June 2024 - Adedeji Olowe

A few of the tools that make me effective

Efficiency isn’t about being perfect; it’s about knowing your limits and leveraging technology smartly. Tools like Todoist for tasks, voice notes for clarity, and VS Code for coding keep me on track. Success isn’t a destination but a journey of continuous improvement.

I wouldn’t call myself the most effective person, but I’m keenly aware of my limitations and a few strengths I have. Let’s just say I’m obsessed with personal efficiency.

Because I respect myself a lot and I don’t want to be insulted, I’ve respectfully cultivated a culture of using technology to make up for some of these limitations and I’m able to achieve a measure of personal effectiveness using different tools and techniques.

I mean, I’m not yet a billionaire (when will maga pay? 🥺), so I won’t say these tools have taken me to the top. But I can say for sure that they’ve definitely taken me far. Case in point, I have the worst memory in the world and I can’t remember sh*t to save my own life. As a matter of fact, as I’m writing this, I can’t even remember my name.

But in 2015, I discovered Todoist and just to show how bad my memory is, I don’t even remember how I managed to find it. Here’s the thing. There are so many task tracking tools in the market but this particular one caught my fancy because it was easy. It was love at first sight. The chemistry was amazing. I’m even considering getting married to it 🤣.

Something that stood out about Todoist was that I could use it not only on my phone, but on my laptop and PC as well, a feature which wasn’t common 10 years ago. The app allows me to record literally everything. I have details of everyone’s information like birthdays as well as all the tasks I have to do. I can set dates and times to these tasks and it has tons of reminders. I can’t say what exactly was so special about it. I guess I just fell in love with it. And one thing that made me stick with it is the fact that I literally get that dopamine hit when I mark something as done. It’s one of the most fulfilling things in the world, marking a task as done.

So Todoist is one of my best tools ever.

Here are some of the other areas that I have applied tools to improve my efficiency

Recording voice messages

I work with a lot of writers at Lendsqr and personally. Before now, they sometimes got stuck when they needed directions for new writing directions or a summary of what to write about. Then I discovered that I could simply send a voice note when I am in between tasks or when I wasn’t using my hands. That made their lives so easy that they now love it..

The good thing is that I could send voice notes from different platforms – on Windows, I use the voice recorder. On my phone, I simply use WhatsApp to send quick notes. Google Workspace recently added voice notes to their mobile and web apps; I now terrorize everyone at Lendsqr with my half-baked ideas every minute of the day.

I’m so glad I don’t work for Adedeji Olowe 😂😂

Jokes apart, voice notes are incredibly helpful as it takes away the confusion and reduces the pain of so much back and forth or typing a lot. My fingers already hurt just thinking about this.

Note taking

For my notes, and things I keep to myself, I use Evernote, but I’m thinking of moving away from because they went shitty as f*.

Evernote used to be one of those tools that people used to praise and talk about, but they went bloaty, slow, and I’m sorry, extremely stupid. They’re just kind of irritating and I’m probably going to leave them.

I use Windows Notepad a lot, because sometimes I just want to take quick notes and I’ve found that Notepad, especially on Windows 11, is a really great tool to put my quick thoughts together. My brain is still begging to move to Notepad++.

Unfortunately for my PC at home, I still use Windows 10. Isn’t that shameful? Not my fault! I have this badass PC I’ve been using for a while that is old, unupgradable, but really chocks along well. I also use Notepad on my laptop and it works really well.

I use OneDrive to sync my personal information. But the Google Drive application on the PC is literally amazing. Instead of having to go into a browser to look through my files, Google Drive allows me to use it like it’s directly on my PC.

Programming

I still write codes. Yes, even at my ripe old age.

My tool of trade is VS code and I’ve a bunch of extensions and indexes like Prettier, Tabnine, etc. , which makes coding more fun and quite effective. I think I’m going to be working with data till the day I die. I have a feeling that even when I die, I’ll probably have a database of people that died before me and I’ll be arguing with the angels about the morality of using certain types of identity for each soul that gets into heaven.

I started my career with data on SQL Navigator, then I moved over to Toad. I actually miss Toad, especially when you launch it and it makes that creaky sound.

By the time I moved my ass to FCMB and the database was MSSQL, I switched to Microsoft SQL studio, which was pretty good. But now that I’m out of banking and life is different with everyone using MySQL, I switched to DBeaver.

DBeaver, an open source data software, is absolutely fantastic. Like it’s super awesome and works very well for me.

Security

At home, I have Ring cameras and they keep me safe and secure everytime. From anywhere in the world, I can see my doors and monitor everything happening inside my home. Best thing is, everyone around me knows I have these cameras.

