I wonder, when do people have time to blog?

I have been pretty busy these days with work, pet projects and other things that make life enjoyable. Using my del.icio.us account, I have found a nice and easy way of keeping a backlog of articles to read! I do now fully understand Guy Kawasaki‘s blog tagline, a definition of the word “blogger”:

Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do.

My thought about this is that its all about prioritizing. We always have excuses about everything… no time, too busy… what ever. The thing is, if we get bogged down by every little thing, NOTHING is gonna get done! An interesting article that I’ve read recently (skimmed through would actually be more appropriate) is Bob Parson’s 16 rules article. I’ve gotten to this article through Leila’s blog who does a very good summary of Parson’s post.

I highly recommend this read to the 2 of you people reading this. It really captures what I think are the most important ingredients for success (not in any particular order): A positive outlook to life, willingness to learn in all cases, have fun doing what you do, stand up for yourself, always move forward (even if its not the best decision at the moment) and do it fast, prioritize and DO things (as opposed to thinking and talking about things without any resulting actions… there’s more, so READ THE ARTICLE!!!).

I find Parson’s rule number 1: get out of your comfort zone to be a really good advice. The way I find that I do it is by committing myself to doing something to people, in which way I’m putting pressure on myself to actually do it! That’s my way of treating my laziness for instance.

I think the sum, or maybe third variable of the 16 rules is confidence. Those 16 rules may be influencing this other attribute or it might be the other way round, but I think that’s an essential factor in success. An analogy to that is the kind of dude that scores with the ladies. Although this might be a symptom of some emotional or social insecurity, chances are the dude scores because he exudes more of that confidence-moolah. He may have the ugly teeth (yes that’s Thom Yorke), a slouch, but man, he goes up to the chick (although he probably felt the butterflies in the stomach, and sorry for the pejorative term ‘chick’… I’m not known for political-correctness) and said “hi” (BTW i’m very happy in my relationship with Kristel and am by no way a player ). Nice guys do finish last… that is, it depends on what you mean by “nice guy“.

But in any case, I hope to have provided some food for thought and who knows… positively affected somebody in the world somehow.

Cheers!

I’m currently living a paradox: there are less “things” to do per se, (i.e. “things” – what would be high level tasks on my now gone PDA, more on that later) but I’m more busy. There is not as much running around to do, but I manage to find myself short on time to check out reddit.com or digg.com. Naturally, my blogging time also suffers; I haven’t posted in a week! I find myself appreciating the little time-saving things that add up. These are the things I try to do, which may or may not be the best way of going around things but maybe those little tips may help somebody less organized than me =) (probably not many of you!) Warning: this is more of some random ramblings of mine rather than a neat and concise essay, so be kind.

Information retrieval

Thank god for RSS readers, I can still keep up with people. What blogging software do you use? I personally use BlogBridge, a free, open source RSS reader implemented with Java Swing (and it doesn’t suck!). Pro-blogsumers will almost certainly know this, but this deserves a mention; It contains features, (way more than I actually use) including smart feeds which can collect articles from del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, amazon and so on. So, if you’re interested in say nail clippings, you can be updated anytime somebody utters the word.

Be lazy

Automate anything you can. That’s the basis behind the saying “Good programmers are lazy and dumb“. If you’re lazy enough, you will spend some rightly spent effort doing something that will ultimately save your MUCH more effort otherwise. In actuality its a matter of foresight. Planning ahead and doing sometimes immediately more annoying things will save in annoyance in the long run. What I say is pretty vague, kind of a Rich dad/Poor dad kinda “nonsense“, but it is easy to see the benefits of what I’m staying. Concrete example: Instead of waiting in line when going to the restaurant, take the time to book a table in advance. This might seem trivial for some, but for the majority of people out there, it simply isn’t.

In the kitchen

Whenever I’m cooking, I try to use as little dishes and utensils as possible. The reason for this is two-folds; my mother is a very eco-friendly person, especially when it comes to the waste of water. It might not seem like much when you’re in a country like Canada with an abundance of natural resources, but in Mauritius, an Island with no rolling forests or melting polar caps, water is in tight supply. Although the hydro bill is much less there than in this part of the globe, less people are actually concerned about the consequence of wastage.

The second reason and more immediately relevant to my long-winded point is that you’ll simply have less to wash! Doing dishes is the bane of my existance, but I found out that doing them as soon as I’m done eating makes this so much easier to deal with.

When the dishes have been sitting in the sink for a week or two, not only did the fat congeal, but when you did that pasta and drain the boiling water in your sink full of dishes, this grease then melts and spreads in microscopic holes everywhere, making it much harder to clean. Being regular with your washing also has the added bonus of eliminating that ‘dead rat’ smell when people pass by your kitchen. =)

Excuses, Focus and Goal Management

This is one area I find the hardest to respect. Its not in so much as to setting goals, but it’s to actually bring them into completion. But its not only that! It’s also to choose the right tasks, prioritize them and to execute them in order.
This is rendered hard due to the hectic nature of life. Things always pop up, and there are always good excuses for any setbacks. The thing is, some people succeed despite incredible setbacks… How do they do it? The answer: inner locus of control, vision and drive. You need to think your success rests mostly on your shoulders to succeed. The motivation will help you keep on the right path, saving you the trouble of not sticking to your plans (or handling setbacks as well), which will in turn help you save time (proper planning -> better execution -> savings in time). My “problem” is I don’t always choose the “critical path“, but life wouldn’t be as interesting if I did! (although the choices I make, e.g. playing games, are totally not justified! ^_^)

Epilogue

At the end of the day, its not the goal that gives the most satisfaction, but rather the process. Incredible but true (at least to me), now that I’m doing everything I can to do less, I enjoy doing the little things more. This is the real paradox.

