A tribute to my father

 

From a continent far away, I see your feeble smile. As  you sit solemnly in your armchair, with your memory thorn into pieces, I know one of those pieces must have me and you hang on to it.

Today is Father’s Day, a tribute to fatherhood, a title I will never bear. Yet I do appreciate what it means for you.

When you took me to school for the first time there was a drawing in our book which fascinated me. ‘A family, the unit of society.’ or so the title said. A father still wearing his office suit, reading his newspaper in an armchair, smiling and puffing his pipe. A daughter and a son playing on the carpet, smiling. A mother making the dinner table, smiling. A grandma in her rocking chair, knitting and smiling. A cat next to a fireplace, having a nap.

This was the picture in my mind that laid out the grand plan for my life. Yet the life had its own agenda. The children were drifted to different parts of the world. We never had a grandpa or grandma around us, regrettably I have never owned a cat.

However I don’t think we have ever stopped being a family. On the dusty shelves of our minds we still cherish the days we spent together. That family picture is somehow engraved in our minds albeit in different forms, happy moments stitched one another. This is of course an enormous privilege in this strange random world.

I could never remember I thanked you enough. For taking me to that soccer game when I was six. For making a perfect paper kite in that freezing Spring day. For sharing every fun occasion with your children, taking us to picnics, to summer holidays, telling us funny stories making me giggle for days. For not taking life too seriously. For not lecturing us. For letting me smoke sitting next to you. For being momentarily upset but not angry even when I crushed your car bought with your life savings. For saving me from trouble whenever I needed you, especially that horrible day when a bomb exploded killing one during a protest and the Army circled our Uni’s dormitory. For letting us read anything, study anything we want. For not brainwashing us with bullshit. For letting us have inquisitive minds. For letting me be me. Thank you my good man.  I don’t think I could ever be half of the man you were. I love you Dad.
.

A pile of bones

Native Greek children standing by the bones of deceased soldiers who died during the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign they have collected on Hill 60, Anzac Cove in 1919.

I was born in Turkey and I now hold dual citizenship of Australian and Turkish.

Back in Turkey I was raised up at school and at home with stories of our ancestors’ heroism.

Gallipoli War was a decisive Turkish victory no one could take away, a war thorn nation’s determination against aggressors, despite being defeated in other fronts. It is also our D-day for the coming Republic, birth of a magnificent leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and a test that checked our confidence to challenge the World, a world determined to see us as “sick man of the Europe”. In Gallipoli a nation was born.

Settling in Australia made me realise to see the other side of the coin. There were similarities. The official history and stories spoken at home. Gallipoli had been a defeat in military terms but out of ashes a new identity, an independent sense of belonging emerged among ordinary Australians. In Gallipoli a nation was born.

During the Gallipoli campaign Ottoman Empire had 174,828, British Empire 187,969 casualties including dead, wounded, missing, not including illness.

The question remains for us, why do we glorify wars?

Is it simply out of respect to dead, or soothing our sense of guilt? We are the lucky ones born in the right time after all.

Is it the primal instinct of close kinship our genes instruct?

Or is it really an absurd arithmetic equation?

Two nations equal to a pile of bones.

Minimalism at Workplace

Minimalism is simple, reduce your stressors by eliminating them. Minimalism will relax you, it will allow you to focus on the essentials.

- Clean your desk.
- When conveying your ideas do not exceed a single A4 page.
- Never organise a meeting longer than one hour. If you think one hour is enough, ask yourself why not half-an-hour?
- Never spend more than 15 minutes to draw a design diagram.
- Never spend more than 30 minutes on a new design wiki page.
- Favour talk to IM, IM to email.
- If you have to, never write long emails, not longer than three paragraphs.
- In your written communications use short sentences;

• Avoid jargon.
• At most two sentences per paragraph.
• Leave an empty line between paragraphs.
• Follow the two-phase structure:

• Background
•   Question or Solution

- Never broadcast emails to unrelated employees.
- Never Reply All to an email.
- Let your actions make you, not your talk.
- Talk less, tell more, listen more.
- Treat everybody equal.

A4

I have a little trade secret to share with you. Whenever I need to communicate my ideas on a printed medium, I use a single sheet of A4 page, and only on one side.

The most frequently used paper size is A4 measuring 210 by 297 millimetres.

The significant advantage of A system is its scaling: Folded brochures of any size can be made by using sheets of the next larger size, e.g. A4 sheets are folded to make A5 brochures.

But there is something else in A4.

A4 is a meme, it simply evolved with modern human.

In addition to scaling advantages I think A4 evolved to be the most frequently used paper size, because a single sheet of it is the most efficient medium to convey ideas.

Not too big, not too small, elegantly scaled.

Next time you have an idea, try fitting it into an A4 sheet, and I guarantee you it will be read by majority of people.

Exceed an A4 page by one line, or use a different paper size, you will have less people reading it.

I call it Natural Selection.

Timeful

Managing work schedules is a crucial element of a modern workplace. For most, work days are fragmented in hourly, sometimes half-hourly time slots.

We use tools such as Outlook to book meetings and events. These tools are great, however they have some limitations. They lack intelligence and flexibility to help us fill gaps with sensible choices, and they don’t work well with our private activities outside work.

What if we have a smart app on our phone, that will merge Outlook calendar with our private organiser, and help us forming habits, manage our to do lists, and other events effortlessly, in addition to syncing with work schedules.

I give you Timeful, a smart time management app that does all that.

Timeful has AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine to track your habits. Its brilliance comes from the fact that it learns to work with you and your roughly defined schedules.

Say you want to form a new habit. Lets say you want to do Yoga, 3 times a week, mostly in the evenings, and at noon. Timeful is OK with rough schedules, it understands habit forming is hard, therefore it gives you flexibility to fit them into your existing schedule. When its sees a fit Timeful fills it with an activity you nominated. You either go for it, defer it or move it to another time slot with a simple gesture.

Timeful has a seamless, simple and a very easy to use interface. Adding a new to do item, a new habit, or scheduling an event is a breeze. Moving an item into a different time slot or deferring  is equally easy.

As time slots are fragmented, we ended up having diverse activities in shorter attention spans. This is a fact of 21st  century. Good or bad we have to live with it and we need ways to deal with it. Timeful comes handy with its AI, and friendly manners to help us go through our busy life style. It turns hectic into sensible.

Timeful