Emails and contacts

Google handles my emails and contacts and this works pretty well for me. I have nothing to complain about. Like I earlier mentioned, I have the worst memory in the world. One thing that helps me remember tasks alongside Todoist is my emails. I always tell those who work with me that conversations should be recorded via emails.

Sometimes when I check-in on some tasks assigned, it’s easy to assume I go through my emails and remember all of them. I actually have a hack for this. I simply label the important threads as follow up and then add to my TO DO to check my follow up label periodically. Other times, I simply schedule an email ahead of time.

With this technique, I’m always on top of priority tasks and I ensure packets don’t drop.

When saving contacts, I make sure all my contacts are well saved with their emails, and recently this paid off as I was able to reach out to tons of my friends for marketing. I have a paid version of TrueCaller which ensures that when saving contacts, it finds their emails and save this as well

Video sharing

When it comes to being able to express my thoughts, Jam Dev is an amazing tool for use on the web. It’s able to show what you’re doing and help, say your developer, your friends or your customers with a lot of things by providing better clarity. It’s amazing.

Jam Dev is probably going to be way better than Loom down the line. Loom was a choice for everybody in the beginning, but they’re kind of screwing up.

On my phone when I want to record some of the things I share with people I use XRecorder. It’s also pretty amazing. I mean yeah, it has some ads but they’ve got to make money, right?

Financial management

When it comes to monitoring my finances across all my bank accounts and figuring out how broke I am, I make use of Kolo Finance, an app that we built at Lendsqr. It works really well for me. It’s able to show me everything about my accounts in one shot, including my international accounts.

For banking, Wise and Monzo are the best banking apps you could think of. For my individual account, of course I will give it to Monzo, but Wise is literally awesome in every possible way you can think of.

Receiving and making calls across the world

For telephone calls. I use Hushed. It’s an amazing tool for having virtual phone numbers. I’ve got a bunch of phone numbers with them, including the ones that I use for testing stuff.

And last but not the least, I know this might seem like just a hype, but ChatGPT is actually f* awesome. It helps me to do a lot of stuff. We’ve recently been experimenting with using embedded GPT at Lendsqr and so far it’s been pretty great.I love it
So there you are. To everyone who thinks Adedeji Olowe is highly efficient and disciplined, my secrets are in the open. And maybe one day, I’ll successfully clone myself and this version of me won’t need to get anything done.

Why many don’t succeed in their careers

To succeed in your career, focus on crucial soft skills like reliability, integrity, initiative, self-awareness, situational awareness, and curiosity. These traits build trust, leadership, and adaptability, crucial for career growth and success.

Most people will never succeed in their careers. You’re probably wondering why this sounds so negative and harsh, right? But it’s the truth.

It typically begins with young people at the start of their careers, hoping to become the best. I remember when I started my own career at United Bank for Africa as an intern, I had a friend then, Odia Okobieme and we used to daydream about starting our own tech company. I remember we used to disturb Tony Elumelu with emails at the time. Dude was probably so patient because I don’t know why he indulged us.

So this gives way for us to question what it means to be the best.

The way I see it, being the best means, at the minimum, you are in the top 1% of the best people in your cohort. If we’re going to raise the bar, maybe one out of a thousand. And If success is defined as being in the top 1% of any field that you have decided to play in, then 99% of people you know in that space would either be ordinary, unremarkable, or downright failures and will go on to live average and unfulfilling lives. It’s what it is. These are the guys who grow up to become cranky, complaining that things don’t work well and that the economy is bad. Yes, the economy is bad, but it’s not eating the people at the top.

Who are the 99% who strayed from the path of success?

Let’s think about, if everyone sets out to become the best but only 1% ever make it, what happened to the 99% who never did and never will?

Something we must have all thought about at one point or the other is probably why some people who were obviously smarter than us, are doing better than us. I mean, we’ve seen it, right? People we knew from our days in school or from earlier days in our careers, who didn’t seem as sharp as us but are now doing great things. Like African parents are known for asking “do they have two heads?” Then on the flip side, there are those with their first-class degrees and straight A who are still figuring things out 15/20 years down the line.

Makes you wonder what went right for the former and catastrophically wrong for the latter. Why don’t many people get to the top of whatever they’ve chosen to do? Some say it’s about competence. Others say it’s about connections. But I’ve come to realize that it’s neither. Of course, being smart is a given but that’s not what gets you to the top. It’s not just about what or who you know.

Let me tell you what actually makes people stand out: it’s soft skills. You know, those intangible qualities like drive, accountability, reliability, integrity, going above and beyond – those are the real game-changers. And if you don’t have these things? Your career is dead in the water and you just don’t know it yet. But trust me, you’ll find out soon enough.

