Kirill Eremenko: This is episode 147 with independent turnaround consultant Vitaly Dolgov.
Kirill Eremenko: Welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast. My name is Kirill Eremenko, data science coach and lifestyle entrepreneur. Each week we bring you inspiring people and ideas to help you build your successful career in data science. Thanks for being here today and now lets make the complex simple.
Kirill Eremenko: Hey guys, and welcome back to the Super Data Science Podcast. Today, I’ve got a dear friend of mine, a mentor of mine, Vitaly Dolgov who is an independent turnaround consultant. In fact, one of the best independent turnaround consultants in the world. He’s worked with, as far as I understand or remember, eight out of the ten top mining companies in the world. He’s traveled to dozens or even hundreds of countries providing his services and he is in very, very high demand worldwide. Today he is sharing some of his best tips and tricks and hacks on time management. This is an episode where we specifically dove into this topic because as far as I know, Vitaly is one of the best people that I’m acquainted with who does time management very, very well and that is partially due to his consulting background, because of his experience in that world where you have to manage every single minute of your time properly in order to mix in all the work that you have to do, all the projects and include things like your relationships, your personal life, your hobbies, and things like that.
Kirill Eremenko: Why is this podcast going to be beneficial to you, to a data scientist or an aspiring data scientist? This is an important question I wanted to outline here because managing your time regardless of what industry you’re in is extremely important. That allows you to get the maximum out of your life. Not only in work, not only to get all the projects done on time and deliver outstanding results so that you can get recognized and get those promotions that you’re after but also in expanding your own consulting work or maybe your own business or your own project so how to manage your time outside of work. How to negotiate to have more time outside of work. But also, time management is an important skill in managing your time for personal things, for relationships with your loved ones, with your friends and family and significant other, for doing hobbies, for feeling fulfilled in life, engaged, or adding meaning to your life.
Kirill Eremenko: Those are all the topics that we’re going to cover in the podcast and you’ll hear about tricks or psychological frameworks like the Myers Briggs test, the PERMA framework. We’ll talk about the big rocks concept and many more techniques that Vitaly uses in his life in order to have a fulfilled life, not just to complete his work and deliver the projects on time but actually feel happy and fulfilled in all areas of his life. That is something that as his mentee, I have learned and aspired to learn from him and today I wanted to share that with you so that’s what we’re going to cover. Without further adolescents, I bring to you Vitaly Dolgov, an independent turnaround consultant.
Kirill Eremenko: Welcome ladies and gentleman to the Super Data Science Podcast. Today, I’ve got one of my best friends and mentor, Vitaly Dolgov on the show. Vitaly, welcome. How are you doing?
Vitaly Dolgov: I’m good. How are you? It’s good to be back.
Kirill Eremenko: I’m good as well. For a change, this time we’re recording the podcast in a studio.
Vitaly Dolgov: Indeed, it’s different.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, in Brisbane. Surprisingly, we just found out that a major world known celebrity was here a few days ago recording. How crazy is that?
Vitaly Dolgov: Indeed. Unfortunately, we are not able to state his name or our head’s will be chopped off.
Kirill Eremenko: Our audio is laughing. Yeah, good times. You were on the show like ages ago and he we don’t a short 20-minute episode asking if they like it to say they like it and a lot of people liked it and wanted to hear you back and so here you are.
Vitaly Dolgov: Thanks heaps. I’ll interrupt you for a sec, I was really surprised by a big comeback and a lot of people searched me up, looked me up on LinkedIn and my network increased dramatically just because of the guys that follow this podcast. I’m really appreciative of the attention and the interest.
Kirill Eremenko: Did you get a lot of questions after it?
Vitaly Dolgov: I had a few people asking to following my career and if I could be their mentor. That was probably the most common question. I would say probably that I’m figuring out the process how to do it at scale properly. If there is a proper email that I could start sharing some of my experience or not. I haven’t launched anything yet but thinking hard about it.
Kirill Eremenko: Awesome. This was over a year ago, right?
Vitaly Dolgov: Yeah, indeed.
Kirill Eremenko: In that past year, some major events have happened in your life. What would you say is the most significant? Watch out, Amy might be listening to this.
Vitaly Dolgov: I know which one you’re hinting to, I got married.
Kirill Eremenko: Congrats.
Vitaly Dolgov: Thanks heaps. Got married …
Kirill Eremenko: Twice.
Vitaly Dolgov: To the same person. I got married, you were part of that wedding ceremony and the two-day wedding event. Thank for coming. It was great.
Kirill Eremenko: Awesome. How’s married life? Are you excited?
Vitaly Dolgov: It hasn’t changed much. It was a great event. We were happy to host a lot of friends and family and to share what we thought is the special moment. Having you on that day was more special to us than putting a signature down. I think it’s a good that not a lot of things changed. The feelings, emotions haven’t change, neither diminished nor amplified tremendously but like having a really great time and support from you guys was important to us.
Kirill Eremenko: I just wanted to clarify for the listeners that twice is because you had two ceremonies in two different countries, that’s the reason. You were so excited about getting married, you had to do it twice.
Vitaly Dolgov: True, indeed.
Kirill Eremenko: Awesome, what else?
Vitaly Dolgov: Good question.
Kirill Eremenko: Any big projects you’re working on?
Vitaly Dolgov: Last year was a really important year for me to establish myself as an independent consultant to make sure I can sustain high cash flow, I can market and sell my skill to other consulting companies so they can resell it later with a high margin. It was important to me to make sure I can do it consistently and to get confidence in the incoming work. That has happened. I think the business has been running for about 18 months so I’m confident that it’s doing all right. The demand for it is only increasing. I have competing offers so I have to decline more and more work than obviously that I can accept. That was one mountain that I have achieved.
Vitaly Dolgov: Another one was trying to think bigger and think how I can move forward and go away from just selling my time and start creating some value to people around me at a bigger scale. I have started documenting some of my knowledge, some of experience. I’ve been in consulting for about 10 years now and I wanted to start documenting and hopefully eternalizing some of the knowledge, not only my own knowledge but also try to get that knowledge from topnotch consultants that I’ve worked with. They all raise their hand and said, yes, we’re keen. Let’s put some knowledge base together of the things that could be useful to future consultants. These are the two probably bigger milestones in my professional life and probably making more confident movements towards improving my personal life. I’ve been prioritizing career for about 10 years and I wanted to focus more on health, on fulfillment, on joy, and to really develop that side of things to the bigger extent possible. Thus, a lot of hobbies flourished. A lot of time dedicated and attention to it went to the next level.
Kirill Eremenko: Awesome. I think that’s the main thing I want to discuss today. For those listening, Vitaly is the best person I know in the world, I want to stress, the best in time management. Where did that come from? Why are you so good at time management?
