Update: Reflections on my career in Software Engineering & Management

Two years ago around this time, I explored my progress with respect to my career choices by performing some self-reflection, by asking myself some searching questions. Later I shared my findings on this blog, in this post: Reflections on my career in the hope my story could resonate with people who may be experiencing similar challenges. I'm glad I did so since people did actually reach out, thanking me for the post & providing feedback.

Anyway, two years have since passed since I last shared the cross-road I found myself at, since I'd started my journey with this path in mind...

a) Software Team Lead -> Software Manager -> Senior Manager -> VP -> Director -> CEO

b) Principal Engineer -> Senior Principal -> Technical Director -> CTO -> CEO

b') Principal Engineer -> Architect -> Senior Architect -> Director -> CTO -> CEO

c) Technical Project Manager -> Senior Project Manager -> Program Manager -> Director -> CEO

...but instead found myself being in the technical project management space for too long, that people started naturally profiling me as the "rockstar program manager" (check out my LinkedIn recommendations and you'll immediately see why). Whilst this is a great place to be (don't get me wrong, I think a career in Project Management is one of the most versatile, lucrative and flexible professions out there, I highly encourage the move), for me, I felt I'd learnt and experienced enough, that I didn't see myself doing that for much longer. I did enjoy the project leadership, but I wanted more. Another factor that was causing me anxiety was that my role as a management consultant was getting a bit boring, what I imagined it to be versus the reality were not fully aligned. My time was fully consumed, leaving me little time to explore my own ideas to look at new ideas/products (my own start-up), I might as well have been a permanent employee - I was living an illusion, in reality I was basically a "perm-tractor". I had built up enough personal equity, credibility to enjoy a decent level of referent power to indirectly influence outcomes in my favour, I still wanted more - I wanted to feel more alive than being a neutral facilitator (which in itself I found quite rewarding but also quite energy-draining).

So what did I do? I went back to my RAGE model, here's what I had for my persona as a professional:

• As a software professional, I would like to learn & grow, seek out individuals, companies and interactions, to reach heights of excellence, so that I can not only enjoy the profession, but take me to new opportunities & experiences. I want to surround myself with people that motivate me, journey together to grow to the next level.
• Want to work with inspiring, motivated leaders that I can learn from. Want to surround myself with deeply technical, bright people. Want to work with people who know what they're doing or unafraid to take chances. Want to work with disruptors, people unafraid to push boundaries, challenging status quo. Want to work with people who are equally, if not, more motivated than me. Want to learn from people so that I can grow and do my own thing one day. Want to be with fellow professionals that will help take me to the next level. Want to work on projects and products that are interesting and cutting edge, not "me-too, copy-cat products. Want to stay at the cutting edge of software, be involved in the next wave like cloud services, mobile app development, car infotainment / self-driving cars, drone software, cloud, etc. Want a chance to start-up my own business in ideas in product development, services-space like crowd-based testing, etc.
• As a professional, I want to run a company, lead my own division. I believe the experiences and skills acquired over the years puts me a good position to do this, regardless of technology stack. I haven't been successful in launching my own start-up, so the best place would be to go back to corporate, be part of story much bigger than myself, and get the experience I need.

I also came to the conclusion that being a specialist is not a bad thing, so I'm now settled with the fact that I'm a Digital TV Technology Specialist, so I should just focus my energy in this area. I can still keep abreast of new technologies, but the road to my continued success is to build upon this experience - the rest is noise - if an opportunity comes my way for investing or if there is something truly exciting with a lot of upside, then I still might consider it ;-)

So what's happened in the last two years?
I made a decision to leave project leadership behind. I explored opportunities that aligned with my aspiration of running my own division. I took a chance by breaking the perception that I'm the guy to call in to rescue failing projects - landing an engagement as interim GM/CTO. A year later, I decided to leave consulting (248 weeks consulting) altogether and enter the corporate world as a permanent employee, taking on a CTO/Head of Technology role :-)

So my path has indeed played out a little different but now seems to be back on track:
Software Engineer > Senior Engineer > Technical Project Manager > Senior Project/Program Manager > Principal Engineer > Program Manager > Management Consultant > CTO (now) > CEO (next)

Lessons learnt / myths busted?

Who says you can't change tracks in between (especially switch to project management) and switch back to technology leadership? It can definitely be done!

Be prepared to Leave it All Behind as long as you believe you're heading in the general direction you seek (maintain your guiding compass always).

Take time to process your situation with Life/Work by investing the time in self-reflection & planning. I found my RAGE model to be a constant source of guidance. It does take some self-control, but it will be worth it in the end, just keep at it...

It is indeed possible to start from humble beginnings and change your life for a better outcome...

2017 Life/Work Balance Review

2017 was a year that went by lightning fast. It seems like not so long ago I was reflecting on 2016 when I did the write up of 80/20 rule on my life/work balance timing review around this time last year. Now a year later, I'm reflecting on how my time was spent in 2017. Interestingly enough the overall profile of my life/work balance hasn't changed drastically if you look at the summaries, but once I dive a bit more into the detail it becomes evident that my time did take a knock in some areas.

I've been tracking my time on how I spend my life for three years and counting. I've still not developed an automated system yet for tracking, need to write an app that simplifies all this manual work, however I need to find the time to do this :-) Part of my personal projects which had taken a knock last year. Once I've automated this through an app, it should make Life/Work goals tracking much simpler, lets see what 2018 brings!

My Personal Value System - Personas

At the turn of 2017, I'd optimised my value system to the following elements, split between Personal & Professional lives:

This was supposed to reflect the priorities in my overall life, with the view that when it comes to time management, how I consume time should be relative to these priorities. In hindsight, this is more difficult to achieve in reality.

What happened in 2017?

Overall, the data for 2017 is shown below:

Putting this in pictures, it looks like this:

Comparing this to 2016, it looks pretty much similar at the high level:

Quick Analysis

2017 compared to 2016, the data shows roughly a balanced life/work split, although in reality I don't feel like it was balanced at all. In May 2017 I started a new job, which had me focused on work more than anything else. If I ignore the hard reality constraints, which is something I define as unavoidable, must-happen activities like Rest/Sleep, Driving-Car and Household maintenance, the picture looks a little different:

In 2017, I worked a total of 2383 hours.

The income-generating portion was spent working as a consultant, totals 2339 hours.

