Started in 2011 as my outlet to share my experiences on personal life and work topics. My handle is khanmjk. My friends & colleagues call me "Mo". This blog is an experiment, work-in-progress.
Life: Self-awareness, personal development, growth hacking (quantified self).
Work: Software and Systems Engineering, Leadership, Management, New Ideas and OpEds.
It's that time of year again to share my time tracking analysis for 2024. The visuals should be self explanatory and nothing surprising. 2024 was the year my professional work stream dominated, but not completely. I did also index on spending more time with family (at the expense of 1:1 time as a husband), and also spent much time on my own "me time" primarily focused on experimenting with AI tools. I maintained previous levels of spiritual hours, back to 2022 norms since 2023 was an outlier (pilgrimage to Makkah was the highlight of 2023). My health and fitness took a severe knock and is on a downwards trend since 2021. 2021 was the year I made big changes impacting personal and professional streams: Relocated to a new city (Cape Town) leaving friends and family behind in Johannesburg, starting a new job in a new company in a new domain -- I'm now four years into this transition, and I'm not pleased with the downwards trends in my personal streams. 2025 will need to be a year of intentional change in managing my work time, setting firmer boundaries, and finding a solution to working late nights, weekends, and limiting the streaks of long work hours. 2024 reached the peak in my work hours since starting time tracking in 2016, that's almost 10 years of time tracking! In the last four years, since starting my new job in 2021, the work hours are trending upwards (in 2022 I made adjustments to reduce work hours with some success), only to rebound higher in 2023, and much higher in 2024. In a future post, I will share the challenges of working for a global high-tech giant like Amazon AWS from South Africa and the impact on personal time - it has been, and continues to be, the biggest challenge in maintaining my professional "happiness", especially when it comes to maintaining a regular "start day" and "end day" routines and rituals.
Overview since 2018
Here's the summary dashboard of my time spent in my personas since 2018:
What's my workflow for tracking all this data?
Nothing much has changed since I started my experiment back in 2016. I use Harvest for tracking my personal and professional streams. I use a free account, with one major project called "RAGE Time tracking". Tasks are related to my personas. I track my time from the minute I wake up till I go to sleep. Throughout the day, I switch between tasks, making sure I don't track my personal time as work time, including lunch breaks. The hours logged do track closely to 24 hours/day, for the whole year, with a negligible margin of error that's within reasonable tolerance (I'm still human!). The idea is to regularly inspect where my time is being spent, and make adjustments according to my prioritized streams. 2024 unfortunately wasn't my best year in reaching a harmony-state, something I'm not pleased about. The data helps me make sense of how my life is transforming, triggering moments of reflection for adapting or at times, just general acceptance of my current reality, it is what it is -- forcing me to make sense of my aspirations to perhaps re-calibrate (for areas where I have full agency to control and influence).
How has my workflow for insights generation changed over time - are genAI tools of any help?
In the early years, I used Excel as my main source of data insights. Later I moved over to Amazon QuickSight. I still use QuickSight to generate my analysis and dashboards, as I have a few transformations with calculated fields. I then export the Quicksight data tables as Excel file as the source data set for AI tools. Quicksight too, is a little quirky with ingesting new data, maintaining the integrity of calculated fields and sometimes data gets corrupted when updating its splice models. I spent a good few hours debugging failures in data alignment, missing rows due to errors in calculated fields (that should have "just worked"). I use a free account, so I'm unable to use any of the AI "Amazon Q" features - ideally, I'm expecting an interactive analysis/dashboard AI assistant that I can have a conversation with. Alas, there is no way to share or embed QuickSight dashboards openly, embedding QuickSight dashboards in blog posts would be cool.
Anyway, with the advent of ChatGPT, in the last two years, I started integrating AI data analysis. I spent the last few days with ChatGPT - suffice it to say, I'm not that impressed by ChatGPT's Data Analyst capability. Nothing much has improved since the last year. At least it can understand large datasets in Excel or CSV format which is cool, something that Claude,Geminior NotebookLM don't currently support.
ChatGPT's "Data Analyst" does a decent job performing exploratory data analysis, was able to infer what my dataset was largely about without me providing clues or guiding info. The biggest problem I encountered was loss of context, loss of memory, and complete loss of the data's runtime environment. I had to repeatedly reload the dataset because ChatGPT "lost the data", then re-coax it to understand the data fields. It also hallucinated and made simple mistakes calculating aggregated results. It got simple math wrong. At times, I had to specify in detail how to use the data fields to generate the insights I asked for. This was surprising as I had a much better experience on the model from a year ago. I'm using the latest 4o model, being a ChatGPT Plus subscriber. I feel that OpenAI team should just kill the Data Analyst as a separate feature and promote the Canvas Projects capability going forward.
On ditching the built-in "Data Analyst", I switched to the latest Projects capability in ChatGPT. I shared my dataset as project files, included all my blog posts on Personametry and RAGE as context data, and provided fine tuned instructions for the project as data scientist responsible for producing business intelligence reporting. I had a much much better experience using ChatGPT projects than Data Analyst - however - I still ran into issues with hallucination, over confidence in the AI's interpretation of data and calculated results. AI is still far from being a trusted source of business intelligence as far as I'm concerned. You need to take time to manually build your own reports and analysis, like the way I use Quicksight -- and then test the AI generates the same results. I've spent hours on this over the last few days - yes, it was a little frustrating - but nevertheless insightful. The more time I spend playing around with these tools, the more I am amazed at the potential power and future disruption in this space - and at the same time, the more I gain some comfort that there is still a long journey ahead. For my simple data set of hours logged by task, the AI doesn't perform 100% on first shot -- so for big businesses out there, don't go firing your business analysts, BI engineers anytime soon, thinking GenAI will replace these roles... IMHO, we are at least another 2 years away from maturing, if not, more. A key input is validation - you would need to generate reference test cases to validate all the metrics compute correctly to gain trust in AI-generated insights.
In 2023 I had some fun with Noteable's ChatGPT plug-in. I was really looking forward to Noteable's progress in the area of AI-assisted data intelligence, but alas, the company and product is no more. I'm now experimenting with something similar from deepnote, but it's early days - and also quite expensive for a general hobbyist as myself. I believe this is the future though.
Where do I see this experiment going?
Personal AI assistants are all the rage these days, some say 2025 is the year of AI agents. I'd like to build a truly personalized agent that is not just about rudimentary calendar integration, answering texts and emails - but an assistant that truly understands me as a person - across my personal and professional streams. Integrating my time tracking data, health, fitness and well-being data from smart trackers, integrated with my todo lists, etc. Coming back to personametry, I would like daily, weekly insights from my personal assistant. Imagine if we could have an assistant that says "Mo, I noticed you haven't exercised in awhile, and you're finishing work quite late. You've not had quality time with your wife and kids - and your recent trip to the ER is not boding well. I've booked dinner for you and the family at your favorite restaurant, and for the upcoming long weekend, I've made a booking at mountain lodge you will enjoy. I scanned your calendar, there's no major work deliverables or travel planned - so take some time to rest and recharge, or else you will burnout soon!"
So, what's the 2024 insights then?
Until I can get my personal agent implemented, manual Google slides will have to do. Check it out below!
So we're already in the month of May(!), I've missed my first quarter personal business review - hence I had to do a quadrimester review :-) A 4-month period is commonly referred to as a "quadrimester" link. The term "quadrimester" is derived from the Latin word "quadrimestris," which literally means "four months". However, it's important to note that the term "quadrimester" is not as widely used or recognized as "quarter" for a 3-month period.
