Are you tired? Are you tired of getting tired?

There have been days when I simply just crash down and don't have the energy to handle anything that matters. There were times when I had it for a good number of days and finally sat back and decided that this problem needs a solution. I can't be struggling for so long. I need my energy when I get back home so that Siya can see me far more lively and feel happy that my mom is back and not run away saying "its time to get bored now". When you are tired, nothing seems appealing, life is dull, you don't get much accomplished and then to add to the complications, you don't even have the energy to change the situation. We have just got better with ignoring our body's signal - our body needs rest but much of the time we have trained our minds to pretend that body isn't tired, so that we can be more productive. This is wrong. It ends up in burnout and less production, because we inevitably run out of energy. Listen to your body — your long-term health and sanity depend on it. Mostly we’re tired because we don’t rest enough. Yeah, I know: duh, Purwa. But if it’s so obvious, why do we ignore it? For us, waking up early, getting stuff done, attending thousand meetings, being sucked in thsi online world, watching that idiot box - all of this is important than rest. If you’re like me, you drink coffee in the morning. You might drink more later in the morning, to keep yourself energized. By the time afternoon rolls around, you’re in caffeine withdrawal. This is often why people are sapped by mid-afternoon. We also run ourselves too fast, like a sprint, when life is much longer than a sprint. Try it: go outside and sprint all-out for two minutes. Stop, breathe for a sec, then sprint again. See how long you can keep that up — most can’t go very long. Our days are like a series of sprints (I was told this by my boss Girish Nair in netCore). My first suggestion is to take a nap. If you’re too tired to take other steps, taking a nap is easy. If you can’t take a nap, at the very least disconnect from digital devices. Computers and smartphones are powerful tools, but being on them for too long tires us out. Disconnect, get outside, take a walk. Cancel an appointment or two if you can. Stretch. Massage your shoulders. Close your eyes for a few minutes. Breathe.These are small things you can do right away, and they will help you become more rested. Sleep for longer hours in the night when you are tired - trust me, internet will not miss you at all :-). Do something that you like - in my case, it would be either reading, writing or dancing. I make it sure I at least remove 30min everyday for something that I thoroughly enjoy. Take stretch breaks at work - get the blood circulating and if possible exercise regularly. Business is NOT directly proportional to productiveness. Be less busy, have more gaps between meetings - Flush and Restart.Most of us multi-tasking but the truth is we are doing mental juggling. And there is only so much you can do in a day. focus - do one thing at a time and be fully present while doing that task. This really transforms anything you do, from work tasks to conversations to chores like washing the dishes. It’s less tiring, mentally, and it can make anything you do more enjoyable. Life is less tiring when you single-task. Read somewhere that drinking more water and keeping yourself hydrated makes you less tired. For me, I like to work with interesting people and will work only on something that I am excited about. Conversations with interesting people refreshes me.


Eventually, life is not such a mess as we think. Lets not waste time getting tired. My inspiration has been Siya. Hope we maintain this child like energy and enthusiasm always!

Learnings from my first business plan presentation

The classy part about internet is that one can share their learning and make sure that the mistake done by one are not repeated by others. So last week I had my first business plan presentation to an investor. Went pretty decent but I am sure I could have done far better by just keeping in mind few things which I already knew but did not implement.

1) Back to MBA days where we were taught this 10/20/30 rule - 10 slides, 20 minutes and 30 font size. My presentation went to about 45 min and I realized that after 25min, the presentation was not required. Most of these guys are always in a hurry and guess tight on time and attention.

2) My presentation included brief introduction of the company, team, description about me, Comprehensive project description: what I plan doing, what is my product/service, what are your major competitive advantages, my customer profile, how much investment and what is the proposed funding structure like own capital, direct investments, etc and other topics like all business plan have. What I conveniently missed is is the payback period. That was a real disaster on my part. I knew it but forgot to include in my presentation.

3) Apart from the negatives stated above, I think I was very good at the visual element of the presentation. Good creativity and the graphics communicated the same ideas and values as the bullet points. A pat on the back for that :-).