Accounting for 168 hours as the legal working hours per month, this works out to 13.33 months.

Assuming a full calendar month for leave & public holidays (11 working months), I've worked an extra 2.33 months in 2017!

Whilst time spent with Family exceeded Work time, my personal time for my own individual interests took a knock. I've hardly spent time on hobbies, pet projects as well as general health/fitness/well-being.

2017 Lessons Learnt

I worked more in 2017 than 2016, in 2018 I need to reduce work-time, to focus more on personal time. If Personal time invested as an Individual is prioritised higher than Work then I need to figure out a way of allocating more time in this area. I can't compromise on the Family aspect so the time has to come from somewhere else.  Even if I leave consulting and enter full-time employment, I need to create space to value my personal endeavours. Pet projects and new ideas have had a dismal focus in 2017, making me wonder if it's worth any focus at all - the reality is quite different from aspirations or expectations. General Health & Well-being took big hits as well. Becoming an entrepreneur is hard, running a consulting company is also hard - are these just dreams, or am I serious about these? It maybe enough just to have three major focus areas: Family, Life & Work, unless Work converts to Entrepreneur / Running my own business - need to ask myself some serious questions here. Career-wise, my trajectory is looking promising but I don't know if I should resign to the notion of just spending the rest of my years working in a corporate and just settle...

Tracking 1:1 time with each child is also very challenging, with three kids where the age gaps are not that huge. The numbers do reflect quite poorly, what I've found though is that the interactions are captured as Family time - so it might not make sense anymore to focus on sole 1:1 time with each child. I still think this quite important, and need to figure out a way of creating these 1:1 times more frequently. I may have to kick-off the weekly family retrospectives to get this going again.

How did I enjoy Work in 2017?

So if I feel I'm working more than anything else, and the data shows a major part of my life is spent in the office, am I having a good time? Am I enjoying the work? Am I spending my valuable life-hours just to get by as a matter-of-fact, or am I actually enjoying the gig, and getting some fulfilment out of it? I've been tracking my level of enjoyment at work for the last few years - here's what the data shows.

I track feelings as: 

Enjoyed - Good! When I had a good productive day, relationships good, achieved something, good flow-state.

Bad When I feel I should really be doing something else, had a bad encounter, things pear-shaped.

Indifferent / Neutral Neither good nor bad, just another day-at-the-office, uneventful.

Personal Time Time off to focus on personal topics: Leave, Family-Time or Personal Time Out

The theory is that if the number of Bad days increases to a level of causing alarm, then this signals an event for me to start reconsidering my options - like just leave the work and find something better. Looking at the data, there is still far greater upside than downside - 2017 has been a year of increased enjoyment at work, so there is really no reason for me to look elsewhere...unless the level of uncertainty in employment is increasing - which as I write this, might just be the case. I've learnt through the years never to be complacent, no matter how "secure" you might feel...so as I start 2018, I must still keep my options open.

2018 Key Goals/Objectives

In 2018 I need to get back to re-evaluating my state every three months. The themes to focus on for now:

1. Find a way to reduce work hours to a point that it is actually sustainable, and not be the only thing that consumes me (even if I'm having a good time at work). Goal is to maintain a consistent level of 168 hours maximum per month on work. Need to do this by building an awesome management team, foster leadership & responsibility downstream. Implement behaviours from "Turn this Ship Around".
2. Create space for Personal endeavours, focusing on leisure activities as well as health & fitness. 
1. My 3D printing experiments seized in 2017. Start again.
2. Cycling virtually non-existent in 2017. Start again.
3. I have a boxed Lego Robotics Mindstorm set waiting for me (gifted this toy for my birthday)
4. Five programming books to read and new languages to code - waiting for a year, unopened. 
5. Read 24 books this year. In 2017 I completed just 9 books of the 38 I'd planned to read!
6. Create the software for my RAGE tracking tool.
3. Continue to nurture the family time to be as memorable & enjoyable as possible.

On Managing Change: Damped Sine Wave

I recently read a piece from the June edition of ACM, Q&A with Erik Meijer, which I found quite apt as it speaks to my current situation at work. Whilst Meijer talks specifically to software projects, we can apply this to any kind of topic, be it personal or professional, work & life - everything we encounter when it comes to dealing with change & uncertainty (career, new teams, family, new projects, etc.).

This is especially relevant to the period I'm in now, a leader driving change - i.e. changes to the way we working, kicking-off a focused management war room, and the recent announcements around delivery priorities for the next three months. This is a large corporate, multi-million dollar industry, the amazing part is that things are so fast-paced and always changing that one can argue that the only constant in this company is one that of Change!

So we need to deal with this reality, it's not going to go away anytime soon. My experience is pretty much aligned to Meijer: try to manage the level of uncertainty (balanced by one's appetite for risk) as quickly as possible through communication & stakeholder engagement, converge on well-bounded known-knowns based on the information we receive, agree to execute & deliver within the binding time constraints. Add to this is a sense of measured calm and patience, start practising ways to control your default responses too...

Courtesy: ACM

Below is the excerpt of the Q&A:

<quote>

What is your team process? How does work get done? How do you communicate status? 

A lot of what you read about process and agile has very little evidence behind it. I don't believe a lot of process is scientific. Instead, I define general guidelines about what I want to see happen, and within those I don't care how things happen.

My thinking has two main sources of inspiration: the military and the hacker way.

Over thousands of years, armies have figured out how to get things done and achieve their goals in an environment that is really chaotic and unpredictable. That is the environment we live in as developers as well. If you read the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting manual, and replace the word war with software, everything in there holds true.

So how do you deal with uncertainty? When people attempt to solve with process, they are trying to fight or control uncertainty. For example, someone can say just adopt zero inbox and your life will be awesome. In reality though, that isn't really the case.

One of the things I like about Facebook is "the hacker way". It is an approach to creating software that involves continuous improvement and feedback. It is about computational thinking: how do you program the system, and how do you make the system do things that no one thought possible?

Being agile is about communication.

The process needs to change with the situation. You have a big picture of where you want to go, but any plan or process will shatter immediately when you hit your first bug or something happens out of your control.

In most projects there are two phases: an exploratory phase and an execution phase. Your project should progress like a damped sine wave, where the amplitude gets smaller over time (see picture above). You have to figure out what to build, and figure out what question you are trying to answer. In the beginning you want to increase the vertical velocity to get the uncertainty under control, and then you want horizontal velocity to increase when you get into execution.

