Working Remotely
It’s the fourth day of Chinese New Year: while the working classes are reporting back into their offices and started work, I’m still back with my parents. My laptop flipped open with the backlit display shining at me, my stationeries and notebook spread across the dining table among the containers of Chinese New Year snacks. I’ve made the dining table back home my remote office.
After a series of hackathons, I’m starting to experiment with how to work in remote locations — outside the comforts of office cubicles where everything is within reach and I never need to worry out running out of office supplies. It’s always about learning to deal with small desk spaces, less than optimal furniture in terms of ergonomics and tuning out ambient noises and distractions from …
Continue Reading (285 words, 2 minute read)Slightly Radical Routine Changes
Am now making two small but radical changes in my daily routine:
- Swapping my gym days from Saturdays to Friday evenings
- Sleep early, rise early (like really early, more details later)
Due to my maximizing nature, any changes to my routine usually indicates some form of shift in my priorities.
My gym days used to be on Saturdays mainly for two reasons: one being that it forces me to go outdoors and be around people; and two being that it forces me to disconnect myself from the online world and give myself some room to rest, draw inspiration and enjoy life. So Saturdays tend to be my indulgent day where I’d spend some money to make myself happy in whatever ways that material stuff can give.
Switching my gym days to Fridays is more …
Continue Reading (433 words, 2 minute read)Overwhelm as a Warning Sign
“Overwhelm is a sign of misaligned priorities.” was what I tweeted a while back.
Especially if you fail to say no, delegate tasks or have an inability to postpone certain tasks if need be. This reminds me a lot of Steven Covey’s First Things First (if you constantly find yourself putting out fires, something’s terribly wrong) and David Allen’s Getting Things Done (the importance of being able to immediately categorize incoming tasks and file them away somewhere if it doesn’t need to be handled immediately).
Getting myself organized and getting things done are two of the key skills that I constantly need to learn and improve upon. I really loved how David described that it’s like going to a dojo everyday, where constant ritual practice is crucial to master the …
Continue Reading (172 words, 1 minute read)Distractions
Mine came in the form of a Facebook game, Bejeweled Biltz. Knowing Popcap had a long string of addictive casual games, I should have known better. It does not necessarily come in the form of a game (for most I suppose it’s managing a farm); it could easily be any activity that contribute extremely little or no value but to show some form of “busy-ness”.
Usually it’s a bad sign when such distractions happened too often.
High productive workspace setup with dual monitors
A month ago, I’m lucky to receive a 24” monitor to be used with my current laptop at work. Having heard about the raves of productivity increment of a multi-monitor setup first from the [late Randy Pausch’s (of “The Last Lecture” fame) Time Management lecture][timemgt], I was quite excited with the prospect of getting that productivity boost. As it turns out, having two monitors is just the first step - Knowing how to effectively use the setup is one that I have spent quite some time to experiment to get it right and starting to notice the convenience and improvement gains.
So , the whole point of this post is to share with you my own personal workspace setup which works for me, which I believe would help you to not only help you …
Continue Reading (850 words, 4 minute read)
