Hey, it's Anfa. Today I'll show you how to do sidechain compression in Ardor, an open source DAW for Linux, Mac and Windows. Sidechain compression will allow us to go from this to this. Let's get to it! Here's a little project I've prepared for this video. First let's compress the bass with a kick. So here is my kick drum and here is my bass. So in order to add sidechain compression I need to select my bass instrument and here, right-click, new plugin, plugin manager. I'm going to use the A compressor stereo, which is a built-in plugin of Ardor and it has a sidechain input so we can use it to sidechain compress the bass. Here's the plugin, let's double-click to open the interface and right now it will compress the bass with the bass of course. But we can enable sidechain input. Now you can see nothing happens because we haven't connected the kick to this compressor yet. To do that I'm going to click here on the pin-out button. It opens the pin configuration dialog and you can see we have two inputs. This is the stereo signal incoming to the compressor, to outputs and we have a sidechain input right here. It's activated. What I have to do is just click here and choose the track that I want to take this signal from. Let's pick the kick. Now I can close this and if I play you can see this moves to our kick but we still need to tweak the settings. I'm going to lower the threshold, well it's best to listen to this in context so let's un-solo the bass and play the whole thing without it and with it. That's simple. As you can see the A compressor has inline displays that will show you the incoming signal, the threshold and the amount of gain reduction which is very useful. Now I want to show you how to do the same thing using a calve sidechain compressor plugin. Let's select another bass instrument, I'm going to move to a different part of the song and let's listen. So I want to sidechain this to the kick. I have my track selected here in the Max review I can right click to add a new plugin. Let's go to the plugin manager and type in calve sidechain compressor. Let's double click it, it's added to the list, I click insert plugin and it's here. I'm going to move it above the fader so it's applied prefader but it doesn't really matter in this case. So the same thing, let's double click to open the user interface and now if I play it you can see that it reacts to the signal of the bass so we need to activate the sidechain input right here. Of course nothing happens because we need to root the kick signal into the compressor. Let's open the pinout and here we have a stereo sidechain input but it's not connected yet and this is not activated so I have to activate the sidechain input, by default it creates a single mono slot but it doesn't matter because we really need a mono signal to compress this. So let's click here, choose a kick and now I can just click and drag to connect the signal from the kick drum to the sidechain input of the compressor. Now if I play it you can see that this moves along with our kick but again we need to tweak the threshold, ratio and other settings. That sounds nice. One cool thing about Calf Sidechain Compressor is that it has filters that can emphasize different frequencies in the sidechain input. So you can enable here one of the modes, by default both filters are off and you can like do two shell filters and you can say make it only react to the higher frequencies and ignore the lower frequencies, which is quite a unique feature and sometimes it's very useful. Another plugin I want to show you is called LSP Sidechain Compressor Stereo. Let's use it on the pad. The pad is used in yet another section of the song, let me play it to you and with the rest, the pad isn't too loud on its own but I wanted to make more room for the kick. So let's make sure it's selected, right click, new plugin, plugin manager and here I will type in LSP which stands for Linux Studio Plugins, Sidechain and we have a long list, compressor and there are four variants. I'm going to pick the stereo one, let's double click, let's add it to the list, insert plugins and here it is. As you can see it also has an inline display that shows the compression function and it's also going to show the current signal level. Let's double click it to open the user interface and now this compressor is much more powerful, it has a lot more settings than the previous two but it's a little bit harder to understand. So by default, of course it works in the non-sidechain mode. To enable the sidechain input we need to change this from feed forward to external and now we're going to use the sidechain input. Of course the sidechain input is empty, we haven't connected anything to it yet so let's do that, let's enable the sidechain input, let's select our kick, drop the pins to connect, let's close it. We have the signal again we need to adjust the threshold and ratio and other things. This compressor has two thresholds, one for attack and one for release, which is by default negative infinity. This is advanced stuff, I'm not going to talk about it much. Here's our attack time, here's the release time. We can also change how the compressor interprets the signal, by default it uses the RMS, root mean square of the signal which is the effective power of the signal but it can also use peak to get faster reaction. You can hear it gives it more click if we decrease the attack all the way, it's going to create an audible click, which isn't going to be a problem because it's going to be totally masked by the kick drum which plays at the same time, so it's only going to increase the punch of the kick but I don't really like that, so I'm going to increase the attack time. There are also different modes of compression, there's upward compression, but this is not really what I want right now. As I said, LSP plugins are very advanced and they have tons of options but sometimes it's harder to understand how to set it up, okay let's listen in context. I also added some make up gain to make the pad louder. Now there's one last plugin I want to show you, which is called SC2. It's an old plugin by Steve Harris, it doesn't have a fence user interface, it doesn't even show you the gain reduction but you can still use it if you want. So let's use that to duck the vocals. I'm going to go for, yeah you didn't know there's vocals, yep so let's sidechain the whole vocal bus during the chorus. You can see I'm using the A compressor stereo in here already but not in the sidechain mode, it's just controlling the level of the whole track for the bus. So let's right-click, plugin manager and I'm going to type in SC2. It's a Latspa plugin, all the other plugins were LV2 plugins, Latspa is an older standard it doesn't support custom user interfaces. So this is the compressor, now it's pretty unusual in that sense that to root the signal in we have to do it a little bit differently and also we have to make a little trick because this plugin presses audio in mono but we can work this around. So let's play. You can hear our vocal became mono, so let's click on the pin out and you can see it has two inputs and one output. Now the inputs are not named because that's not supported by the plugin format. The first one is actually the sidechain input or the input for the compressor to analyze in order to make decisions what to do. So to make this compressor a sidechain one we need to enable the sidechain input and drag it into the first input. Let's pick our kick and play. We can't hear anything, that's because the threshold is all the way up so we need to move it down and the ratio is all the way down so we need to move it up. So it works but it's a very old plugin and not much features on it but we can use it anyway. Let's set it up, I want shorter attack, shorter release. That sounds very clean though. Now with that for that mono problem we can enter manual config and we can increase the number of instances. Now we have two instances of this plugin being run in the background using the same settings we have picked here. So now I can route the left input here, the right input here, make sure that both instances get the same sidechain input and now we need to add another audio output, route this out and I messed up the inputs. Sidechain goes to the first one, the signal goes into the second one. So that's SC2, there are many different variants like SC1, SC3, SC4. I've tried a bunch and SC2 worked the best in this case. It's like just an extra thing, I wouldn't really recommend you using it if you have Calf compressor or just a compressor stereo. Another thing you could do is use multi-band sidechain compression to for example duck or attenuate only the low frequencies of a bass when the kick hits. There's a plugin that does that from the LSP bundle. It's called LSP sidechain, LSP sidechain multi-band compressor stereo X8 and it has eight bands and it's really really complex. You can also just select every single band and tweak it, this is kind of an easier view. You can also disable many bands and just use it in a dual band configuration. So you can have like duck the lows but not duck the highs etc. Yeah, but I'll leave that for you to explore if you want to do multi-band compression, multi-band sidechain compression, it would be too much for this single video. So that's the main dish of the video. In case you'd like to get a deeper understanding of how compressors work and what are the various types of it, how do they differ and such, I've already made two lengthy videos about that, one about the basics and another one about the advanced stuff. In case you're not feeling very confident with using dynamic range compression, I would highly recommend you check them out, I'll link them both in the video description. That's all I have for today, thanks for watching, I also want to thank everyone who supports my work financially through Patreon and Liberapay, these people really make it possible for me to keep doing this channel, I also want to thank everyone who buys my music on Bandcamp. If you would like to drop me a few bucks a month to help keep this show going, please go to patreon.com slash ANFA or liberapay.com slash ANFA. Now go and make some music. Recycling compression of course.