With prescriptive processes. people are looking for a silver bullet to solve problems, but it doesn't exist...the world is super-confusing, and you have to embrace it and work with it.

</quote>

Signs of Stress every Project Professional should know

When you're working on projects you will experience many challenges: from working on multiple, often conflicting and ambiguous priorities, multiple streams of work (tasks, work packages, etc.) as well as interacting with many different types of (difficult) people, from different cultures, behaviours to different languages spoken. Your customers (stakeholders, client, sponsors) will vary in quality, more often than not applying pressure for their work getting done (because more than likely its linked to some kind of personal objective / business reward). This pressure is usually passed down to the project team members assigned. With the focus on delivery & timeline pressures, the project manager is often forced to multitask, expecting the same from project team members who often have the challenge of juggling between between project and non-project work, multi-project work (generally people are assigned to more than one project at a time) and not forgetting people's own personal/life (family, health, etc.) challenges thrown into the mix.

All of this can become too much, and as a project professional (project manager), who's primary responsibility (in my humble opinion) is to ensure his people are led, directed, guided, coached through the implementation phase of the project thus meeting expectations of the customer and coming away intact, that it behoves the project manager to be aware of the common signs and symptoms of stress. After all, we work with human beings, not machines that are oblivious to mood swings, emotional problems and simple pleasures - so being mindful of your team members state-of-mind, as well as your own -- and taking time to truly pause and reflect, adjusting your behaviour as a project manager can go a long way to not only improving your work relationships, but also can help with the the successful outcome of your project implementation.

The American Institute of Stress (AIS) stated that the term "stress" was coined by Dr. Hans Seyle in 1936, who defined it as a "the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change". He sometimes defined it as "the rate of wear and tear on the body".

Here are some fifty common signs and symptoms of stress from the AIS. Look out for these in your own life as well as the people you work with.

• Frequent headaches, jaw clenching or pain
• Gritting, grinding teeth
• Stuttering or stammering
• Tremors, trembling of lips, hands
• Neck ache, back pain, muscle spasms
• Light-headedness, faintness, dizziness
• Ringing, buzzing or "popping" sounds
• Frequent blushing, sweating
• Cold or sweaty hands, feet
• Dry mouth, problems swallowing
• Frequent colds, infections, herpes sores
• Rashes, itching, hives, goose bumps
• Unexplained or frequent allergy attacks
• Heartburn, stomach pain, nausea
• Excess belching, flatulence
• Constipation, diarrhoea
• Difficulty breathing, sighing
• Sudden attacks of panic
• Chest pain, palpitations
• Frequent urination
• Poor sexual desire or performance
• Excess anxiety, worry, guilt, nervousness
• Increased anger, frustration, hostility
• Depression, frequent or wild mood swings
• Increased or decreased appetite

• Insomnia, nightmares, disturbing dreams
• Difficulty concentrating, racing thoughts
• Trouble learning new information
• Forgetfulness, disorganisation, confusion
• Difficulty in making decisions
• Feeling overloaded or overwhelmed
• Frequent crying spells or suicidal thoughts
• Feelings of loneliness or worthlesness
• Little interest in appearance, punctuality
• Nervous habits, fidgeting, foot-tapping
• Increased frustration, irritability, edginess
• Overreaction to petty annoyances
• Increased number of minor accidents
• Obsessive or compulsive behaviour
• Reduced work efficiency or productivity
• Lies or excuses to cover up poor work
• Rapid or mumbled speech
• Excessive defensiveness or suspiciousness
• Problems in communication or sharing
• Social withdrawal and isolation
• Constant tiredness, weakness, fatigue
• Frequent use of over-the-counter drugs
• Weight gain or loss without diet
• Increased smoking, alcohol or drug use
• Excessive gambling or impulse buying

Check out this Human Function Curve by Nixon in 1979, that illustrates the generally accepted view of the effect of stress on worker productivity. It is entirely personal and shows that each person has their own individual limits for stress - there are good stresses and bad ones. Zero stress = Zero performance - interesting.

Human performance peaks at modest amounts of stress. (Source: Nixon, p: Practitioner 1979)

Credits / Reference Material
I came across this topic from this book, Chapter 2 on The Human Behaviour Problem as Root Cause: Multitasking from Critical Chain Project Management by Leach

On mapping your realities

Earlier this year, around March/April some time, I came across this TED talk, about drawing your life / aspirations in terms of current reality (current state) to desired new reality (future / desired state). At the time, I had just finished working on my own version of personal journey mapping, which I coined as the RAGE (Reality Aspirations Goals Expectations) model. This TED talk made me think and experiment with my own sketch, which I actually attempted, immediately after watching the video. I found the picture lying on my desk, so decided to post it on this blog, and to share with others (who may find themselves in a similar situation as I). I hope the picture says it all, suffice to say, I've been making some headway in my own personal journey tracking (which I plan to share in a future post, called On Self-Awareness). If you want to see what I've been tracking this year, check it out here.

Here's the TED Talk:

And here's my very own version 0.01, of my life picture, snapshot from March/April:

And back in Jan/Feb I had sketched my general view that led to my RAGE model, which incidentally is my implementation plan to get me from Current -> Desired State:

RAGE Life Logging, Iteration 2 of many, March 2016

Earlier this year I created a model called RAGE, which stands for Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations - a planning model that can be used in all sorts of manner. I'm using it to track my own personal & professional development. I ended up defining just over 20 areas of my life that I need to give time to, had prioritized these "Personas" and set about some goals to achieve for each one. I try to maintain a high level of focus around the top 10 personas, monitoring the rest in between. I am two months down into my tracking, this post shares insights for March 2016.

My goal was to start measuring my time spent in these various areas - either validating or invalidating my instincts. A friend of mine recently challenged me, quite rightfully so "Mo, why are you doing all of this?? Surely you know, deep down instinctively the areas you spending time in and the ones you're not? What did you learn from this data that you didn't know before?"

That is an interesting question indeed. I wanted to measure and quantify the time I'm actually spending against what I instinctively "know" I should be doing. For me, measurement is important because data often highlights interesting insights that we wouldn't have observed, or taken time to reflect - often because of the mental and emotional biases we all have.