Vitaly Dolgov: Thanks, that’s really flattering. Frankly speaking, I’ve learned from a lot of other people who I think are better than me at that. Interesting enough, yesterday I interviewed one of my mentors from the consulting world, Michael Spence. He’s the managing partner of Partners in Performance Southeast Asia, that’s a management consulting firm working in that region. I asked him a question that was around time management and prioritization. His first response was a long laugh and saying, “I’ve learned that over 19 years and I still keep learning it.” The summary of his tricks and tips I realized was something that he passed on to me almost no day one we met and that was about three years ago. His wealth of knowledge and experience and knowledge and experience of other people was probably my source where I picked it up from. Summing it up, it’s learning from other people that I believe are deemed successful. I don’t believe I have reached there yet but obviously, I’m keen to share.
Kirill Eremenko: Also, I’m just going on a bit of a tangent. You interviewed Michael Spence and you’re interviewing others. You’re starting your own podcast, is that correct?
Vitaly Dolgov: That’s the idea. I haven’t launched it yet. I want to create a sudden backlog or forward look, whatever you call it, of some recordings that I can start putting more consistently every fortnight, every three weeks online. I’ve a few of the recordings lined up and looked in. I’ve got two done and they are in the processing stage but yes, that’s the intent.
Kirill Eremenko: What’s it gonna be about?
Vitaly Dolgov: It’s gonna be about consulting and sharing the experience of topnotch consultants with other aspiring consultants or already established consultants and learning from years and years of experience of topnotch people and short cutting that learning curve into sometimes a matter of hour or several hours.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay, awesome. Do you have a name yet?
Vitaly Dolgov: No, I haven’t. Open for any suggestions.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay, cool. Yeah, guys. Leave your comments if you have a suggestion. Awesome. I can’t wait to listen to that. I think you have some influential people in your network who I would personally leave to hear speaking on this topic of consulting. This is a data science podcast so any kind of data science work I do or I’ve done in the past, I always treat it as consulting. Even if it’s internal, I still treat it as the people that come to me from within the company, they’re internally asking me for consulting work and that way it makes me much more professional and deliver things on time and talk to them appropriately and prioritize my projects accordingly. I think that would be beneficial definitely for me but also probably for anybody else listening to this podcast.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay, now back to time management. I want to explain to our listeners why I think you’re really good at it, like the best and I stress the best.
Vitaly Dolgov: I’m blushing.
Kirill Eremenko: I’m sorry, yeah, too much. The reason for this is Vitaly has a system where he just gets so many things done, probably at least five times more things in a day than I get done. He wakes up 6:00 a.m., he does some work. At this point in time, he has to do this. Then he goes for a bicycle ride for 55 kilometers was it yesterday or the day before?
Vitaly Dolgov: I had a physical.
Kirill Eremenko: Then he comes back, he does work. Everything is scheduled. Sometimes I feel that your calendar is your best friend. You just live by your calendar. Tell us a bit more about that. What does an average in the life of Vitaly Dolgov look like?
Vitaly Dolgov: Ooh, average day. First of all, thanks a lot. I think I deserve a small portion of the compliments that you’ve made so hence, blushing because I don’t think it’s well deserved or earned but I’m happy to share what I’ve done so far.
Vitaly Dolgov: The average day probably would be different between the two days. When I’m on an engagement or a project and doing the consulting work with a client or when I’m at home and therefore working on personal projects, spending time with the family, or enjoying my hobbies. The most common one currently is still working with a client. Usually, the day starts two to three hours earlier than a normal client’s day. I make it a point so if the client usually starts their day at 6:00 a.m. and usually at different remote sites or constructions sites, their working day starts pretty early. I try to beat that and start my day two to three hours earlier. Why do I do that? Just to increase the level of energy and awareness and get stuff done and get that confidence even already progressing things forward before to be on the front foot as they say. That’s one of the main tricks and techniques.
Vitaly Dolgov: Funny thing, I found a lot of brains work and particular mine, it is at best capacity early in the morning and it is free like got some fresh sleep and rest and therefore is a little bit not stretched yet not woken up, but probably at the best purity stage in the day. What I try to do usually in the morning is to get a good shock, provide exercise. I do exercise every morning as a routine since I was 12 years old and I don’t think I dropped by a day like stretching and everything. It pumps blood through your veins and therefore activates different parts of your brain. Sometimes it’s getting to a drink that contains caffeine, whether it’s coffee, and I tried to reduce reliance on it, as you know from the last podcast, quite a bit. So, green tea is a good alternative. Get something going, try to do something early in the morning before anyone else woke up. That’s an amazing first feeling in the morning when you do something before anyone else has woken up. That’s the thing that I tend to aim.
Vitaly Dolgov: In my mind, sending an email half an hour before the day starts with something accomplished or suggestion for the day, for the team. It’s much more powerful than staying back until 2:00 a.m. and showing that you cannot keep up with your work and therefore had to stay late. To me, waking up early seems like a routine that a lot of mentors or celebrities that I follow find it useful. That would be one of the things in common between different days that I’m on a project, a client project and just following a few rules that I have in my mind for prioritization. How do you choose tasks? What do you decide to do versus what do you decide not to do? There are a couple of them.
Kirill Eremenko: Let’s go through them.
Vitaly Dolgov: Yeah, sure. These are what I would call tactical things and we can probably later think about the bigger picture stuff. Tactical things, a lot of people like to do time management but I believe it’s really, really energy management that you need to focus about. I lot of think about, hmm, how can I combine certain activities to give myself a couple of extra hours, taking the red eye flight, for example. I will try to sleep somehow in the vertical position if you’re not flying business class, and therefore I’m saving on this extra 12 hours of flying if you’re traveling from Australia somewhere towards Asia or Europe. To me, this is not something I found very useful because my energy level on the following day would be half or probably just a third of the energy than if I were to have a proper sleep.
Vitaly Dolgov: What do I do? I fly during the day and I make the point and I make it a billable day of course, for companies I work for because during that day on the plane, it’s a quiet time for me with good humming, almost like a white noise in the background. I get a lot of stuff done. Plus, I get to bed. I prefer for my flights to end before 9:00 p.m. I get to bed, get a proper sleep so I can get up at 4:00, 5:00 in the morning and get my day fresh. The value that you get from the several days combined, in my experience, outweighs all the cost savings, and I’m trying to do the air quote marks right now, that you get by combining some activities like flying and sleeping. To me, energy management is sometimes more important than trying to find how to save time.
Vitaly Dolgov: Another couple of examples how to manage your energy is which task to start your day from? Some people tend to think about what is important versus what is urgent and try to break it into quadrant. Okay, I need to focus what is urgent and important than what is important but not urgent and get worked into stressing themselves into doing either what is urgent or important. I found that few people focus on what they would like to do, what they are keen to do right now, what they are in the mood of doing. That’s the lens I apply first before thinking what is urgent and important. I read it in one of the books and before this interview I tried to find that book, I couldn’t, and I had to reach out to the guy who recommended it to me in 2011, Robert Lebrun, one of the mentors of mine. Once he comes back, I will shoot it back to you and you can include it in the show notes.
