Archive for the 'Life' Category

Zen-like Simplicity

Published at 14 June, 2007 in Life and Work. 0 Comments

A friend passed me this link from zenhabits - The First Rule of Simplifying. It includes these magical questions that all of us should have an answer for:

  1. The first question: What is most important to me? What do I love to do? The answer is different to every person. For me, it’s simple: I love my wife and kids, I love writing, I love reading, and I love helping others. For others, it may be hiking or mountain biking or creating music or anything, really. Answer this question first.
  2. The second question: what are the things going on in my life, the things I do every day and every week and month, and how are they related to what is important to me? If you are going out drinking with the guys, and it’s not really important to you, and it’s stopping you from doing what is important, that’s a candidate for simplifying. Examine all your commitments, and ask yourself if they are really important to you, if they give you great value for your time, and if they are related to what is truly important.
  3. Possessions: The same questions can be asked of all the stuff you own — do you really love them? Are they truly essential? Another question you can ask, to clarify your thinking: If my house burned down, which few things would I want to replace? Get rid of all the rest. They leave clutter and stress and keep you from enjoying the stuff you really love.
  4. Everything else: This same concept can be applied to anything else in your life — your work, the information you read every day, the television programs you watch, the people in your life. Know what’s essential, what you love, what’s important … and get rid of the rest.
  5. What you’re left with: If you get rid of the extraneous stuff, the stuff that’s not related to what’s important to you, what do you have left? Just the important stuff. Just the stuff you really love to do. When you get rid of the other stuff, when you cut, let’s say, television and hours of Internet surfing and beer drinking from your life, don’t just cut it out — remember what’s important and what you love to do, and do that instead. For me, that means spending time with my family instead of working, that means writing or reading instead of watching TV, that means helping others instead of going to the mall (something I want to do more of).

It ends with this simple premise: identify what is important to you, and ditch the rest. I like it.

Finding time and format to read

Published at 3 June, 2007 in Life. 3 Comments

I was sitting in a meeting the other morning waiting for it to start, and rather than go over my notes one more time, I read some of Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint ebook on my phone. Because I don’t get much time these days to read, I use every free minute. It is one of the key reasons I went for the bigger screen of the Nokia e61:

e61.jpg

I’m a big fan of ebooks - I’ve designed them, worked with them, and it would be a rare day when I don’t read at least part of an ebook. While the e61 is cool, it is smaller than my laptop, and infinitely more portable:

laptop_vs_e61.jpg

I tend to use Mobipocket Creator or Plucker to create ebooks, as they allow a richer experience than either of Microsoft Reader or Palm Reader format. Mobipocket works best where there is a linear progression throughout the book - start at chapter 1 and go through to The End, one chapter at a time. Plucker is an offline website browser, which is why it copes better with the thousands of cross-references in Schedule for PDA (that I helped to prototype and design).

Something to think about for your next phone purchase - there are a range of options that usefully support ebooks.

The changing nature of work

Published at 3 June, 2007 in Life, Blogging and Work. 1 Comment

Australians, on average, work too much. Gartner say that this is going to change, and that a 20 hour work week is probable by the year 2015.

Compare this to Tim Ferriss who is currently selling the concept of the four hour work week. He warns against going for your dream job as it can lead to a blurring of the work/life boundary. This is an interesting concept - don’t get too “into” your job or it may swallow you. Here is what Tim had to say about the concept of work/life balance:

I am a strong advocate of work-life separation as opposed to work-life balance. The concept of work-life “balance” is a dangerous one because “balance” is often mistaken to mean blending, where work and personal tasks are alternated in the same environments, or where one activity is expected to provide both work and life. The Blackberry is checked while you wait for dinner in a restaurant, the laptop is cracked while your spouse waits for you in bed, and the passion you loved so dearly for 10 years is now expected to pay the mortgage. This keeps your mind in the office 24/7 and destroys the few activities you cherished for the pure joy of experiencing them. This produces—at best—a state of constant low-grade overwhelm, even if actual workload is low.

I wish I didn’t have any personal experience of what he calls the state of constant low-grade overwhelm, but it describes my life to a T. I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon from a client office where I’m preparing for an interstate flight and a full-day meeting tomorrow. I’ve got some afterwork finished, more to go, and I observed this morning that my “todo” lists for work and blogging are growing at a faster rate than I can successfully undertake the work. The Ferriss solution is to outsource, and this is certainly possible with blogging in the form of guest blogging, and asking for a hand with afterwork. I’m not sure that it is sustainable as a long-term solution though - unless I am in a position to better outsource what is in front of me, or change things such that I can take advantage of $5.00 an hour white paper writers and the like.

What will the currently overworked do if the 20 hour work week ever happens? More to the point, how many of the 60 hour a week crowd will live to see that day?

Why are we working ourselves to death?

Published at 31 May, 2007 in Life and Work. 4 Comments

Zern Liew has some graphs showing how the average Australian is working themselves to death. I can relate to the afterwork hours entirely.

In Japan, they even have a name for death by overwork - Karoshi.  My comment on Zern’s posting reads like this:

I wonder if we’ll end up revolting against work like our Japanese colleagues - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi says that lawsuits around people working themselves to death are on the rise. No-one should be encouraged to work themselves to death - and I contrast this to “being worked to death” because we mostly have a choice to not do this. Mostly. That said, there are organisations that expect people to perform above and beyond the call of duty every single day, which works when your work is your hobby, but is not sustainable.