One outcome would be that my measurements reflect one-to-one what I always knew; on the other hand, the numbers may just show weaknesses in my own aspirations. Just as you need to measure your progress with your physical fitness / nutritional planning, why wouldn't you want to measure how, where and what you're spending your life doing? Measurement allows you to take corrective action and steer your ship in the direction you'd like. Often we live our lives, day-in, day-out, accepting the routine as a fact-of-life, robbing ourselves of the opportunity to instigate meaningful changes...for me, being able to quantify my life, is helping define the person I want to be, in the next chapter of my life. Soon I'll be in my forties, we never know what's around the corner (quite literally, two weeks back I lost a nephew in a senseless armed robbery, 32 years old - life is cheap in South Africa)...

Am I Crazy??

In my previous post, I posed the question: Am I crazy for doing this stuff? I still maintain, nope I am not, maybe a little OCD, but I am so vested in this now more than ever. Besides, I recently found a massive Quantified Self community online and across the world that are engrossed in this area of personal measurement. So I'm really not alone in this journey :-)) I am going to start my own QuantifiedSelf meetup in Johannesburg this year, in what I hope will be the first of its kind in South Africa. Just take a look at this guy, from a few years back - this guy actually logged his life over a period of 6 years! What more vindication does one need? :-))

March 2016 Insights 01-Mar to 31 Mar (756.77 hours)

Tracking progress of my RAGE plan, snapshot 1 of many

Earlier this year I created and shared my RAGE model aimed at making sense of my own personal planning, to get to a point of balancing my work/life activities. I had sliced myself into 22 different personas, and for each persona, defined my current reality, aspirations, goals and expectations to achieve in 2016 going forward. I also found a way of prioritizing and ranking these personas using my own ranking matrix. Once I had those defined, the next step was to start collect the data, do the measurements, analyse, get insights, and then make adjustments if required. Run the experiment for a few months, until I've collected enough evidence to help demystify the path I should take. 

This all started toward the end of January this year, and I'm happy to report I've diligently kept up with this experiment, and am ready to share this experience with my first progress review!

How did I manage the Time Keeping?

I use HarvestApp for time keeping. It is a simple, powerful way of keeping track of your activities. Used by people to track time spent on clients / projects / tasks, I created a personal project and added as tasks, each of the Personas/Subject pairs I split myself up as. I am using the free version which is working beautifully. So from my phone, using the app, I can very quickly switch between tasks and start the timers off. It does take some getting used, to consciously remember to log the hours - it becomes second nature after a while (my daily tracking is close to 24 hours with +- 4% error tolerance).

Recap the personas I ranked myself as split into:

This became the basis as "project tasks" in Harvest, with a bit more detail to focus on the specific subject.

Data Captured from Harvest (29-Jan-16 to 05-March-16)

From the January 29th to March 5th, I had logged a total of 873.61 hours on Harvest, with 96% accuracy, given that in this time period of 38 days (912 hours), not too bad going for the first iteration of this experiment. Here's a report generated from Harvest:

Report view generated from Harvest

Analytics (Personametrics)

Harvest comes built in with some very basic reporting, I needed to make sense of this data in different ways, like in my best tool of choice Excel(!), which Harvest caters for exporting the data straight to Excel, where you can do nice things with Pivot Tables & Charts :-)

Just focusing on the Top 10 activities that featured out of the 873.61 hours, and getting a percentage split of my time, the picture looks like this:

How I spent my time over 38 days from 29-Jan to 05-Mar 2016

So this is what I've picked up - on average....

• I spend 8.5 hours a day working as a Service Provider to my Client (MCA) - over a third of my day is spent working
• I spend 7.97 hours day Sleeping / Resting (which involves reading before bedtime) - another third of my 24-hour day
• I dedicate 3.5 hours a day on Family Time (this is the collective family time like dinner/movie time, school runs, but not one-on-one time with each member of the family)
• I practice my spirituality (prayer, Quran recitation, etc.) for just over an hour each day
• I spend just over an hour each day related to activities with my eldest child (10 year old son)
• I'm not doing too bad with my health & fitness goals, about 16-18 hours a month cycling or running 

Overall the breakdown over 38 days (percentage of total hours):

Row Labels	Sum of Hours
[Individual] Rest n Sleep	34,647%
[Consultant] Consulting - Service Provider to MCA	24,387%
[Family-Man] Family Time	16,047%
[Muslim] Spirituality - Practice n Awareness	4,762%
[Father] Relationship with Muhammad-Jawad	4,078%
[Husband] Marital Relations - Spending time with Fathima	3,228%
[Consultant] Knowledge-Base - Books	2,577%
[Individual] Health & Fitness - Cycling n Running	2,088%
[Business Owner] AS3 Time	1,730%
[Individual] Me Time (Nothing, PC/Surfing, Silence - Alone Time)	1,640%
[Community Member] Community NBHW Patrols	1,273%
[Friend] Social Being a Friend	1,148%
[Colleague] Work Social Relationships	0,553%
[Son] Relationship with Mommy	0,481%
[Blogger] Writing articles	0,317%
[Individual] Driving Car Time	0,244%
[Consultant] Service Provider Partners	0,228%
[Home Owner] Home Improvements	0,207%
[Father] Relationship with Ahmad	0,165%
[Job Hunter] Job Hunting Companies	0,096%
[Individual] Health & Fitness - General Well Being	0,072%
[Innovator Entrepreneur] New Product Ideas	0,027%
[Father] Relationship with Sarah	0,005%
Grand Total	100,00%

Insights 

Now that I've got the data, how do I measure and compare against my initial planning, in terms of the focus areas for my personas that I'd ranked in importance when I started?? What if in reality I am focusing on other areas that are not ranked in my persona top 10?? 

I've decided not to make any drastic changes to my rankings until I've allowed three months of measurement, however, I could start looking at tweaking, fine tuning the following areas:

• I'm not spending enough quality time with my wife as I hoped (1:1 outside of the kids / family time)
• I'm probably sleeping too much, look at getting my sleeping hours down between 6-7 hours. Aim is to hopefully reach a level of fitness that could help with me coping with 6 hours sleep.
• I'm not getting enough time to focus on my own business AS3
• I'm not allowing enough time to push through my ideas / new product development stream
• I've not made any progress connecting with software / startup professionals (need to attend at least one meetup event a month)
• I'm not evenly spreading my Father-time across the three kids, currently it's skewed towards the eldest child
• I should probably move "Job Hunter" to a low priority now since I'm fully booked as a consultant for this year already (but I will still keep an eye out for CXO / GM / Director opportunities, or a fantastic startup venture for personametry)
• The same with "Potential Employee" - I am happy remaining a consultant for this year, unless an opportunity as above presents itself
• I should probably move "Investor" to low and bump up Entrepreneur, Software Professional & Programmer

Based on the original rankings set out in January, this is how I've performed:

Am I just plain old Crazy??