2024 vs 2023 Insights and Comparisons
If this is the first time you're seeing my personal metrics, you might want to catch up on how I got here. I invented a term "Personametry" and have been tracking my time in some detail since 2016. Catch up on the history of personametry posts here.
<chatGPT>
Family Time (P5 Family) has increased from 408.64 hours in 2023 to 488.14 hours in 2024, indicating more time spent with family.
Professional Work (P3 Professional) saw a significant increase from 549.06 hours in 2023 to 825.54 hours in 2024, highlighting a heavier focus on professional activities.
Individual Activities (P2 Individual) decreased from 339.81 hours in 2023 to 207.58 hours in 2024, suggesting less time spent on personal activities and hobbies.
Sleep (P0 Life Constraints) saw a slight decrease, from 903.63 hours in 2023 to 857.69 hours in 2024, possibly due to the increased professional workload.
Muslim Practices (P1 Muslim) also saw a decrease from 501.00 hours in 2023 to 418.30 hours in 2024.
Time spent with friends (P6 Friend Social) and as a husband (P4 Husband) has also decreased.
These shifts suggest a trend towards more work and family engagement at the expense of personal leisure, sleep, and other social activities. This might reflect a shift in priorities or changes in personal or professional commitments.
This report delivers a comprehensive analysis of personal time allocation for the first four months of 2024, benchmarked against the corresponding period in 2023. The findings are crucial for optimizing time management strategies and ensuring alignment with broader personal and professional goals.
*Key Highlights*
Workload Increase: There has been a significant surge in professional engagement, with work hours increasing by 50.3% from 549.06 hours in 2023 to 825.54 hours in 2024. This increase indicates a robust uptake in professional activities, potentially reflecting expanded responsibilities or new projects.
Health and Fitness: A concerning decline in health and fitness activities was noted, with a 70% reduction in time allocated to these crucial activities. The decrease from 64 hours in 2023 to 19 hours in 2024 signals a need for immediate realignment of priorities to safeguard physical well-being.
Self-Learning and Development: Time invested in self-learning through books and other media saw a dramatic drop of 75%, decreasing from 69 hours in 2023 to 17 hours in 2024. This reduction could hinder ongoing personal development and professional competitiveness.
Sleep and Rest: Sleep-life balance saw a modest decrease of 5.1%, with total hours reducing from 903.63 to 857.69. While not as stark as other categories, this reduction will continue to be monitored to prevent potential impacts on health and productivity.
Personal Life Engagement: Time spent on broader personal life activities decreased by 14.7%, indicating potential overreach of professional commitments into personal time.
Husband Time: Notably, time spent in the role of a husband decreased by 40%, from 134 hours in 2023 to 80 hours in 2024. As every wise person knows, a happy wife is indeed a key to a happy life, suggesting that revisiting this balance could be crucial, lest we find ourselves investing significantly in couch time!
*Strategic Implications and Forward-Looking Statements*
The data from early 2024 underscores a pivot towards intensified professional commitments, which, while beneficial for career progression, has led to significant sacrifices in health, fitness, and personal development. To address this, strategic initiatives will focus on reinstating a balanced allocation of time across all domains to support sustained health, continuous learning, and overall life satisfaction.
Moving forward, we will implement routine evaluations and adjustments to our time management strategy. This will ensure that our commitments and daily activities are optimally aligned with our stated goals of maintaining a healthy work-life balance, fostering continuous personal growth, and ensuring physical well-being.
*Conclusion*
As we continue through 2024, our objective remains clear: to effectively manage our time to enhance our quality of life and fulfill our professional ambitions without compromising our health and personal development. This report serves as a foundation for making informed decisions that will drive improvements in our daily routines and long-term strategies.
</chatGPT>
My Reflections, what happened? I had a good thing going in 2023!
It's that time of the year when I sit down and review my time tracking data for the year. This time round, playing around with ChatGPT (whilst still maintaining my AWS Quicksight dashboards). I was quite looking forward to continuing to use Noteable's AI/Data tools, sadly the service shut down :-(
I've shared my dataset openly and also you can look at the ChatGPT transcript of the conversation and prompts here.
ChatGPT's overall summary:
Rest and Sleep (Individual): A substantial 2,856.11 hours, akin to the restorative power of a long, rejuvenating sleep every night.
Professional Work: Impressively, 2,051.20 hours were dedicated to your professional life, showing a solid commitment to career growth and achievements.
Family Time (Family-Man): A heartwarming 1,398.79 hours spent with family, which is like embarking on a year-long road trip with your loved ones, filled with bonding and cherished memories.
Spirituality (Individual): A profound 1,106.44 hours in spiritual pursuits, reflecting a journey akin to a spiritual retreat, deepening your inner peace and understanding.
Personal Time (Individual): 467.55 hours of 'Me Time', ensuring a healthy balance of personal space and activities, like taking a short, refreshing break each day.
Marital/Wife (Husband): 451.91 hours dedicated to marital life, resonating with the quality time spent in building a strong, supportive partnership.
Knowledge and Learning (Individual): 202.88 hours of enriching your mind, like attending a series of insightful lectures throughout the year.
Health and Fitness (Individual): 145.07 hours, a commitment to staying active and healthy, similar to a consistent routine of short, daily workouts.
Social (Friend): 117.06 hours, akin to enjoying meaningful social gatherings, reinforcing bonds and making memories.
Looking back, my time tracking is reaching steady state. Not sure I'm going to keep reporting these stats going forward, but I'll probably keep fine-tuning. For 2023 Scorecard, I'm glad to have focused and met largely my spiritual goals, work/professional goals was maintained year-on-year, despite the spike in work hours in the last quarter (I got "promoted", with extra responsibilities which means more work hours). Health and Fitness hours took a dive compared to 2022, but it seems that my Strava/Garmin activity tracking shows better performance in 2023 compared to 2022 (so more time logged doesn't necessarily equate to being for fit, or achieving more). Social time decreased because we lost some friends to emigration, and generally our year was focused on the kids as my son approached his final high school matric exams, we prioritised staying at home.
If you've read all my previous posts on Personametry, you would've learnt that as part of this experiment, even way back when I started in 2016, I wanted a personal-assistant AI to help me with my RAGE / Personametry framework. I wanted to engage in meaningful conversations with an AI-assistant, coach me, act as my council, gatekeeper, motivator, etc. I believe there is still a need for this and the current state-of-the-art still has some catching up to do. Nevertheless, I am quite enjoying my interactions with ChatGPT. It was able to understand my personametry data, derive some insights, create the views I would generally take a couple hours doing myself. It's just a matter of time until we get truly personalized agents, like a personametry-gpt agent. Here's what ChatGPT offered I should look into for 2024:
Around this time of year with 6 months already past us, I spend some time reflecting on my Personametry and RAGE model - keeping in check how I'm performing against my own personal and professional goals -- just like we do in business with mid-year performance reviews.
If this is the first time you've come across my work on Personametry, here's a view of my time spent in 2022 compared to 2021, click here.
Okay, so I spent my Sunday locked up in my office playing around with ChatGPT geeking out on data analysis & visualisations. So not much gain in time productivity there - but the learning was fun and immensely rewarding. Yes, a good investment of time, spent learning and preparing to adapt for the new world of AI disruption!
