with it’s own desires and flights of fancies. The key is to have a powerful — सुत्रधार. The central one that looks playfully at all the personalities spawned within and allows them their play like children, but with his fierce gaze dissolves them all when it’s time to be centered. Sometimes for some people the focus on purpose is so overwhelming, all the playful personalities are effaced completely to achieve one mind.

Unfeeling, unfettered and only bound by code of duty.

So over three years now I’ve been maintaining a Trello based system. One swim lane for each year, with cards that reflect my areas of interest.

I’ve a swimline like this since 2019. Every year it goes slight changes as my internal system evolved to do more with fewer cards. And new year begins with agendas from the last year carried forward, but unticked as new list.

The first card Goals,Strategies,Initiatives,Activities & Decisions reflects from left to right connected dots from large iconic long term goals — a single one for each area of interest, no goal overload — to annual single Strategy adopted to further the goal, quarterly 2–3 initiatives aligned to the strategy and to that attached myriads of weekly activities.

e.g. NativeOrigin— Largest aggregator of Gaushala & Vedapaathshala cow ghee and funnel for most digitally organised cow program is the iconic goal, for which annual strategy is — global marketing & distribution infrastructure. Quarterly initiative for this quarter was — get FSSAI license across several categories, IEC code, International payment gateway, international and national shipping & various kind of perfect packing. And to this was this week’s activity e.g. — make IEC & LUT actual filling. This week’s IEC was achieved on Monday itself. LuT for GST is to be actioned.

To the above mix add Decisions — right from fixing long long term goals to daily activities , there are many small are large decisions — each has assumptions, known facts, known unknowns and other criteria basis which choices for decisions are generated and one amongst them chosen with confidence interval anticipating particular outcomes. These need to be noted. When the actual outcomes arrive — they’re going to validate or invalidate the decision and recalibrate judgement .

All of that goes in that card.

Daily Tasks — is literally the micro activities that emerge from any weekly activity from the previous card. Written prior night or in the morning, these are stream of consciousness level activities as they emerge from other people creating work to which I must respond and other way around. Marked with estimated time. Ticked when finally done.

The one’s that are completed go under a header for each role.

Here’s one role — Head of Product for CurbWaste. The ticked check list items are dragged and dropped into relevant bucket to know under which hat what activities were completed. The hats themselves emerge over time.

Last year , with this structure — I completed 3556 activities.

The card Working On Self carries a slight random but large reading list of mine from which emerge thoughts and ideas — most of them related to my personal self and reflections. This is also responsible for spawning those plenty of playful personalities :P.

As noted earlier , these have been best years of my life — and so a lot of playful personalities had all the fun the सुत्रधार could bear. But he is back in control with a fierce gaze.

Incidentally the Sanskrit work सुत्रधार or सुत्र (thread)+ धार (holder) , the holder of all threads, the master of puppets. Unless the master has clear long view — the puppets will be happy playing around.