4) It took to a while to tell the marketing personality in me to shut up! This was consciously decided because I really did not want to sound to boastful. One of the slides had the word "game-changing". Not that the investor complained but when I just saw it right now, I did smile at myself. How funny I could have been to include this!

5) I could have done far better in my "Call to Action" section slides. A lot of things came up in the discussion which I realized they were there but not organized well. So make sure you put in 80% of the time for this final section. This is only what your investors are interested to know.

All the best guys and hope you guys learn from this too :-) !

Oh God, I am just so busy!

When I look back today, I almost feel like laughing on myself on how busy I use to be. I think I was just serious about my ability to be a superwoman :-). I could work for 16 hours per day in office, raise Siya, cook, dance, choreograph shows, exercise, travel, clean, network, facebook, blog and on and on. I could do it all and then some. I would always think that everyone is doing it all and so can I. But if I look back, I didn't want to really do it all. Doing it all made me exhausted, it cost me friendships, it cost me my health. My busyness wasn't even a bit silly. To get less busy was not an accident but a decision I made on purpose. This surely does not mean you compromise on your career or on your family or anything of that sort. I realized that by even being less busy, I was moving ahead, reaching closer to my goal. I made the decision that a busy life wasn’t a life for me. Being a good person, loving wife, mother, an inspiration for my sub-ordinates and friend…that was the life I wanted.More than that, I wanted freedom to do things that made made my heart sing instead of things that weighed me down. And most of the times it is because you are overwhelmed that you can't figure out how to change. Do you also have one these symptoms that I suffered from:

- People would ask me "how are you?" and my answer would be "very busy", "lots of work", etc
- I can only talk to family or friends in car because I have no time otherwise
- I forget that I am hungry and its lunch time
- I would check emails, facebook, linkedin several times a day.
- Prepare lists after lists so that you dont forget anything
- Would volunteer for almost everything just to make sure I am in good books of everyone
and so on and on.

All it needed me to do is (which I learned from my boss sometime back but implemented now):
- Be unproductive for 1 day in a week.
- check mails only x times a day
- delete all unwanted mails, do not feel that if you get lots of emails (which are really unwanted), you have lots of work.
- turn off your computer when you not working
- turn everything off in the car (except the car :-) )
- help someone
- do less, be more
- Delegate and give ownership at work place to your team and peers - Don't believe that you you are the only one who can do this best, be a mentor and a guide to help them achieve their best.

And I soon realized that I could still be as productive as before without being overwhelmed about my task list.

Chaos!

As my close friends tell about me, I do generally a lot of planning. Planning the year, planning the expenses, planning the career, planning Siya's career, plan cooking, plan, plan and plan. After I have left my current job, I took a conscious decision of not planning anything for roughly 6 months especially for myself. Of course, everyday was a big chaos. But I soon realized Chaos is creativity, and creativity is chaos. They are the same thing. Creative work doesn’t happen by plan and control. I do know a good number of people who are detail freaks and who are genuises too, but I am sure they did not have a plan to come up with a creative genius idea. It came to them because they were open to random thoughts, explored paths no one else had thought to look down, took an idea they saw from someone else and twisted it in a new way. Creativity comes from a place of chaos, and it’s only when you open yourself to this lack of control that you can come up with your best creativity.

How to create a email campaign calendar

Based on feedback from the first blog post, I am covering up this topic. Ya, I am sure each one of you think that it is very simple to do this but trust me when I say that if email marketing does not work out for you, one of the few primary reasons for failure could be email calendar.


I go back to my MBA days where in Marketing I had a very interesting chapter called Integrated Marketing Communication - Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is defined as customer centric, data driven method of communicating with the customers. IMC is the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools, avenues, functions and sources within a company into a seamless program that maximizes the impact on consumers and other end users at a minimal cost.This management concept is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation.(source)

Email Marketing is generally a part of the same and hence we need to make sure that all our communication channels like blogs, online newsrooms, social media, events, print media, promotions and sweepstakes, web pages, etc are at all times in sync. The purpose of the calendar is to bridge together content and themes for all of them.