I've been on my data capturing journey since 2015. My end goal to end up with an AI personal assistant that truly understands me. I suspect realising my aspiration isn't that far off and neither far fetched for that matter. My entire workflow would be a fully integrated AI assistant that has the ability to track all my activities, by the minute (imagine "personametry.ai"). To get there, the next simpler step would be to automate the data ingestion piece, leaving me with the only manual entry of starting and ending tasks. My next experiment would be to use the raw data export from Harvest, without doing any data transforms and let the AI do that for me. If that works, I can build in automation that does monthly data imports and produces insights for me automatically. Ideally, I would build personametry.ai as a task into my personal assistant. Imagine a time when we're all wearing a device that "just knows" what we're doing, who we're interacting with, and what we're spending our time on? This device, i.e. "my AI" or "personametry" will act as a guide, coaching us along the way to improve - and hold us accountable - calling us out on what we're paying attention to (i.e. deviating from our goals.)
Lessons Learnt - Still early days but very hopeful
The tools are still early days, but still nevertheless very powerful and will definitely improve my productivity in future.
It takes a few attempts to load data files with the plugin, CSV seems to cope much better than XLS files.
ChatGPT/Noteable uses different methods each time for approaching the data analysis - some coaxing on the nature of the dataset produces better insights.
I didn't need to edit any code myself so there's an immediate empowerment driver right there.
Don't trust every output though, as the AI can get things wrong
Double check calculations, ChatGPT still doesn't seem to get some simple math right the first time round
It is amazing what one can accomplish with simple, clear prompting
I am definitely going to learn more
I had so much fun learning, I was in a state of flow for 10 hours and couldn't stop thinking about the world of possibilities of this technology!
Here's a video of ChatGPT prompts - Play at fastest speed (sorry, no time to edit)
It is time for my yearly ritual of analysing my time spent the previous year. This ritual is one of analysis and reflection, setting up the stage for planning & making new intentions for the upcoming year, 2023!
I've been doing this exercise consistently over the last eight years! Am I crazy? Maybe?! I've become quite the data junkie, and I'm loving it!
I know that tracking every activity and accounting for every minute of one's life might seem like overkill to most people. I on the other hand, actually quite enjoy doing so! :-) Primarily because having insights into how I spend my time has really helped me be more conscious and intentional about my aspirations, goals and expectations covering all dimensions of my life, seeking balance and harmony in my personal and professional streams. My methods allow me to focus and maintain discipline with my time...
This is my value system that describes my streams:
Muslim | Individual | Professional (Work) | Husband | Family-Man | Social/Friend
When someone asks me the following: Mo, how's life? Mo, how are you doing work-wise? Mo, how's things? Are you happy? Are you meeting your aspirations? Mo, what consumes most of your time these days? I can have a sincere and authentic conversation about it.
Yes, as some of my friends have argued that you "just know" instinctively where your time is being spent, on what and you just know the areas you need to improve on. Sure, I get that and agree. I find it much more useful to validate my instincts, verify anecdotes with quantifiable data & metrics to help me answer such questions: Where am I spending my time? Am I spending time in the right areas according to my priorities? Am I heading in the right direction? How am I growing? Where am I in my stages of growth across all my personas? How do I measure success? Am I growing holistically as a person?
In 2015, I researched productivity and personal development methods extensively, culminating to me creating my own frameworks:
RAGE (Reality Aspirations Goals Expectations). Knowing yourself, i.e. what you stand for, your value system, by identifying Personas. For each Persona, define Aspirations/Goals that becomes your long term personal roadmap. What emerges from this is a scorecard that you can track your progress, see example from 2020.
PERSONAMETRY is another concept I created that essentially captures key metrics about yourself, TIME being our most valuable resource. If time is our most valuable resource, do we not owe it to ourselves to account for it? For each Persona you identify with, Personametry is your personal telemetry. It can be extended to a variety of use cases, including overall happiness/stress sentiment analysis. If you're keen to learn more, check out this product specification document I created years ago, but alas, haven't developed the app for it as yet (alas, no time, wasn't a priority!)
Personametry complements RAGE by providing data insights, that I use to analyse if I'm trending in the right direction or not. Keeping a personal RAGE scorecard helps me keep track of how I'm progressing against my personal roadmap. In the last eight years alone, these frameworks have helped me reach my highest potential in climbing up the career ladder (making CTO, executive role), becoming debt free and remaining debt-free for 7 years and-running, improve my marriage enhancing the foundations (insha Allah), and rekindled relationship with family members, including long lost friendships, develop a more consciously confident identity as a Muslim in the workplace, make big bold decisions of starting over in my career (like walking away from CTO and big financial incentives rewards, take a pay-cut and step down in role) or start my own consulting, also make time to focus on paying it forward by offering my time to coach/mentor for free, etc. RAGE/Personametry has also helped me in being critically selective of where/what/whom I spend time with, I've learnt to say "NO" more often guarding my personas and setting boundaries, even with my own family and dearest loved ones.
Emerging from this experience so far are some interesting learning experiences, such as how one's goals and aspirations can change with time, depending on one's stage of life. For instance, where I'm at right now in 2023, is my profession is no longer what drives me (I'm consciously not seeking out the next promotion or level up because I've been there already and experienced the life of an executive), as I'm now seeking new experiences centred on creating more purpose, meaning and fulfilment...Having said this, I remain a pragmatist and so am open to new job opportunities that more closely align with my value system (example: NGOs/NPOs looking for CTO/CIO expertise, Africa-friendly timezone working hours is also being considered). If you know of any opportunities in this area, do get in touch!
Analysing 2022 v 2021 - Data Analysis & Insights
Since 2016 I've tracked 24,983 (±25K) activities as data points, tracking my life streams as: Muslim | Individual | Professional (Work) | Husband | Family-Man | Social/Friend - thus logging 60,572 (±60K) hours with an error tolerance of ±0.5% (99.5% capturing accuracy). In 2022 alone, I logged 8,715 hours, of which: Professional Work consumed 23%, Personal Life 43% with the physical constraint of Sleeping accounting for 34%. Yep, we sleep for a third of our lives, and I have the data to back that up!
Suffice to say, I've made some good gains in 2022 that I hope to carry through into 2023. Check the slide show for the rest...
P.S. If you'd like to have a coffee/virtual chat about my RAGE/Personametry concepts, or you're curious to learn more, or seeking a mentor/coaching/networking opportunity or you simply want to learn about my workflows, then please get in touch!
I recently came across the GROW model which I think complements my own RAGE model quite nicely when it comes to inspecting aspirations and goals. It's all about seeking clarity through questions:
Goal - What do you want? What's your desired outcomes (Aspirations)?
What would you notice if you were performing in this area more proficiently?
What would others notice if you were performing in this area more proficiently?
What would be the benefits to your team / family / business / friends of you gaining proficiency in this area?
What is the short- and long-term impact of you not enhancing in this area?
Reality - What's your current situation? Be brutally honest about current reality.
What is the current state of your proficiency in this area?
What have you done till date to develop proficiency in this area?
What has helped your progress?
What has held you back?
How long have you been working on enhancing yourself in this area?
Where do you feel stuck?
What perceptions about yourself might be getting in your way?
Are these perceptions accurate? How do you know?
Options - Exploring possibilities / Expectations. What could you do?
What do you feel you need to gain proficiency in this area?
What are the possible actions you can take to enhance yourself in this area?
What else can you do? Probe deeper
Now that you are aware of the possibilities, which one would you try first?
What would you like to have happen?
If you do nothing, what will be the impact?
What does the wiser part of you tell you?
If you were coaching someone on enhancing themselves in this area, what might you say to them?
