Google Fonts

Fonts and typography have a fascinating world of their own. A lot of thought and effort goes into creating a new font family. In the era of pen and paper, the handwriting gave an insight into the personality of the writer, perhaps the same is conveyed through their choice of fonts in the digital era.

My initial days in IT started with Verdana - the font looked clean, nicely spaced and easy on the eyes. However, it wasn't quite the right choice for technical documents, which was the real of Arial and Times New Roman. These two fonts were --and I guess still are -- so ubiquitous by their presence, they were considered as workhorse fonts.
Another font that caught attention was Helvetica, it's an elegant font, and it looks best in the titles or headers.
Around 2007, Calibri became the default font in MS-Office products and it became the new de facto standard. Although it still remains the default font, Microsoft later came up with Segoe UI, and it has been one of my favourite fonts for the past 4 years.

Recently, I have been experimenting with IBM Plex font family, and loving it. It is functional as well as aesthetic, and provides a much wider range of styles and a better support for Unicode.

If you love typography, and enjoy trying out different fonts, the Google Fonts site offers more than 800 free typefaces.

https://fonts.google.com/

Ike

Ever since being introduced to the Eisenhower Matrix, I have been using it manually in one form or the other; so it was a delight to find a productivity app specifically based on it.
Aptly named as "Ike" -- the nickname by which Eisenhower was fondly referred to -- the app presents us with four quadrants: FOCUS (tasks that are important and urgent), GOALS (tasks that are important but not urgent), FIT-IN (tasks that are urgent but not important), and BACKBURNER (tasks that are neither important nor urgent). The user interface is sleek and intuitive and provides most of the features needed in a To-Do list, such as reminders, schedulers, and notes.
One cool feature is Location reminder: You can specify reminders about tasks to be performed at a specific location. A boon for forgetful folks like me!
The free version is good enough, but I would suggest the full version which costs Rs. 100/-. It's worth it.

App Idea: Uber for retail goods and skills?

[Disclaimer: Perhaps an app like this already exists. If so, please do let me know!]

Consider this use case scenario:

I am sitting at my desk, working. I am having a terrible headache, and realize that I need to buy medicine for it. 

Just then, my wife informs from the kitchen that we need to order some grocery items. 

My little kid is tugging away at my leg; She wants a drawing book and a set of colour pencils for her drawing class. 

(Image credit: Far Reach Inc.)

So… I open this app and enter my list: A strip of tablets, a bunch of grocery products, and a couple of stationery items. 

The app sends notifications to various shop-owners around my home. Pharmacists see the medicine list, grocery shop owners see the grocery items and stationery shop owners see the demand for drawing book and colour pencils. 

Each of them enters a 'bid' in their app. 

I see the various 'bids' on my app. Depending on the location of the shop, the brand of the product, and, perhaps my past experience with a particular shop, I select the vendors. 

For example: I need the medicines urgently, so I would select the nearest pharmacy. 

I need good quality grocery and it's not very urgent, so I would select a vendor that could be little far away but with whom I have had excellent experience in the past. 

Each of the vendors that I select gets a notification. They pack the required items and send it out for delivery. Optionally, I can also mark some items to be picked up by me. For example, for stationery items, I may select a shop that is located on the way to my kid's drawing class. 

The cost for the items delivered would be auto-debited from my account in the same app, and credited to the respective vendors' account. The app can also provide a "credit" or "EMI" option in the cases where I cannot make the payment right away.

The app would also provide a facility wherein users can give feedback about various shops. This would make the shop owners pay attention to the quality of goods and customer service. 

Furthermore, this need not be limited to goods. How about 'shopping' for skills that are available for hire nearby. For example: I need to build a website, so I can enter it in my app, and the web developers in the area would get notifications which they can bid for.

So basically... This is Uber, but for retail goods. 

What do you think?

The Eisenhower Matrix

Dwight Eisenhower was a remarkable man. He served as the Supreme Commander of military forces and one of the chief architects of Operation Overlord (the Normandy invasion) that ultimately defeated Germany and Italy in the Second World War. During his tenure as 34th President of United States of America, he consolidated the USA as an economic and military superpower, started the Interstate Highway System (one of the biggest civil construction projects in history), founded NASA and DARPA, and forewarned about the threat of military-industrial complex. 
And when he found some time from all of this, he created the Eisenhower Matrix. 

Eisenhower Matrix is a simple yet highly effective productivity tool. It consists of four quadrants along two axes (Important vs. Non Important, Urgent vs. NonUrgent) and provides a guideline for what you should for a set of tasks in each quadrant. Important and Urgent tasks must be done by you and on priority, Non-Important but Urgent tasks can be delegated, and so on.

This Matrix can be extrapolated and modified in a variety of ways depending on individual preference. This infographic shows a couple of them.

Motivation and Discipline

How to get anything done….

If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it.

1. The first is to try to motivate yourself. This is the more popular option. And, it is devastatingly wrong.
2.  The second — somewhat unpopular but entirely correct — choice is to cultivate discipline.

What’s the difference between the two?

Motivation	Discipline
Motivation, broadly speaking, operates on the assumption that a particular mental or emotional state is necessary to complete a task.	Discipline, by contrast, separates outwards functioning from moods and feelings and thereby ironically circumvents the problem by consistently improving them.
Action is conditional on feelings. You wait for the right mood to start doing stuff, it’s an invitation to the dreaded procrastination loops we all know about.	Successful completion of tasks brings about the positive state of mind that chronic procrastinators think they need to initiate tasks in the first place.
Motivation is waiting until you’re in Olympic form to start training.	Discipline is training to get into an Olympic form.
At its core, motivation is insistence that we should only be doing things we feel like doing.	Discipline aims to cut the link between feelings and actions, and do it anyway.
“How do I get myself to feel like doing what I have rationally decided to do?”.	“How do I make my feelings inconsequential and do the things I consciously want to do?”.
There are psychological problems with relying on motivation. Trying to drum up enthusiasm time and again is literally a form of deliberate psychological self-harm.	Discipline makes you feel good and buzzed and energetic and eager afterward.
Motivation usually comes in short, periodic bursts. It has a tiny shelf life and needs constant refreshing.	Discipline is usually self-perpetuating and constant.
Motivation is like winding up a crank to deliver a burst of force. At best, it stores and converts energy to a particular purpose.	By contrast, discipline is like an engine that, once kick-started, continuously supplies energy to the system.
There are situations where it is the correct attitude, one-off situations where spring-loading a lot of energy up front is the best course of action.	Discipline is the basis for regular day-to-day functioning and consistent long-term results.
Motivation is trying to feel like doing stuff.	Discipline is doing it even if you don’t feel like it.
Motivation is analogous to goals.	Discipline, in short, is a system.

Summary

Productivity has no requisite mental states.
For consistent, long-term results, discipline trumps motivation.

How do you cultivate discipline?  

By building habits.
Start as small as you can manage, even microscopic, and keep gathering momentum. Re-invest it in progressively bigger changes to your routine, and build a positive feedback loop.

Forget motivation…  What we really need is discipline.

Excerpts from a blog post by Zbyněk Dráb
Blog URL: http://www.wisdomination.com/

Also available as a presentation on SlideShare:
www.slideshare.net/gautamsoman/motivation-vs-discipline