Tom here from Lawrence Systems and PF Sense 2301 was released on February 15th of 2023. Today is February 17th of 2023 and I've updated some of our office systems and our lab systems and some other systems to test because we start rolling this out to customers pretty much immediately once we realize whether or not there's any issues. And so far I haven't found any issues that I would say would stop me from going forward. That being said, that's a few things that are really nuanced I want to talk about here to make sure you have a good upgrade experience. That first thing and the first step and there's a whole video on it linked down below is use the boot environments. Boot environments will greatly help you recover if something goes wrong or if you don't follow a step properly or the download breaks or something goes wrong with your whole update process. I didn't have too many problems but I was also testing and following some pretty good practices here to avoid many of those problems. Now they have a whole guide on how to do the upgrade. I recommend you follow it but if you want to know if Tom followed it exactly the answer is no. Kind of out of laziness but I'll tell you what I did do. I go ahead and reboot the firewall before I start the upgrade process. This helps eliminate any potential issues of maybe you have a drive that's ready to fail but you wouldn't know until you reboot it. But if you then add on top of that you load an update and that's the first time you rebooted it in nine months. Well that may be a problem where you didn't know there was going to be a problem. So as long as the firewall boots up fine before you start the upgrade you're good that at least eliminates that as a factor. Next I have that snapshot I create with a fully work inversion. Then I go ahead and remove a few packages. Now the packages are supposed to pretty much all be removed when you do these major upgrades to avoid the issue. Sometimes it works. Sometimes there's some hang up on there. It's really not a big deal to remove packages because the default install option on packages is to remember the settings. So if you remove a package and then reinstall that package all the configuration for that package for something like Saracada should come in there. Now when I say I didn't follow the instructions completely I just chose to remove a few packages that I thought might cause problems because I had problems when I was playing with the release candidate with these packages not following through when I did the in-place upgrade. So I did remove Saracada, PF blocker and top PNG and Xabix. Those are the only ones I chose to remove and then I created one more snapshot after I moved them because just in case I had to remove one more and the upgrade went bad but the upgrade went fine once I removed those packages on each system that I had tested. One thing I kind of note is I wish and maybe the developers will get around to this. There was a remove all packages button that would be really handier if I could checkbox remove them because the only reason I didn't remove all of them because I didn't want to tediously go through and do each one through the web UI. So I think just the way you can do it from the command line but I do follow the web UI I want to share the same experience as most users will have using it and hey that'd be cool if there's a checkbox. Once the upgrade was done then I went ahead and added those packages back in, made sure everything worked, rebooted the firewall one more time after the packages to make sure there was no errors when it restarted and now everything works. Now we're going to get into what my environment looks like but let's first jump over to what's new in PF Sense 2301 and we'll just cover the highlights and I'll leave of course links to all the details but we'll also then jump to the what doesn't work and a couple of known bugs as of today that have been reported but the good news is there's workarounds for these bugs and hey all that's linked down below. Now the first big major change and this is where there's just a lot of reworking under the hood here is the move to PHP 8.1 and FreeBSD main. This means FreeBSD is going to be at 14 as the underlying OS and PHP 8.1 is supported all the way till 2024 with the older PF Sense running the seven versions that are well end of life being sunset added support for Cha Cha Poly 1305 encryption. They did this with IPsec and with the OpenVPN DCO. Data channel offload is awesome. It is a substantial gain in speed for OpenVPN and that's a really nice thing because OpenVPN because it attaches to things like LDAP or radius and other methods of authentication maybe where you tie this into a business with Active Directory which is something we do. You're going to see OpenVPN for years to come and actually this kind of breeze a lot of new life into it in terms of performance and I think this is a great feature that they've added in here. Next, resolving previous issues that unbound. There's a whole write up down below where Christian McDonald was able to finally reproduce kind of an elusive bug that caused some problems and unbound and that's all been reworked so that does not occur again for those of you that were having the unbound crash continuing to improve captive portal which many people know I'm not the biggest captive portal fan because of the support problems it creates. I will note that this does not improve your experience that you'll have if you put captive portal on a Wi-Fi network with a lot of general public users on there especially if they have phones you'll run into weird issues with captive portal unrelated to PF Sense just because some phones don't process captive portal very well that's still my opinion on it but hey there's improvements on the way captive portal works and maybe I'll do an updated video on it since their PF Sense 23 is here and you know it's worth talking about. Updating a PF Blocker NG package to match the PF Blocker development version they are the same now so you want to load PF Blocker NG you don't need to load development version that was ahead of the other one so this is the version you load right now here um maybe I'll do an updated video because there's been some changes in PF Blocker but for the most part it looks enough the same that my previous videos will get you through setting it up if you're uncertain. Now I want to touch on topic that's been well a bit controversial to some people but I think this is a good thing they've moved to the new version of FreeBSD 14 some may go well FreeBSD 14 isn't completely released is it and you would be correct but the people at Netgate are code contributors upstream FreeBSD 14 is due out later this year as a whole operating system but this is PF Sense built as an appliance by the team at Netgate I feels are competent enough to build this in a stable manner with the latest version of BSD as a base this being an appliance means not everything is in there and the package repos it's pulling from are the ones provided by PF Sense so their customization of it kind of alleviates to me any worry that they're using a more new version than what would be considered current stable this also gives them access to the most up-to-date drivers for a variety of hardware this is something people have asked for and they're delivering on closer alignment to develop cycle of FreeBSD so we're developing future versions against similar branches avoidance of more complex and larger volumes of work anytime PF Sense software should change to a newer FreeBSD base ability to upstream our own changes and development to FreeBSD without a subsequent merge to older base lowering our technical debt this is actually something that really needs to be considered if you're contributing the latest updates and the latest changes you then not only get them in FreeBSD 14 then you have to if you were on a previous version bring those down and backport them in now they don't need to do that and do the merge into the old base they can now just have the new base so i think this is going forward going to save them a lot of time and it's also why it's taken so long undoubtedly to get to these newer releases because this is a lot of code reworking under the hood even though it doesn't give you visually a major change in PF Sense it gives you a base change that's pretty substantial and once again this is for both CE and the PF Sense Plus versions here that this is being done for now let's talk about some of the environments i'm testing in this one is my studio firewall which is not too complicated but it has a few things set up here we have just a single interface but we do have a privacy VPN so that's working perfectly fine connected to PIA i have my wire guard VPN connected to my office well other office i should say so that's working fine so we have the client instance here no issues with any of those settings then we have down here the handful of different networks and VLANs and no issues with any of that and i'm running on this one specifically snorks i wanted to try snorks a lot of people asked to snort work well i use snort at home and we use seracada at the office but all these packages loaded perfectly fine didn't run into any issues and i have n-top ng on this one moving over to our office system the office system has dual WAN so we get some load balancing going on we have ha proxy we've got dark stat we got our watch running we also have n-top png open vpn free radius seracada that we're running and seracada is working fine here there's something i'll get to about seracada moment a wire guard and zavik so all of these things running at the office here and no issues matter of fact i collapsed it so you don't see all their IP addresses but all the employees that remote in have been promoting in perfectly fine so this is a little bit more complicated setup using because we use the free radius to authenticate all the users but none of this seems to have any trouble we haven't had any usage issues in terms of the CPU usage being higher the memory being high of that i seen a question come up a little bit but i didn't see any change from before or after we loaded to say there's a substantial change in memory usage on there one of the things i will note this is our neck gate 8200 and i've been waiting for the 2301 to come out to do the review so this will be a long-term review actually been using this for a few months now and i'm really happy with 8200 so other video will be out soon but i i'm running a full production load on it for a few months so