Maybe so, it depends on your point of reference :-) Time will tell...all I know is that I'm finding this experiment quite interesting to me personally, it is making me see things in a different light, I'm hopeful that after three months, it will help me settle on the core personas of value, leaving a lot the noise all behind...I still feel strongly that just as we can see a future for self-driving cars, I see a future where people are into personametrics to improve their self-worth, and lives around them...

Tips on how to gracefully disagree

I am currently reading through the classic 1930's writings of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Still a classic, and still pretty much relevant today, which struck me in the same awe as my earlier encounter with Elbert Hubbard's works. If you haven't read this book, please get a copy soon! 

I am quoting some tips from Part Three, Chapter One on how to keep a disagreement from becoming an argument (that Carnegie himself sourced from an article in Bits and Pieces, published by The Economics Press, Fairfield, N.J.):

Welcome the disagreement

Remember the slogan, "When two partners always agree, one of them is not necessary." If there is some point you haven't thought about, be thankful if it is brought to your attention. Perhaps this disagreement is your opportunity to be corrected before you make a serious mistake.

Distrust your first instinctive impression

Our first natural reaction in a disagreeable situation is to be defensive. Be careful. Keep calm and watch out for your first reaction. It may be you at your worst, not your best.

Control your temper

Remember, you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry.

Listen first

Give your opponents a chance to talk. Let them finish. Do not resist, defend or debate. This only raises barriers. Try to build bridges of understanding. Don't build higher barriers of misunderstanding.

Look for areas of agreement

When you have heard your opponents out, dwell first on the points and areas on which you agree.

Be honest

Look for areas where you can admit error and say so. Apologise for your mistakes. It will help disarm your opponents and reduce defensiveness.

Promise to think over your opponent's ideas and study them carefully

And mean it. Your opponents may be right. It is a lot easier at this stage to agree to think about their points than to move rapidly ahead and find yourself in a position where your opponents can say: "We tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen."

Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest

Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends.

Postpone action to give both sides time to think through the problem

Suggest that a new meeting be held later that day or the next day, when all the facts may be brought to bear. In preparation for this meeting, ask yourself some hard questions: Could my opponents be right? Partly right? Is there truth or merit in their position or argument? Is my reaction one that will relieve the problem, or will it just relieve any frustration? Will my reaction drive my opponents further away or draw them closer to me? Will my reaction elevate the estimation good people have of me? Will I win or lose? What price will I have to pay if I win? If I am quiet about it, will the disagreement blow over? Is this difficult situation an opportunity for me?

The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

My RAGE Model for Personal Development Planning

Over the last few months, I've been working on a concept I've come to coin as the "R.A.G.E model", which stands for:

• R Reality
• A Aspirations
• G Goals
• E Expectations

I am using this model to map out a plan for my own self, as part of my own personal planning. I am sharing this experience because it maybe useful to others, since the topic of finding a work-life-balance affects us all. The years come-and-go so fast, that we're so busy being busy, just living, surviving, making ends meet, meeting your current commitments, heads-down in work, rush-rush-rush, that we really don't take the time out, to pause, reflect, look deeply within ourselves, to map out what really makes us, us!! There's a lot of material on this subject of work-life balance, and stress - I opted for finding my own path, which I'd like to share...

I came across the concept of defining Aspirations vs Expectations vs Reality from another coach, colleague and friend. I mulled over it for a while, and then later coined up RAGE, to go further than just highlighting Aspirations vs Expectations vs Reality, but also include Goals to help make sense of the Aspirations & Expectations, keeping it real.

In this post I share an exercise of how I was able to identify the different streams of my life, prioritise them using rough quantitative formulae borrowed from agile product management like weightings to balance priorities, culminating in a future plan for tracking my goals going forward. This exercise required a lot of self-reflection, introspection, deep searching...it's about making sense of all the noise, including understanding my circles of control / influence, being self-critical and at sometimes a little harsh (with priorities) on myself, example: Is being a husband more or less important than being a Father, Is being an Individual (self) more important than being a Sibling?? and so on.

The end result is a tangible personal plan that I can use to track my progress from 2016 onwards. It is far from complete though, the next phase is actually implementing my plan, and monitoring my progress throughout the year. I intend doing so using a personal-kanban-style Trello board, culminating in time-tracking to measure the distribution of my time across my different personas (topic for another post).

I believe this tool is useful to both life and work. At the end of the post I share some of my ideas where I think this tool can add value to different work/life scenarios.

Please have a read, let me know what you think!! And if you're interested in a template to get you going, let me know.

How does RAGE work?

It's about understanding your situational context - YOU as a person, currently, are being pulled in many directions, how do you juggle all the things interesting to you as a person, plus give enough time to your work, family, friends, etc. What is this thing called "work-life balance"?? How do you know if you allocating enough time to the things that are important?? What if you're wasting (or spending too much time) on something that is essentially of little value or consequence to you?? What matters most to you as an individual?? 

Often this comes down slicing your life into two major categories: (a) Personal & (b)Professional. For each category, there could be further sub-categories, or topics. I call these Personas, and for each persona, I define Top-Level Subject as a sub-category.

In my case, my current reality, consists of 22 high level personas split between my personal life, and my professional life. I am being sliced in 22 different ways, only in 2016, and I've not included any higher level aspirations, like big dreams like travelling the world, owning a porsche, meet Bill Gates, get invited to the World Economic Forum, work in Silicon Valley or Run a StartUp in New York City :-)

I will explain the personas breakdown in the next section. This section talks about what RAGE actually is. It essentially means, take a particular situation or topic from your persona, and analyse the following areas:

• Reality - What is the current status of the situation? What is currently preventing you from reaching the aspiration / goal / expectation?
• Aspiration - What is your ultimate wish to accomplish? How does it look like? What does it mean to you and why?
• Goals - How / What would you need to do to get to the Aspiration? How would you break it down? What milestones do you set yourself that will eventually reach your aspiration? Techniques like using specific measurable goals, something with a tangible outcome helps here, or it can be a story - the future vision.
• Expectations - Based on the goals you've set, what expectations do you have (can it be quantified like a level of confidence, or percentage completion by a certain date, etc). Is the expectation too high?

