Anuradha Sridharan

peteoshea / CC BY 2.0 For anyone dealing with knowledge work that requires deeper thinking, analysis, unraveling assumptions and developing solutions, writing is a must-have skill. Whatever be your role - a developer, designer, product manager, marketer, analyst etc, I would highly recommend that you develop writing as a conscious practice. I'll give you 5 reasons why you should invest diligently in this practice. 1) Provides clarity A vague problem for which I seek solutions becomes more clear if I sit down and write about the problem statement in actual words. It gives great clarity and helps me to think through the problem scenarios in great detail. 2) Gives directions As I write down the problem statement, I automatically reflect and think through the causes and context. It also helps me to go deeper into various aspects of the problem and the expected outcome. As a result, I have a good "approach" or steps that I need to take to solve the problem. It doesn't hav...

As a follow-up to my earlier post on remote work , here are the 10 steps if you want to make "work-from-home" work for you as well as your employer. I tried to keep them as generic as possible, without focusing on any specific role or industry per se. 1) Ensure you are extremely passionate about the work you are taking up Be clear about why you are taking up a specific opportunity. Is it something you are passionate about? Is it something you want to build expertise on? How do you think this opportunity will take your career forward? Spend adequate time thinking about these questions. My definition of passion is not about " do what you love ". I believe in " love what you do ". It's also important you connect to the work you do, in some level. If you are coming back to work after a break, do invest some time to keep yourself updated. Embrace active learning. I love to be a conscious learner all my life. It keeps me grounded and I know there'...

The last decade has seen a tremendous shift in the way we learn, just about anything. I remember vividly during my Engineering days (not so long ago) when learning meant picking up a text book or a reference book, sit down with a pencil/marker and read. There wasn't much collaboration, interaction or discussion during or after class hours. It was a one-way source of communication from the lecturer to the student. Internet was still at a nascent stage and neither accessible nor affordable (browsing centers were few and used to charge anywhere between 30-50 Rs per hour). As I look at the way things have changed for the better, I feel inspired, excited and at the same time, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff one can learn in a lifetime. Being in the technology sector, I spent the initial years of my career, googling for tutorials and learning programming languages along with the skills needed at my workplace related to databases and data warehousing. It was still mostly text ba...

As a product manager, I receive information from different sources at all possible times of the day - emails, action items, random ideas/thoughts, meeting notes, telephonic discussions with various stakeholders, interesting nuggets of information from blogs and news sites, useful links for future references etc. Having made the shift from an engineering role to a product management role, the first challenge that I had to face was to manage this sudden pile of information. I initially made notes in a single text file and searched through this file whenever I need to refer. But this was proven to be a cumbersome task when I had to organize this information into clear groups. Then I shifted to a model of creating separate text files based on the categories - Project Ideas, Tasks, Meeting Notes, Conference call discussions etc. This was working well for a while until I realized it wasn't easy to transfer the information collected in this manner across different computers. I stumbled up...

I'm an ardent believer of mindmaps. I have been creating a lot of mindmaps in my professional and student life. Whenever I need to work on a presentation or a report on a relatively new topic, mindmaps have proved to be very helpful. As I read up on different aspects related to this topic from various sources, I create nodes with the information I have collected. After a thorough research, my mindmap is filled with little nuggets of information in a somewhat organized fashion. Once I sit down to write the report or make the presentation, I just need to refer to this huge mindmap and prepare the material as needed. This last step takes little time compared to earlier days when I used to open a document and start collecting my research notes directly and then organize the content in a presentable manner. In projects or tasks where you have little prior knowledge or the outcome is not very clear, mindmaps help to take the next set of actions and capture the details in a single place. ...