my thoughts on it are based on that all right now let's go to one more environment and this is virtualized inside of zen once again didn't have any problems with it we just have serocata running on it i just loaded it this morning to make sure it worked but all this was working didn't have a problem at all doing it in a zen environment now the ones we've tested in terms of devices in the office where some custom hardware setups just that we had laying around and then we loaded up a 3100 which we've been getting prepped and that'll go out to some clients some of the clients are close we'll probably just swap to 3100 and swap it out so there's a minimum amount of downtime and not having to remote in because the clients are close but whenever we can obviously we prefer to log in and do these remotely so the 3100 didn't seem to have a problem but let's get into doesn't have a problem except this one thing if you run into it and didn't do a fresh load because we had a lab setup we didn't encounter the error because we fresh loaded it because we can we'll just grab a new image and load it fresh but let's talk about what's not working now this particular problem was brought to my attention on our live stream but of course I looked through the forums and was reading through it this morning to see all the latest information and it looks like this was updated four minutes ago and there's basically some fixes for this what you're running into is certain scenarios such as if you didn't just fresh load like we did ours at our office you could run into a problem where it will not create the proper tunnel when you're setting up open vpn don't worry there's a fix you don't have to roll back updating it manually allows the starts allows the tunnels to start so pretty simple fix in here the notes in the forum posts and the bigger discussion is linked right inside of this and I've got this link down below system states graph no longer working now it still monitors other things such as the ping times and everything else I've done a video on using the system monitor to monitor your gateway ping times but it's not monitoring the states and you can see this person when they did the upgrade and I noticed this issue as well good news is there's a fix there's a ticket and there's a patch this is actually a really cool feature you may not know about in pf sense you can actually install a tool called system patches and then you can apply a patch number and this is a way for pf sense without you even reloading the system or reverting back to the old version pulls that patch and inserts it into your pf sense so this is actually pretty cool that there's a fix for it so if you care about the states and you don't want to wait till this gets fixed in a future version you can apply the fix today this was posted about 21 hours ago it looks like and there's still some discussion on it but nonetheless there's a fix for this if you care about the system states now I've covered what I found in the forums as of today recording this video but in terms of new features and changes and more detailed release notes there are a couple things they do note in here one of them is on using zfs the first boot post upgrade will appear to have a higher normal memory usage due to large volume of file activity that takes place during the upgrade process this is harmless and due to the zfs arc memory usage done a whole video on zfs arc regarding true nas it applies the same because this is also bsd based so the using zfs bsd you're going to get the same arc usage which is a good thing but it will show you using that extra memory for that reason one of the things that's kind of noteworthy in here though the netgate 1000 does not support free bsd 14 so that one's out and not an eligible for upgrade the pc i bus for the netgate 1120 and 100 model does not currently function in 2301 this means if you're trying to use those and using such as a wireless card in them you're going to have a problem none of us get further down the list because well there's a lot of things to cover in here and I need to keep the video somewhat brief here but there's plenty of things you should read through one though that hit me was this right here seracotta has an issue processing pass list entries containing a slash 31 subnets developers have a fixed prepare for testing which will be added to the package shortly after 23 ohm release see 13920 for detail so you can check the status of this this update will solve this problem if you have a pass list that has a slash 31 I think this actually came up where I was confused when it seemed like seracotta and wire guard weren't playing nice together but it's actually more specific than that it's when you have a pass list and you've set probably a peer to a slash 31 and added it to the pass list but this is something that is actively known and there's a fix that will well maybe by the time you're watching this is already available and it may not even affect you at all but just something I should note if you're doing one of these upgrades and that's all I have with the pfcents plus 2301 release and of course I have to address the elephant in a room is what about pfcents CE is it dead were those commenters right when they told us 2.6 would be the last release but they're also saying people think they told me 2.5 was their last release or something like that but I have played with and tested the 2.7 we have a couple of them running at the office because I liked it that's a CE a lot of people are still interested in that progress has been made it's running previous d14 it's based on PHP 8.1 sound familiar yes they do develop these in parity with each other the pfcents plus and the pfcents CE pfcents plus has a few extra things I think pfcents plus is great if you want to use it but if you are a diehard who only wants to use a CE version that's fine too there's a few differences I've got a video where I cover the differences on there of note you don't get the boot environments with your pfcents CE version but nonetheless 2.7 is available the images are there you can download them you can test them you can see how the progress has come on that the development team is working diligently to solve any problems with that particular version so I expect it to be released maybe soon but I don't have a crystal ball and her answer is a good one they don't release it until they feel it's stable so now that this is released and they're quashing some bugs I feel they'll get that release pushed out here relatively soon nonetheless leave your thoughts and comments down below if you have a bug to report head over to the neck gate forums and that's a great place to engage the developers to get those problems solved because complaining about them on twitter and tagging tom complaining about them youtube is the worst way to get them solved I just kind of struck my shoulders and go wow you have a bug is there a bug report and then someone usually tries to post the link and youtube comments eats the link so engage with the development team the forums are free join them my forums are free if you want to engage with me the neck gate forums are a great place to do some reading and engage with the developers over there and if you have a nice write up that's how we get bug solved as we work our way through them we make them reproducible we provide the evidence to the teams there and then they solve them so go ahead and get updating alright and thanks


What's up everybody, Jason here for jasperyscasebreak.com, 2022 hip-raid baseball autographed limited edition series 8, just sold out. This is a dual case break, random teams number one. And again guys, 30 total spots, this is a random teams break. Everybody gets a chance at all the teams here, so we'll randomize names, teams, and then we'll go through the two cases. Now it's a repack product from hip-raid, these are some of the potential cell sheet hits, some of the bigger hits you can potentially pull out of here. So let's get it going guys, we had one filler we needed to do, everybody else bottom straight up. There's the teams, dice roll. It's a four and a five, nine times, good luck. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Four, five, nine. Steve Burch done it, Steve Burch. Nine times. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine, the final time. Badres down to the Giants. Your son is at the Michigan right now Rex? What is he doing over there? Does he go to Michigan? All right, so Steve Burch, Padres, Brad, Yangi, Steve, Marlins, Tom, Jones, White Sox, Steve Burch, Dominevex, Steve Burch Race, as well as the Blue Jays, Chad, Angels, Steve Burch, Rockies, as well as the Cardinals, Dubbs, Andy with the Brewers, Adam with the Tigers, Steve Burch with the Twins, Ed with the Royals, Chris Pair with the Mariners, Steve Burch with the Reds, Braves, Red Sox, Dodgers, Chris Walker with the Texas Rangers, Steve Burch with the Guardians, Eugene with the Pirates, Steve Burch with the A's, Nationals, Mets, Phillies, Bobby with the Astros, and Steve with the Orioles and Giants. And Michigan supported another touchdown. Nice, which son are we talking about here Rex? How old is he? All right, let me go grab the cases. Guys, I'll be right back.  Big 10. That's awesome. Where are they playing this game at? Are they playing in Lucas, Ole, Stadium? In your bite in Indianapolis? All right, guys. Well, I'll try to win the close-in. Nobody wanted to try to guess. All right, guys, here we go. All right, guys, here we go. Some 20 total hits. Wait, this part, not the box. Ow, first box. I think this is a cell sheet hit. It is. How about Derrick Jeter from tier one, number seven of 11? I don't know why he signed 11 of them, but all right, and that is a cell sheet hit, guys. Oh, right off the bat. Brad Pauley with the Yankees. That was pretty quick. And how about a little Ronald Acuni Jr. from Tribute? That's 125-150. That's a line of brave Steve Birch. Bert Blylov in signature cuts, nine of 10, and that's Minnesota Twins Edition. And I'm only going to cut this open just because we've got a show hit. It's just not like it's a mini seal or top seal. I just want to show you guys the hit there. That was Minnesota. Oh, so that's Twins, Steve Birch. And then we got a Novelli Marte with an Immaculate Patch Auto, a little bit of a laundry tag. That's a four of seven at a Seattle Mariners joint at Chris Parent. Got that from the Mosaic filler. No, Aaron, you did pretty good there, man. I'm still pretty bummed, though, because the kabooms are literally just hiding from us, but that was a good break for you, buddy. It's funny. I've seen your brother by the first half.  