In addition to the RAGE criteria, an Action Plan for each topic helps in cementing a plan that you can use to track progress against meeting your goals. It is also useful to keep track of how your expectations will change over time, taking snapshots of progress and re-evaluating yourself through your own personal retrospectives.

Personas & User Stories

Personas are about describing how you split yourself up - i.e. we as people have many stripes: 

You as a .... Individual Self, Husband, Father, Brother, Friend, Colleague, Teacher, Business Owner, Family-Man, Son, Daughter, Grandfather, Uncle, Social Worker, Community Member, etc, etc.  

So we have many commitments, relationships with people and business entities (including rights to meet), that demand our time, energy and focus - how do we organise ourselves so that we focus on the things most important and useful to us? How much investment should we put into relationships over self-joys? What is each Persona really about? What does it mean to be a Father, an Employee or a Friend?

Before I delved into my RAGE criteria, I had to understand myself: Who am I? What makes me Me? How do I slice myself currently?? And for each persona, what am I really trying to achieve as an Aspiration for that Persona??

I'm going to be brave and share my own persona list with you. Who knows, there might be something common in your own life, and you might share similar persona aspirations as I :-) ?? This is just capturing my current reality, and not looking into the future with dreamy eyes of who I could become (that ship has sailed long ago or has it?).

The table below shows the Personas for me, read as "Me as a..." split between my Persona & Professional Life, for each Top Level Subject area. For each topic, I borrowed a page from Agile user stories, taking the form of [As a....] [I would like to...] [so that ....] [...get something of value]

My Personas

Type	Area  (Me as a…)	Top Level Subject
Personal	Brother	Being a Brother As a brother to four siblings, I need to grow our relationships & support structures (including continued financial support), so that our family unit appears strong and united, always.
Personal	Colleague	Work Social As a colleague in a work environment, I must nurture and grow authentic & sincere relations (not shallow, superficial hello, how you - but genuine relations), so that I am recognised as someone who values people and interactions, working together on projects, and when not working on the same team, I am a friend that offers a listening ear, advisor & mentor to colleagues as needed. Social interactions & sincere relationships in the workplace matter a big deal.
Personal	Community Member	Community Forum As a member of the community forum, I must spare my time, resources and energy in committing to the good causes, so that ultimately we have a peaceful and safe neighbourhood for our families.
Personal	Family-Man	Home Affairs As a family, living in any country, I need to sort out all Home Office requirements, so that we may live free in the country of our choosing.
Personal	Family-Man	Family Time As a father and head of the family, I would like to invest my time, energy, love and passion into my family (wife, kids) so that we can nurture relationships, grow together and create a strong family unit, paving the way for a healthy, stress-free life going forward.
Personal	Family-Man	Lifestyle Choice As a person living on this earth on borrowed time, I would like to make lifestyle choices, so that my family can live in the best situation & circumstances possible, that promote a safe, meaningful and promising future, where life is beautiful on all fronts.As a family, we would like to evaluate our lifestyle choices, our preferences and situational circumstances, and make changes (if required) to help us attain our ultimate lifestyle that satisfies our happiness criteria.
Personal	Father	Fatherhood As a father, I must spend time with each child, building up a unique, loving and caring relationship, so that my children have good memories to take with them, such that they become successful (happy, content, confident, mentally, physical & emotionally strong) human beings.
Personal	Friend	Social Network - Being a Friend As a friend, I need to maintain, nurture and grow authentic and sincere social connections, so that people see me as a trusted person they can turn to, so that I have a support structure in place for me & my family (and of course reciprocate to my friends).
Personal	Home Owner	Home Improvements As a home owner, I need to continuously maintain the state-of-repair, redecorate & keep the property up-to-date, so that we not only enjoy the living space, but also be ready to sell (and make a profit), if and when we decide to leave.
Personal	Husband	Marital Relations As a husband, I need to fulfil the rights of my wife, taking the relationship to new levels so that my marriage is successful, rock-solid, and future-lasting.
Personal	Individual	Health & Fitness As a person I would like to reach levels of fitness & good living, so that I may lead a healthy & enjoyable life, with minimal medical issues
Personal	Individual	Hobbies As an individual with interests outside of work / family, I would like to pursue my hobbies (Cycling, Writing, Art, Inventing) so that I have an outlet for my creative interests, and that I get joy out of doing so.
Personal	Investor	Wealth & Finances As a person I would like to reach financial independence (by pursuing multiple investment streams) before retirement age, so that I don't stress when I'm retired (or in death) so that my family are taken care off financially. Must be within the realms of halal investments tracking as close as possible to Shariah.
Personal	Individual	Giving Charity & Helping Needy As a person with extra means, I would like to help more in Charity (Sadaqah, Compulsory Zakaat, Lillah) so that I fulfil the rights of others (within my family, friends, workers, community, local and world), and in keeping with the guidelines of Islam
Personal	Individual	Motor Vehicle As an individual with specific requirements for transport, I would like to invest in a new car soon, so that it is more reliable than my current one, and satisfies all present as well future usage needs (4x4 off-road, bikes, family-adventures, etc.)
Personal	Muslim	Spirituality As a Muslim / human being, I want to reach a level of spirituality that allows me to be content and at peace with the world, so that I may live life, according to the way of life of Islam, as a Muslim, and a Sufi, tolerating & living in peace with all beings (not matter what belief system others may so choose). I would like to elevate my spirituality so that I am at peace with myself, others around me, the world - so that I don't go chasing illusions, accepting the reality of the fragility of life (there is more to life than career, business, etc.)
Personal	Son	Being a Child As a son, I must cherish the remaining years with my mom, spoiling her, comforting her, taking care of all her needs, so that I fulfil the rights of my mother, set an example of caring so that my kids can learn from, and to show my appreciation to mom for her love, patience and support all these years. To maintain the Islamic & Indian traditions of taking care of ones parents.
Personal	Son/Bro-in-Law	Being a Son/Bro-in-Law As a son-in-law and a bro-in-law, I must grow these relationships stronger, so that family are content with our life situation, and so that there is harmony overall. To being someone they can trust, count-on, and rely in times of need & support.
Personal	Uncle	Being an Uncle As an uncle to 12+ nephews and nieces, I must be a good role model, offering advice, help, financial aid, coaching and mentoring so that these kids have a decent chance of succeeding in life.
Professional	Blogger / Writer	Blogging & Writing Papers As blogger, I need to take my writing to the next level, so that I gain personal satisfaction out of it, of not being afraid to create my own art, especially when "it just might not work".
Professional	Business Owner	Consulting Business As the owner of AS3, I need to establish the brand, grow a client-base, and run this company as a real-one, so that I get valuable life/work experience from this venture.
Professional	Consultant	Consulting - Client to MCA As a consultant to MCA I must consistently deliver value, exceed client's expectations, so that my engagements are maintained, reputation remains in-tact, and overall ensure my client is happy with my performance, such that there is a pipeline of work always available.
Professional	Consultant	Client Engagement Options As a consultant, I need to diversify my clients engagements, so that I can manage risk and survive, as well as broaden my network within South Africa or overseas.
Professional	Consultant	Service Provider Partners As a consultant, I would like to take my relationships with other SPs to the next level, exploring opportunities for partnerships, joint ventures, etc. so that I improve my chances of success.
Professional	Consultant	Knowledge Base As a consultant, I need to keep abreast and up-to-date, with topics I specialise in, so that I gain the knowledge & ability to apply new tools & techniques to improve the outcomes of my engagements, and so that I personally grow my toolbox as a professional.
Professional	Job Hunter	Employment at Specific Company of Interest As a job hunter, I must find a role & company that I like, value and will enhance my career experience, so that I climb up the ladder on my professional journey onwards & upwards - ultimately to fulfil my ultimate career aspiration (awesome company, awesome brilliant minds).
Professional	Potential Innovator / Entrepreneur	Product Development StartUp As an aspiring entrepreneur, I must push forward on my ideas, take chances & risks on a startup, so that I can ultimately say I've tried this (possibly failed) and learnt a lot in the process.
Professional	Potential [Company] Employee	Permanent Employment, exit Consulting As a potential Employee, I would like to attain a senior management position in an area I can add value, so that I build my career & increase my network profile (in line with my aspiration of finding awesomeness).
Professional	Programmer	Programming - Software Development As someone who used to enjoy coding (and was quite good at it), I need to keep my technical skills fresh, so that a) I don't become a dinosaur and b) to enjoy the feeling of creativity again, c) so I maintain my closeness to technology streams.
Professional	Software Professional	Seeking out People for Learning & Growth As a software professional, I would like to learn & grow, seek out individuals, companies and interactions, to reach heights of excellence, so that I can not only enjoy the profession, but take me to new opportunities & experiences. I want to surround myself with people that motivate me, journey together to grow to the next level.