Vitaly Dolgov: That’s managing what you’re keen on doing and thinking from these lenses and then thinking what is urgent and important? It gives you a good perspective. If are keen to do something that is a little bit less urgent and important and you just get it done, it will be awesome and will boost your energy level and sense of accomplishment for the next task that could be in two hours or three hours after that. That’s another example of managing energy, not necessarily for something your backlog or your time, per se.
Kirill Eremenko: That’s really cool. I really like those examples. I totally agree with the flying one. I also love working on airplanes. Now they have wifi on some flights but I don’t even use that. I try to make sure nobody can touch me. I can write like a whole article or something. Really, it’s my favorite time of my life, being on a 12-hour flight where nobody can touch me, where I can focus on whatever I want.
Vitaly Dolgov: I’m gonna make an assumption, you’re an introvert by nature.
Kirill Eremenko: Yes, yes. Would you consider yourself an introvert?
Vitaly Dolgov: Not a pronounced one but on a scale from 100 being an introvert and minus 100 being an extrovert, I’m probably about 10.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay, so very subtle. Have you done the Myers-Briggs test?
Vitaly Dolgov: Yes, I have.
Kirill Eremenko: What did you come out as?
Vitaly Dolgov: As an introvert and that’s where the scoring comes from.
Kirill Eremenko: Do you remember the letters? I, N, or?
Vitaly Dolgov: Yeah, it’s INTJ.
Kirill Eremenko: Me too, me too. Exactly, wow. I never met anyone else INTJ. That’s crazy. Okay, cool. Energy management, oh wait. For people who don’t know, Myers-Briggs is a test that you can just do online for free somewhere and it’ll tell you are you introverted or extroverted, do you use intuition, do you use logic more?
Vitaly Dolgov: It’s a psychological, good psychological profiling tool. It defines yourself, bucket yourself somewhere, and funny enough, I’ll drop on your thought, it’s really good when you assess the team dynamic to know who you work with because you know what clicks for them.
Kirill Eremenko: That’s really cool. Exactly, and you can approach different people differently. You seem to really like these psychological frameworks. I remember back in, when was it? I think 2014, you told me about this framework. I was having some dramas in my life and you told me about this framework, PERMA. Do you remember that conversation?
Vitaly Dolgov: Yes, I do.
Kirill Eremenko: Conversations with Vitaly are amazing. Especially at the start of our mentoring relationship, he was always on the move, always doing stuff according to his calendar. I would be like, “I need some time of yours.” He’s like, “Okay, you can meet me here.” We would sit on a park bench for 30 minutes and then he’s like, “I’ve got to go to the shop now.” I’d be walking with him asking him questions along the way.
Vitaly Dolgov: Crazy times. I think the roles [inaudible 00:24:06] right now. I think you are the busier man right.
Kirill Eremenko: No, no. I pretend to be busy. Compared to you, I’m just imitating.
Vitaly Dolgov: I’m learning a lot from you these days so I think it goes both ways and the success you’ve reached in the field that you do is worth imitating and worth understanding to learn from.
Kirill Eremenko: Thank you, I appreciate it. Let’s talk a little bit about that other framework, PERMA, the framework of happiness. Again, we’re going on tangents here but I think it’s an important topic to cover because it really impacted my life. I’ll explain it the way I remember it and then you can give us a more detailed dive into it. PERMA is a framework that people or that psychologists derived in order to understand what are the components that constitutes happiness for people. If I’m not mistaken, the way they derived it is by looking at people who were the unhappiest and seeing what they actually missed in their lives.
Kirill Eremenko: They came up with these five components, which abbreviate to PERMA. P stands for positive emotion, E stands for engagement, R stands for relationship, M stands for meaning, A stands for accomplishments. Positive emotions are times when you’re laughing, smiling, and you’re just feeling very positive.
Vitaly Dolgov: It’s instant gratitude type thing. Something that you got immediately. Here, I got a lot of positive stuff.
Kirill Eremenko: That’s a great addition. Engagement is when you’re completely immersed into an activity. You got me into scuba diving and that’s a great example of engagement. When you’re scuba diving, you’re 30 meters under water, you have to control your air, control your buoyancy, check your pressure gauge, check your air levels, be calm, look around, navigate. There’s so many things you have to focus on. When you’re in that, especially when you get caught up in a situation you haven’t been in before, you get into a current or you’re getting into a cave or something, the last thing you’re thinking about is work or your relationship problems or whatever. You are completely focused and nothing can get you out of that focus.
Kirill Eremenko: Another good example is running. If you’re running a marathon, this is the example you gave me at the very start, if you’re running a marathon, in the lat 100 meters, you are extremely focused on what you’re doing. Nothing else can get you out of that focus. That focus also brings you happiness. After doing something that … You can even be focused at work. You can be extremely focused on your work but it’s that focus, that state of flow that brings you that state happiness. Is that about right?
Vitaly Dolgov: I typically use the well being instead of happiness but it’s exactly right. It helps you feel … It makes you feel differently, being in the zone, being in the state of flow. When you get out of it, you’re like, wow, that was amazing. Now you have all of the noise of it coming in again, you phone buzzes, and someone calls from.
Kirill Eremenko: You kind of feel alive, right?
Vitaly Dolgov: But you felt you’ve lived in that five minutes or whatever time it was, one hour, two hours.
Kirill Eremenko: It’s so true. The next one is R, which stands for relationship and that is the time you spend with people you love, your significant other, your family, your friends and so on. It’s a feeling you get after you spend time with them or from spending time with them.
Vitaly Dolgov: Yeah, and probably you could relate to this, Kirill, yourself by you dedicated this Easter break that just passed to spending time with your old friends and your family down in Melbourne. Am I right?
Kirill Eremenko: That’s correct.
Vitaly Dolgov: Why did you in the first place decide to book out this time?
Kirill Eremenko: Every Easter we go down to Melbourne for three days or four days with my two brothers and we have two close family friends, three close family friends because one of them is married now. All six of us spend time together and we just play board games for three days in a row. It’s really cool because we get that engagement component in the PERMA system that we’re engaged into the board game. A few days ago we played this one, the day before yesterday, actually, we played this one with submarines and it’s real time and you’re sitting at this table three on one side, three on the other and you’re trying to find each other. It’s like Battleships but real time, like crazy cool. At the same time, you feel loved, you feel love around you. Walking into the airport yesterday, I felt like, wow. I was immersed in love, I feel loved.
Vitaly Dolgov: And connected.
Kirill Eremenko: Connected, yeah. Very important.
Vitaly Dolgov: That’s a good example.
Kirill Eremenko: That’s the R. M, meaning. What is meaning?
