PF Transfer Woes: Here is a Workaround

Transfer of Provident Fund from one Employee Provident Fund office to another is a real pain. It's a pain because there is no way to find out if at all the transfer took place involving substantial amount of our hard-earned money (sometimes the only savings that people like me resort to :-) ).

I relocated to Bangalore in September 2007 from Noida and filled up the PF transfer form on the first day of my joining. I wanted to check the status of my PF transfer in one year's time. But I found that the lady from finance department dealing with PF transfer had left the company and now it's handled by some outsourced party. I then contacted the outsourced agency. They had no records if and when the lady filed my PF transfer application. I met some of my friends who relocated from other cities to Bangalore three years back and they told me that their PF transfers were still due. I felt frustrated with the system like many others.

Then I thought that let me re-apply for PF transfer since I was not sure if at all my PF form was submitted. So I reapplied using the standard procedure through the finance department. It was after 1 and half year of my joining the new (was it still new?) company.

In three months' time from my second application, I received a letter from Noida EPF office. The letter was written in pure Hindi. First thing that I understood was that my transfer application was rejected. Then it had a table showing the various reasons for rejecting a PF transfer claim. The reason that they ticked for my case was that my PF of amount ............ was already transferred on so & so date to Bangalore EPF office! I was much relaxed to know that finally my PF was transferred and , damn, I knew the amount too.

So the workaround is to re-apply for PF transfer after a gap of some months or a year of submission of the first application.

Future of EDA

Recently I've read two interesting articles written on future of EDA industry. It's predicted that by 2017 semiconductor industry will grow to become a US$1 trillion industry. Currently it's about US$270 billion. It's predicted that EDA industry will reach US$10 billion market in next 10 years. Here is the full article titled Future challenges for the EDA industry: A business perspective http://www.edn.com/article/CA6711232.html. The author of the article is S.N. Pamanabhan who is a Senior VP of R&D Services at MindTree.

The second article that I read recently is titled EDA: Aging or Dying. It was published in EE Times 10/02/2010 and written by Mike Gianfagna, Vice President marketing at Atrenta Inc. It states that EDA is maturing, not dying.

EDA: Looking for new avenues?

In February 2010, there are five events that indicate that EDA industry has started looking beyond its core areas of EDA and IP. These events are listed below in some random order:

1. On 18th February at a panel discussion during EDA Consortium (EDAC)'s Annual CEO Forecast and Industry Vision event, all the CEOs agreed that there is a need to explore new market segments. At the same time, they cautioned that new segments require sustained effort and considerable patience. The related news from EE Times is here.
2. Synopsys, the largest EDA company, acquired virtual system prototyping technology provider Vast Systems Technology Corp on 2nd February. Here is the news from EE Times.
3. Synopsys signed a definitive agreement to buy electronic system-level (ESL) design software vendor Coware Inc on February 8th. Here is the EE Times news.
4. Mentor Graphics, the third largest EDA company, acquired the Virtual Garage software suite from Freescale Semiconductor Inc. to expand electrical design scope. Here is the news from EE Times.
5. Mentor Graphics, on 16th February, announced it has named Serge Leef, current general manager of the System Level Engineering division, as Vice President of New Ventures. His role will be to expand the company into markets adjacent to EDA. The related news from EE Times is here.

Looks like EDA is looking into embedded/system level design for new growth opportunities. EDA industry is almost stuck at a US$4 billion market for past several years.

Why am I so concerned about Time Management now?

Of late, I have started focusing a lot in managing my time efficiently. What is the reason for this? Well, primary reason is that I now have to spend one and half hours every day from my work hours in gym. Last October I got an injury at my left knee. (I'll write a post on that). I'm yet to gain full strength on my left leg after that. As per the advice of my Ortho doctor, I joined a gym to undergo a post-surgery rehabilitation program. I do my work-out from 11AM to 12noon every day. Then I take a shower. By the time I'm back to my work, it's 12:30PM. Well, it's lunch time then. I finish my lunch and come back to my cube. It's 1 PM. So two hours from my day is gone! Then my two year old son Krishu expects me at home by evening. On top of that, I have important projects at office. On a first look, it seems each of these jobs (office, gym, family) suck time off from the other. It's not so if I manage my time well. Hence I must manage my time so that I don't waste it. Remember that time is a commodity.

