K. Stone posted over on LifeHack, offering a number of points that will help you overcome procrastination once and for all.
The overall idea is as follows:
– Know your most important goals and values.
– Only do tasks that contribute to those goals and values.
– Mentally link tasks to the pleasurable outcomes you seek.
– Plan your day & week.
– Do, but don
I just finished reading Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services by Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist at Apple Computer and current Venture Capitalist, in collaboration with previous coauthor Michele Moreno.
This is the first book I’ve read by Guy Kawasaki, and I know it won’t be the last; I really liked his entertaining light style of writing, that is clear and straight to the point.
The book is divided into three parts, whose titles alone show the book’s style and tone.
1. Create Like a God: This part discusses the way that radical new products and services must really be found, thought of, developed and updated.
2. Command Like a King: This one explains what kind of leaders are truly necessary in order for such revolutionary products and developments to succeed, the best way to market them and how to avoid the usual big mistakes.
3. Work Like a Slave: This last part focuses on the kind of commitment that is actually required to beat the odds and change the world, and how clients should be dealth with and treated.
A concluding section presents us with a bunch of entertaining and inspirational quotes on topics like technology, transportation, politics, entertainment, and medicine that illustrate how even some of history’s most successful ideas and people have prevailed despite the scoffing of naysayers.
This book is a very interesting read that I recommend for everyone looking to create a new product or service; it really has some very useful advice and tips.
Check this book out: Rules For Revolutionaries (Guy Kawasaki)
I found this interesting post about ten ways you can have a happy work day, and who wouldn’t want one of those.
The list goes as follows:
1. Eat breakfast
2. Get plenty of sunshine
3. Get Aerobic Exercise
4. Avoid RSS, Email or phone before 10 am.
5. Think positive thoughts not negative
6. Take breaks
7. Go for a mid-day walk
8. Avoid gossip
9. List your top 5-7 objectives for the day and break the list down to 3
10. Be slow to react to other people
Now here’s one creative thing to do with a mobile phone when you have a lot of time on your hands…
Bernocco took advantage of his idle time while commuting to and from work by train, writing his 384-page science fiction novel, Compagni di Viaggo (Fellow Travelers), on his Nokia 6630 phone, using the phone’s T9 typing system.
By dividing his manuscript into short paragraphs, Mr. Bernocco wrote his novel in perfect Italian, not your typical text-message shorthand, and saved the paragraphs on his mobile phone. Mr. Bernocco then downloaded them onto his home computer for proofreading and editing. The book took him 17 weeks to write.
Source: CNW Group
Amazing, I can’t believe how much patience this guy has to write a whole book using a mobile phone; I barely use text messages because it’s annoying, so imagine having to go through this. Bravo.
Tunisia will launch an international tender soon for a fixed-line telecoms licence.
The news was published by Reuters, based on an article by Tunisian newspaper Le Quotidien.
This move comes upon a recommendation by the Tunisian President to speed up preparations so as to open up Tunisia’ s telecommunications sector.
A team charged with this project in the telecoms ministry is preparing an international tender to select a second fixed-line phone operator, thereby ending Tunisie Telecom’s monopoly.
State-controlled Tunisie Telecom still holds a monopoly in fixed-line services and controls 72 percent of the mobile market. Dubai’s Tecom holds a 35 percent stake in Tunisie Telecom after outbidding France’s Vivendi.
This is one of the best pieces of news I’ve heard in a long time, I can’t wait for this to come true and for Tunisie Telecom’s monopoly to end. Their service has been pretty mediocre when it comes to my case and their customer support is one of the worst I’ve ever had to deal with. I know a lot of other people who have the same problems as I do with Tunisie Telecom, but I’ll resist the temptation to generalize, even though maybe I should.
Anyway, the new company can count me as one of their first converts, if not even an evangelist.
So many people underestimate the power and importance of a smile, that simple little facial expression characterized by an upward curving of the corners of the mouth.
A smile has many meanings: pleasure, friendliness, welcome, amusement, and many more; and it is part of a universal body language that doesn’t need any extra interpretation.
Plus a smile, with all its simplcity and beauty, can be a very important factor in many aspects of our lives:
– You fall in love with a new country you visit because its people greet you with a welcoming smile everywhere you go; other countries you just don’t like even though they might have more history, nature, entertainment and whatnot because their people don’t seem so friendly or accepting.
