No one took you seriously, any idea why?

Everyone wants a good laugh. That's tough but it's also difficult to believe you are serious.

That's the problem with execution. Your intention, conviction, seriousness - all these are difficult to believe for the other person. Forget the greatness of your idea. Some guys would respond only if you really showed the persistence to follow up like mad. Your madness proves that you are serious.

On the other hand, for quite a few of us, following up with some one is kind of embarrassing. Perhaps if following up once isn't so, doing that twice or thrice, definitely so. In effect, the (assumingly hurt) ego serves as a good barrier to show really that you are serious.

Cockpit offers a space and a mechanical framework which strips the process of following up of its emotional embarrasive charge. By making it mechanical, Cockpit sort of spurs you to follow up like crazy, once, twice, thrice, today, tomorrow, day after and prove yourself mad and dead serious about what you are up to.

It is when you are believed to be serious, execution begins.

Ontology of Daily Planning

It's easy to recall things which have a form. Visible form.

What's the form of 'doing' in the context of work? We have words for those forms because we utter them day in and day out. And yet, when it does come down to planning the day early in the morning, those words don't appear on paper so obviously. And those forms are strangely elusive. Of course, the form of 'doing' is so often invisible, unless actually performed.

Cockpit is an answer, a visible form for that invisibility.

Sustaining the execution loop

Loop isn't a seat on a merry-go-round seat that you climb onto a seat and then it takes you round and round and round and then you climb out and say, "It was fun".

When we execute anything, unless we are endowed in the godly ways, we have to work with or take help of others. And that requires getting into the loop of conversation.

Business being business, and people being people, it takes effort to stay in the loop of conversation. Sometimes, others don't do enough to stay in the loop. You've to gather them and push them enough to stay a part of the loop.

And if you are the one to take initiative, it goes without saying that you have to initiate the loop. And if you have initiated the loop, in all likelihood at least for a while when the natural tendencies propel others to stray off the course, you have to follow up to keep them into the loop. Once, twice, thrice. May be more.

Sometimes, the incessant follow up could be too much to handle and you might've to accept that others do not stay in the loop. Respect your failed effort and move on. Get yet others into the loop.

"I just use it like a notepad."

Source: quovadisplanners.com

I see a lot of people around use this kind of 'planner'. Not for planning. For note-taking.

So, the other day when I happened to see a friend write something in one such thing, I asked him casually, "You use this for note-taking?!"

Not aware of my undertaking to launch Cockpit AIT Planner, he responded, "Yeah! Why (do you ask)?!"

"No, I thought this is a planning diary, that's why."

"Naaah! What to plan! The pages go waste. So why not use it."

Out of this little bit of conversation I can draw some inferences.

Genuinely, this friend is so well on top of everything naturally day after day that there's no need to 'plan'.

A kind of extension of the above-made inference could be that the plan's in his head. He doesn't find it necessary to plan in writing.

Third inference could be that while he does want to plan every day but is unable to do so with the 'planner' he has. This last inference isn't very difficult to fathom.

The Italians surely have a Cockpit-like mechanism in place

Here's a piece of a letter (which forms a part of their book HERE & NOW) J.M. Coetzee wrote to Paul Auster:

I've been to enough cultural events in Italy by now not to be unnerved by the chaos that seems to envelop them. No one is sure exactly where the session is to take place, the man who looks after the sound system cannot be located, the interpreter is up in arms because no one has informed her of the running order, etcetera, etcetera. Yet when the hour arrives, everything goes off smoothly: the audience miraculously knows where to come, the sound system works, the interpreter does a first-class job. The chaos turns out to have been spurious: we can run an event perfectly efficiently, the Italians seem to be saying, without fetishizing efficiency - in fact, we can turn the running of an event into a diverting little comic drama of its own.

Guess, this sounds familiar for a lot of events that we ourselves have arranged or have been a part of.

Strict scheduling format like that of a Franklin Planner for day to day work is over-rated. And we know efficiency resulting out of that scheduling effort surely is way way over-rated. Guess, we've observed and experienced that too.

Before any effort at scheduling for the purposes of efficiency, one ought to recall what exactly it is that needs to be undertaken. One will notice that as compared to Franklin Planner, the Cockpit AIT Planner is far far better at scooping out of our heads what needs to be done.

Understanding the impact of frequency of 'responding'

Source: http://thisisindexed.com

My eyes light up every time someone talks about 'responding'.

Suppose, in the above graph, you replace the word Stimulus with Execution. And suppose, likewise, we also replace the phrase 'rioting in the streets' with 'quality execution at the workplace'. Or perhaps use a bigger buzz-phrase 'innovation in the organization'... Yes, we get how 'responding' affects the execution of plans.

Too much of it, and there's disturbance instead of execution. Too little of it, and there's almost nothing happening.