My biggest inspiration in my hope to manage time efficiently is someone who led multiple lives in a single life - a professor of Physics at Gauhati University, an Assamese author of repute who wrote many short stories and novels (he won Satitya Academy awards), a famous movie director (he won many Swarn Kamal & Rajat Kamal awards), editor of the famous Assamese magazine Prantik, editor of children magazine Sofura, Chairman of Indian Railway Service Commission etc etc. He is none other than Dr Bhabendra Nath Saikia. How could he achieve so much in a single life? I never had the opportunity to ask him that question. But I'm sure he was able to play so many roles at the same time because he could manage his time well.

For more on Bhaben Saikia, see the following two links:

• http://www.bhabensaikia.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhabendra_Nath_Saikia

If Dr Bhabendra Natha Saikia could manage his time to do so many things in a life, why can't I manage my time to do just three simple things - office, gym and family-time?

BTW, I have created a Time Journal for next three weeks. It's a simple excel-sheet with multiple tabs, one tab for a day, that logs my time for every 15 minutes from 8AM to 6PM on all working day. My sample Work Journal can be viewed here.

Time Management

Continuing with my post on Prof Randy Pausch, let me now write on his speech on Time Management that he delivered to University of Virgina. It was 850 capacity auditorium and it was full to its capacityon that day.

There are many talks, seminars, books etc on Time Management and I must confess - most of these are boring. But the one that Prof Randy Pausch delivered is just too good. It was a pragmatic lecture unlike the Last Lecture that he delivered to CMU. The speech was very special. We all can talk of time management. We all feel that we have just lot of time for us. But Randy had maximum three more months of his life left. Three months before he gave the speech, he was diagnosed with pancreatitis cancer. His doctor told him that he had 3 to 6 months of healthy living (euphemism for death in 3 to 6 months) ! This talk on Time Management is special because it was delivered by someone who really had a limited time in his hand.

The full speech is available at https://youtu.be/oTugjssqOT0. The power-point slides for this can be downloaded from University of Viginia's website here . I've just finished watching the video. I took some notes from this. Let me share these now below:

• Time is a commodity. Manage time the way you manage money
• Time is money. When we talk about household budget, we mean household money budget. Do we have a household time budget?
• Money can be earned any time in life; but time lost can never be re-gained.
• We just have too many things to do in life ; but time is limited.
• Better time management leads to happier and wonderful life.
• Fun: If you're not having fun at your work, why do it? Life is too short. Why not enjoy it?
• Goal is to maximize fun.
• A typical office worker wastes 2 hours a day. It's a universal thing that plague all of us.
• Being successful doesn't make you manage your time well; but managing your time well makes you successful.
• He said that he was not a smart person. There were smarter people around him. What he was good at was managing his time well. If you have to run with faster people around you, then you have to find ways to optimize what skills you do have.
• Doing things right way is more important than doing the right things adequately.
• Plan: Planning is very important. Failing to plan is planning to fail. Plan each day, each week and each semester.
• TODO list: break things down into small steps. Do the ugliest thing first.
• Multiple monitors at work helps. TODO list, email, calendar etc in separate monitors.
• Speaker-phone helps in saving your time.
• Telephone is time waster. Use it efficiently
• Learn to say NO.
• Know your Good or bad times: Find your creative time. Defend it ruthlessly, spend it alone. Find your dead time and schedule meetings, phone calls etc during it.
• Interruptions: Every interruption takes 4 to 5 minutes for recovery. We must reduce frequency and length of interruptions. New email alert is also an interruption. Turn it off.
• Time journals: Time a commodity. You better track where your time is going. Monitor yourself in 15 minute increments. Update every 1/2 hour throughout the day - not at the end of day.
• Work-Life Balance: You can become more efficient at work. So you can leave office at 5PM and spend time with family. Randy worked fewer hours after marriage and still he got his works done. In grad school, people who completed their PhDs fastest are those who are married and/or have kids.
• Procastination: It's the thief of time. Doing thing at the last minute is expensive. Stress comes in. Deadlines are important. Create fake deadline which is before the actual deadline and treat this as actual dead-line. Usually when he was procastinating, there was a deep psychological reason. We feel embarassed because we think we won't be able to do it. When you're procastinating, identify why you're not enthusiastic.
• Meetings: An average executive spend 40% or more time in meeting. There must be an agenda. A one minute minutes noting the decisions taken in the meeting...who is responsible for what by when?
• Email: Save all of it. If you want something done, only one recipient. If you really want something done, CC some powerful. If you don't get a response in 48 hours, most likely they'll never reply. So nagging is ok after 48 hours.
• Managing Time with bosses: Write things down. When is our next meeting? What's my goal by then? Remember bosses want results, not excuses.
• Important advice: Kill your TV. Exchange money for time at every opportunity when you've young children. Eat, sleep and exercise.
• Feedback loop: Ask in confidence what good or bad you are doing.
• Books: The One Minute Manager, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
• Action Items: Get a day-timer. Put your TODO list sorted in priority order. Do a time journal. Make a note in your day-timer to revisit this talk in 30days. Ask "What have I changed?"