Phew! So that's over 20+ ways I must split my time up... Now for the next part, surely not all personas hold the same level of importance in relationship to another? There must be some way I can make sense of all of this by prioritizing the personas I'm most interested in...

Interestingly enough, my brother recently called me to help with the local school's governing body, they could do with my help. I said unfortunately, this topic doesn't occur on my focus areas for this year, I am filled up with other commitments, and may possibly consider that request for next year (i.e. Me as an active member of a school governing body). Now what is more interesting though, is I could add an activity under my Persona / Brother subject, and be able to support my brother indirectly helping in improving & strengthening our relationship, thus taking me closer to reaching my aspiration of increasing family bonds with my siblings!

So it certainly helps to have laid out your personal map...

How I ranked my Personas ...

At first I wrote down all by RAGE criteria for each Persona/Subject, and then prioritized my list based on the importance of the Aspiration alone. Then after much thought, I decided to get more closer to something I can actually implement, I need to treat personas differently. I had to come up with some way of weighting & ranking one persona against another. In doing so, I could then arrange my plan according to rank & importance of the persona itself.

So with this in mind, I created at 22x22 matrix of all the unique Persona / Subject Pairs, and went across from left-to-right, passing a value judgement when comparing one persona against another. For example, starting with Personal-Individual, going across and compare: Is being an Individual more important that being a Husband? and so on...

If a persona was more important in relation to another persona, it would get a value of 1, otherwise it would get a value of 0. I built in intelligence to track that if a value was 1, then the opposite relational-comparison, down the matrix, should return a value of 0.

I chose, for the first iteration to go the mutually-exclusive route - to keep things simple, and make the numbers balance. Of course, I could have went there OR route, meaning "If a persona is the same OR equal in importance" - this actually does make sense in reality, but I chose to park that formula because I'd just spend a good couple hours implementing the mutually exclusive rule, and I just didn't feel like reworking the formula again.

Anyway, the mutually-exclusive rule is useful because it drives home the point of distinguishing one persona against another, in true black-and-white, no grey in between. I either make a call or not - a simple forcing function that allows me to drive my behaviour changes going forward.

So this is how my relational matrix ended up:

Ranking Personas

Having entered the 1s & 0s, I then summed each row, and came up with a total. Then used a heatmap to identify the personas by rank (the higher the ranking, the darker the colour to red, the more important the persona).

Interestingly enough, the Persona that came out on top is my spirituality, followed closely by me being a Husband!! Prior to the exercise, I had prioritized my spirituality as something in the background, so this exercise brought to surface how important this topic is, since Islam is a way-of-life, and after much thinking and relational comparison, it appears on the top of the list (bringing to surface that my spiritual dimension is very important, which I've been neglecting for some time now).

I as a Husband on the other hand, did have prominence before the matrix, however, I would not really have put it as number one, because I was thinking more about my personal individual aspirations in terms of career & business, ahead of the family stuff (often taking family relations for granted and not investing adequate time and energy in those relationships to elevate them to the next level)!!

So this exercise has certainly given me something to think about! If only there was more than 24 hours in day ;-)

Difficulty Levels of Aspirations

In addition to getting a view on my relational-personas ranking, I wanted a way of ranking aspirations by importance. So I chose five levels of aspirations, and assigned a weighting (for points-scoring) to each one:

Level of Aspiration	Aspiration Weighting
1 No Brainer - Absolutely Doable	100
2 Within the realms of Doable	80
3 Doable but with some Effort	60
4 Difficult but not Impossible	40
5 A Nice Dream - Stretch BHAG?	10

Like my formula in the ranking matrix, when I ran these numbers in the overall ranking plan, I got to thinking maybe I should reverse the weighting. If I really wanted to make some hard changes, I should instead focus on the most difficult things, and aspirations that fall within the realm of doable should be ranked low, since I have a level of confidence in achieving the aspiration.  This really is a matter of choice, some people prefer to focus on "low hanging fruit" since it is really motivating to knock-things off your TODO list building up momentum and confidence to tackle the harder, more challenging stuff...There is the risk of choosing the difficult aspirations that one gets bogged down and demotivated, leaving little time or lost time on the more doable aspirations...