Vitaly Dolgov: Meaning in the definition of this framework, and later I will quote where I took the framework from, meaning stands for things that you’re trying to achieve in this life. How you are planning to make this world better. Just being in the day-to-day tactics and efficiencies but not thinking about what you’re trying to achieve, what is the value add from you being on this earth is not as fulfilling and is not much benefit to you as striving toward something. We have a very good mutual friend, Cat, who tries to make this world a better place by increasing people’s awareness around use of plastic in this world. That is to me one very clear distinct example of clear meaning. Less plastic so our generations beyond us can enjoy this planet longer and we can live together.
Vitaly Dolgov: In the world that you’re immersed in, I will try to do it for the first time, to think about the meaning of the work you do is to inspire people in the data science community and to provide them with a wealth of knowledge to fast track their careers, to improve their well being, so you have a bigger purpose, a bigger meaning from the type of you do and how to check if you are doing the right thing. To me, what’s the KPI? It’s the number of people and the quality of feedback that they give back to you. By receiving thank you from people and saying thanks, you’ve changed my life or thanks, you’ve made this world a better place to me there’s a real KPI that will say the meaning is somewhere high up.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, and you don’t have to do it at a mass scale. Even if you go outside and … Whenever you do something for somebody else and expect nothing in return, that’s my definition of contribution. If you go outside and you have a subway sandwich and you a see a homeless person and you decide to give it to them instead of eating it yourself, even though you’ll feel hungry, you’ll feel so much better that you actually genuinely helped somebody with no expectations. Meaning, very important as well.
Kirill Eremenko: The final one, accomplishment or achievement, whichever. That’s about, finally we get to my favorite one probably of the past, of my whole past life is the goals that you’ve checked off, what have you actually created, the challenges that you’ve overcome. All those things that are super, that a lot of people see as the main priority in life. It is a component of, as you say, well being but it’s not the main one. It’s not the only one, there’s five of them.
Kirill Eremenko: The trick is to spend time to diversify your time among them. If you put all your time into just one of them, let’s say achievement. There’s people who just work and work and work and they’re always away from their family. Their going up their career ladder and they make millions, they buy Ferraris, they live in penthouses and so on. But if you take all of that away from them, you take away their job or whatever, they jump out the window, they commit suicide because they don’t have any other parts of that PERMA framework. People who are truly happy they have diversified their time across the PERMA. How do you go about diversifying your time? Slowly going back to time management, how do you go about diversifying your time across these five components? Do you do it consciously or do you just look back and see how it happened?
Vitaly Dolgov: Yes, I do it consciously but I would probably refine your word. I’m not so much diversifying, but I’m actually finding what is my lowest score against any of these five criteria and just focus on improving that because one or two hours per week spent on my lowest score will yield much more benefit and that will increase my being in my life than spending this one or two hours on the highest score. If I’m really on the ball with my career, if I’m getting promoted, I just had a promotion announcement or whatever, a pay raise or I don’t know, a big paycheck in the bank account. I wouldn’t be considering okay, I need to quickly improve it. What is the next step? I want to double it or triple it. I will just kind of be like okay, cool.
Vitaly Dolgov: I feel great about this pillar of my well being. Where am I lacking? Am I lacking somewhere else? I’ll look, hmm. When was the last time I reached out to my friends, family. When was the last time I spent time with my family like on a road trip or something? Then I would quickly find the lowest, the lagging score behind and I will make a commitment, I will book something in my calendar and I will communicate to people, hey let’s do something. That’s the way of diversifying but I would say a prioritized way. Just to pick your lowest score and just work on it. Do it consciously, review, am I covering all the bases and is everything happening as planned and therefore developing consistently, I would say.
Kirill Eremenko: That’s very cool. One thing that I’ve learned from you among the many but that recently I learned from you. When we were talking about PERMA about a year ago and I asked you, how do you keep up with all the personal stuff, the family, the relationship component? The family or the friends and so on. Vitaly gave me a great tip and hopefully, this is will be useful for everyone else. You should treat time you want to spend on relationships with friends, family, significant other, you should treat that time just as you would treat time you want to spend on a project or on work. Meaning, you block it out on your calendar.
Kirill Eremenko: I took this advice and at the start of this year, whenever somebody would suggest we want to go there or whatever, I’d be like, why not and then I would just block that out. I’ve blocked out a trip here or I’ve blocked out a scuba diving trip in June, I’ve blocked out this and this and this or a catch up with somebody in November. It’s already blocked out in my calendar months in advance, like six, eight, twelve months in advance. Even before I get close to that month, I know it’s blocked out and I know I can’t move it. I know all other commitments have to go around it.
Kirill Eremenko: If you don’t do that, what I find is that work commitments somehow in our brains they take priority and we tend to shuffle around the personal stuff, the relationships and therefore we miss out on a lot of those interactions and yet they’re at least as important for our well being. That was a great tip. Thank you for that. Is there anything else, tips like that, that you can share?
Vitaly Dolgov: I’ll probably expand on this tip and try to generalize it. It’s the piece of advice that I got from Michael that I mentioned earlier today. He calls it a big rocks principle. He’s a managing partner in a big consulting firm. His time is decided down to almost the quarter of an hour. He knows what to do and thinks about every meeting he attends quite carefully. Therefore, he’s got a lot of competing priorities for a limited resource of time. That’s the piece of advice he gave me after the 19 years of his finding for that ultimate recipe. He said, “It’s the big rocks principle. Put the big, important stuff first.” You know the mason jar type analogy.
Kirill Eremenko: No.
Vitaly Dolgov: Okay, then I’ll try to expand on it. People say imagine your time, your 24 hours times 365 or 366 at the fourth year, as your mason jar. That’s the space, that’s the time you can fill in with activities, tasks, spend it somehow. If you put the big rocks first in the jar, you probably can fit I don’t know, five, six relatively big rocks and after that you can put some pebbles around it and after that you can add some time and after that you can pour water over it and the jar will be full. If you try to do it in reverse order, that will never fit in the same way. If you try to put in pebbles or sand or water and then try to fit the big rocks, the big rocks will miss out. They will be out of the picture.
Vitaly Dolgov: The big rocks is the analogy for important and significant tasks in your life, that commitment that you decide that you want to achieve something. Unless you put it in your calendar, unless you block out the time for them, unless you want to spend time against those priorities and make that commitment, it will be pushed out by something else. By a small meeting, that one hour meeting you planned. Super urgent, super important, but probably it shouldn’t be taken in exactly that month. It could have been done earlier or can be postponed to later.
Vitaly Dolgov: That’s the principle and how to apply it in your real life, think of your calendar. You make any point in time. I usually pick up the end the year, like the new year celebration or the season. I’ll look forward to the next 12 months and think, what are the things that I want to achieve in the next year? What are the big ticket items? There definitely should be a trip with my family somewhere like a road trip or something. Last year it was our wedding celebration and a road trip around south Australia and Victoria. Next year we plan to go to France with my mom, my wife, and hopefully my dad will be able to make it. I put this time in my calendar and right now it’s scheduled for the first part of July and it’s two weeks blocked out.
Kirill Eremenko: Next year.
Vitaly Dolgov: No, this year.
Kirill Eremenko: This year, okay.