Something that we all need to think about.

Cheers, Andrew

What I am saying is this: that we should not allow ourselves to be worked to death without thinking it through. In most cases, where there is death by overwork, there is an element of choice involved. Society allows us the freedom to work ourselves into the ground. If we do this, and we don’t die, but cease to be productive, should we become pariahs, as we may be tempted to treat people now who suffer from smoking-related illnesses? If we burn out, are we bludgers?

And if we do actually die by Karoshi, have we in effect committed suicide? In simpler times, would our remains have been excluded from hallowed ground, or staked to prevent us rising as vampires? Should our survivors and witnesses receive trauma counselling to accept our demise and prevent them from following in our footsteps?

Is working ourselves to death for a noble cause the same as taking a bullet for a friend? Do we accept the price of the sacrifice and do it anyway, knowing the consequences?

I haven’t given it enough thought to be able to say that I have my own personal answers to any of these questions, let alone offer advice. That said - I do have one question for you: if you work 12+ hours per day, do you know why you are doing it?

Please think about it before it is too late.

A routine might help

Published at 28 May, 2007 in Life and Work. 2 Comments

…then again, it might not.

I worked fairly steadily through Saturday on afterwork with occasional blogbreaks then I met Helen in town. After some shopping we went to Cream - good food. While I don’t resent the afterwork, it did take the day away from me. Yesterday (Sunday) I started playing with blog setup (I need to get the databases sorted out before it drives me nuts!) and did some housework in between riffing on the possibility of BarCampCanberra happening sometime soon - sure enough it was 2PM before I knew it without much of a break. I declared a mini-holiday, and Ringo the Jack Russell Terrier and I sat and ate rice crackers and watched Reservoir Dogs together. I sipped on some wine, he didn’t, but we both enjoyed it I think (I am not sure that his experience was any less than mine for not wondering why Harvey Keitel doesn’t light that first cigarette).

Anyhow, the point of this ramble is: some probloggers and life coaches recommend getting into a routine - allowing so much time for blogging and life activities per day - but I am not sure that I have that luxury. With a variable amount of afterwork, and Helen working every second weekend, the amount of discretionary time varies.

Anyone have a suggestion for what might help? :)

Work/Blog/Life

Published at 24 May, 2007 in About, Life, Blogging and Work. 0 Comments

The following post was originally made on Facibus On Blogging and was the inspiration for this blog:

Darren Rowse gives some good advice for Prebloggers on how much work is involved in Problogging. Prebloggers are would-be Probloggers - people who are interested in finding out how to blog for a living. Darren’s readership must contain a lot of Prebloggers amongst the Probloggers that regularly comment on his posts.

I think that the point of Darren’s post is that Problogging is hard work. He lists the following as typical Prologger tasks:

  • Posting Posts
  • Researching Posts
  • Moderating Spam Comments
  • Dealing with Comment Trolls
  • Responding to Comments
  • Responding to Emails from Readers
  • Following what others blogs in the niche write
  • Following what mainstream media is writing on the niche
  • Commenting on other blogs
  • Administering Servers
  • Renewing Domain Names
  • Marketing/Branding the blog
  • Chasing up spam blogs stealing content
  • Promoting posts to other relevant bloggers
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Blog Design
  • Monitoring Blog Stats and Metrics
  • Testing monetization strategies
  • Administering payments, banking cheques, invoicing advertisers
  • Networking with other bloggers via IM or email

There are a lot of Prebloggers that are doing a lot of this stuff (except for banking the cheques) already while holding down a full-time job. So here is the question that I need answered for myself: how do we, as Prebloggers, maintain the work/blog/life balance?

Indulge me for a little while and I’ll take you through a day in my life to provide background to the question. A typical day for me starts at around 5AM. I’m an early riser, and like to get stuff done while the rest of the world is quiet. I’ll spend until 6:30AM or so working on blog setup, blog postings, or ‘afterwork’ (take home work from my day job as a consultant). The afterwork workload varies - some days (and weekends) I do little else in my spare time, other days it might only take 15 minutes - some of it involves a lot of playing with the mediawiki wiki platform, which is a tale for another day. At 6:30 Helen and I start getting ready for work, so that we can be there by 8AM. Depending on what is happening and how I am feeling on the day (at the moment, getting over a cold, I might not be up to much after about 4PM) I’ll leave the client site and either head home or into the company office. There is usually at least one meeting in the company office requiring my presence a week, often two. If I am heading straight home I might get into a bit more work/blogging (up to an hour or so) before getting dinner ready. If I am think my emotional health requires it I will rest or play games on my Nintendo Wii. Helen gets home and we spend some time together discussing our respective days, we eat and watch a little TV or a movie. After that I’m back on the tools for an hour or two before retiring with a book. Some evenings we go out to eat (probably once a week) and maybe a big-screen movie.

In other words, I will spend four hours or more on an average day working on afterwork and blogging apart from client-time work (minimum 7.5 hours per weekday) and liesure time. Where is the balance? How do I find it? It is interesting enough that I’ll probably blog about just that - finding the Work/Blog/Life balance.