My mechanic told me, 'He couldn't repair my brakes, so he made my horn louder.'
- Comedian, Steven Wright

Time Management - My To-Do List System.

Time Management is a common subject. Many books are written on this subject. Most of them stress more or less the same points. Personally I find that the most important element for successful time management is that you WANT to seriously manage your time. I believe most people who cannot manage their time properly are because of their emotion. Not the know how of how to manage time. People simple get carry away to do things without the concern of time. People simply do not exercise the discipline, pay the effort and commit to manage time because it means a lot of commitment and work.

So ask yourselves frankly. If you manage your time poorly because you just want to do thing by impulse, no system will help you. However, if you are committed, than most systems or many simple ideas will help!

For me, I have a very simple system. This is more like a "work place" system. I don't really apply it to my personal life (after work) cause my life outside of the office is very simple. No need for such complicated system to be used to manage the personal side of my life. Ok, let's focus on the "work place" system I have.

I don't have a formal name for my system but I just name it (as I am writing this blog post) the "Clear Your Tasks Today" system. As the name implies, I try to clear my desk. Whenever I clear my desk, I feel clean, revitalized and feel I have achieved something. And I am ready to move on to something else such as get off work or have a meal or something. It's really a "To Do List" without the form of a "List".

It's very simple. On my desk, the system looks like this:

This is my routine:

First, create a deck of card (can be a Letter / A4 size sheet of paper). One for each project. Tasks to be done for the project is written on the sheet. The tasks are written on the card with the simplest form. Unless you have a really complex engineering project, usually a project 'plan' is just a simple straight list of to-do items. So just write down a list of tasks. When I pick up that piece of card, I usually am able to recall what's the current task out of the list written for that project to be done right away.

Second, setup couple of boxes to sort the cards. I label them "Today", "Tomorrow", "To Read Later", "To File Later".

Third, every morning when I come to the office, I take the deck of cards in the "Tomorrow" box. The "Today" box is supposed to be empty if I have done a proper job "yesterday". Anyway, go through the list of cards, take out those project with the current tasks that need to be done within the day. Sort the cards in the sequent you want to complete within the day if needed. Put them all in the Today box. Please those cards that were NOT selected for today back to the "Tomorrow" box.

Forth, just pick the first card on top of the Today box and start working on the tasks. When the task is done (but the project is not yet completed), put the card back to Tomorrow box. If the task happens to be the last item of the project, put the card to "To File" box.

Your job is to clear the "Today" box as fast as possible. If you happen to finish early, reward yourself with something (a cup of coffee or something). If you have time left, go to the Tomorrow Box again and assign a few tasks to your Today box and get them completed ASAP.

If you have "intrusion" of new tasks such as your boss suddenly come to your office and ask you to do something today, you create a card (or pick the card if the project exists) and put it to the Today box (if it can wait). Or you do it right a way with creating a card. If you have "intrusion" such as a Magazine just got delivered to your office but you really don't have time to read it now, just put the magazine in the "To Read" box. If that "To read" item is too big to fit in the box, make a card. Put the book away to a shelf. Don't let it cluster your desk.

Every week or at a period you believe suitable, clear the "To File" box. You can keep the card or dump it! In most cases, I keep that card and achieve it with your project file.

In this way I don't need to maintain a complex "To-Do" list. There is no need to "group" and "classified" your tasks by projects. I can spend most of my time working on the task and not to "manage" and "priority" the tasks.

It's not a very sophisiticated system. I want it to be simple, VERY simple.

I actually organize my Gmail's inbox this way with Labels (Guess what I have labels: "1 Today", "2 Tomorrow" and "3 To read". There is no need for "4 To file" because on gmail I just "Archive" the message. That's the old system I have with gmail. The new one I have is even more simple (as I only have "today" and "to read" label). I don't need other gmail's label. This is because I use the "Multibox" lab feature to create multiple box in the "Inbox" pages. Guess what, I organize messages to various boxes". I have "Today" box, "Tomorrow" box and "To Read" box.

I'll talk about that in the next post.

進入公司前後

今天收到朋友的email, 看完便笑了:

進入公司前

老闆： 萬分歡迎，無左你 , 我地公司肯定好大分別！
職員： 如果工作量太多，我會辭職的。
老闆： 放心，我唔會比咁樣既事情發生！
職員： 我逢星期六日可以休息嗎？
老闆： 當然啦！哩個係底線！
職員： 平時會日日 OT 到淩晨嗎？
老闆： 無可能，邊個話你聽架？
職員： 有餐費補貼嗎？
老闆： 唔洗講啦，絕對比同行都高！
職員： 有無做死人既風險？
老闆： 唔會！你點會有咁既念頭？
職員： 公司會定期搞旅遊嗎？
老闆： 哩個係我地明文規定！
職員： 那我需要準時返工嗎？
老闆： 唔會，睇情況啦。
職員： 人工呢？會準時出糧嗎？
老闆： 一定係啦！
職員： 所有工作都係新員工做嗎？
老闆： 邊有可能，你上面仲有好多資深既同事！
職員： 如果管理職位有空缺，我可以參與競爭嗎？
老闆： 唔洗問啦，哩個一直係我地公司賴以生存既方式！
職員： 你唔會係呃我掛？

進入公司後 ...... 由下面讀返上

I was ranked top 6th Hong Kong Twitter user.

I was just checking this blog's traffic couple of days ago and discovered that certain traffic was referred by a specialized Twitter Account crawler site. When I visit the site (TwitterHolic.com) I realized that I was ranked the top 6 twitter users based in Hong Kong with the most followers. I have 6,524 followers as of now, 12:05am Sep 1, 2009 in Hong Kong local time. Click here to see the site.

Before you read on, I like to say that I am NOT a Twitter Holic. You will know why in next paragraph!

I don't remember exactly when but approximately couple of months ago I opened my twitter account using my real name http://twitter.com/stanleysuen/. Before this account I have another one which focuses on investment http://twitter.com/chinainvest/, which has 3,449 followers. The investment account has been opened in around 10 months ago. I have only come to know Twitter only recently. I don't really follow twits as there are too many things to be done in my life. Following twits is not exactly on the top of my agenda. I opened the account simply because I am interested to learn and experiment on using social media as an marketing tool. As far as a novice concern and a late comer (vs. those users in US) for Twitter from Hong Kong, the numbers are much better than I expected. Considering that I am ONLY using RSS news feed to supply twits to my twitter account (which means I hardly talk about myself at all), I spent very little effort in "twitting" and "growing" my followers. Frankly I rather like blogging where I can always talk too much and pretend people likes my long post articles. ;)

However, we can always combine blogging with Twittering. For example, I feed the RSS feed of this blog to my Twitter Account. So every blog post on this blog will be fed to the twitter account automatically. So the system will automatically broadcast my latest blog post to the 6,500 followers and drive traffic to my blog site. Cool. And I don't have to do much too.

I think I can also send my twitter update to facebook too but I think it's a bit too much to push many RSS newsfeed to my friend's community.

Anyway the new world of internet is always amazing!

I think the Google Wave will be an interesting one to watch out for. See my previous blog post about my comment about Google Wave: Click Here.