Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

I was trying to visit Twitter’s website, but it was down for a planned maintenance. Here is the screenshot of it’s landing page. Very creative and funny too! It definitely made me smile. It definitely helped me not to get frustrated with their down time. Very clever.

But once I found Twitter is down, I decided to use Hootsuite for updating my Twitter status. As a co-incidence, it was also down at the same time. Here is the screenshot of their landing page. I found this is cleverer than Twitter’s. This is not only creative, but informative too. It definitely made me a little smarter than a moment ago. So who would bother about down-time, if you provide this kind of user-experience? Very very creative.

I think these are very clever design decisions to note down when I need to implement scheduled maintenance pages for my websites!

This blog’s commenting is now Disqus powered. Disqus is a very powerful comment system, which enhances the discussion on your website. Ever since I moved my blog to WordPress platform, which is the best decision I’ve made about selecting blogging platforms since I started blogging, I always wanted to enable the Disqus commenting system for this blog. But I kept procrastinating that task thinking that it might be a cumbersome process to configure it.

But I was simply wrong. Enabling and configuring the Disqus commenting system on my self-hosted blog was a dead simple experience. The process was extremely smooth, and it blown away me with the complete user experience. Disqus implementation rocks!

My strong recommendations to all bloggers (newbies and professional):

1. Use WordPress for blogging platform – either self-hosted or from WordPress.com. WordPress 2.7 is damn awesome! Blogger and TypePad should die. They are the worst blogging platforms. Those who are still using Blogger and TypePad, still don’t know what they are missing from WordPress. Go move on to WordPress – it’ll be your best decision of blogging life.
2. Use Disqus for commenting platform – there are tons of awesome features that Disqus provides to enhance the commenting experience on the blog. Now commenting on the blogs is more interactive, trackable, and controllable. If your blog don’t have Disqus commenting system, then I’ll wonder why you don’t have it, and will think twice before commenting on it.

Thank you WordPress and Disqus for making my blogging experience so awesome and so easy!

I was doing search on Tripadvisor about things to do in Lake Tahoe. Here is the screenshot of that query’s result.

This is how advertising based startups after a while turn into a website with too many advertisements and very less or no content in the attempt of making some money. It took me quite some time to just figure out which part was the content and which part were ads. Not to mention, I closed the window in 2 minutes of fruitless attempt of finding the content.

A few days ago, I posted my thought on Twitter -

Every single day my goal is to be “more efficient” than I was on previous day. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. But the goal persists.

To that thought Rajesh Setty (@UpbeatNow) from Life Beyond Code replied me -

@adityakothadiya Effectiveness trumps efficiency – so why not focus on effectiveness Aditya.

I couldn’t argue with him more. Being effective is far more important than being efficient. But what exactly is the difference between being effective and being efficient? Here is what I learned from the book The 4-Hour Work Week.

What is efficient?

Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner.

Some people do a task with thorough thinking and planning, and do it in a most disciplined way. They strive for optimal way to do that task such that they can save resources. They do it in a way such that it will cause less rework or maintenance in the future. That’s what called doing a task in an efficient way.

What is effective?

Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals.

Some people do only those tasks which they think are important to achieve their goals. They know that not every task is going to help them to achieve their goals. Their objective is not to do all the given tasks efficiently, but is to identify which task is more important than the other, and prioritizing them in the order of their importance. That’s what called being effective.

What should be our objective then?

So doing tasks efficiently is nothing new. It’s universal and obvious. There is no option for that. Now the real objective is to filter out only those tasks which matter to our goals most, and then do them efficiently.

What are important tasks?

Our main goal is to list down important tasks first. But we should remember, an urgent task does not mean it’s an important task. Also requiring a lot of time does not make a task important. Important tasks are the ones which we think will result maximum ROI (return on investment).

Conclusion:

Efficiency is definitely essential and important, but effectiveness is far more important than just efficiency. Since there are so many things to do, and there is so little time to do them, what we do is more crucial than how we do it.