Peter Lonto. That is Metz, Steve Birch. And you got the Devante, too, as well, man. I don't know if you've seen that far, but if you got a Devante to 10, that was really nice. And then fame ticket of five, Luis Angel Acuña for Texas. Texas Rangers, Chris Wager. Texas Rangers are spending money. Good lord. They dished out like over $600,000,000 in the last three years. Did it really? That's funny. And how about a Paul Goldschmidt? That's nice. Five of five. This will make a Diamondback fan sad, but Steve Birch will be happy, although he has the Cardinals in hand, the Diamondbacks, but nine, five, ten on the dynasty patch auto. Hey, that's what I always say, man. That's what I always say. If you have a chance, an opportunity, just buy them in both halves, because unless you're feeling lucky and luck is on your side, then I don't know, man. It just hurts me for that to happen, you know, if somebody else just bought the second half. But it was going to you, so that's probably actually even worse. Rafael Devers, because now not only did he not get the hits, it's going to you instead.  Maybe he gets the Eagles in this new case, and maybe he gets a Kaboom finally. Maybe he could get a little AJ Brown Kaboom, I don't know. John in India, a little finest to 25. I think that's one of those finest flashbacks, a reprint, which is really, really nice. Cincinnati Reds, that's going to Steve Birch. Hugo Jose Altuve, the 25, including the authentic. That's for the Houston Astros and Bobby. Alright guys, well that was just a one case break, we'd be done. But no, there's more. We have another half. Another full case here. Nice interception by Michigan. I think Michigan's going to start running away with this now. Little Vladdy Jr. on cardwriter rookie. That's for Toronto, going to Steve Birch. Now let's see which case we can get on this side now. Little Pete Alonzo, that is from Top Scrum Black. Another one there for the Mets and Steve Birch. And we got a Manny Machado. American autographs, 21 out of 25. For the San Diego Padres, going to Steve Birch. Oh, what is this? Oh, so it's one of these things. They're showcased at all, but whoever gets this hit will get this also in their box. But it's basically you receive an entry into a giveaway, which is a Barry Sanders autograph jersey and a Muhammad Ali cut. Now it does show a code right here. I don't want to show the code because then someone could just take it. They basically have a chance to win one of these two items if you submit it by January 13th. So Yankee's owner, Brad Pauly, you're going to get that with this hit here. With this Hideki Matsui, 25. So I'll tape it to this. So that way, you know, to ship it together. All right, next one, guys, we'll be halfway through this case now with this. That is awesome. Right there, a little reprint and autograph on there for the Chicago Cubs ad. And that is the second sell sheet hit right there. Very sweet looking cars. We got the Jeter, then we got the Ernie Banks. We got a Steve Carlton to 10. A little patch auto. That's for the Phillies and Steve Birch. All right, four left here, guys. We got Jose Abreu to 25. Rafael Devers to 31 for the Red Sox. We got Shane Baz, that is a first for the Pirates to 150. Pirates that is Eugene. And down to the last box, folks. Here we go. Good luck. Alex Bregman for the Houston Astros, 3 out of 10. Houston, it's been a Bobby. And there you go, folks. That was the break. So the two sell sheet as we got were Derek Jeter to 11 and a Ernie Banks, which is pretty nice, guys. So appreciate it. Again, this was the only two cases we had in stock. So I'll take this off the website. But if you guys want to do some more similar hit parade products, we do have a basketball one up still. So two fillers away, plus some full spots. But I can always cancel that second filler if we sell it out. So if you guys want to do that tonight, we can. JaspysCaseRakes.com, guys. Thanks.


who intentionally call using FaceTime audio when calling people internationally. Why not just do that all the time and make it your favorite? It's not speed dial, it's favorites. When you add someone, you can select to call them via FaceTime or Teams, Cellular or other apps. It's true. Yep, this tip came in. I changed my daughters. I've removed my daughter from favorites because I had like her cell number in there and I added her with her FaceTime audio and now that's what's in my favorites by default. Yeah, brilliant.


Next up is the concept for the renewal of the diversity of the action plan, diversity action plan rather, and Lucia Hindoorff, a remote participant is going to give the presentation. Thank you, Dr. Okay. Thank you so much council for this opportunity to present the diversity action plan or DAP concept reissue on behalf of the NHGRI external training team. So before I get into the details of the reissue, I wanted to take a step back and put the diversity action plan into some context. The DAP is the training programs longest running program. It was initially established in 2002 as the minority action plan. The purpose was to increase the number of you are am or underrepresented minority scientists in genomic research through research training and mentoring. So this was established by the large genomic programs being mandated to include training activities, mainly providing research experiences for individuals. As the DAP program continued it in 2014 they we established a change so that large programs were no longer mandated to participate in the DAP as a condition of their funding. So the opportunity to apply from other institutions was made available. It became an open competition for everyone to apply. And so now in 2023 we're preparing to reissue the DAP concept and funding opportunity announcement. In that context there have been a few recent highlights that I want to describe to you. The first being the NIH notice of interest in diversity being renewed in 2019, which basically reiterates NIH's commitment to encouraging institutions to diversify the students and mentors that are being trained to do research. This is also underscored by the NHGRI diversity action agenda that you heard Vence Bonham speak about earlier this morning, released in 2021, underscoring NHGRI's commitment in this area of enhancing and increasing work diversity. And then in the past two or three years in particular there have been quite a number of new NHGRI led as well as NIH wide funding opportunity announcements for trainees from diverse backgrounds. We think this is a really good thing and obviously the interests of the NIH in general has done a lot to encourage the diversification of the workforce. So that being said we want to make sure that as we think about renewing the DAP we put this program in context with the rest of our training portfolio. And that's what I'm showing here. It's not my intention to go through each row in this matrix but suffice to say that the columns here are each different career stages ranging from high school on the left to mid or late stage investigators on the right. And you can see the place that the diversity action plan occupies by the red rectangle here so as you can see the current or most recent FOA supports trainees at the undergraduate post back and pre doc levels. Before I zoom in I want to note that on the right side of the career stage at the pre doc levels on the kind of pinkish bars what you see here are also opportunities for pre docs to be supported through fellowships as well as institutional research training grants which are the largest chunk of our training portfolio among all the programs. So now zooming in a little bit closer at the undergraduate and post back stage what you can see is the DAP is the main program for institutions at the post back level. And at the undergraduate level it does occupy distinct niche so in addition to diversity supplements which are individual awards for one time needs. We also have undergraduate programs that are related to a minority serving institutions or idea eligible institutions partnering with research intensive institutions to provide research experiences for undergrads that's the great program. We have a program that supports the outreach and education related to cloud computing and data science that's the educational hub and a concept that council heard last round about providing curriculum to trainees at the entry level through entry level modules. And so the DAP occupies a distinct niche among the undergraduate and post back phases of the training portfolio. So moving to the proposed changes for this concept. We are proposing a primary focus and undergraduates and post baccalaureates. So the previous FOA allowed for semester or summer experiences for undergraduates post baccalaureate trainees and graduate students who are transitioning to an F 31 that's a pre doctoral fellowship to complete the dissertation. However, there was never an intention for the DAP to become a replacement for the T 32 which is the primary institutional way that graduate students are supported. And so for this new concept we are proposing that the focus be on some summer and semester experiences for undergraduates and then post baccalaureate trainees. In addition, we plan to add additional language related to evidence based evaluation approaches and metrics that excuse me. The previous FOA did include language about evaluation but since then there has been a lot of additional evidence related to evaluating programs for diverse individuals. We also want to add some stronger language about diversity and mentors, and then that language to encourage broad approaches to recruiting, including targeting minority serving institutions and community colleges which are less well represented in our training portfolio. So before I open it up for questions I want to acknowledge the DAP program leadership past and present, particularly buddy Graham. And I also want to acknowledge my colleagues Tina Gatlin and Amber Jackson for their assessment of the program, and then the training team in general for their support and feedback throughout this whole process. So, thank you. And I think we had identified a couple of discussions to kick off the discussion. I'm Dr. Brothers and Dr. Jarvik, although we welcome comments from all council members. Thank you. Go ahead, Gail. Thank you. That was really informative, Lucia. I, first of all, I'm very, very supportive of any measures to increase the pipeline of diverse students coming to