Aspirational Importance or Happiness Index

In addition to having a view of the relative difficulty of achieving the Aspirations / Goals, I added another filter for defining the importance of the aspirations. Again, not all aspirations are equal, some are more important than others, so it made sense to rank the importance of aspirations, giving each one an arbitrary weighting:

Importance Levels	Importance Weighting
1 Not at all Important	10
2 Slightly Important	20
3 Moderately Important	30
4 Very Important	40
5 Extremely Important	50

I was in two minds about adding another criteria for a Happiness Index - the idea was to quantify the level of happiness. Trying to answer the question, In reaching my goals & aspirations for a given persona / subject pair, what will be the resulting happiness index, i.e. how happy would it make me as a result??

Measuring happiness index has become somewhat of a fascination of mine, which I'm still experimenting with. I had this idea about Personametry (how nice if there was a device that could that?) so I am still trying to define my happiness matrix. For starters, I have been tracking two topics using a Trello board: One board for tracking my Happiness at Work and another board for tracking my Mood/Happiness at Home. The jury is still out on this...

So I decided that Level of Importance implies a level of resulting happiness. If I set something as Extremely Important, it implies a similar, if not equal, level of happiness. Hence I don't need another number.

Ranking Formula

Using the above quantitative techniques, it becomes possible to rank and sort the RAGE list by order of priority, using a simple points scoring system:

Persona Ranking x Importance Level (Happiness Index) x Aspirational Type

This is similar to user story sizing in Agile/Scrum - the higher the points, the higher the ranking / importance, and therefore should get your focus & attention.

Bringing it all together - the Personal Plan

I am using Excel to manage my RAGE list. With the Personas & Top-Level Subjects identified, for each subject, write down the Aspiration (e.g. I would like to complete a road race this year). Having identified the Aspiration, now work towards breaking down the Aspiration into one or more Goals (e.g. To enter 5 seed races by June, To ride 50km every weekend). Once the goals are identified, think about the Expectations - how confident am I, what's the probability of achieving this goal?  And as a final step, turn some of those goals into concrete actions.

Below is a snippet of my own plan - it has been ranked by highest story points, and I've also indicated the probability of delivery (in terms of my expectations of realising the goal / aspiration). This is just a first pass based on the simple, doable aspirations (I am actually going to change it to focus on the BHAGs Big Hairy Ass Goals)...

Snapshot of my RAGE Plan

Visualising the Persona Map

Whilst I've created a way to numerically rank and prioritize each specific Persona/Subject pair, and I can now focus on say, the top ten aspirations / goals, a table with numbers (as above), might appear to be a little misleading. I wanted a way of seeing the spread, and weighting of the rolled up Personas, one level up - this view is created from totalling up the points ranking (planning priority), giving a cumulative total for the main Persona/Subject pairs - basically a single view of how my life may end up being spliced:

How I'm being sliced up - TreeMap

Next Steps (Post initial sense-making)

Now that I've mapped out my life's demands for 2016, and have a reasonable idea of what my commitments and focus areas are, in relation to both life-and-work, I can now start planning to deliver on these goals. Using Excel is cumbersome, so I'm going to look at using Trello or Smartsheet to track and measure progress...I am also going to look at creating a schedule or a reminder system to help me monitor and track my progress to reaching my goals and ultimately my aspirations...it's a start!! I've also set up a personal Kanban Trello board to track any new topics for aspirations...I am also thinking of using HarvestApp timekeeping to start measuring amount of time I spend in each Persona/Subject pair.

I have shared my map with my wife - it's important to include the people in your life, their input is valuable as it provides different perspectives. It is also useful because this sharing opens you up to others, and makes them appreciate the challenges you're facing along the many facets of your life...

Of course this list can't be static, it needs constant grooming, refining and simplifying. I am currently grooming my list, rolling up similar personas, since the level of detail of the first draft is a bit too granular. Constant feedback, and updates from further introspections will happen, as well as, new ideas for aspirations must be tracked as well (you guessed it, I have another Trello board to track my new aspirations ;-)

Other Areas of Use

Apart from using this technique / tool for your personalised inventory checking, I believe this exercise will benefit others in areas such as:

• As a student out of high school, settling on your future life choices can be daunting. So many choices, so many people with advice. You can use this tool to make sense of your options, and prioritize accordingly.
• As a student just graduating from college, you too have to make choices around your next career aspiration. How do you choose the company that best meets your aspirations? What factors play a role in prioritizing? Use this tool to help you decide.
• As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you're faced with many ideas and options to take your business to the next level, so how do you make sense of the next area to focus, which direction is going to add the most value??
• As a person with ideas, or managing your product roadmap, how is one idea or feature more important than the other? In the same way as I've used personas, you can use the same deep thinking questions to help you sift through competing ideas - and prioritize by rank and value.
• As a line manager, you have to manage people, set their goals and objectives. Wouldn't you like to use a more meaningful approach to setting objectives and expectations?? Using this technique will not only bring clarity to your team, but is bound to improve the relationships going forward (your team will look forward to defining meaningful objectives instead of seeing the appraisal process as a pain).
• As a worker, you have many responsibilities, projects and tasks to take care of - how do you prioritize your work, time management and also do stuff that not only ticks the done boxes for tasks, but also help you grow in the company as well??
• As a parent, how do you manage all the ideas, aspirations and goals you're setting for your children? Are you doing too much? Are you focusing on the right areas?? 
• As a project office, how do you prioritize and manage the tens of projects under your portfolio? How do you value one project over another? 

That's a few areas just top-of-mind, I'm sure there's more...

Feedback / Coaching

If you found this topic interested, please share your comments on this blog.

If you're interested in learning more, or would like a template of the tool to use in your own life mapping and planning, let me know. I am glad to help out, to the point of running a coaching session taking you through this journey!!!