Culture Shock?

Doing my reservist in the last 3 days required a bit of adjustment from me.

The reason was because the army takes a lot of breaks!

I’m typically used to doing work cycles that consist of at least 6 hours of uninterrupted work. Sometimes the sessions could be 12 hours at a time. Sometimes I could do 6hr + break + 6hr + break + 6hr. Or even 8hr + break + 8hr work days.

So it was interesting to hark back to the laidback lifestyle of 8am start, teabreak at 10am. lunch at 12, teabreak at 3pm, end work at 6pm.

I guess for what I consider a Lowest Common Denomintor organization like the army. (Typically big organizations), it works.

But I think this 2hr + break + 2hr + lunch + 2h + break + 2hr workday just doesnt quite cute it in private companies simply because there issuch a thing as market competition.

The army lives off a defence budget that is pegged to the GDP so it’s obviously different from companies. Also 2hr essentially means that nothing really substantial can be done. I mean what can you accomplish?

I know programmers who essentially work 20 or even 30 hr stretches then sleep then repeat the cycle. Not that I’m advocating a crazy work life but rather focusing on continous stretches without context switching is extremely important to get anything done in the knowledge industry. This is why I find people in the tech industry so cool! Because a lot of them are essentially in the upper echelons of ability to concentrate and focus.

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The iPhone

After about 3 weeks of using my iPhone I must say a few things:

1) I finally have the mobile Internet in always on mode right in my hands.

2) it has been a tremendous productivity boost. Less workflow bottlenecks. Emails can be replied and fwded from anywhere. I can work on things during stupid times that used to be useless like waiting outside toilets, waiting for next meetings.

3) I can google or wikipedia whatever I don’t know rightaway. That’s intelligence augmentation for you!

4) It’s a real moblogging machine. The built in camera allows me to moblog with pics.

5) The Facebook app is my killer app for the iPhone. I must say it has really taken social networking mobile: I can just add people rightaway instead of having to wait.

6) It is a great social lubricant. Can use it to share and show the stuff I’m talking about. Typically I share websites or show my company’s portfolio.

7) I created a set of gdocs that contains karaoke lyrics so I can draw it up to Singalong anytime.

Really amazing huh? Yet we’re still only in the early stages of the mobile Internet. Imagine the power of this platform when the network effects of unlimited 3g dataplans really kick in! I.e when people begin to all start doing this.

This is the quantum leap that all of us in the IT industry has been looking for! Web 2.0 may be peaking and if you’d like to really experience the next disruptive wave of innovation, look no further than the unlimited always on mobile web as it clearly is in it’s early stages and has the foundational enabling technologies all set.

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Nice I Can Now Blog From My IPhone

Just testin…

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Evernote: Notetaking Software You Can’t Do Without

I’ve been using Evernote and it has been nothing short of brilliant.

So I’d like to recommend it to everyone that I know.

The software is really simple but the whole concept is simple:

- Desktop Client (Win/Mac that you can Write Notes In)

- Syncs with Web Site and Mobile Client

- Allows you to use mobile cam to take photos and it will do image recognition of characters.

- Full-text search and instant Sync.

- Tagging

I use it primarily for the following:

- Discussion Note Taking: After creating a discussion note during a meeting, I can immediately email it out to people concerned. Cuts down time required to followup.

- Drafting Articles: I draft out articles that I want to write and then eventually transfer onto GDocs

- I use it to write my Things To Do

- I use it to Web Clip articles which I can then send over to other people via email.

- I do Text Clippings of stuff I wanna remember. Little snippets of Ideas.

- I keep a list of Cafes I can Co-Work at.

I used to use TextEdit on the mac. But it kept scattering all over my hard disk. Also TextEdit doesn’t provide full text search, image snapshots, OCR and folksonomy. The most powerful thing about Evernote is the Sync to cloud feature which is so attractive: I need to have my data accessbile and synced up!

So if you’re looking for a good note taking software that will really be usefu, don’t hesitate to  signup and begin using this!

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