Vitaly Dolgov: Then I have what is the thing I would do with my wife’s parents and we have Eric, who is the brother of my wife. He’s got a wedding celebration as well, he’s getting married. We have blocked out two to three weeks in December, end of this year. Cool, I have two big rocks. I have four weeks, already one month crossed out of the calendar straight away but I’m committed to that. I might move them by a day or two but I will not shrink by 50% or I will not cancel. That’s a commitment I made to myself and to developing positive relationships.
Vitaly Dolgov: What other big rocks? I have decided to invest more time into building something long term, like a bit of a business and sharing the knowledge with a broader audience. Not just immediately capitalizing on consulting engagements that I’m getting because they’re not disappearing so I had to make a conscious decision. I will stop earning money, I will say no to the work in May and in June to be able to think, step back, and think what I want to do for the business. These two months are largely blocked out for developing the podcast you mentioned earlier, developing the mentorship emails and starting drafting them up right now. These are the commitments you put and then you find, hey, now you’ve got six to seven maybe nine, ten months of things that you can fill with your duties like to do your work, to do this kind of stuff. Do the paid work as you need to pay the bills and whatnot and do this kind of stuff.
Vitaly Dolgov: You can do it on a small level as well, think about the next week’s schedule. For the listeners on this podcast, I would encourage think about your next week whether you count it from Sunday or Monday and look for the next seven days. What do you have there? If you have nothing except for oh, I need to go to work between 7:00 and 5:00, I would encourage you to think, what are the big things you want to put in there? Do you want to put a meeting with the friends that you haven’t seen for a while and they’re your dearest friends for Thursday night, Friday night. Guess what? If you don’t do that, some urgent work that landed on you may be super important and urgent that will potentially take that time.
Vitaly Dolgov: By the end of the week, you will feel accomplished. You will feel you achieved something but you probably will not be able to say the same thing on have I done something in my relationship space and that’s the trick. Think of these different pillars or dimensions and try to make a commitment. If it’s not on the calendar, it’s not committed. You have to believe your calendar and follow it to get committed. That’s the routine and a good practice that helps me and some of the people I know to keep their world in orbit.
Kirill Eremenko: It’s good you touched on that because I was gonna ask you, for yourself, where you’re an independent consultant, you manage your own time 24/7, it’s all up to you how you put it in, having a calendar is essential. But what about people, for instance a majority of our listeners on the podcast are employed as data scientists or analysts. They knew that between the hours of 8:00 and 5:00 they need to be at work and they have a calendar at work, a work calendar that is for those hours that they need to be doing. Do you still recommend having an overarching calendar for your life I general? Something more personal where you have the work time blocked out plus the evenings, as you say. What are the benefits of that?
Vitaly Dolgov: Good question. As an overarching thing, I think that’s what drove me to go to independent work. Higher risk but a better control of your time. That’s the conscious decision I made. However, I have a lot of friends who actually do have a full time job and are committed to stability over control of the time and still manage to do adjustments. One friend that has been at the wedding as well, Nick, he works in the IT industry as a lead for the programming team. They program PLCs and the controls of the trucks, of the Caterpillar, like large trucks here in Brisbane.
Vitaly Dolgov: The way he manages his time, he just talked to his boss. He said, “Hey, I’m most productive if I hit a lot of things in my life on the nail. I love surfing. Therefore, I want to finish my work at 3:00 p.m. How can I make that to catch the 4:30 good tides?” The boss said, “Well, everyone finishes work at 5:00 or 6:00. You want to cut it by two or three hours?” He said, “Yeah. What can I do?” He said, “Well, if you come out on Saturday and work for these extra few hours and therefore, your afternoons are free. Just make up the time elsewhere. Or if you come earlier to work when no one is there where you can tend to accomplish more, that’s another way to do it.”
Vitaly Dolgov: He was a programmer, just a programmer at that time without having the responsibilities of managing the team. Because he did it so well, he got a promotion and the boss, his immediate manager, went away from managing his time but just giving him tasks for him to accomplish and his team. Right now, he is no longer committed to be within the boundaries of 9:00 to 5:00 or 5:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. But just, hey, there is a volume of work we need to do as a team, let’s make it within this one month or something and I don’t care when it’s done. You guys tell me what is the most efficient way.
Vitaly Dolgov: Having that thinking in mind and starting that discussion would help. More flexible time arrangements, if you want to use your annual leave, like most people I know have about 20 days of annual leave per year, dedicating that time to something important, planning it is a good way. Try to put some hours in advance. If your manager is not flexible, try to work some on Saturdays to earn days in lieu to get like a block of one week for example and it’s just seven weeks working an extra day to do it further. There is a degree of flexibility you can take but obviously, the ultimate degree is to become your own boss and then manage time. It’s scarier but indeed possible as you’ve proven and I’m still proving myself.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, you definitely made the jump. Was it last year?
Vitaly Dolgov: It was 2016 so about one-and-a-half to two years ago.
Kirill Eremenko: One-and-a-half to two years ago, yeah. It’s an important step. Those are some great examples. I’ll add to those by saying that for me it was very important even in this step of transitioning to running Super Data Science, managing my time after work it was very crucial that I don’t waste any moments. Get back, have a quick snack for dinner and then every 15 minutes I knew what I had to do because I only had six hours until midnight before I had to go to bed. Then the weekend, it’s again, the same thing. Just manage, manage it. Fit in some personal time or relationship time with friends and family. Yeah, I guess that’s important.
Kirill Eremenko: That’s us about the PERMA system, time management. We talked about energy management. We talked about the big rocks. Anything else? Any other tricks that you use for time management?
Vitaly Dolgov: Yes, and I think you’ve touched on it just a minute ago briefly, about having a routine. In my mind, and also capitalizing on the knowledge of other giants, having a routine helps you eliminate a lot decision making in your life, unnecessary decision making. What do you do in the morning? How do you manage your time in the morning? If you every time decide, what am I gonna have for breakfast? That to me I found is very exhausting and very inefficient. How I know that my kettle is brewing or the water is boiling and I want to brew my tea or coffee on an occasional day while I’m doing my morning exercise. I have things that procedurized as a routine.
Vitaly Dolgov: This is gonna be wake up, shower, a cold shower to get a wake up, start doing an exercise while kettle and the tea is brewing, finish that within 10-15 minutes and the blood is pumping. You get a first drink, done. If I’m staying at home, then within 25 minutes I know from the moment I wake up, I will be full capacity with a drink steaming on my desk, opening my laptop and crunching the first priority or opening up my notepad for that matter. If it’s going to work, I have an extra step to do is to get dressed. It’s like quickly ironing the shirt. For some reason, I love doing it, I’m not outsourcing it and it takes me three minutes. It’s concentration, I’m thinking about my priorities for the say during that time.
Kirill Eremenko: Engagement, huh?