– You feel like buying from a certain store when the vendor welcomes you in with a smile, sometimes even if you wouldn’t intially have bought anything; and in other stores, even though they have exactly what you need or better, you decide to walk away because the vendor doesn’t look welcoming at all.
– You want to give a waiter a good tip when he serves you with a smile, even if the food turns out not that good; on the other hand, sometimes you’ll have some of the best food ever, but you won’t feel like giving the waiter a tip, even if you do, because he was grumpy.
More and more examples from our everyday life show how much a simple smile can change everything.
Forever engraved in my mind will be the smiling faces of the people of Thailand, the friendly pizza delivery boy, the welcoming supermarket vendor, the nice cashier at the bank, …etc.
It is these smiles that keep me wanting to go back, and that keep us all wanting to go back; looking at it from another view, if we break it down using business sense, a smile is one of the most effective means to generate sales and develop customer loyalty.
On top of all that, a smile is a very simple and easy thing to do, so it amazes why no one bothers to do it, it not only makes the person in front of you better, but it also makes you feel better as well, and I’m not making this up, it has been psychologically proven.
Personally, I’d like to see more smiling faces in this world; in the airports when I enter a new country, in companies, government agencies, restaurants, hotels, banks, everywhere; and I think it is up to governments to campaign about this, and even make it obligatory in certain important places like airports, hospitals, hotels…etc.
Let’s all simply smile 🙂
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
This weekend I finished reading Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen, the personal productivity and self-management guru.
I’ve heard so so much about this book over the past years, read many reviews, went through so many productivity blogs that base their ideas and advice on the teachings of this book, and well, I just had to read it.
I can confirm that the hype is well deserved, this book can be a life-changing one if you choose to apply the simple ideas and tips in it. It will take you from being swamped with things to do and stress, to being well-organized, clear-minded and stress-free when it comes to whatever you need to do.
I’ve already started setting up two parallel systems based on the tips in the book, one for my work and the other for my personal life, and I’m already feeling how much potential they hold to enhance my productivity and relieve me from the extra stress of everyday life and the accumulated stuff I have to do.
This book is a must-read, I truly recommend it to everyone, and if it weren’t so damn hard to buy things online from Tunisia, I’d order a copy each for all my friends and colleagues; yes it’s that good.
Check it out yourself here: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
A number of people I know have told me that they find the way I give them phone numbers or reference numbers is a bit weird.
I’ll explain, take the following number for example: 75468916
Most people would say it this way for example: Seventy five, four hundred sixty eight, nine hundred and sixteen; or some variance of that, grouping each two or three numbers together.
When it comes to me, it’s: Seven, five, four, six, eight, nine, one, six.
Because of the many times I’ve had people comment on my way of saying numbers, I’m posting to prove that my way is better, more efficient and even easier. I’ll be using some basic computer science concepts in here, drawing parallels to how I think our human brain would stock and retrieve this information.
Well, first of all, I understand that people group numbers because it makes it easier for them to remember these numbers. But when you come to think of it, it’s not a really wise use of memory space, because the grouped version is only a pointer towards the simple version which is a series of numbers. So what you end up with is the person’s name being a pointer to the grouped version which is a pointer to the simple version; that’s a waste of memory space.
Another issue is that everytime you want to read a number like that or try to recall it from memory in that way there’s some wasted processing time trying to find the best way to group the numbers; some people are faster than others but no matter how unnoticed it goes, there is a little lag, as you put some brain processing cycles to work on something useless.
The same goes for the receiving end when hearing a number, you’re forcing their brain to process the number to break it into the simple version, so you’re not only wasting your brain processing cycles but other people’s too.
Imagine when you’re saying the number in another language like French for example, where a number like 78 is actually said as follows: Sixty, Ten, Eight. That wastes even more time in processing and storing.
I believe that if in the end the number is going to be stored in its simple version and then retrieved for use in its simple version, then you should just stock it (remember it) and transfer it (say it, pass it) in its simple version.
It takes a bit of getting used to to optimize your brain to stock the information that way and index it well, but I find it to be a lot faster, more efficient and simpler.
The New 7 Wonders of the World were announced last night, July 7th 2007, during an Official Declaration ceremony in Lisbon, Portugal.
People from all over the world voted to choose the 7 wonders of the world from a list of 21 candidates, and the final results were as follows:
– Chich