If there were no limitations/restrictions, what might you do?
What options are within your control?
Will - What will you do? Commitment / Next Steps?
What support do you need to be successful in your next steps?
What obstacles do you anticipate? How will you navigate them?
How might you motivate yourself when things get tough?
Who might be able to help you in achieving your next steps?
Tis the period of mid-year performance reviews in the workplace, so I decided to inspect my own personal performance with my time tracking metrics covering the dimensions that make up my life and work streams.
I've been tracking these metrics for a number of years already and at least once a year, share the analytics and insights from this lifelong experiment. I created the term Personametrywhich basically is about telemetry (metrics) about the self (personal). Feeding Personametry is a framework I've created for myself for personal and professional development, my RAGE model.
At the start of 2022 I shared insights from my past six years of tracking and also followed up another post zooming in on the 2021 year, highlighting the main time sinks and the impact on other related streams. I set a goal of turning things around in 2022 to get to a state of balance I enjoyed prior to 2021.
With half the year over, 2022 is fairing much better than 2021 - as I've been very intentional about the changes.
Here are the headlines (comparing 2022 with 2021 for the first 7 months, January to July):
Work hours is down 28%
Spirituality is up 53%
Family time is up 27%
Social time is up 75%
Overall "Me Time" is up 16%
Holistically then, my process of re-calibrating in 2022 is having the desired effect. I'm spending time in the areas I've prioritized without significantly compromising on a major stream like my work (work obviously provides for the lifestyle I'm grateful for).
For more insights, check out the embedded slideshow :-)
In terms of my overall happiness sentiment and tracking my aspirations and goals as governed by my RAGE model, I'll share in a separate post in September '22. I've started to warm up more and more to Mo Gawdats' happiness formula which has helped me in coming to terms with the turbulence I've experienced with my job/career decision to disrupt and reinvent myself...stay tuned for the next write up!
In my first post of 2022, I shared some analytics of my life tracking data for the last 6 years. I couldn't help myself going down the rabbit hole with additional questions that could be used to trigger additional self reflection, which would then spark me to make deliberate changes in my life. It was quite fun going down the rabbit hole playing with AWS Quicksight and manipulating data fields to get to the answers I sought.
When I have more time to play around, I think an AI/ML personal assistant should use my data to help me with insights. I believe there will be a market in personal analytics or metrics, or personal telemetry that I've coined the termed personametry back in 2015. At that time I wanted to build a product based on my RAGE model called personametry. Alas, that project is still on the backburner, and I've made a ton of excuses (to be honest) not getting it off the ground. Yes, my work got in the way, reality of family and financial obligations, then complacency and comforts-of-life (aka laziness). If I was serious about it, I would've made a plan. I resigned to keep tracking my data, keeping abreast of the progress of personal assistants, productivity apps and personal tracking devices, looking for the timing when things begin to fall into place!!
If you have additional questions you think might inspire changes & personal improvements, let me know in the comments section!
How do I breakdown my 24-hour days?
This is an interesting question. I decided to splice my 24-hours into "periods" and so I ended up with 8 (eight) partitions of the day. Since I track the start and end of my activities (tasks) captured in Harvest, I should be able to see how I utilize my time in a typical day. There is a missing element of productivity/impact as a result of that activity, which is a topic for another day.
Here is the code for splitting up a day, using a datetime field, in Quicksight:
I don't start my day at midnight and count 24 hours. Rather I account for the 24 hours from the point of going to bed or starting my day at 4am. I used to consistently begin my days at 4am for 2016-2020, but since relocating to Cape Town, it's been a struggle. I'm going to have to renew this habit in 2022. The partitioning of 24 hours days is not impacted though.
In addition to splicing the parts of day, I could look at how my routines differ between weekdays and weekends. For weekdays, I haven't yet filtered out real workdays, that is, not a public holiday or a leave day.
With this new partitioning I can then answer these questions like:
It's that time of the year when I review my personal time keeping metrics showing how I've spent my time over the previous year. I've been doing this exercise diligently since 2015, when I created a framework for myself called "RAGE" Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations. Using ideas from software engineering and product management, I decided to map out my personal (life) and professional (work) streams across the many dimensions I was involved in (Muslim | Individual | Professional | Husband | Father | Friend | etc.). I focused on Timeas the key metric to track, since time is one of the most important resource that should never be squandered.
The idea is simple: if something is important to me, then I should be spending time in that area - but if I end up spending little or zero time on that thing, then that thing must have not been as important to me as I thought it was.
Tracking time allows me to answer questions like:
Am I spending time in the areas that are important to me?
Which areas am I over indexing on that negatively impacts my other steams, robbing me of value?
Am I giving each stream the necessary amount of attention?
What decisions do I need to make when the data and anecdotes (feelings / instincts) don't match up?
To read my 2020 review and reference my personal value system, click here.
2021 Re-starting Life & Work (again)
Driven by my personal planning through my RAGE model, 2021 was the year I hit reset. I uprooted my family and relocated from Johannesburg to Cape Town in December 2020. Earlier in 2020, I'd resigned from my C-level position of a very stable and secure job - at first - to take a year long sabbatical to work out my next move. This sabbatical was short-lived due to the uncertainty of Covid-19, I felt it too risky not to secure another job in 2021. I knew one thing for sure: I was no longer interested in building video entertainment technology applications "make people watch TV" and wanted to branch out into something else either in Cloud or e-Commerce. Thankfully I landed the first job I decided to interview for in cloud computing with AWS, Cape Town. A big departure for me because I was going back to core engineering building software, something which I've not done to that level of technical detail since 2010! I was also going to start as a senior manager and not a GM/CTO. So essentially I'd walked away from a high influence, high referent and hierarchical power, entrenched credibility and track record - to starting professionally all over again, from a "big fish, small pond" to being a "tiny fish, large ocean" fella, with zero credibility. I value learning new knowledge, building new relationships and gaining new experiences as more important than positional titles. My wife and kids also left their lives behind which we'd nurtured for a decade since relocating to Johannesburg (from UK), relocating and disrupting their lives to Cape Town with me - they too, hitting reset leaving much loved friendships, community and family-support behind.
So 2021 would bring a massive disruption to my personal, professional and family streams. Time will tell if this grand reset is working or not. So my personal time tracking data is now more important than before.
This post shares my time tracking data for 2021 compared to the previous 6-years for comparison. Resetting one's life personally and professionally is not an easy thing to do. I've learnt much about this experience that I hope to share in future posts. In terms of the key KPIs of time tracking, 2021 went as well as can be expected considering the unusual context & challenges of Covid-19. In this post I share only the data and limited insights. There's some soul-searching I've yet to do on making drastic changes to my personas, which at the time of this writing doesn't seem to be major...
With year one done, so far, so good...no major regrets although the data has shown I need to recalibrate some streams if I want to get back to previous levels of balance.
Around this time last year in January 2020, I shared (in this post) how I tracked against my personal & professional aspirations of the previous year 2019, accounted for my time spent and narrowed down the major questions (and hence decisions) that remained open.
This was all before Covid-19 happened, but despite that disruption, I remained committed to holding myself accountable for realising my aspirations. I track these aspirations through a framework I created roughly five years ago, aimed at lifestyle design, something that is always a work-in-progress and is never complete. This framework is called my RAGE (Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations) model. It has seen multiple iterations and has remained my guiding compass, even as I enter 2021 - the year of massive change for both myself as well as my family.
Looking back to 2020, it started with these open questions:
How do I get my work hours of the previous three years under control? What am I willing to walk away from?