Vitaly Dolgov: Yeah, yeah. I’m not letting my wife do that although she tried to take over that task a couple of times. I’m like, nope. Then I just go off to work and I know exactly how many minutes it’s going to take. Changing that would blow that time to an hour, maybe more. Thinking would I want to fry some eggs or to make toast. I don’t want to do that. Routine and knowing exactly what you’re exactly going to do after you come back from work, as you mentioned. Having a quick snack and 15 minutes do something, helps dramatically.
Vitaly Dolgov: Try to make as many routines and procedures as possible. How do you go to the airport? What time you go, how you pack things. What is a simple checklist of packing things up? I have it on my Evernote account like, checklist bag. I don’t want to think about it. Having done everything, the checklist goes like, am I dressed from head to toes? Do I have everything for work, all the gadgets and the appliances? I have a couple of routines that do some checks. Having those routines helps manage your time dramatically and respecting them, revising them, and sticking to them.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, that’s very cool. It reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg gray tee shirts routine. He only wears gray tee shirts ever, the same tee shirt. He never has to decide what to wear. That saves mental power, which he can use on other things. I’m glad you touched on routines or explained it because you guys should know that Vitaly’s life, wherever possible, is organized into a list of check boxes. It’s like, check, check, check and it’s done, everything is prepared. Exactly for that reason to make sure that everything is efficient. You were the person who first introduced me to the concept of operating procedures. I call then SOPs, standard operating procedures. That’s a very important part of business that you have procedures or SOPs set up in order so that anybody can pick it up and anybody can just go through that list and like a routine, get the job done. I think it’s really cool that you can do that in life as well in order to optimize things.
Vitaly Dolgov: Before people think there are a couple of robots sitting here who procedurized their whole life, I would try to dispel that myth. I think you need to procedurize or standardize things that are not really important. Routines that are almost mundane, I want to say, things that I just want to get them done in the best effective time. I’m not fancy about going to the airport and how I call on an Uber and how I go through the check-in. I don’t want to reinvent that thing every time because I don’t enjoy that. Going on a break and on a travel trip, that’s a totally different story.
Vitaly Dolgov: One of my best trips I’ve ever made was with one of my really, really good friends by taking a toothbrush, some spare underwear and a couple of hundred US dollars and just going to Cambodia with zero plans and zero accommodation bookings. That was just exploring and discovering this world and renting bikes and traveling around. There were zero procedures of planning because that was the purpose to enjoy it. I don’t think you should procedurize your relationship for that matter, you intimate life. That’s the innovation there and discovery is part of the journey. But things you want to procedurize, you don’t want to spend time on like picking up your shirts or what’s for breakfast, I would to standardize those and free up space for something more important.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, good clarification. We’re definitely not two robots sitting here. I guess for me procedurizing helps not forget elements. For instance, my packing list for travel is procedurized because I know that I need earplugs, I know that I need a sleeping mask, I need my passport, and this and this and this. There’s so many little things, it’s just easier to check off the boxes and make sure everything is there rather than trying to remember it on the go every time.
Vitaly Dolgov: Indeed.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay. I had another one I wanted to add and let me know your comment on this one. For me, I know you said in the morning, you prefer to do the thing that you’re most excited to do, that’s urgent, that’s important.
Vitaly Dolgov: At first glance, I put, but it’s not the only lens, but yeah.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, okay. For me, I found this trick really handy for time management. When I’m in the evening and I’m working on a task and it’s getting late, I can power through and finish the task and then in the morning start something new or what I prefer actually to do is to almost finish the task and leave like a little bit unfinished, maybe 30 minutes of work unfinished. That allows me to finish it with a fresh mind and sleep on it and maybe come up with new ideas. But also in the morning it already gives me that thing that I’m already excited about doing because I know I’m almost done.
Kirill Eremenko: It’s almost there and so when I wake up, I don’t have that choice paralysis. Should I do this, do I do that, do I do a third thing? I just get into that thing I was doing yesterday, I finish it off, and as a result even though I only put in 30 minutes of work, it looks like I finished a six-hour task and I’m super pumped, super excited, I’ve got energy, and I jump into the next thing with a lot more power. I actually didn’t read it anywhere. I just accidentally did that a couple of times and thought, wow, these days are way more productive when I do that so I’m gonna keep doing that. When I’ve done that consciously, it still works and it really helps. What do you think of that?
Vitaly Dolgov: That is a really good example. I’m not sure if you thought of that, one of the people I’ve heard from he said that it’s really good to leave a really enjoyable and complex task overnight, to do it overnight to really work on it and leave it unfinished because your brain can process it at night and put things in the right kind of boxes, compartments. The neurons will fire up in some weird way during sleep and in the morning you will have an improved and sometimes a better solution. That’s maybe the quality of the output that you’re producing is high as well for one of these reasons because you’re leaving that thing that you’re enjoying, doing it overnight, finishing it off potentially with 110-120% of what original spec what you thought you would do and you feel accomplished, you feel like you’ve achieved really awesome outcome out of that so maybe it’s serving you double purpose. I agree with your taking off thing in the morning and getting that boost for the next task. It worked for me too.
Kirill Eremenko: Another thing I wanted to ask you. I know I had a list of at least four topics I wanted to dive in but this is so interesting. I’m learning as we go from this podcast, so I want to keep digging into time management. Is that okay?
Vitaly Dolgov: Absolutely.
Kirill Eremenko: One other thing I was thinking about is, when you switch between tasks, a lot of people have, and me including have experienced that it takes time to switch between one task to another. Yet, your calendar, if somebody were to look at it is all these different tasks. From what I understand about your day, you don’t often spend six hours on one task. You quite switch between tasks like an hour or 30 minutes interim. Is that about right?
Vitaly Dolgov: The short answer is, it depends. For creative productive work, I think generally starting from one to about four hours is something that works best for me, like having those chunks of time dedicated to something, and as little as one hour but probably not more than four because brain for me starts spinning and getting less effective and efficient around that task. On a lot of jobs when I have to the leader for the team and lead a project team or an engagement, I have no choice but to solve the most important or urgent tasks and to address big ticket items that require decision making. Decision making is usually relatively fast but you need to gather the data, use different frameworks to think about the decision and come up with the best decision. For that, I find the smaller chunks of time, smaller intervals, sufficient to do that. It could be just 30 minutes to do that. It really depends.
Vitaly Dolgov: I find I’m forced, paraphrasing this, with working a larger team and leading the team to do a lot of smaller decision making tasks. Sometimes I crave for this longer time content development and thinking. Therefore, I block one, sometimes two days a week to do that. Usually, it’s Friday or Saturday when I want to get my creativity out and it’s a good test for the team as well to lead without the leader and see how they’re emerging like rising stars are trying to lead, my two IC, like second in charge, how he or she is trying to lead the time. I consciously do that so it really depends.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay. On those days when you have to switch between tasks quite frequently, how do you deal with that transitional time between tasks?
Vitaly Dolgov: Efficiency, right ?
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, how do you minimize it?