In email marketing, if you aren’t planning a week or two ahead, you’re too late. If you really want to plan a successful campaign, and avoid “blasting”, you need to give your self some time to create content, creative, landing pages and most importantly the segmentation of the list. 

What I generally advice is in the first week of every month, plan the next month. When doing this, remember the following:

1) Make the calendar transparent - Make sure it is published where everyone can see it, understand it and live it.

2) Get the accountability in place - Identify who from the marketing team owns this calendar.

3) Planning - Streamline the people who will be involved in planning of dates, content, creative and finally sign-off

4) Measure, measure and measure - Effectiveness of the campaign has to be measured so that the next one can be tuned up. Identify the person for the same.

Now what exactly do you want to send in an email? This will generally have two broad level goals:

1) Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again e.g. schemes, promotions, etc

2) Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship e.g. newsletters, new feature promotion, downtime mailers, etc

Given that you would like to accomplish these goals month on month, identify the topics or themes each month into broad categories that can be broken down into sub-categories or if the company has many products or services, dedicate each month to a different product focus or service of your company and design a collage of content ideas centered around that product or service. 

Co-relate the topic to be sent out with the business. e.g. Schemes and Promotions are best announced mid-month closer to month end so that your target gets accomplished, if a very aggressive scheme then move it closer to the month-end, feature announcements are best announced in a clutter free week for maximum attention, etc.

One more thing that I generally advice is co-relate your communication to that of your competition's communication if you have the information. This is important especially in the goal is acquisition and that is where the timings matter.

Put the topic up on the calendar and withing the remaining three weeks, get the content, the creative and the list to be targeted in place. (Please note: List segmentation is one of the very important factor to determine the success and I will blog about it in this week)

Sending emails on regular basis

Now, since I have been conducting workshops all over India on "Good practices of Email Marketing", I do come across a lot of questions related to the same. The best I thought to address them is by writing about them :-). So, here is my first post on "Easy tips to make sure you stick to your schedule!".

The question is what is the correct frequency of sending emails? Most of the times this question is simply answered by saying "don't send too frequently or too in-frequently". But the way I look at it is the frequency of the email campaign should be aligned with your business and more importantly should address the basic concept of consistency. In other words,  not sending on a regular basis is the same as sending too frequently or infrequently. Think of email marketing as a beginning of a new relationship. The more you see the person, the more will there be bonding build and more there will be trust. Now imagine that in a new relationship, you show up thrice in the first week and then just not show up at all for 3 months, what happens? Did you not just dig grave for yourself? This is exactly what happens to your recipients too in an email marketing campaign. 

I had a friend of mine who was working with a magazine and she was just sharing her working style with me. She had a calendar that was shared between all editors and writers keeping a track of all the things they are doing months or weeks ahead of time. I think this is just such a classy idea for email marketing too. Create a calendar, it need not be absolutely accurate but can simply be a guesstimate of your campaigns so that you know how much time you'll need to get specific emails together.

One more very weird and funny thing that organizations do which either causes delay or irregularity in sending emails is by not giving the creation of the email to the same person everytime. This almost like rolling out a different product each time. Simply appoint one person who own the calendar and make him accountable forthe design as well as delivery. Let the person be a shepherd from start to finish. To my surprise, this came as one of the primary reasons why there is irregularities in emails being sent out.

As a manager, I have always been taught to break up a big task into small manageable sub-tasks. Similarly, why do we try doing that with our newsletters. What does a newsletter include - new features, industry news, good news, tips, etc. Once you have a good idea on what you need to include, templatize it. Then all you will need to do is drop in the appropriate section-focused text or images every single time. The key to this exercise is not to reinvent the wheel, but rather come up with a system that helps you easily stick with a schedule.

As a business owner or even a email marketer, you don't want to compromise with your routine and would like to stick to it all the time, even during the busiest parts of the year. By putting these measures into place, you'll know well ahead of time how much time you'll need to dedicate to every single newsletter, and exactly what's needed both text and art-wise to keep your campaigns on schedule.

