Less is more - Part 2

Continuing from my previous post, here's the additional nuggets that I'd like to share with all. This is about asking ourselves the following questions regularly. It helps us to stay focused while eliminating the 'less important' (perhaps even unimportant) tasks.

1. If you had a heart attack and had to work 2 hours per day, what would you do?

2. If you had a second heart attack and had to work only 2 hours a week, what would you do?

3. If you had a gun to your head and had to drop 4/5 of time-consuming activities, what would you remove?

4. What are the top 3 activities that I use to fill time to feel as though I've been productive?

5. If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?

6. Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?

Another tip to accomplish more in less time is this - shorten schedules and deadlines to force focused action and prevent procrastination. This is based on Parkinson's Law, which states that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. If you were give 24hours to complete an assignment, the time pressure forces you to eliminate the non-essentials and focus on execution. If you were given a week for the same task, you'll be spending your energy and brain juices for 6 days trying to perfect it. Often, when you look at the end result, the end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably or equal or higher quality due to greater focus. And when I think of my own past experiences, I fully agree with this :P

In conclusion, we can adopt these 2 approaches to increase our productivity:

• Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20 rule)
• Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson's Law)

Combining the 2 approaches offers the best solution: identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and set short and clear deadlines for them.

That's about all I wanna share. Hope you find it useful as much as I do :)

Less is more - Part 1

What is the most common thing you hear from people around you, be it friends, colleagues or even relatives? 'Very busy, a bit busy lately, no time for.....', right? Busyness often gives one the feeling of being important, useful or even successful. And it's so very often that we hear people remarked how busy they are at work, at home or even social life. I think generally, people 'feel good' about being busy. But do we really have to be so busy that we always don't have time?

We often create stress and make ourselves lethargic because we want to 'do everything ourselves'. But if we were to slow down and ask ourselves 'if today is the last day of my life, will I still want to do this?', it becomes clear where our priorities should be. I am not undermining the necessary task of housekeeping etc. It is important to keep your home, workplace in order, spick & span. It saves you time and increases efficiency. However, there are some other tasks that are unnecessary time-eaters and I'm sure we all know what we are guilty of.

I like what I read from a book recently. It says that the key to having more time is doing less and the way to get there is to do this - define a short to-do list and a not-to-do list. Both of these should be used together. How often have we come up with a long to-do list only to feel disheartened at the end of the day because we couldn't complete it? Be realistic, list down what is do-able within the specified time frame and you'll feel good when it is accomplished.

I don't want to sound 'preachy' but I thought it'll be good to share with friends what I've read and found beneficial. There are a few other points which I think is good and I will leave that to my next post. Don't wanna make it too lengthy here ;)

On time management

I have long heard of Timothy Ferries' book 'The 4-Hour Workweek'. It was only until recently that I laid my hands on a copy (from the library). I'm not done with the book yet but the first few chapters already challenged my thinking. I particularly like the chapter on time management, or in this case, the chapter title is 'The end of time management'.

Most of the time management books that I've come across talks about prioritizing your tasks, doing the most difficult task first (to get it out of the way), keeping your work area organized to increase efficiency etc. The very first advice that this author gave was to 'forget all about it'. Most of us tend to fall into the trap of trying to do more each day, filling every second with work or some sort of activity. As the author put it, being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. For instance, organizing your contact list in outlook, mobile phone, PDA and so on, or calling meetings when you can settle it by email or phone call.

Here's another 2 golden nuggets from this book:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

What you do is more important than how you do it. If we attempt to do everything perfect, we'll probably never ever get started. But if we'll just do it, we can always tweak as we go along. This is a good reminder for myself too ;) Effectiveness is doing the things that get us closer to our goals, whereas efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. While efficiency is still important, it is useless unless applied to the right things.

Elizabeth, the cat

I thought this cat is pretty funny, sharing with all here... And btw, Elizabeth was actually a stray cat. There's another video on youtube showing how its new found owner picked it up.

Boring Cats

With much anticipation, I went to watch Cats this evening. How disappointed I was?! The songs were not quite my cuppa tea. The storyline doesn't quite appeal to me. The movements, well er... am I watching a musical or dance performance? By musical standard, it's considered not bad. But there were so many dance movements, I feel like I'm watching a dance performance. And if I were to view it like a dance performance, sad to say, the standard is not quite there yet.

Despite the loud and fast music, both of us fell asleep. This is the first time I drifted into slumberland while watching musical *omg* I was so glad when intermission finally came and we left.

鸡犬不宁

夜半鸡啼啼不休，
啼声嚷嚷喋不休。
细听方知鸡啼因，
开门见山解鸡愤。
鸡愤怒气冲霄天，
滔滔不绝亦难眠。
此时无声胜有声，
闭门熄灯欲入眠。
辗转思索吾错焉？
终结癫鸡亦疯犬。

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千言万语，不知从何说起？
轻声一叹，诉尽心中话语。