Phil Zimbardo - The Secret Powers of Time [video]

I stumbled across this video via the blog of Caterina Fake (a Flickr co-founder) and found it to be interesting in a number of dimensions. First of all I've been interested in the topic of time and how it's perceived differently by individuals and cultures for quite some time. Secondly the way the video is animated is simply spectacular and thereby really adds to the content that's being presented. After some quick googling I discovered that the video was prepared by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and they provide a number of other videos that seem worthwhile watching (if only I had the time to watch them...;-). Thirdly the video is based on a lecture by psychologist Philip Zimbardo who, as I discovered via Wikipedia, is well known for being the brain behind the famous Standford prison experiment. To cut a long story short: I'd definitely recommend you to watch this 10min video, I promise it will be well worth your time.

P.S. Paul Graham's latest essay deals with "How to Lose Time and Money" and therefore complements this video quite nicely...

Personal productivity – Follow Ups

Over the past few years I’ve become increasingly interested in personal productivity. I can’t pinpoint it exactly but I guess it must have been at some point during my second year at university that I realized that even with very little sleep I only had so much time to get things done in-between getting up and hanging out at the bar in our student residence in the evenings…

Previously - during my last two years at schools – I started heavily relying on all sorts of lists, both on paper and my computer, to keep an overview of the things I had to do. Later I started using my mobile phone to write down all kinds of thoughts, ideas, to-do’s and other information while on the road.

I now have a pretty confusing (for outsiders) system of post-its (I count about 20 on my desk at this very moment), notes/tasks on my mobile phone (sync’ed to my computer) and e-mail tagging rules to to organize my to-do’s.

However lately I’ve been hitting a road block as I’m realizing that doing things is one thing, but following up and following through with something you’ve started doing is something entirely different.

For example for olpcnews we often get contacted by guest authors who want to submit an article. I read through the submission, write up some feedback and send it back to the author. My to-do list for the day then says read Ubuntu-for-XO submission.

Now the problem here is that I’ve only done part of what is really a multi-step task. And it’s all too easy to forget about the other steps in case I don’t get a reply from the original author which automatically triggers me to setup a new to-do task.

Dealing with this kind of scenario has become increasingly error-prone and time consuming. For some time I kept a second list on my desk with the names of people I had to follow up with on something. I also set myself reminders on my phone to follow up whether something has been done x days after I completed my initial task. Needless to say all of that only works so well and creates quite a lot of overhead…

One thing that would tremendously help me is an extension for  Thunderbird (my e-mail client of choice) which would allow me to set an automatic follow-up reminder before sending an e-mail. (Potentially even customizable depending on what kind of e-mail I send, e.g. replies to messages sent to editors [ AT] olpcnews [DOT] com come with a default 3-day reminder.)

The same kind of functionality should also be available for my mobile phone (which runs Symbian S60 3rd edition), allowing me to mark a task as done, setting up an automatic reminder and then pushing it off my regular tasks list and onto a separate follow-up list.

Unfortunately I haven’t seen any efforts heading into that direction so I guess for the moment being I’m stuck with my current system…

Blog: Personal Productivity – thoughts on follow-ups

3 weeks without blogging...

I really can't believe that it's already been 3 weeks since I last blogged but time is really flying by quicker than ever before. Without looking at my Outlook calendar I can't even really begin to write down what I've been up to, it's simply been too crazy...

Obviously when I initially came back to Vienna after being gone for the better part of 6 months (except for those short weekend visits) I spent *a lot of* time meeting my friends around here and going out to all the bars, cafés and restaurants where I hadn't been in such a long time. We also had a reunion with many of my intern colleagues from the embassy which was a lot of fun!

What else? Ah yes, I spent 1 1/2 days down in Graz, a city in the south of Austria, meeting people from various universities and talking about the current state of OLPC, related projects they had started, plans for the future, etc. On top of that I got to see two friends which I hadn't seen in more than a year and, guess what, obviously another great night out was had by all.

The past two weeks here in Vienna have been quite busy with lots of time spent on preparing and organizing my university term which started on October 1st. Additionally I've been working on or at least discussing a couple of different plans for projects which all have somewhat of a long-term impact on the months and years ahead of me. I can't really go into details here but will rather talk about them in individual posts when and if things start moving... However I can say that I'm certainly spending quite a lot of time thinking about the future these days.

Looking at the next few weeks it looks like I'll be insanely busy, with university related matters and lots of coding taking up most of my time. Also the awesome Viennale film-festival (which I also mentioned last year) is taking place in the second half of October and compared to 2007 I almost doubled the number of movies I'm going to see to 16. I'll also have three cool concerts (Calexio/Lampchop, Mogwai and Welle Erdball) to go to in October and November. Plus I'm very much looking forward to extended visits from A. H. (of Canadian border cutie fame) and Patrick over the coming weeks.

Anyway, I'm certainly having an outstanding time and only wish that sometimes I had an extra moment (or two) to breathe inbetween all the madness;-)

I also hope to get back to a more regular post-schedule, in the mean time you can follow me on twitter/random_musings, I've also embedded my 5 most recent messages on the right-hand side of the blog...

24 hours simply isn't enough

It's been a good and productive day for me here but looking at my to-do list I still feel like crying. Of the ten or so items I only managed to cross off three, that's quite a disappointment. Admittedly I had to deal with some unexpected stuff too but overall I still wish I could have gotten more things done.

Not that the rest of the week is going to be any better, it's just that time of the year where 24 hours / day aren't enough. Even my weekend - which I'll be spending in Vienna - is pretty much booked out with meetings, discussing important plans for the weeks and months ahead, seeing friends and going out. This time 'round I'm actually going as far as planning ahead how I'll spend the ~1 1/2 hour train-rides to and from Vienna. Quite insane, right?

Anyway, instead of ranting I better go and grab some sleep so I'm at least in good shape for tackling this week's challenges.