Where next do I take my career? Do I remain with Pay TV moving further up to Group CIO/CTO or should I do something else altogether at the risk of going down a couple steps in the ladder?
How serious am I about working with, or starting my own NGO/NPO non-profit?
What am I going to do with my growing list of product / business start-up ideas?
Should I leave South Africa and return back to the UK; or should I relocate to another country whilst still working in Pay TV?
We all know how 2020 turned out - but - despite that black swan - I nevertheless wanted to be antifragile and took bold action to not play it safe! Instead I dove head first into uncertainty, however, I did lay out a detailed plan. Those questions I needed to answer were Type 1 decisions (according Jeff Bezos' types of decisions), which called for careful deliberation & planning. So, using my RAGE model as my guide again, along with inspiration from a few folks (authors, friends, mentors, coaches & critics), I was able to address those questions by taking the following BIG decisions:
I quit my job, my own sabbatical with no return policy - thus creating space for me to rest, recuperate & reflect. This wasn't an easy decision to make, as I was walking away from some rather good monetary incentives due to cash out in early 2021, and as a result of Covid-19, the prudent thing to do would've been to stick it out until the world recovered. Yet, I left anyway, putting into perspective What am I willing to walk away from?
This was only possible because 5 years ago, when I started my RAGE model, one of the aspirations for my persona as an individual was "To be debt-free on the road to financial independence". Since I was debt free, and maybe 30% on the road to financial independence, I had enough saved up to afford a break for at least a year.
Life is short, we've lost loved ones unexpectedly in 2020. I have tweaked my life model somewhat to weigh more strongly toward living a life of meaning, purpose & enjoying the present more.
I decided to leave TV behind - switch domains - do something else preferably in cloud services. I will use my sabbatical time to ramp-up and then land a new job. This too wasn't quite that easy:
I'd reached a peak in my career with a highly respected company in the industry, although I knew I had gaps to close to move to the next level. It took a long time to mentally let go, but I found my flame again that helped me remember my past as inspiration to change my future.
I even considered going to medical school - but that didn't make much sense financially in terms of my family responsibilities and commitments.
Being the practical guy, I ended up cutting my sabbatical short because I landed a job much sooner than I anticipated - and as a result - ended up making not only a new job decision, but also a relocation to a new city decision too!
Not serious about starting my own NGO - I spent a good few days unpacking this topic. I even went through a "finding purpose" retrospective and mind-mapped the options. Lo and behold, there appeared a golden thread throughout my life on working with blind and partially-sighted people. So I planned to use my sabbatical to explore that option...but that was short-lived. So decision: NO, not financially feasible for me. Instead I'll join accessibility-related community meetups at work, continue to donate money to causes and look to committing some of my time as a volunteer (which has been difficult, since it doesn't appear anywhere in my Persona priorities).
Not serious about being an entrepreneur because I don't have the time nor the resources to focus on it properly. I will rather focus my energy into innovating at work. I will still build and maintain my ideas repository because I'm an ideas guy - but if the timekeeping from the last five years has shown me anything - it's not that important to me - a wantrepreneur! I will still look at angel investing opportunities though. Thus "Being an Entrepreneur / Run my own product start-up" has been deprecated as a persona. It's actually such a relief to just let that go and leave it all behind! Shedding unrealistic aspirations reduces stress and anxiety, reinforcing a sense of perspective. A cup can only hold that much water before overflowing, the same with life!
Decided to remain in South Africa but instead try a new city, Cape Town. I was lucky to meet a career aspiration and a lifestyle aspiration (to live in a coastal city & enjoy nature) at the same time, but I'm still a little far off from having my own beachfront holiday homes so a 20 minute drive to the seaside is a good start though!!
Now, as I begin my 2021 journey, having addressed those serious questions, some of which were the cause of much stress and anxiety at the workplace, home & personal well-being fronts - 2021 will simply be about appreciating new experiences cross-cutting both work and life, aiming for harmony, acceptance, learning and growth (spiritual, personal & professional). My personas remain largely the same priorities, their aspirations and specific goals will be adjusted for the next set milestones. I have hit reset so the process of reinvention will take time, I'm not going to rush things by being overly aggressive in setting unrealistic goals!
I have indeed made Type 1 (one-way-door) decisions, making it very difficult to go back now. I have rekindled my flame and now it's up to me (as it has always been) to make my life more interesting and meaningful!
2021 is about re-invention.
I believe it can be done!!
As usual, I share my RAGE metrics with you - see below for my 2020 time-keeping performance...
Hint: Click on the images to view them properly.
If you'd like to chat about my RAGE model, tools and other frameworks I use to help manage my personal & professional life, please feel free to reach out! I believe as human beings we are all striving to make sense of our life/work/world, regardless of our culture, belief systems, etc. I believe I have found a method that could be useful...and I'm happy to jump on a video call with you for free life/work coaching! It has helped a few people already, so maybe that says something??
A recent post on LinkedIn that I casually commented on by sharing my own personal story about the time I hitch hiked a lift, travelling 600km overnight on a long-haul truck just to make a job interview on time. I commented on LinkedIn without giving it much thought actually. It nevertheless struck a nerve that made me realise I need to go back into my past, dig up the old memories to help ignite the fire-in-my-belly, thus provoking me out of a slumber zone that I found myself recently experiencing (even before covid-19).
The theory: by reflecting on my past stories, building blocks that "made me ME", I would be encouraged to continue moving forward with a renewed sense of energy and purpose. To become that bold, daring & courageous individual again. Someone who always went against the grain, never one to follow the herd or play-it-safe. An owner of my path, unafraid of uncertainty or the unknown, with a sense of curiosity in all things life & work, not swayed by people be they corporate executives, colleagues, friends or family. Equipped with my reliance on God and my confidence in my own strengths & abilities, having a strong sense of faith and fine-tuned instincts...daring to be different! How do I find that guy again?
After all, I have indeed successfully navigated through many challenges and obstacles in the past despite my background, to get to where I am today of which, I am immensely proud of, so why should I settle now? Should the next 20 years not be filled with even more?? But it seems my flame was dying out, so I began to ask myself whatever happened to that flame? How do I re-ignite it? Whatever happened to being that lion? Have I settled for a life of ease and comfort? Am I comfortable doing routine work? Why do I need to play the system, be under the radar just because I'm close to having made it? What's so important about job title anyway? Does my work really define my identity?
I needed to find my story again and was sure the clues were waiting to be found hidden in my past. I'm sharing this because just maybe, I'm not alone in this boat - that this exercise might be something others could find useful too, in helping you with instigating the change you seek. When I did travel back it time, it occurred to me how much my work or career defined my life!? Victim of circumstance or not, it was quite revealing that my profession which stemmed from being conditioned by the system of Life programming to work hard and survive - shaped my life's choices.
Still, I contend that over the years we tend to forget who we were (sometimes it could be argued this is a good thing depending on one's past circumstances). We also lose touch of our inner core. To some extent possibly even forget our own roots. We thus enter either a comfort zone of complacency or living life through wilful ignorance. That is, who we are today is not so clear anymore because we've forgotten our past!
HAS THE LION INSIDE OF ME BEEN TAMED??
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THAT FIRE IN MY BELLY??
My inner voice shouts!!
Have I really arrived? It can't be, but I'm still quite young!?
