We were talking about time zones and how we remember them, I attempted to jot down how I remember them and what I remember.

Basically I just remember the ones I use regularly which is East Asia (ex. Japan), Europe, UK, Eastern USA and Western USA. The rest I can probably have a rough guess at, certainly enough to know whether I’m going to wake someone up in the middle of the night or not.

The way I remember them is as a series of time differences, Asia to Europe, Europe to UK, etc. The result is that only four time differences need to be remembered for my five important time zones but a further eighteen can be derived. Of course, you have to remember to add one during winter for everywhere except Asia.
The diagram that I jotted down looked something like this…

How do you remember time zones?
Would this help?

A visual quick reference for moving around a buffer in Emacs.

Coincidentally both in my J-O-B and for a personal project I’ve been doing a little bit of development again recently. I’m not a software developer and spent only a year at the very begining of my career being one. I’m very much the hobyist here so it’s both fun and frustrating to pick it up again.

One of the minor irritations each time is how much EMACS I’ve forgotten. I’m still in the process of reading ‘The Back of the Napkin’ but this seemed like an opportunity to put my new ‘visual thinking’ skills to the test and see if I could make some EMACS commands stick in my swiss-cheese brain.

I’ve just started reading The Back of the Napkin which is apparently about Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, I’m interested in how this can improve my effectiveness so before I get too far with the book I thought it might be worth documenting what I have so far. Basically a personal short hand for taking notes. Not exactly a visual vocabulary for sure but it will be interesting to contrast this with where I end up after reading the book.

Like most people, this has evolved over time for taking notes in meetings, training, when reading, etc. I first noted this down when I covered it in some training I did on effective meetings a long time ago. The image below shows the key aspects of my key for note taking, mostly applicable to meetings. The key objective, of course, is to make sure I end up with a record of who, will do what, by when and also note informational items. All done in such a way that it’s easily extracted later (consistency being key here).

The key then looks like this…

An example of this in use might look like this…

For those that are using them here are the updated 2010 Task / Goal planner templates:

• Weekly Goal Planner
• Daily Task Planner

If you are not familiar then these are described in the EffectivenessSeries.

As the astute amongst you may have noticed I’ve stopped doing weekly reports. A lot has happened since then, I’m working again, we’ve been on a fab holiday, I’ve read a bunch of books and lots more besides. So you can look forward to some interesting updates over the coming weeks, as time permits. For now, I think an explanation about weekly reports is required.

When I published the Effectiveness Series all of the other ideas where tried and tested, the publishing of Weekly Reports was a new idea that, as I stated at the time, I was trying out.

Well I did try it out and while there is a lot to recommend it, I’ve decided against using to going forward. My reasons are thus…

• It didn’t increase my effectiveness. I thought publishing the weekly report would add some gravity to the weekly review and my progress towards my goals. It didn’t. I think that I’m accountable enough to myself and being accountable to nobody-in-particular by publishing didn’t really add anything.

Additionally…

• Some things that would have made nice little short blog posts ended up as line items in the report and then didn’t seem worth a post. So the net effective on blog content seemed negative.
• What I was working on didn’t really lend itself to weekly status updates to the wider world. Either through being personal, actually confidential or simply long timeline stuff that just wasn’t interesting at weekly level.
• I’m now working again and, sadly, that means progress on non-work activities will slow, making it even more difficult to have something meaningful to talk about on a weekly basis.
• While I did get comments, mails and calls in response to the weekly reports, the interactivity doesn’t add enough to really make it worth doing.

So there you go.

Headlines

• A ‘regular weekend’ in Prague, which was nice after what seems like months of visitors and trips away (which was also nice, of course).
• Still looking for that great opportunity in the Czech Republic, don’t forget to write in!

Wealth / Career

• Job Hunting - Still the main focus of effort. Trying to get creative now.

Skills / Personal Growth

• Attended a Toastmasters meeting and evaluated (unexpectedly) my first advance manual speech.
• Finished publishing to the blog a new series of posts on ‘glue phrases’ in Czech and created flash cards for the same.
• Continued reading The 80/20 Principle (will I ever finish this). It’s a PMBA book.

Health / Fitness

• Couple of good runs.

Enjoyment

• Continued listening to the podcast/audiobook edition on Chris Anderson’s Free.

Headlines

• Great weekend away in Moravia.
• Still looking for that great opportunity in the Czech Republic, now is the time to mail me with the offers, people!

Wealth / Career

• Job Hunting - Still the main focus of effort, more good leads, nothing yet.

Skills / Personal Growth

• Began publishing to the blog a new series of posts on ‘glue phrases’ in Czech.
• Continued reading The 80/20 Principle (really struggling to get into this). It’s a PMBA book.
• Two new lessons from ChinesePod.

