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。

无言

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轻声一叹，诉尽心中话语。