One of my greatest fears is to reach a point in my life where I'm resentful, i.e. of having regrets about missed opportunities. Taking the safe path instead of the uncertain, uncharted one. As we get older, start a family, climb the career ladder, the less inclined we are to taking risks, to upsetting the balance or causing disruption to our family's lives or to breaking away from accepted social/cultural or even professional norms.
There are indeed times when we need to be patient, be wise, show grit and resilience by deferring rewards for later (delaying gratitude), but this tactic too if used too often or unwisely, may just only be a crutch that we hold on to - because actually, deep down, we're afraid to admit that we fear the unknown, so we often settle for the safety net of waiting for that retirement pension as an example, to only then start enjoying life. In another LinkedIn post, I described this as Life Programming.
We seek out excuses, governed by rationality or play the sacrificial card of putting our own personal interests last, ahead of the rights of our family, spouse or children. We may have created a personal value system that expects self-sacrifice. We may make our worlds larger than what we can neither control nor influence (like we should be so grateful because others have it much worse than us, why chase the world when you're got it good now, look at the trouble in other countries, better to be thankful and let it be, don't be too ambitious, etc?). Sometimes we use our religion and faith in a way that promotes static stagnancy than taking on risks (why should I be an ungrateful servant by chasing this world of "dunyah"?). Sometimes we compromise our core values and passions because the money is just too good to resist. Sometimes we place unusually high notions about rights of the companies we work for, or attach sense of loyalty to our bosses or the teams we lead or work with. In our minds, this sacrificial attitude conjures up feelings of goodness, almost a saintliness, that can be blinding us from the hard truths...self-preservation is not necessarily a selfish act, after all, this world is fleeting, and we must therefore not waste ourselves with our limited time on earth, we each deserve an experience worth living...and to do so, action, re-action & forward momentum is needed IMHO.
Personally, I've been riding this roller coaster for some years now, so I created a model called RAGE, to help provide guardrails to prioritise the various streams in my life & help with decision-making rules (I'm an engineer after all). This tool has served me and others (friends, family & colleagues) quite well, I've received some good endorsements...
My theories are also shared by others, take for example Bernadette Jiwa, author of Story Driven, what she has to say about this topic:
We're so busy trying to connect the dots looking forward, we overlook the opportunity to learn from the experiences, not just the mistakes, of the the past. We don't spend as much time looking back as we should. I don't mean just to reminisce about fond memories or to regret stupid mistakes. But rather, to reflect on the significance of our stories, remind ourselves of our resourcefulness and reinforce our sense of identity. History, heritage and hindsight are powerful teachers. But we're in too much of a hurry to reach higher ground to learn from them....
I started my thinking & writing on this topic long before reading Jiwa's book, I'm really glad I did though. There's much more work on self-awareness that I need to unpack, for instance, Part Three "Developing Your Story-Driven Strategy" is packed with some of these soul-searching questions.
I'm still processing these questions in the background in the context of my RAGE model; and may just follow-up with another blog post, sharing them here for you to help your reflection:
What's the hardest thing you've ever done?
What did doing the hard thing teach you about yourself?
Who are the two people who have had the biggest impact on your life?
What did you learn from them?
What was your first job and what valuable lessons did you learn there?
What's your proudest memory? Why?
When are you at your best?
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would that be? Why?
What's the one thing you wouldn't change about yourself? Why?
How can you bring more of that thing you wouldn't change into your work?
Go back in time five years. What's the thing your old self would be most proud that you've achieved?
How would you like to be remembered?
The exercise: How to find the flame again & then make it stick?
Go back in time, rewind the clock to trigger memories that you think have shaped & molded you...just write whatever comes to mind...then study, analyse and look for common themes.
Take those themes and create affirmations (this is where it gets private and personal).
Write those affirmations down, keep them with you wherever you go.
Start your day with repeating those affirmations out loud to yourself.
Whenever you're in doubt or feeling glum, use your affirmations to get you out of that funk.
You should notice a change, soak this in, observe yourself in this moment.
Use this energy to immerse yourself in solving/creating your next challenge / opportunity.
Does this thing work? Is this some mumbo-jumbo new age thing?
Maybe, but all I can say this has certainly worked for me - so much so that I'm now out of my funk. This has helped me create yet another defining moment in my life that I'm living through right now as I write this...
My affirmations
I trust in God, have hope in God's Mercy & Generosity always.
I am always thankful to God. With God by my side....I...
I love my parents and am grateful to them, love my siblings and my family.
I love my wife & 3 children, my anchors in life.
I am driven, self-motivated & brave.
I choose courage over comfort.
I hustle.
I am a survivor.
I don't blame anyone for my circumstances.
I am not afraid of the unknown.
I am comfortable with uncertainty.
I have overcome many challenges in life.
I have shown grit, patience, perseverance.
I am determined to succeed.
I make calculated decisions.
I am bold.
I take chances. I dive in, sometimes in complete darkness, but I go anyway.
I am always moving forward, never looking back to "what ifs".
I break stereotypes.
I dare to dream.
I question the status quo.
I remain curious. Curiosity is a good thing.
I have taken chances in my life that paid off.
I tend to go against the mould.
I persevere.
I am relentless.
I keep going.
I have never depended on help from anyone unless help is extended.
I hold myself accountable for my own life.
I don't seek hand-outs, ever.
I value my relationships with trusted friends.
I seek their council & can count on when in trouble or difficulty.
I am grateful to all who played a part in helping me.
I help others in need whenever I can.
I have a responsibility to pay it forward to my family, friends and others.
I have always been responsible for my future.
I take responsibility for my life.
I fear no man.
I believe Nobody owes me anything.
I contend that Not everyone needs to like me.
I am comfortable with myself.
I am only in competition with myself.
I hold myself accountable to high standards.
I loathe mediocrity. I am always learning to improve and grow.
I remind myself often: The only one keeping score is myself, no one else.
I seek counsel from people but take full responsibility for the final decision.
I have confidence in my abilities.
I become an expert in a subject in a short time.
I know that every new endeavour will at first be uncertain and difficult.
I gain comfort in past memories.
I have what it takes to accomplish anything I set my mind to.
I trust my gut instincts and intuition.
I have initiative and drive - my past speaks for itself.
I have proven myself more than capable on many fronts life-and-work.
I am world-class.
I am an innovator.
I have walked away from many an opportunity when it just didn't feel right.
I started from zero a few times in my life, I can do it again if need be.
I do not hang around for the safety of a pay cheque.
I have walked away from many a past opportunity with no regrets.
I pave my own way, make my own path, with the help of God.
I strongly believe: Taking the safe, comfortable path has never been my way.
I alone am responsible for shaping my future career.
I cherish and nurture the networks I've created.
I look deep into my past to shape my future - adaptability is key.
I love and respect my roots, no matter humble.
I am who I am, my past is mine to own, my future is mine to create, my present is mine to act.
I know the only obstacle blocking my path is myself.
I hold myself accountable to my own value system, not other peoples'.
I am self-aware.
I am mindful of my ego & keep it in check always.
I am humble but I don't tolerate nonsense.
My Backstory
Here's some stories that are helping me re-ignite my flame...
I grew up not rich, not middle-class, not poor and not in poverty either. My ancestors came to South Africa from India as indentured labourers most likely to work the sugar cane fields in Natal, I don't know where from since there's no paper records to trace back to.