This talk is highly recommended for any professional. I'm going to start with the action items immediately after this post.

Prof Randy Pausch

I came to know about Prof Randy Pausch a few months back. He was a professor of Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon University. He was a pioneer of Virtual Reality, human -computer interaction researcher, co-founder of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center. He passed away in July 2008 after battling with pancreatitis cancer.
Prof Randy Pausch gave a lecture at CMU which made him a celebrity. CMU organizes a series of lectures titled the Last Lecture where a professor is hypothetically given the scenario that he would soon die and that was his last lecture. For Prof Randy, he was actually dying. He was diagnosed with pancreatitis cancer a few months back and he had just a couple of months left in his life. A normal human being would have been so depressed and mentally weak after coming to know that death is looming large on him. Randy was not a normal human being; he was an extra-ordinary person. His spirit was extra-ordinary.

Randy chose a topic titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams for that lecture at CMU. There are three parts in that speech:

1. How Randy could achieve his childhood dreams?
   
2. How he helped others (students) in achieving their childhood dreams
   
3. Lessons learned
   

Under the second part, I came to know about the Project Alice. It teaches young kids how to do computer programming through a 3D gaming interface. He said that kids would be playing a game; but learning computer programming at the same time. He said that his legacy would live in that project after he is gone from this world.

The complete video is available at the following site:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

At the end of the lecture, he said there are two head-fakes in the entire lecture:

1. There is nothing like achieving childhood dreams. He said that he believed in karma. If you live well, dreams would come to you automatically.
2. Secondly, he didn't give the lecture to the 500 people sitting in the CMU hall; but was actually giving the lecture for his three kids (6, 4 and 2 year old).

I have just finished watching that. I learned lot of good things about life from this lecture. There is a book also named The Last Lecture now on this lecture.

He gave another lecture at University of Virginia titled Time Management. This one is important for all of us. How do we manage our time correctly?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5784740380335567758#

I'll write about the Time Management lecture some other day. There are two more videos that I watched.

• On March 13th 2008, Prof Andy Pausch gave a testimony before US Congress http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iP7xr6ig-s
  
• Andy Pausch on Oprah Winfrey show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ya9BXClRw
  

May his soul rest in peace.

Changing old habits? Yes, it's possible

I used to believe that changing a habit, which is as old as I'm, is difficult, rather next to impossible. But recently I'm able to change one such old habit.

Right from my childhood days, I used to go to bed late in the night. I could never wake up early in the morning. In those days, my school started at 9:30AM or 10AM and we used to leave for school half an hour or one hour before that. Children in my neighbourhood would get up as early as 4 AM and then study for a few hours. (In Assam, the sun rises at 5AM in summer days.) I could never do that despite my parents often telling me the virtues of early risers (Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise). I would get up at 8 AM, and then leave for school at 9AM. I continued the same habits throughout my days as engineering student during my under-grad and grad school.

The same habit continued in my work life too. Usually I have late night meetings. Then I'll work into the night till 1 or 2 AM and get up late in the morning. Will come to office at 11 to 11:30AM. So every thing was late in the day. It was like a consistently late-running train that reaches every station late. I remember one of my friends telling me about the Guwahati-Trivandam train that sometime used to run 24 hours late and you never know if it was today's train and yesterday's train!


Very recently I've changed my style. Even Indian Railways too is changing. Nowadays Guwahati-Trivandam trains run in time. So why cannot I? :-) I have started going to bed early at around 11PM. Next morning I get up from bed at around 6:30AM to 7AM. Then I am in office by 8:15AM. I go back home at 6PM. I don't log-in from home in the evening. I've started liking this new time-table.

What is the catalyst for this change in my old habit? There are three catalysts

1. I have joined a gym. The gym is in my office-complex and I do my work-out from 11AM to 12:30PM there every day.
2. The second is a realisation that most of us, including me, tend to waste lot of time in office in reading mails, surfing net, coffee-table etc. If I utilize my time efficiently, then there is no extra pressure to work from home in the evening and I can spend the evening with my family.
3. I couldn't attain any of three characteristics - healthy, wealthy and wise - attributed to early risers. I am neither healthy nor wealthy nor wise. :-) By waking up early, if I can get at least two of these attributes, I'll be happy. :-)
   

It's too early to say that I'm successful in changing my old habit. It's just three weeks into this new habit. I hope I'll be able to stick to this new time-table.