nirav March 29th, 2007
Solution # 1: Check your emails only twice a day!
Yes, you read it right, “Four Hour” week, not a “Four Day” week. Timothy Ferriss has written a book on how you can work only for four hours a week, yet deliver much more productivity and results. Not all of us may be able to shrink our work weeks to four hours, but the principles he talks about can certainly take off five to fifteen hours off the week, allowing you to do something else you enjoy.
Tim spoke at SXSW (South by South West) conference, and the whole audio of the session is available for download. Listening to that, I was surprised, curious and inspired. The 80/20 principle was not new, but the technique of elimination or checking emails only twice in the day, was something radical. Tim has a team of MBAs, sitting in Bangalore, doing most of his work, at $4 per hour. He suggests outsourcing everything that’s not profitable for you to do, given your hourly earning rates. Scot Hacker has done a fantastic summary of Tim’s talk. Both the summary and the audio are excellent and recommended to all who want to optimize their work time! Head over to Tim’s blog on how people redesigned their lives, after attending his talk at SXSW!
nirav February 20th, 2007
Read a note on Joel On Software about Language Wars. Someone asked him about the language to choose for his next project. And Joel mentions (on the language war):
These debates are enormously fun and a total and utter waste of time, because the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of platforms where you’re pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it’s too late to change anything (Lisp, ISAPI DLLs written in C, Perl), and a handful of platforms where The Jury Is Not In, So Why Take The Risk When Your Job Is On The Line? (Ruby on Rails).
What interested me, was the mention of PHP there, and the significance of it. We have been working with PHP for 8 years, and it has grown tremendously. It’s now even preferred language for big enterprises. Makes me proud to have taken the PHP route for Magnet! As it is, after working on and managing projects in so many technologies, PHP is still my number one choice for programming!
nirav February 14th, 2007
Just read on BusinessWeek about a new government policy on taking design as a national priority. The policy acknowledges the need to develop design skills in India, is planning to set up more National Institute of Designs. This whole thing is still at the policy level, but it’s a good step forward. Good design skills are really scarce in India. With Indian companies now catering global markets, it’s critical that we train ourselves into designing our products in a manner that’s delightful to all our customers.
Albert’s Design Master Class we had in Magnet a week ago was a superb training for design in software projects - he actually even discussed design in everyday life. That was one reason why the training was so interesting. I think we should train our knowledge workers about design, at the same time setting up institutes for more formal design education.
Two friends who come in mind when I think of great designers, are Pranav and Kaushal. I think we should get together and do something!