Vitaly Dolgov: Good question. I think it really depends on the content of the work you do. I really distinguish the content of the work you do into two types. Content creation or creative type of work as we discussed. It’s when you want to produce something from scratch. When there is zero ground exists and you want to shape uncertainty into precise firm matter and produce and output that will be of high quality. For that, I find you have a relative long building up to that and really hard to wind down as well. Switching cost, using that term, would be huge to jump between the tasks. I would not recommend to do a lot of things in a day with that. Concentrate on one to two big things a day max, do them early in the day so your brain is fresh and whatnot and just do them without switching. Switch off your devices but try not to switch yourself between the tasks.
Vitaly Dolgov: When you have a lot of smaller tasks and you have to be in the decision making mode, that’s the second type of content, I think the switching cost is more affordable because it’s almost like you don’t have time to get used to it. I’ll give you an example. It could an emergency on one of the construction engagements. I had one of the team members saying something too aggressive to a client and aggressive in a way of pushing for results but I know he stepped beyond the limit in unleashing someone’s potential. He almost overpowered the decision maker with his strong management and leadership and that came to me through another person, through the client saying there was an inappropriate conversation that happened and we are afraid of the consequences. The client person could leave the company feeling disempowered and whatnot.
Vitaly Dolgov: In that moment, to me it was okay, cool. That’s an emergency that is probably higher than anything else I was holding on the engagement because there are no safety threads. I just paused everything I had. Okay, what is the plan? First, get the facts. Go to the ground, talk to both people who were in the room and the third parties who observed, get everything on paper. Then two, try to understand what are the mistakes that have been done? Play them by someone I trust, some third party. If my understand is correct, good. Then decide on what is the course of actions you want to take. Look at your standard rules of engagement, what the procedures tell you to do, what your values tell you what to do, and come up with the best plan. Again, played by a third person, your two IC or someone like that, and implement it rapidly.
Vitaly Dolgov: If it’s been a mistake, acknowledge that you as a leader because you are in charge of anything that is happening within your team, done a mistake, this is how you’re gonna remediate that mistake. That plan would take … It immediately switches in your brain. It removes a lot of work into the background that you worked on and it will take you between an hour and two hours to resolve. After that, after being in that zone of resolving that problem, you would just breathe out and, okay, I’ve done everything I could. What are the lessons learned? Put some actions, move on. What is the next task? You’re either coming back to the old one, to the task that you’d been working or something like that. I find that being in that decision making mode, what are the priorities we are working on? Managing some fires, which tend to keep, when they’re below like 20% this is good in my world. I find it can work because it has clear beginning and end and there are certain steps in the procedure you follow if something happens.
Kirill Eremenko: That’s a great example and it actually leads into the next thing I wanted to ask you about this whole emergency situation might affect your mood, might affect your stress levels, might affect your focus and concentration. The question is, how do you separate different parts of your day from each other. For instance, in a day, you might have some personal time with your wife or with family and that might relax you or that might put you in a certain. Then you might have some work and then you might have a hobby and then you have some work again. So, jumping between these things, is there any technique that you have that allows you to close the door on what you were doing just now, open a new door and walk into that room mentally and work on it completely not affected by what was happening just before or what’s about to happen after this task?
Vitaly Dolgov: That’s a great question. I think it touches on something very important that we only briefly mentioned today. I think it comes down to really the decision making, the commitment to do something whether it’s work, whether it’s spending time with your family, wife, girlfriend, significant other and following your commitment. It’s simply said then it’s done. To make the right decisions, you have to have the right framework in mind. What is more important right now? Spending time with your wife who is quizzically looking at you or reading that email that says, urgent we have an emergency at work. How do you make that decision? I think that comes back to the values, to the personal values that you as an individual set for yourself to live your life by.
Vitaly Dolgov: If you decide that on your personal values, family is number one and you’re having a strong argument, as a hypothetical situation that never happens in the real world with your significant other, and you know that your relationship could be at risk at that moment in time. At the same time, your colleague calls and says, “I have an emergency.” Our engagement is at risk or the sales or our team or something. At that moment in time, you have to back to yourself, to your personal values and say what is more important to me in my life? What did I tell myself is important when I was at the state of the peace of mind? That’s family. Okay, you’re picking up the phone and encouraging work as a leader, “Hey you’re my two IC, I trust you’re gonna resolve it. I cannot be next to you at the moment, I have another thing to attend to. You’re in charge.” Hang up your phone and deal with your family situation.
Vitaly Dolgov: That’s a decision making you have to do based on the set of rules, values you developed for yourself earlier. That would be my answer, is to have a clear understanding what do you value at different stages in life. Manage and revise those values and put something higher, lower, have a clearly defined set of values and use them in the moments of uncertainty when you don’t know what to do. Is walk out through the next door and switch your mind. You just have to look at what you need to work on, realize that’s what I promised to myself, stick to it, and then do it. Then walk through that door and forget about the previous task you were on because that’s the commitment you made to yourself, that is what is important to you. Any techniques? Remove the distractions.
Vitaly Dolgov: If you decide that managing the business emergency is a priority over managing your personal life, and I’m a little bit laughing because currently the set of values that I most recently revised, family is higher on the list than managing the business and that’s not what I would do at this stage, but imagine that you’ve decided that you want to attend to your business emergency.
Vitaly Dolgov: Switch off your phone, leave it behind, and tell your significant other, “I’m sorry, I really have an emergency at work that requires me attending it. We can discuss that later. Let’s calm down.” Manage your downside of leaving her behind by saying something nice. Switch off your phone and move on and make a commitment to yourself, I’m not switching it back on for personal reasons so I’m not answering the messages or block the user from calling you and just attend to the business and be fully immersed to resolve it. Remove the distractors. First, make a decision to concentrate and remove the distractors, prioritize everything else. Get it done, come back to the previous task to revise. That would be my suggestion.
Kirill Eremenko: That’s good. I think you actually gave more there than I was expecting. You even mentioned that system of values, which I still have to work on. I still have to outline for myself but yeah, that’s important to get those things right. Then once you’re committed focus on that one thing because you’ve got to trust yourself that you made the right decision or even if you made a mistake, you still have to commit to it because there’s nothing worse than being half in your work, half in your person life or half in this project, half in that project like not focusing on either and then you don’t any of the things done.
Vitaly Dolgov: You’ll take longer or most likely deliver sub [inaudible 01:11:30] result if you try to focus on both versus if you tackle them one by one as your personal values dictate in order of priority.
Kirill Eremenko: We’re coming to the end of this amazing session. I had one other question for you, which I think will be beneficial for our listeners because I found it very inspiring. The importance of hobbies. I know that you do the least three very interesting hobbies. You do scuba diving a couple of times a year, you do cycling every week several times, and you also do dancing. For those who don’t know, if you don’t mind me mentioning, is that okay?
Vitaly Dolgov: I don’t at all.
Kirill Eremenko: Vitaly is a competitive tango dancer.
Vitaly Dolgov: Amateur.