us, you know, the pipeline gets shorter, you know, narrow and narrow as we go along. I think that focusing this on undergraduates and leaving the graduate support to other existing programs makes just so much sense. And I also just wanted to applaud the increased focus for this round on evidence-based measurement of outcomes. I didn't really have a question, just I really think that this round has strengthened the focus of the program in a very important way. Thanks. Thank you, Gail. Kyle? Yeah, I'm really supportive as well, Lucia. I did just have a quick question. Could you say just a little bit more about diversity and mentors? You know, there seems like there's a number of ways to come at that topic, so just wondering what you're thinking about there. Yeah, so we do have a number of approaches that we could use, and I would be interested to see, you know, which of these, or if you have additional ideas. So we could, you know, I think the standard is to sort of include language, emphasizing how important it is for individuals to have access to diverse perspectives and diverse experiences from their mentors. That would be simple. You know, that we had a discussion earlier about potentially encouraging mentors as well as kind of part of the structure of the program. So we'll look at that, but it's something we're interested in doing overall in the training portfolio. And so that might be an opportunity to build something like that in the DAP to the DAP FOA. And then of course we do encourage the, you know, we do have a number of DAP programs that have been funded throughout the years. And so we're always encouraging them to not only expand their faculty mentors, but to really think critically about the interactions between, you know, seminar speakers, for example, or research mentors and the participants. And so I think it can be a continuum all the way from how these individuals, these trainings are recruited through how they experience the program to the networks that they develop. So, you know, I think there are a number of approaches that we could take. And, you know, if you have additional ideas, we'd be glad to hear them. I think there's, you know, a lot of the creativity needs to come from the applicants obviously. So it's just a matter of making the call open-ended enough that folks can, you know, can use creative solutions like, you know, maybe there's not a lot of mentors who have experience being underrepresented during their own careers in genomics. But there may be sort of colleagues who have that experience who are not in genomics who could collaborate. You know, there's a number of different ways of approaching it. It seems that at minimum you would want the programs to involve some kind of training, as you were saying, for mentors to sort of like just prepare them to be good mentors in this context. But, yeah, in any case, I think that the key issue is just making sure that there's room in the program for projects to be creative and to address that issue. I think it's a really important one. Thanks, point noted. Other questions or comments from council? Okay, can I get a motion to approve the concept? Second, all in favor? Anyone opposed? Anyone abstaining? Lisa, I see your hand.


Welcome folks. Thank you for joining us. So glad to welcome Faiza Yusuf to talk to us about how to supercharge a person's growth journey. It's a pleasure to have all of you as well. I hope all of you are doing well. Without any further delay, I would ask for Faiza to begin the third session. Thank you so much. Hello everyone. So my name is Faiza Yusuf and I'm a technology professional based out here in Karachi, Pakistan. And when the team at Agile India reached out to me and we were talking about some personal growth and mindset related topics. So I wanted to, I told them about the work that I've been doing on myself to kind of improve myself and they were really interested in hearing about that and they invited me to talk about this. So I'm really grateful that they chose this topic and I'm also really grateful that you all are here. Listen to me. So these are a few organizations that I'm associated with. So Code Girls and Women in TechPK are the organizations that I have founded. I'm extremely invested in the idea of diversity and inclusion. And these are the two organizations around that most of both of them work around gender inclusion in Pakistan. I work at Genetic Solutions as a senior product manager. CryptoChicks is an organization that I did here in Pakistan. It's an organization based out in Toronto and Upwork is where I go to find a lot of work. So I tend to work on a lot of content creation, head tech, product management related areas on Upwork and consult for people there. So goal setting is tricky. The reason that I say that is because a lot of us have gone through the phase that whenever New Year comes, a lot of us set resolutions and then we are, we fail to work through. And this is all of us, including myself, because we tend to think that because it's New Year's, it's important that we do that because everybody else is doing that. But goal setting is tricky, because we need to not just think about what we want to achieve, but we also need to think about the system behind that. So the focus on system is extremely important and these are the things that I'm going to discuss in our, in our discussion today. So goal setting in our mind when we think about goal setting, we are thinking about motivation, we are thinking about transformation, we are thinking about change because personal growth is all about transformation. It is something that you do to improve yourself. And when I say yourself, I'm talking about your physical health, your mental health, your financial state, your intellectual state, your spiritual state, anything at all. So when we do goal setting, we are usually focusing on motivation. But what I want you to think about today is to focus on your behavior instead of motivation and especially motivation that is not intrinsic, because if the motivation is coming from inside, you also know that this is something that you really, really want to do, and you really, really want to be, then this is something that's going to happen eventually over time but if the motivation is coming from outside, in most cases, it will freeze it out. So I've had this conversation around habit forming and about personal growth with a lot of people that I work with. So my peers, colleagues, people that I've taught, people that have mentored me or I have mentored. And there are a bunch of questions that I've collected over the years that keep on coming back because people do tend to read about goal setting and do tend to read about habit forming. So I created a list of questions that I'm going to show you right now and then we are going to go through these questions and talk about, I'm going to talk about my answers and then I would really, really want you to think about your answers for these questions. So top most questions, question, should I time block? What should be the size of my goal? How should I quantify it? Do I have to do all of it daily because you are talking, I'm saying about, I'm talking about habits. So if it's a habit, do I need to do it daily? How soon should I self reflect? Can I quit it in like two days? Do I need to do it for two weeks minimum? Do I have to spend 1000 hours on it? What am I going to do with that? What if my tiny habit is too tiny? So there is a wonderful book called Tiny Habits. I have mentioned that book at the end of my talk as well and then another one it's called Atomic Habits. So it talks about very, very small and simple behavior. So some people think that it's too tiny, too tiny for me. So I don't think that's substantial enough. Should I count on snowballing? So is it ever going to happen? Snowballing? What if my goal is not worthy of my time? What if I'm doing something but I think that this is not the right thing to do? Should I quit my goal in the middle? If yes, when is the right time? So these are the questions that keep coming back when it comes to talking about personal growth and when it comes to talking about goal setting and habit forming and ritual forming. So first of all, let me share my answers with you. So time blocking doesn't work for me. I cannot just say that at 9am from 9am to 10am I'm going to do that because I have a very, very chaotic kind of work structure because I work with multiple organizations and I do a lot of volunteering and I run a household as well. So things tend to get really messy around that. So instead of time blocking, my focus is on setting an intention for the day and pick up at least three things that are extremely important for that day for me. And then I go from there. So instead of setting up a calendar time, I basically block the whole day for achieving three or four goals that I want to do that day. What should be the size of my goal? So it should be doable but not boring at all. So in my case, I tend to kind of push myself a little bit further every year to make sure that I'm adding some excitement to it. The size of your goal should not be something that is impossible to achieve. You cannot set a goal that I'm going to complete 100 courses in a year's time or maybe I'm going to learn five new skills in that year. You can do that again, but if you have a full time job, if you have children, if you have other people around you, that will become really difficult and you will eventually burn out. So how should you quantify it? In some cases, I love to do habit tracking. In other cases, I do it by milestones. So for example, a lot of my work involves writing and teaching and reading. So for writing, I do habit tracking, but for reading, I do milestones. A lot of for teaching also, I do a lot of milestones. For learning also, I also do, for learning, I do habit tracking. So I spend around 30, 40 minutes every day learning something new, learning that is part of my goal for the year or for that quarter. So do I have to do it? It depends. In most cases, I don't. I use a tool called Asana. So I have set days for set things and it counts when the day comes. So I know that this is the day for that item that I want to do. How soon should I self-reflect? For some cases, monthly works, for some cases quarterly, I would not recommend you to self-reflect within a week. I would not recommend you to self-reflect after the quarter because that's too much time to spend on something that you may not do again. So self-reflection, I would, minimum I would recommend you to do it in like two weeks and then maximum maybe a month or in some cases a quarter will work. If you think your tiny habit is too tiny, that's my problem also. So I make it substantial. In case of learning, I don't do one lecture or one video, I will do 30 minutes. In case of reading, I won't do one page. I will do 20 minutes. In case of walking, I won't do 10 minutes. I will do 30 minutes or four kilometers or something like that. I will make it substantial and this is why this is what makes it exciting for me. Should I count on snowballing? Yes, absolutely. It works. It works beautifully. What if my goal is not worthy of my time? You pivot. Absolutely. There's no shame in that. Consider it as an experiment. You experimented on it. It did not work out. Go ahead. Change it. You quit.  