Health / Fitness

• Other than a couple of nice hill walks (see Enjoyment) not a great week for exercise as the weekend reactiveated my foot (canoe-meets-weir, me-meets-rock) injury.

Enjoyment

• Great weekend away in Moravia which included BBQ,  some great people, a walk up Praděd (highest hill in moravia, 1491 metres) in the pouring rain and then a walk up a nearby hill the next day for the view we missed . There are a few photos in the gallery here.
• Started listening to the podcast/audiobook edition on Chris Anderson’s Free.

Headlines

• Weekly Reports are back! It’s been a crazy few weeks and while I’ve done all kinds of cool and useful stuff, somehow Weekly Reports fell by the wayside. Well, no longer, they’re back.
• Fabulous long weekend canoeing and camping.

Wealth / Career

• Job Hunting - Still the main focus of effort.

Skills / Personal Growth

• Wrote and published to the blog a diagram showing basic ‘house related’ vocabulary in Czech.
• Attended a Toastmasters meeting and evaluated a really nice speech.
• Continued reading The 80/20 Principle (I’ve been reading other things in the mean time). It’s a PMBA book.
• Began studying Chinese again, again.

Health / Fitness

• Three day canoeing trip, see below – Exerting more effort than my rowing partner is willing to give me credit for .
• Didn’t run, due to a canoe-meets-weir, me-meets-rock injury (I’m fine now).
• Did manage a yoga class, we’ve found one I really like, I really feel like I get a work-out.

Enjoyment

• “Na Vodu” – “On the water” as described above, fabulous three days in the sunshine making our way north on the Vltava from Rozemberk, through Český Krumlov, almost to České Budějovice. Camping each night which is something I’ve not done in years. There are a few photos in the gallery here.

This is my brief review of The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, posted to the PMBA Forums.

4-Hour Work Week Cover

I chose to read The 4-Hour Work Week at this point for some specific reasons, beyond the mere fact that it is a PMBA text. I’d just quit my job, moved to a new country and was looking to start a fresh, not with my own business at this stage but with a new ‘corporate’ job. I was not disappointed by the choice to read this book, now.

The greatest value from the book for me was further proof behind the idea that there is another way, beyond the regular approach to corporate life, and that it’s achievable. I found that in this respect the book was inspiring and instructional.

There are some real gems in the book regarding personal productivity, Timothy Ferris has taken this to quite some extremes but there is a lot of food for thought in the book regarding virtual personal assistance, outsourcing, managing inputs, prioritisation of your life goals and more.

The book is organised such that if you want to follow the Timothy’s path fairly closely then it’s a step-by-step how-to, this was done with out detracting from it’s readability by someone taking another route.

I found that the specific ideas around what your business might do or how to go about achieving it (roughly the middle part of the book) not always relevant to my situation or likely projects. It steered dangerously close to ‘get rich quick schemes’ at times which left me a little cold. For me the passing references to ‘information products’ were closer to my likely projects and would have made for more pertinent examples that were, shall we say, for business ventures with more noble aims.

Again, the greatest value of the book was that he promotes an approach to life, and your happiness in it, which resonated with me in quite a profound way. Beyond that there was a lot of practical advice for managing your life and your business in such a way as to maximise your time, hopefully for more fun and happiness.

An enjoyable and useful read. The book is backed up by a great web site with extra material, surely a must nowadays.

Brain Rules

I’ve not long finished reading the book Brain Rules, by John Medina.

I came upon Brain Rules, not initially as it is a PMBA text but from a Slideshare ‘Brain Rules for Presenters’ by Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen (also a PMBA book). Check out the Slideshare.

I found the book to be a joy to read and engaging throughout, enlivened by anecdotes and stories both personal to author and from the research on which the book is based. This technique is explained in the book but the book itself is a fantastic example of it in action.

The structure of the book as 12 ‘rules’ worked really well for me. Giving me a mental framework off which to hang the information. Each rule / chapter then containing an explanation of what is known scientifically, presented in such a way makes sense to a layman such as myself and made engaging through stories. Each section then having suggestions (or hopes, perhaps) for further research and then the real gems of what the rule means for you in your personal life, business life or education life.

The website that accompanies the book will serve to whet your appetite if you’ve not read the book or reinforce the learning if you have.

The most important sections for me, where I will be seeking to implement what I learned were the parts on how we learn and remember and the impact of stress, sleep and exercise on how I learn and work.

Read this book for fun, read it for an understanding of brain science, read it for some useful take-aways for your personal, business and educational life, or better yet read it for all these reasons.

This review has also been posted to the PMBA Forums.