So I was exposed to the reality of the system of economics & social inequality as I grew up in apartheid. So I was always reminded about the reality "unfairness" of life, practicality, hard working humility, from an early age. We could not afford a car until I started working professionally, neither did we spend our childhood enjoying family vacations away from home. We sometimes didn't have the means to enjoy even the small pleasures of school excursions, school photos or even attend my final year farewell party of high school. Despite the lack of financial means, I can't fault my parents, family & friends for not sheltering us from these realities and filling our house & hearts with love, warmth & protection. My childhood was a blessing upon reflection, our elders did a great job providing psychological safety & groomed us to survive whatever challenges came our way.
My late father was indeed a blue collar shoe factory worker, a machinist, one of the best actually, who won many awards for his craft. Although earning just above the minimum wage for much of his life - he taught me so much about hard work, dedication, setting goals, patience, humility, honour, respect, bravery & frugal money management - that I never really had a chance to thank him in this life though. I was much too hard on him. In fact, I was quite naive! To the extent of living my life with a purpose of "never to become like my father" as I saw his lack of ambition and drive as a weakness not a strength. How naive was I!? I went through life with blinkers on, driven to be better than my father, to never become that guy who settled...alas, how ignorant was I, only to realise years later that I've got so much to thank my father for!!
Despite our financial difficulties growing up, I honestly can't fault my parents for not providing a safe, secure, humble, warm and loving home. Home was always our sanctuary, it still is - every time I go back to my parents home (which is now taken care for by my brother and I), I am reminded of where I started: the tiny room I spent my life studying in, the small house that was never really empty, always bustling with visitors, our food table always welcoming to many guests, the wonderful conversations I'd have with my elders about their past, discuss world politics and life...one should never forget one's roots, home is where the heart is...whenever I need to recharge and remember who I am, I find solace back home...
So I grew up with a practical head, my eyes wide open to the realities. I knew I needed to study hard, do my best at school. I started working part-time in high-school (following my elder brother's lead) whilst my friends were enjoying their teenage freedoms. At the age of 11/12, I was responsible enough to do grocery shopping & pay the bills, I knew what my father earned and the total running costs of the household. I grew up knowing that my duty was to take care & support my parents, siblings, etc. That I needed to pay it forward for my siblings and their children as well. I helped my father get his drivers licence and bought him his first car. My parents have been overseas, an idea that would've been impossible to even dream about growing up.
During high school, I had applied to hundreds of institutions for bursaries and scholarships, consistently for four years since grade 10, all through facing rejection but I never once gave up trying. I did this on my own, without help from anyone. I went to the library, enquired about bursaries, photocopied all the forms (there was no internet then), and I would send letters and apply to literally hundreds of companies (back then we just transitioning out of apartheid, the companies were not as diverse as they are today, and most of the bursary/scholarship forms were still in Afrikaans and had conditions like military service). I tried my best in high school, although I thought I could have scored more As, but I couldn't afford to send my papers for remarking and so settled with my grades, it was an A aggregate which was still nevertheless excellent. Even with these grades, it was a proud moment to be accepted to medical school...
I learnt through persistence. I taught myself computers by reading books even though I did not own a computer at the time. In high school, students were only allowed one computer lesson starting in Grade 9, I on the other hand, camped out the computer room everyday until the teacher granted me access, from Grade 7/8, break times, afternoons, etc. Later in high school, I would persistently complete the maths syllabus in advance, and learn new concepts in programming too. I demonstrated the same curious energy when I worked part-time at the retail store. Starting in sales, moving to finance clerk then made my way to the IT department, to being given freedom to run POS installations in branches by myself. Took the same persistence wherever I landed - be it in Dublin, where I closed the gap on my computer science, or in UK where I innovated a Talking TV EPG for the Blind, a personal project of mine. I took initiative, met with customers & spread the word inside the company, throughout the 4 continents, later landing the best, highly coveted technical position in the advanced technology division.
At the end of high school I was successful in getting placed at Wits medical school, but had to turn the offer down, because I lacked the financial means, couldn't get financial aid not even a bank loan.
At 18, that was quite a defining moment for me: A phone call determines my fate in medicine, I realise I really have no one to back me up, I had to do things on my own. That was the first major turning point in my life, bringing it all home - that I'm alone in this fight, it's up to me to work my way out. There were no adults in my family or friends that ventured to stand guarantor for a bank study loan for me. So I thought I'd just continue working and try to find a way to study part-time.
I had worked part-time at Asmalls in Pietermaritzburg as a teenager growing up selling shoes, clothes, working for retail, doing finance admin as a clerk and IT support. This hard work and "not standing still", got me noticed by the owner of this retail store, interviewed me and agreed to finance my studies when he learnt I was not studying. He took a chance on me. I am forever grateful. I chose engineering not because I had tinkered in building stuff growing up, but because it was the sensible degree to choose on paper as the next best thing to medicine, better than computer science (which was really my passion), providing the best of both worlds. Also, engineering jobs paid more, and I could start earning money sooner...so as usual, with no one else to guide me, I made what I thought as the practical sensible realistic choice.
I never gave up hope for bursaries or scholarships. This consistency of purpose paid off that in my 3rd year, I got through and landed a bursary from Vodacom. This enabled me to live independently and experience freedom (which wasn't always a good thing). I moved out of boarding with family to sharing a flat with fellow students, and thus learnt what it meant to live responsibly.
Eventually I would work for Vodacom during vacations setting up mobile base stations and doing drive-by quality of network experience testing. Vodacom was great in supporting me, unfortunately there was no automatic placement post graduation.
As much as I did not quite enjoy half of electronic engineering topics because my intended software courses dropped away, by that time I was very much fully committed to seeing the degree through in four years, so no turning back. I couldn't whine about it, just get on with it. I was thankful for the bursary and committed to work for the company even though broadcast/radio was not my thing, and assumed the job would naturally follow upon graduation, but it didn't. Even on completing my engineering degree, I turned down three jobs before landing a job in the field I'd studied! I did not want to waste my hard slog of four years by not at least experiencing the job of an engineer!
Eventually I would land a real engineering job with UEC outside my home city. I would bunk in the lounge at my student friend's flat, later would end up boarding at a distant family's residence, closer to the work. Ever ready to adapt to changing circumstances. UEC experience was great, no limitations as long as you took initiative. It was fun, stressful and sometimes quite intense. UEC set me up to take the leap to my life overseas.
After just one year of engineering training, I took a chance - responded to an advert in Sunday Times for engineers in Dublin, Ireland. I applied, without thinking what it actually meant, all I knew was that my best chance of earning money was overseas, and best chance of knowledge to work on core software engineering was definitely not South Africa. I left my home with one suitcase and R5000 in savings, landed in Ireland without having any contacts there, absolutely zero, apart from support from the company, S3. I was on my own, first time out of the country away from home, unknown everything and I started from scratch. In one year, I had made a life in Dublin, made new friends from all over the world, my eyes opened up to life, I wasn't the introvert I thought I was. I also adapted to a new lifestyle in Dublin very well, best social life experience, honestly, I never felt like leaving Dublin, ever!
Working in Ireland, in the "first world" was a real eye opener for me. I became consciously aware of my incompetence. My knowledge of software engineering was lacking compared to the "first world", I was a little behind my peers and lacking some depth of computing principles I either would've learned at university if my courses hadn't been dropped; or if I had studied Computer Science.
I had to ramp-up and teach myself all the things I should've learnt at university (if the courses weren't dropped). I ended up on a project that really stretched my ability, but I did not give up. Instead I dug in deeper and through this I had also secured a placement to study my Masters in Computer Science, from a world-class university, that would then bolster and take my South African education to another level, I hoped.