You quit the goal, you get into something new. So here are a few things that I want you to think about when you are making a goal specific decision. Think about comparison analysis. So you compare two things and you basically set a criteria. So for example, I want to, as people and as professionals, we do tend to have a lot of goals and we can't do all of them at the same time. So what you do is that you prioritize and how do you prioritize? You do comparison analysis by comparing two things that you think you can do both, but you know you won't get time. So you set a criteria that maybe which one is generating more impact or which one makes sense at this time in my career or in my life. So if you want to pick up the one that's most, you know, that's most relevant. Then the next thing is that I really, really want you to be aware of is herd mentality. Do not get into that, because people are doing something, you don't have to do it, because everybody's setting goals, you don't have to do it.  So you're not thinking about your own context where you are in your life, but you are just thinking about that this is something that because everybody's doing and I have the fear of missing out on that. So I'm going to do that. So don't do that. Your time is way too precious to get into something that you have not kind of thought about properly. Some cost. So that happens, especially with product managers, because that's my profession that if we have spent certain amount of time, effort, money into something, we'll see that, oh my God, I've already spent that might as well get done with it, even though I know it's not working out just on the hope that it will work out. So some cost is something that's already gone. You can't recover that. So if you have already spent a month on doing something and it did not work out and the experiment was not a success, just let it go to not follow through, because you are going to spend more time into it and most probably no good result will come out of it.  Then action virus. So we tend to overvalue, not overvalue, but maybe we tend to favor action over an action. So we just want to do something to feel in control. Think about that as well, because you have limited energy and limited time. Just because you think that you are not doing anything, you just find something to do. This is a problem that I also have. And I keep on trying to be mindful of that. And my family also reminds me that I overvalue action and a lot of times that action is not turning into something substantial and I still go ahead with it. So I think about this as well. And then last is confirmation bias. So we tend to unintentionally, we find information that confirms our beliefs for our mindset. So if you want to pursue a goal or pursue a skill or pursue career or whatever you want to pursue, you will tend to find information that confirms what you already believe. Most of the time we do it unintentionally. Sometimes we do it intentionally. So you have to be mindful of that as well. So when we are doing goal specific decision making, what we need to do is we need to make sure that we are not sticking to something because of some cost. We are not doing it because others are doing it because we are not taking an action just because we want to feel in control.  And then comparison works but make sure that your criteria is defined, you know why you are measuring these two things and what you want to get out of it. And of course, you have to make sure that when you are looking for evidence to prove what you would already believe in, look for the evidence that disprove what you believe in. And I think that is going to really help. So a few things, a few do's for you, create a master list. So I have a master list and ironically it calls chaos. And chaos because it has a lot of chaos in it. So many things that I wanted to do so many things that, you know, so many ideas that I have.  And that also have a lot of, you know, things that I think I would invest my I would invest my time in the future, you create categories so help. So health, happiness, finance, spirituality, intellectual. You know, whatever, whatever is important to you, you prioritize either by, you know, comparing two things or to see which one makes more sense in in your context. And of course, you also make sure that you don't overveil yourself so you pick four goals or five goals a year and not more than that I would say just pick four goals a year, not more than that. So in my head, it should be all about symmetry so there are four quarters of four goals. This is what I have in mind. You said milestones and so milestones for every quarter so that you can measure it. My milestones also include also include that I would say that if I have to do something daily and I have achieved five to seven times a week that that's a success. That's something that I want to do, I've achieved my goal 100%. So you can do that. Habit tracking, get a bullet journal, get a notebook, do that. You can also use a tool. I'm a big fan of technology in that sense. So of course, definitely. Pre-order reviews, I do a quarterly review in most cases because I've been following this process for a long time but in your case maybe if you're starting new, you can do it a monthly review. It's very, very honest of yourself. If you don't enjoy something, if you don't like something, if something is not impactful, if you find it boring, you know, be honest with yourself that I don't enjoy this. I don't enjoy it at all. So I went to, I went to a class to basically learn yoga. I don't, I didn't enjoy it. For me, the most enjoyable physical activity is work. I enjoy walking. I love walking. So this is something that I wanted to do. So joining a gym or going to, you know, go into a yoga class did not work out for me. The same goes for a lot of learning. So some sort of topics that I'm interested in, some sort of topics that make me sleep. So be honest with yourself. And then, you know, of course, if there are things that you have to do but you don't enjoy them, again, you'll have to push through them. But at the same time, you have to be honest with yourself and watch out for your biases. So confirmation bias, action bias, you know, her mentality, all of these biases you need to be mindful of them. And then put things on the back burner. This is extremely important. So not have, if something is not happening right now, just put it on the backburn, let your mind do, let your unconscious mind do its magic. And, and there's no shame in that. So, so do that. Put things on the back burner. Don'ts, don't have conflicting goals. It's going to drive your nuts. I've done that. It doesn't work out. So don't have that that is the reason that you don't have the don't want to have more goals because eventually they will conflict with each other. So do not have that. Don't overvalue yourself. If you are starting new on this journey, and you're really trying to find a system for yourself, maybe start with two goals, maybe start with three goals, not more than that. Do not get rushing yourself if something doesn't work out. It's fine. It's your time you have taken a decision it did not work out you have learned out of it. That's absolutely fine. Don't count on motivation, count on your behavior, count on habit triggers, you're going to talk about them later on. Don't be inflexible. So if something doesn't happen at a certain time, don't get frustrated out of it. Life happens. We need to make time for life as well. So that happens. Do not separate your goals from your identity. So I'm also going to touch upon that later in the talk. Do not overly plan your schedule. Life happens, things will change, something unexpected will come. So do not overly plan your schedule, make sure that you leave some time for the unexpected.  So breaks are extremely important, and you should definitely, definitely invest in rest. You can seek for shortcuts. In most cases they don't work out or if they even work out the temporary.  So, the most important thing you have to do is optimize your environment. In my case, I, for being my most productive self for being able to think about personal growth, I need a clutter free mind. I also need an environment that induces peace. I also need an environment where there are not a lot of people around me because I'm an introvert with social anxiety. So it makes me anxious if there are a lot of people around me. So, so I'm I've optimized my environment in that way. I also have a different place for work and a different place for rest or family or personal life. So you can do that as well. Most of the days I'm so half of my day I'm working from here my office and other half I'm working from my office. So, I'm fortunate enough to have this I'm privileged enough to have a separate space to make my own office a separate room. But do that, if not, you know, create some kind of partition between your personal and personal workspace so that you know that when you're here, you're working when you're here, you're not working you're resting or you're doing anything else. And then of course you set habit triggers for me. So when every morning I get up. The first thing I do is that I will, you know, clean up, and then I will go and make tea and while I'm making tea. I'm basically planning my day in my head. I'm checking a sauna app to see what my, what I have in, you know, what I have in my intention for the day. And then I'm also going to do a few little things. I take medication for anxiety so I know where my medication is that I don't forget it. I also have triggers in the workspace I have so every morning when I come in, I turn my laptop on and the first thing I do is I go and get my, what about the field. So you set small triggers to initiate behavior and you are basically making space for other things in your head by not consciously thinking about them. So I have to figure out my walking or running shoes outside the days that I have to go go for that to make sure that I don't have to think about it. I know the shoes are there. That's my day. That's my cue to do that. The next thing you have to do is minimize decision making decision fatigue. It gets all of us.  