Kirill Eremenko: Amateur competitive tango dancer. You’ve consistently been doing tango lessons like once or several times a week for the past couple of years.
Vitaly Dolgov: Yeah, that’s right.
Kirill Eremenko: What is the benefit of having hobbies like that? Why should people choose to dedicate time to those?
Vitaly Dolgov: Good question. I bet a lot of listeners were thinking, what are the things that actually put me in the zone? Like when we talked PERMA framework, what are the things that keep me engaged? I’ve been thinking about this probably for the majority of my life so making that extrapolation that is the question in people’s mind. The answer to that that I found that helped me and hopefully will help others is to try different things. You never know what will engage you and will make your vision of the life expand and make your life be more fulfilled, more energetic, more like happier.
Vitaly Dolgov: Dancing was that thing that I just encountered on the way back from work from one of the clients. I was really tired, really in my gloomy mood just passing by the dancing studio is Brisbane. Through the full glass windows, I noticed people dancing and I was like, God damn it, I’ve never danced in my life. I’m really shy of either singing or dancing or drawing or playing an instrument. I want to try. Am I daring to try it? I thought, I probably am in the mood right now to commit to something and I went in and signed up for the lessons and did it. The effect it has on the overall life was very substantial, I would say. I never expected in hindsight that it would yield so much positive emotions to me.
Vitaly Dolgov: I think engaging in something that is new that is outside of your typical work or home routines is important to expand your vision. Dancing is a lot about coordination of your movement, of the grace, of the flow of the movement from the outside but also, it’s a dialog between the follower and the leader. As a leader, I act as one during dancing, you have to whisper certain moves and certain lead to start the new step. If you are shouting and if you’re pulling the hands of your partner to try to direct her to go there or there to make a sudden move, that will not work. That will not be enjoyable for her or for him as a follower. If you do it gently with grace and just say enough with some of your body movements so the follower can follow and execute a beautiful dancing step whether it’s tango or waltz, that’s where you get that fulfillment. It’s a beautiful thing. That’s nothing like I experience in the consulting world. You don’t do any direction to the team through your body gestures, well, with rare exceptions. It’s not like that at all.
Vitaly Dolgov: Expanding that leading through body movement in tango has blew my mind and knowing when to whisper and when to shout when people don’t hear you, and making myself comfortable with one of these things was quite important. Hobbies in life, they keep you in the zone. You mentioned a couple, I know that you are a very keen bike rider and therefore being in the zone on a track or just riding around the city is important to you, it just switches you off. Hobbies allow you to experiment and expand your vision on certain things and routines like leading gives you a different perspective. It expands your relationship. You find hobby buddies and therefore, the amount of positive relationship in your life, one more pillar from that PERMA framework, helps in your life. These are at least a couple of reasons I could mention why hobbies are and could be important.
Kirill Eremenko: Amazing. Thank you, thank you so much. It was a really cool description of the whole dancing. I got mesmerized listening to you talking about the whispering of body language. It was very interesting and I completely agree. Hobbies give you something out of your normal day-to-day that gives you a different perspective in life. On that note, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can our listeners follow you or contact you if they would like to get in touch. You’ve got a few projects coming up, the podcast, a platform, and so on. Where can they find out more?
Vitaly Dolgov: At the moment, I would recommend just connecting on LinkedIn. That is where I would try to keep my professional thoughts to that at the moment. I haven’t been posting much but I intend to. That will probably the platform where I will share the news about the other media, how to follow the work that I’m planning to do. It will be a podcast and it will be mentorship emails that I’m planning people to allow people to sign up and to see if my thoughts are helpful and provide some feedback to me. If people will find it helpful, I’ll probably continue doing that. In a short answer, probably through you, and through your podcast your listeners will find out more or through LinkedIn.
Kirill Eremenko: Awesome. Guys, make sure to follow Vitaly on LinkedIn, we’ll include the link in the show notes. This is really cool. I really like your idea of the podcast, amazing idea. But also, the mentorship emails. A lot of time people come up to me or on the virtual world, LinkedIn and other platforms saying, can you be my mentor or where can I find a mentor and so on. This is like mentorship at scale. I can vouch for Vitaly’s mentorship, it got me to where I am. Receiving his emails is like being in my shoes like I’m actually sharing my mentor with the world right now, free of charge, absolutely free of charge. Yeah, so I’m very excited about that. I’ll definitely sign up and be checking those out as well.
Vitaly Dolgov: Thanks.
Kirill Eremenko: Any final thoughts? Any recommendations, any suggestions to finish up today?
Vitaly Dolgov: Good question. I think we’ll use the idea from the interview I had yesterday with Michael. One thing that bubbled up is find the people that you’re excited to be around and learn from because this going through things together whether it’s hobbies, whether it’s surrounding yourself with positive relationships, or whether it’s surrounding yourself with mentors goes a long way in life and helps you go through a lot of obstacles and a really cool way to learn things.
Kirill Eremenko: Amazing. As they say, you are the average of the five people you hang out with most, something like that.
Vitaly Dolgov: Yeah.
Kirill Eremenko: Make sure you surround yourself with worthy people.
Vitaly Dolgov: I agree.
Kirill Eremenko: Thank you very much for coming on the show.
Vitaly Dolgov: My pleasure.
Kirill Eremenko: Amazing again.
Vitaly Dolgov: Thanks for inviting. All the best, guys.
Kirill Eremenko: There you have it. That was Vitaly Dolgov, my friend and mentor and one of the top independent turnaround consultants in the world that I know of and that was us talking about time management. I’d love to know your thoughts. What were your biggest takeaways from here? For me personally, some of the things that we talked about, I already knew and it was good to refresh on them. For instance, Vitaly had told me previously about the concept of the big rocks and it was good to refresh and kind of see how it impacts my life and how I can use it better.
Kirill Eremenko: Probably, the newest thing that I learned from this podcast and the most inspiring thing that I’ll take away today is energy management. I often think of time management as the management of time but as Vitaly put it, you don’t need to just focus on managing your time, you need to manage your energy so that you can actually get things done. It’s not about just having the time to do things, it’s also about calculating when exactly you will have the right amount of energy to get into things and get things down properly and efficiently so that you don’t waste a lot of time. That example where he was talking about how he spends time on the plane to work, that was a great and telling example and he had a couple of other of those along the way in the podcast.
Kirill Eremenko: That’s our session. Make sure to follow Vitaly on LinkedIn. We’ll include the URL in the show notes. You can also find the transcript for this episode and any other materials that he mentioned. The show notes are at www.www.superdatascience.com/147. Make sure to connect with Vitaly and see what other projects are coming up. His podcast sounds very exciting. Hopefully, that will be live soon and I can’t wait for his mentorship emails because that will definitely keep me up to date with what he’s learning and I think that’s a very efficient way of getting that knowledge and absorbing that knowledge. Once again, the show notes are at www.www.superdatascience.com/147. On that note, I hope you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