The world belongs to early risers. We do everything we can to delay sleeping, yet we can’t get enough of it. Yet, sometimes we do manage to get to bed early, but we fail to catch the Z’s because we are so anxious to sleep. Being a recent grad, the unregular sleeping schedules are still fresh in my memory, with the odd eating hours as well as the sleepless nights browsing the internet (“research”).
“Sleep is for the weak”, that’s what some actually believe. Well guys, I think you are very wrong. Not only is sleep very important, but due to our newfangled social and professional obligations (damn Edison and whoever invented the candle) we are also expected to stay awake after dusk and still rise a couple of hours after dawn.

I have found a few excellent articles on the subject of sleep, notably on how to become an early riser, its sequel, possibly how to annihilate sleep anxiety and finally, a wonderful article about everything you always wanted to know about sleep but were afraid to ask. The latter goes into hypothetical evolutionary explanations of our sleeping patterns WRT circadian rhythms, and how to make them fit our societal requirements, all written in a funny, pleasant style.

I do not know what to blame it on; sometimes when bedtime comes i’m “in the zone” while coding away, therefore I push back my sleeping hours, otherwise I’m often reading really interesting articles (notice the “s” after “article”) and want to get through till the end, and yet other times… I’m just losing time doing totally unproductive things (yet so satisfying).

The 3 most useful rules I find to waking up everyday at the same time are as follows (but not limited to):

1. To always get up at the same time. No matter when you go to bed, wake up at the exact same time everyday. That way you’re setting your biological clock to automatically be prepared to wake up at a thus-defined time. (i.e no sleeping in, much to my dismay)
2. If rule #1 is observed, go to bed whenever you feel tired. Let your body determine the amount of sleep you need! If your body is set to wake up at 8:30am everyday, you should be pretty lethargic at around midnight or so. Sometimes, 11 could be too late, especially after a pretty heavy workout!
3. Developing a going-to-bed ritual. Mine entails brushing my teeth and cleaning up the smorgasbord of Firefox open browsers (which sometimes actually leads me to NOT sleep!). This will cue your body to go to bed.

In preparation for my job starting on the 31st, I have put it in myself to wake up early everyday (early for me is 8:30 am!). Ever since monday, I’ve succeeded on waking up at the same time and I’m very proud of it, even though its only 4 days now! I can’t wait to start =)

Although I haven’t been able to indulge much into procrastination lately (yeah right!), the habit is easy to come and rob my living hours from my otherwise productive life. And by productive I don’t mean work; I mean not doing things that don’t contribute to anything in my life. You know what I’m talking about; vegging out in front of the TV instead of working hard on projects, playing videogames instead of pursuing constructive hobbies and browsing the internet instead of typing a report due soon(under the pretense of ‘research’).
This article by John Perry, prof of Philosophy shows that PHL profs do more than fight on word definitions or logical syntax. It is a very insightful essay, written by what appears to be a friendly, nutty guy. He indeed illustrated a way to satisfy both aspirations of a normal human being at any given moment:

• being productive at an important task
• doing anything except the said task

Ah-ha! You recognized yourself didn’t you? Well, here are examples of clever ways to effectively waste time and do a lot of things:

1. Read articles and write your thoughts on them instead of working on projects.
2. Go to the XXX department and file numerous forms/requests instead of working towards the impending deadline.
3. Contribute to that open-source thingie on SourceForge instead of filing those damn tax forms.
4. You get the point…

Yeah, as it turns out, you WON’T do your main task anyways, so instead of wasting your life and piling calories by eating your own snot in front of the tube, you might as well do something which will contribute to your growth.

Conclusion

• Wasting time is good, if you ‘waste’ your time productively (oxymoron, i know).
• There are a number of tasks to be done at any given time, doing the least important one when the most important one is due might actually make yourself look ‘productive’.
• John Perry played ping-pong, read his newspapers and pigged out on snacks to avoid work and in turn was acclaimed for being ‘close to his students’. What a fraud.
• This blog is good for me =)
• Man I’ve done so much stupid things just so I wouldn’t be productive.

Go forth and be productive amigos.

I came accross an article on lifehacker yesterday and it was called the 10 Steps You Can Take To Guarantee Failure. This article is rather interesting because in addition to being funny (not laughing off my ass kind of funny, but still funny), it contains pearls of truth. How many times have I wanted to do something and it didn’t happen? And its not the desire for that something to happen that is lacking often times.

Although other people have written whole books about the subject matter, this article sums up some nice points. I don’t think there is one most important point in the article as they are all requirements to success, in my opinion. As what it says in point number 5, or rather the contrapositive of it: Don’t talk, do! (that’s my favourite one right there) and have fun.