In my case, I do a lot of male prepping so Sunday morning, you come to my house and you see that, you know, it's chaos of cooking because I'm cooking for the whole week. I invest a lot of time in my and making sure that during the week during the work week I do not get anything, you know, happening weirdly around the household. So whatever is required happens on the on the weekend. I also plan my week. So I have a weekly to do in my notebook and I also have my days intention planned. So I have a plan for like for the next two three months in my Asana app. I use that I use technology to make sure that I'm on track. Also, you need to decide your day ahead. So when it comes to clothing when it comes to other things you do that to make sure that you don't get tired of thinking about smaller, smaller things, things that do not have a lot of impact on your life. So then you focus on system. So you create productive rituals and habits to make sure that the system is in place.   So make sure that you focus on the system of that. So once you have your own like I have my system in place. Everything becomes easier for me to kind of tweak it every year, every quarter and then, you know, do it for other things. So focus on building a system for yourself. And then make use of technology, whatever works for you to do less, create a to do less create a tool calendar blog. You can use focus apps you can do whatever you want to make use of technology to make sure that you know you're being productive. I do not like notifications on my phone. I mostly my phone is silent and it's upside down on a drawer or in a table I check it when I want to check it. I usually keep it disconnected from the internet as well because I do not want to be disturbed when I'm in that zone of working. So, so I do that I I have disabled all the notifications on my phone and someone calls me on my phone so so you do that you you basically kind of don't be slave of technology but make it, you know, something that that's useful for you. So you tweak that thing for your own context. And there are a few things to consider that I really want you to consider is to think about deep versus shallow work. This is an excellent book I've added it at the end of my talk. When you're working. So in my case I do a lot of acting a lot of thinking a lot of strategy work, a lot of research. I know that I cannot do it do that kind of work for more than for more than three or four hours in a day. I do not have the capacity to focus that much. So I know that I need to optimize that time to find that kind of schedule in my day where I'm doing that deep work without any interaction without any sort of interruptions. And then shallow work is a work that we are doing by mostly meetings mostly responding to emails mostly taking a call while cooking, you know, things we do when we can multi multitask as well listening to a podcast leaving our home, listening to a podcast and responding to an email stuff like that. So, so think about deep and shallow work and see if your goals fall into a shallow kind of work or a deep kind of work and then decide or schedule your day. Then, of course, invest in rest. I need to remind myself this again and again and again that I need to invest in rest, because burnouts are nasty, and you don't want to get into that you will get into that then Julie but you know it happens to everyone once in a while. For some people it's there for some people it's pretty, you know, often in my case it's often. So I need to remind myself to invest in rest. I am learning this and I want you to learn this as well. And then run it like an experiment if it doesn't work. That's fine you have learned something go ahead and do something completely different. I also tend to alternate between different types of course some years. The theme is about learning so this is my year of learning. Last year it was the year of financial stability so I did a lot of work to make sure that I'm financially stable and I have a savings account and I have some money for emergencies and I built an emergency fund and stuff like that so this is what I did last year. This year's theme is learning so I've done a lot of learning. I've taken a lot of classes. I've taken a lot of courses so I experiment every year to find the things that I enjoy. Last year I did not enjoy what I was doing, but I did it anyway because I know that that was really really important the impact of it on my life and on my well being and on my health was huge. This year it's learning. I'm having the time of my life with that. This year it was make it your identity.  Instead of I like to run. I'm a runner. Instead of, I want to be, I like to be productive. I'm a productive person. Make it your identity. That really helps it centers the, it centers everything it makes you makes you makes you want to do it more makes you want to believe it more. So, make it part of your identity. And then, whatever you are doing to find your findings. My notebook is just a mess of things that I keep on writing about writing about the things that I'm doing so how am I feeling what is the impact of it was a context what did I learn. Do I want to do it again do I not want to do again do I want to give it another try. So record your findings a few lines every day. Either you want to do some kind of exercise like morning pages, a lot of people do that. Some people journal every day. I don't I do not do that I don't do some kind of journaling every day, but I do write about my goals, because I want to record record my findings of whatever the experiments that I run. So in that time. And of course, these are five wonderful books that you should read atomic habit drive daily ritual speak performance and deep work. These are excellent books, you will really enjoy them. I'm pretty sure about that if you're if you're listening to this talk and you're interested in learning about productivity and personal growth. And thank you so much. Thank you so much for opening up and taking us through the journey of how you have planned fact, and also not written yourself for things and so glad thank you so much for sharing that. I'm just looking at the chat. There aren't any questions there. Let me also open up the question answers. There aren't any questions that I'm seeing as of now. I will request for the folks were participating. If they have any questions they can put it here. Also note that will be at a hangout area post this discussion. So you can come there as well and talk to as I want to one as well. Yeah, so just wait for any questions or anything yeah oh okay there's a question now it's a that's from an anonymous attendee. How do I come out of laziness and concentrate on goals. That's the question. Okay, so I wouldn't call anyone a lazy person until unless they just do not do anything at all in the day. A lot of times we tend to procrastinate. I do that to everybody does it. I think in any case you should in my case I do not look for shortcuts but I would love to find some kind of low hanging food for myself to motivate myself.  It was a massive thing to do like opening up a saving account and doing this and doing that and hiring a tax consultant and accountant and a million other things. Do not start with something you start with something very very small, something that you really enjoy doing and then see what happens. Usually it's usually we feel that kind of inertia that it takes us a while to get into the, you know, groove of things but once you are in that in that zone. It's going to really help. And if you're starting on this journey, start with two goals. One is about your happiness and another is about your health that will be really really helpful for you. So, you know, I'm very open about a lot of topics one of the topic that is really close to my heart is mental health. So in this years of my goal I wanted to go to therapy six times a year. I've done that this year. That was one of the goal very simple schedule an appointment, go to therapy every alternate month. And that's it. That's the goal. So you have to find something and it's extremely important for me because I'm an anxiety person to go and talk to someone. So, do that, find something that is easy find something that is a low hanging fruit and go ahead with that. Thank you for that. There are more questions coming up. Parul Bhargava is asking. What do you, what do you mean? Okay, I don't know. What do you mean by keeping mean I think is the word by keeping things in back burner. Could you give us some examples. Yeah, that's a very good question. So, so what I do in most cases that I do not jump on things as they come to me. So in most cases you'll see that an idea comes to you and you get really excited about it and you just even without thinking about the time that it will take or what's going to be the end goal or the impact of it we just jump on that idea. That's not how I'm over the years I've got to function in a different way. So if an idea comes to me, I'm going to think about it, write about it, put it on the back burner, until I'm absolutely sure that this is something that I want to do. So this is how I do not have a lot of unfinished projects. So if I've started something I'm mindful about my time I'm mindful about the thing that I'm going to finish it. If you have ideas about your goals about learning about scale about improving something, write them down, definitely write them down, write them, write, write your thought process behind it and let it sit there, let it sit there for a while. So as my dad would say sleep on it for a while and you will know if it's worth doing or not. So you put it on the back burner and then you eventually figure it out that this is something that I really want to do. I something that I mentioned about a financial goal or a learning goal. So for this year, I had like a whole list of things that I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn specifically, specifically, South Indian cooking, because my daddy was from there. I wanted to learn Mexican cooking. So I did that I recently completed a course on that I but again this is not related to work