I also experienced my first-and-only layoff in Ireland, made redundant, something I wasn't expecting it. I was gutted. My world was about to shatter. I was just settling down to a nice routine, enjoying my work, good social network. Without much opportunity left in Ireland, I applied to UK since I did not want to return back to South Africa. Using my savings wisely, I remained in Dublin until I found a job in UK.
In between I got married. I completely funded the wedding myself, including the relocation to UK, etc. It was a simple, down-to-earth wedding, but I do take some pride that I did this all by myself, without asking anyone for any financial help.
One of my proudest milestones has to be raising my engineering skills to become recognised as a Principal Engineer in the UK, as a result of my innovating text-to-speech technologies to make a Talking TV, as a side off-the-work-books project.
Following closely behind was gaining my Masters in Computer Science from a world-class international university. These are important to me because coming from South Africa, it certainly means a lot. I remember some colleagues in Ireland and UK just scoffing sarcastically when I shared I worked for an SA company which they had previous interactions with (they held SA engineers in low regard at the time). The UK being a serious meritocracy where competition is tough, meant getting that job as a principal engineer for me was quite vindicating!
To know that I could hold my own amongst senior engineering peers, architects and managers who - I felt small compared to them - who had also applied for the same job as I, felt really good! Working with a small group of engineers, who's day job it was think up big ideas disrupting the market bootstrapping start-ups, was a dream come true for me.
I am grateful I was able to climb up both the technical and management career ladder in the UK and not in South Africa. IMHO this is because it is somewhat difficult in SA to decipher if your promotion was based fully on merit or whether a "previously-disadvantaged background quota filter for equity and diversity" actually influenced the decision making process. Despite South Africa being "free" for 25+ years now, there's still so much to fix in the corporate world. Let's just say, there's still a lot of biased perceptions going on in this country. Non-white people are still doubted here which is sad really, actually quite frustrating at times! So yeah, I actually derive great personal satisfaction and comfort in knowing I actually made it entirely on my own in the UK, based on my own merits, in what is probably the hardest parts of the world when it comes to high-performance "world-class" output. So this achievement is still my story worth cherishing.
My career was spent learning-on-the-job and through self-study. Whenever I started a new role, I would become expert in the subject matter, by reading & learning from others. I was not afraid to jump in the deep end, challenge status quo and be different. Always self-aware, I had a sense of what I needed to improve, but I never doubted myself. I remember a few internal interviews where I shared my ambition of being a Jack of All Trades, Master of Some, of running my own company one day, I was told I had too high ambitions, but that feedback never deterred me! I can indeed claim to be a generalist with specialist skills, I am indeed a Jack of all trades, master of some!
After 10 years overseas, I decided to return to SA. It was a scary decision to make - leave the life we were building that promised a good future for our kids, we had given up SA citizenship (the thought of returning to SA was alien to us for many years), then we made a U-Turn to return back to SA!!
I had zero savings, no private pension to cash out, which meant starting from zero again, but this time in debt, with a wife and three kids to support. To boot, the job I landed in SA was a junior one as well - but I returned anyway, I embraced the uncertainty nevertheless.
The decision was emotionally biased as well, dispelling much logic or rationale. I recall coming close to a nervous breakdown realising missed opportunities in SA as one example. So I felt we needed to return home to be closer to family. I also wanted to allow my kids to open there eyes to real world problems and challenges they wouldn't normally be exposed to had they continued to grow up in UK. At the time UK felt boring and perfect, whereas Africa felt more vibrant and alive!
After experiencing work in South Africa, I soon realised that my education, training and work-experience was on another higher level compared to the local talent. I could provide much more value working at higher levels, close to director / CTO level. I thus quickly gained respect and credibility to get promoted to running pretty much the entire project end-to-end. Yet another personally rewarding experience for me, since in the UK I would've been a couple levels below that of program director, but in South Africa, I became THE CHIEF Program Director - how exciting!! I realised that whilst I sacrificed financial rewards in UK, my knowledge, skills, experiences gained there, paved my way forward to own and confidently perform senior roles in SA that would've taken me a few more years to reach had I been in UK. It was also quite eye opening in terms of the skills gap and opportunities in South Africa. Equally revealing was that I could in fact, return back to the UK with senior management/executive experience, something that would've taken me far longer to break through had I not left the UK in the first place.
After a couple years working in SA, I was not happy with the work. I felt I needed to operate at a much higher level really. The work began to feel very routine and no longer challenging, because I was operating on skills & expertise from UK on autopilot. The projects I was running, whilst "state-of-the-art" for South Africa, was quite old news to me since I'd done them before, years ago. I considered myself an expert in that field of work (set top box engineering) and therefore I needed to change.
Me being the hustler I am, I convened a meeting with the executives, pitched my offering to them, explained I could provide so much more value to the group if I was set free, used the "tamed lion" analogy - and successfully negotiated an exit agreement that saw me start my management consulting gig. It was a win-win for both sides, as I'd continue to support the business as a consultant, and be free to branch out to other technology & business projects within the group & external non-compete companies as well. I took a chance, was brave to leave comfort of a secure, stable job...but it paid off!
So I decided to leave the comfort of a permanent, secure job and good career progression; to become a management consultant into unknown territory! This opened up a few opportunities, expanded my network and also exposed me the the bigger world of business. In a relatively short-period of time, I cleared my ALL my debt, and our lifestyle started to surpass that which we had in the UK, although I've remained very disciplined not to let my lifestyle follow the gains made. So leaving the comfort of a permanent job, trusting in my ability to venture on my own, taking chances, building professional credibility did pay off.
I would again later leave management consulting and rejoin the collective again to take up a challenge of being CTO, yet another change that stretched my potential. Why did I do this? I had a safe consulting gig, with a good pipeline of work, in control of my own time, working at times a four-day week, and earning good money. I was relatively independent and free. Then I decide to join the matrix again, become part of the collective. Why? Because I wanted a new challenge and was becoming bored of consulting. I also wanted to prove to myself I could switch career tracks again, go back into technical, and prove myself & the sceptics wrong. I am very glad I did so, got to work with a great bunch of people, learnt so much & achieved very good results. The experience provided everything that was missing in terms of my next career jump - and in terms of the original goal I'd set myself, i.e. to be a Jack of All Trades, Master of Some, equipped with the tools to run my own start-up company one day, I believe I've done it. I have the ability to run a company if I wanted to, or lead very large teams as CIO/CTO...so what's my next challenge then?
I tend to get bored once I feel I have acquired mastery or proficiency in an experience. I usually give the job a minimum of 24-30 months to acquire a high level of competency, anything longer ranging between 3-5 years (depending on the project or requirements of the role), I consider optional or sufficient time to reach a higher level of mastery. I do try to finish what I've started or at least aim to leave at a point in time where I know it is safe to let go and pass the baton on.
I do take care not to burn bridges, this is very important. I've learnt that having the courage to leave it all behind and walk-away is actually not so bad, in fact my experience has taught me it is quite a healthy thing to do! I've hit reboot a few times already and it wasn't so bad. Life & work goes on - one should never feel one is indispensable, that's just pure hubris! Life is about exploration, standing still can't be an option.
As I've recalled these stories from my past, I felt the energy build up creating a burning desire to do something different yet again! I have accomplished many feats in the past, so I can definitely accomplish much, much more into the future! I decided again to not settle nor to stand still. The next twenty years I have left in my life can definitely be as interesting, if not more exciting and rewarding than my past twenty years!! It is indeed time for another change! I'm about to fill in the gaps in my life/work plan that I shared previously....