When you’re young, you might get away with lacking in these areas. People cut you some slack, give you the benefit of the doubt. But as you get older, the world is less forgiving and these soft skills become non-negotiable. Without them, you’re simply on a path of self-destruction.

So yeah, it’s not a lack of competence or connections that kills careers – it’s the absence of these crucial soft skills.

Which of these are killing your career?

If your behavior mirrors the ones below, you are definitely not going to succeed. And no, I’m not cursing you:

You don’t keep your word

You make promises to people;your colleagues and your bosses, “ Oh I’m going to deliver this thing at this time” and you don’t keep them. You will never succeed. Because once people know that you can’t keep your word, they’ll stop relying on you. And once they stop relying on you, they’ll never use you for what’s important. You’ll just be some old relic they keep around until they’re ready to let go because they want to stop “hoarding”.

You’re unreliable

This is also linked to not keeping your word but there’s a slight difference: not keeping your word could mean you just don’t have integrity but you might still be good .On the other hand, being unreliable means people can’t depend on you. All of us know people around us who we would never give a chance to if we had something super important to do because we can’t bank on them. Pay attention, if you’re not that person that the average person can bank on, you’re not going to succeed.

You don’t have integrity

You lie. Why do you even do this? Once people know that you can’t tell the truth and you’re very coded, you’re never going to succeed. And it’s very simple because nobody likes liars. Nobody likes people who aren’t straightforward, so people will start avoiding you.

You only do the bare minimum

“Oh this is what they told me to do” and that’s all you ever do; you never step forward to do extra or seize the moment. You’re never going to succeed because success comes from the extras that you do.

These extras include stepping forward when there is a leadership gap, or when a colleague has gone on leave and things are going crazy or if you come across a customer having a problem, even if none of these are your job.

You lack self awareness

You’re often exposed when you don’t know your capabilities. For instance, you step forward to say you can do something that you literally don’t have the skills to do. I don’t know whether you think you’re trying to impress anyone; of course you’re going to fail at that thing because you don’t know how to do it. Duh.

Now, there’s a difference between being self-aware and pushing yourself. If you’re aware that you don’t have a skill, but you want to get better at it, you can push yourself and seek for support, knowledge and mentorship that can make you good at that thing. So this even shows that you’re actually self-aware. Lack of self awareness means you literally don’t know your limits and then you burn bridges and people dump you.

You lack situational awareness

This is another key behavioral aspect. Take for instance, the company you work in is going through a grind; maybe systems are down or the government just brought out some regulation that turns things upside down for you guys and that’s the moment you tell everybody, “ I’ve got to go on leave. I need to take a few days off. I’ve already booked my leave. I can’t kill myself.” Of course you will go, but the truth is everybody will see you as irresponsible and nobody will depend on any irresponsible person.

You lack curiosity

You’re just floating and you don’t know what’s around you. You come into the office, see something is happening and you don’t ask “what the hell is causing this thing.” You heard that your competitor in the market is doing some things and you’re not asking yourself what those things are. It just means you will never succeed.

Do these to turn your fortune around

If you’ve read up to this point and you’re feeling attacked, that’s good. Keep reading, there’s still hope for you.

Now that you know all these things above, you can easily (don’t quote me) turn your career around by running away from career killers.

If you made a promise to anybody, die keeping it. Never go back on your words and never make a promise you know you can’t keep. Let people be able to use your words like currency. Consistently deliver on your promises and communicate well to encourage confidence in your capabilities. These will also earn you a reputation as a reliable colleague and person. Give people a reason to trust you. When you are trustworthy with small things, life will trust you with big!

Integrity plays a crucial role in your professional rebirth. Speak the truth; even when it may be painful or embarrassing. When people know that you always tell the truth, they’ll respect you more and they’re more likely to bank on you.

Also, step forward as often as you can. Everybody loves leaders. That’s why people who have leadership skills always tend to advance faster in their careers. And if you need more motivation to do this, remember that leaders earn more and grow faster.

Self-awareness is also quite critical to your professional growth. Take a long and hard look at yourself in the mirror and truthfully assess yourself, “these are the things I can do and these are the things I can’t do”. For the things you can’t do, if those things are critical, you need to find a way to address these gaps. If you have to go for extra lessons or seek mentorship, then you better do that. Fast.

In addition to being self-aware, you have to be situationally aware, you have to “read the room.” Know what’s going on so that you can navigate complex professional spaces well and show better judgment. If your boss is not happy or your customer is not happy, that’s not the time to go tell them that you’re jacking up your prices. Be sensible.

Finally, you’ve got to be curious. This is a must-have because curiosity helps you stay informed and seize opportunities where they exist.

I’m no self-help guru but do these consistently and see for yourself what happens.