Prepare our kids for a unpredictable world!

I somehow feel that kids in today's school system are not being prepared for tomorrow. The school system is still the same as it was at my time when things around have moved ahead. I have myself been in the corporate world and then the ever changing online world and realize how the world of yesterday is just so irrelevant. But hey, to make them children of tomorrow, we will need to predict the future. And here’s the thing: we still don’t. We have never been good at predicting the future, and so raising and educating our kids as if we have any idea what the future will hold is not the smartest notion. So the question still arises - how do we prepare our kids (for that matter even ourselves) for the world that is unpredictable, unknown? This requires an entirely different approach to child-rearing and education. It means leaving our old ideas at the door, and reinventing everything.
I have written about few of these skills in the past on what I do with Siya but re-insist them here with respect to this context.
Encourage your child to ask questions -  My boss in netCore once said "The best thing that you can give Siya is learning how to learn". What we want most for our kids, as learners, is to be able to learn on their own. To teach themselves anything. Because if they can, then we don’t need to teach them everything - whatever they need to learn in the future, they can do on their own. Luckily, kids ask questions naturally - all we need to do is simply encourage it. A great way to do this is by modeling it. When you and your child encounter something new, ask questions, and explore the possible answers with your child. When he does ask questions, reward the child instead of punishing him (you might be surprised how many adults discourage questioning).What I have also figured out over a period of time is that anything new be it new environment, new people, new office, new industry - all of it is nothing but solving new problems. Make sure you teach your child how to solve problems. I have seen mothers, when a child encounters a problem, they run themselves to solve it even without allowing their child to even try solving it. Don’t immediately solve all your child’s problems — let her fiddle with them and try various possible solutions, and reward such efforts. Eventually, your child will develop confidence in her problem-solving abilities. I would re-insist everyone to read the blog post Ignite your Passion - How? and Effortless Parenting where I talk a lot about being passionate about something. When I’m so excited that I can’t stop thinking about something, I will inevitably dive into it fully committed, and most times I’ll complete the project and love doing it. Help your kid find things she’s passionate about - it’s a matter of trying a bunch of things, finding ones that excite her the most, helping her really enjoy them. Don’t discourage any interest - encourage them. Don’t suck the fun out of them either - make them rewarding.One thing that has made me the way I am and thanks to my parents for it is Independence. Kids should be taught to increasingly stand on their own. A little at a time, of course. Slowly encourage them to do things on their own. Teach them how to do it, model it, help them do it, help less, then let them make their own mistakes. Give them confidence in themselves by letting them have a bunch of successes, and letting them solve the failures. Once they learn to be independent, they learn that they don’t need a teacher, a parent, or a boss to tell them what to do. They can manage themselves, and be free, and figure out the direction they need to take on their own.Siya also is a kid who is happy by herself. And this is without TV or video games or any other gadgets. She can spend time just reading or writing letters (recently started this new thing) to mom and dad or setting up her room or arranging her cupboard or simply just imagining. This is a valuable skill because it takes a while to have children being happy without parents. And because she finds happiness in making others happy, she has also become very compassionate. Show them empathy by asking how they think others might feel, and thinking aloud about how you think others might feel. Demonstrate at every opportunity how to ease the suffering of others when you’re able, how to make others happier with small kindnesses, how that can make you happier in return. And then finally, teach them how to deal with the change. I believe this will be one of the most essential skills as our kids grow up, as the world is always changing and being able to accept the change, to deal with the change, to navigate the flow of change, will be a competitive advantage. This is a skill I’m still learning myself, but I find that it helps me tremendously, especially compared to those who resist and fear change. Life is a adventure and things will go wrong, turn out differently than you expected and also break all the plans that you had made - but so be it. Life did not come to me with a instruction set - that's all a part of excitement.

We can’t give our children a set of data to learn, a career to prepare for, when we don’t know what the future will bring. But we can prepare them to adapt to anything, to learn anything, to solve anything, and in about 20 years, to thank us for it :-).