this is not related to product management or technology. So I wanted to make sure that I do that. So this idea was in my head for three years, but I wanted to find the right time to do that so rather than jumping directly on spending money on a very expensive class on that. I would just put it on the back burner, let it similar there and then put it up back up when when I think the time is right. Thank you for that. And we have about 12 minutes to go through. So I'll quickly go to the next one. It's by an anonymous attendee. How do you handle too many meetings in a day. That's a problem. That's a problem everywhere, especially in remote work. So in my case, if there is an listening meeting, I make sure that I have just two of them. If I'm meeting that I have to contribute to and I have to talk, then, then one meeting a day. That's how I do usually, but there are days when it doesn't work out. I make sure that I do not plan any kind of deeper creative work. And I do tend to kind of move the schedule around because as I told you that time blocking is not something that I can do because of the chaos around me all the time. So what I tend to do is I, if there are days in the week that I'm meeting this today is my meeting day, because I'm meeting the content part of the team and I'm meeting my product team and I'm meeting, I'm here right now as well. So I do not have a lot of, you know, creative or a lot of deeper plans for the day. Because if I do that, I'm going to be really tired and I won't be able to give my 100%. And also in cases, in cases where you can say no to a meeting and just instead write an email to that, go ahead and do that. I'm infamous for writing long emails. So, go ahead. Thanks for that. Moving on to the next question. It's again anonymous. I have a problem of procrastination. I tend to avoid the major work and do the not important work. I do other things faster. How can I get over it is the question. Yeah, I usually set internal deadlines for making sure that I don't do that. Interestingly, when you procrastinate, and you're doing other things, your mind is still thinking about the main work that you want to do. So in a lot of cases you will see that when the deadline will approach which will become extra productive and get it done. So in that case, set internal deadlines for you. And so from the beginning, I am the kind of a person who would study at the last time. And my mom used to get very mad about it. My husband tells me that he hates people like me because we do everything at the last moment and we do it well. So again, there are few few people like this that this thing work for them because in their mind again, the thing is on the back burner. They constantly thinking about it while doing other things.  What I do is that I break it down. I am going to spend for example, I have a major goal. So currently I have around in my list today I have to review a very major document that's going to go to a client. I have a whole week for it. I'm going to do a few pages every day. And this is what I do to make sure that you know I don't just overwhelm myself. Procrastination is not a bad thing until unless it starts affecting your life. So don't kind of get yourself on that everybody does that if there's no person in the whole world that doesn't procrastinate. But you need to set it on deadlines to make sure that you do things on time and put it on your schedule. So put it on it on your to move for the list. If you're writing it by hand if you're putting it on the fridge if you're putting it on your sticking out on the table do it put it there. Yes, thank you for that. Another anonymous question. What would be our strategy if the growth setting keeps failing continuously due to a tough work schedule. How do we keep ourselves motivated is the next question. Yeah, this also happens especially with tech technology jobs because we tend to have very crazy schedules and the work pressure is a lot and in most cases people don't have the energy to do anything else after work. Give yourself a break. Don't don't push yourself give yourself a break you're going to burn out otherwise and again start with one thing just one goal that you have fixed for the whole year that this is one thing that I'm going to do the whole year. That's it that's my goal other than taking care of my family other than working or going to my nine to five or whatever job that I do. This is one thing that I'm going to do for myself and then you do it and make sure that you understand the impact of that thing. It should not be watching Netflix it should not be just sitting on the couch it should not be something completely random but something with a purpose. So maybe going for a walk for 20 minutes this is something that I want to do to clear my head after a busy day at work. One thing that you want to do that improves your life and start from there. You will start seeing the results of that you will be really motivated to do that and also also start thinking about your about your daily work. If there is any way that you can automate some of it. If there is any way that you can you know, delegate some of it or if you can simplify some of the work. Go ahead and do that. That is also really important especially in the kind of work that we do a lot of meetings a lot of communication, see ways to optimize that and find your, you know someone where you work the best. Thank you guys I think there was there was another question which is almost related to that again it is anonymous. I was talking about how to avoid procrastination while working from home. I think you did answer that before. And also there was another question that how do we then deal with goals when we're too tired and I think you mentioned go take a break. You know you can protect what you have to do. Yeah, moving on to another question. We have a few more two more to go. Bad habit of thinking a lot before taking any actions. And sometimes I missed the time for the activity how do we improve is the question. Yeah, that's analysis analysis that also happens that you keep on thinking about it. So you, this is again, this is not something life altering right if you're thinking too much about it. Do you think it's big enough decision that you're spending so much time thinking about it. In most cases, just run it run it like an experiment okay I'm going to try this if it works out well enough if it doesn't work out well enough. So, I think that is required a lot of times we overthink because we are scared of not enjoying it or scared of not being able to do it well. If you don't do it well that is also fine. It's a goal, a goal, this kind of goal is a commitment between you and yourself. There is no one else. You don't have to publicly announce it you don't have to put it out in social media you don't have to tell your family it's a commitment yourself if it doesn't work out that is fine.  And in most cases, when we are overthinking something a lot and excessively. This is something that we think will going to impact our life positively but it doesn't because there is a part of our mind telling us that I don't think it's worth my time should I think it through should I think more about it. So do that run it give yourself three days I'm going to do it for three days and see what happens I'm going to do it for a week and see what happens. And then see if, and I've done that as well so when when you go to shopping you try things on to see if they fit you. So in cases of goals I've also done that so I've tried something and see that. So when I started doing a lot of online learning and online teaching, I started with one class to see if it is something that I enjoy. And I really enjoyed it, I went ahead with it. But there are things that I don't enjoy and then I pull myself back out of it. This is not something that that's worth my time because there is so much resistance from who I am as a person that it's not worth it. Moving on to the next question again is anonymous. How can one develop a mindset that keeps identifying and addressing the subconscious biases. That's also very tricky and it's an excellent question. You reminding yourself that we are all inherently biased. And when you are taking a decision in your, you should have a checklist in your head that I have checked my decision for these biases. In my case, action bias and confirmation bias are going to be the death of me, because in most cases I will just choose to jump on something without thinking it through that that's a problem that I also have. So when I'm taking a decision, I remind myself that am I doing it because I just want to do something or I really, I think that's that's going to be useful. And the second is that you think about the data that you have gathered for making that decision. Are you just looking for data that confirms what you've already thought or believe on. In other cases, I will basically find a person who would say that that's a terrible idea of as a don't do that. And then the conversation will start from there, what they have to say about it, or I will, you know, start looking for data that disproves what I have in mind and then this will open you up for for better thinking. So in that case, create a checklist for yourself on paper, maybe that every time I take a decision, these are the four things that I'm going to kind of recheck in my head to make sure that I'm doing the right thing. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. Last question. I'm conscious that we just have three more minutes. If you don't have a separate place to work and kids constantly disturb you because they are too small. How can you manage it? Oh boy, I don't have kids. So my answer won't be a good answer for this. But that's a problem. That is a problem, especially when working from home. In my household, we are just three adults. So I don't face that but this this happens. What I've seen a lot of women around me doing is that they basically kind of take their kids in confidence in a lot of cases that this is, you know, your mom or your dad is working right now. And I leave this time and then you know, after that I've also seen people scheduling their time around their kids schedule. So, you know, when they're at school or at daycare or this and that. I'm really not sure about about this because I don't have any experience in this. Sorry about that. Thank you. Thank you for being honest with that. Thank you for that. So that's all the question that we have guys thank you so much for asking this question for accommodating all of them.