Recently I am adjusting my work habits to achieve a better balance. Let’s see if the hacks below will be effective in the coming new year:
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Abandon Facebook
There are more than 700 friends in my personal account. However I discovered that around 90% of Facebook friends are not in touch with me in my daily life. Everyday when I surfed on Facebook, there are just shits appeared on my feed, in which I don’t care at all. Another kinds of post appeared on my feed are boasting from the industry friends. “Hey I’ve got an award. Cool, man?”, “Interviewed by XX about our new product YY”. All shits wasting my precious time. The only function I used is Facebook Messenger (Web), no others.
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Do Less, Fewer Meetings
Enterprise customers used to ask for a meeting to collect information they need for an IT project. I am often asked to attend meetings without any compensation. After they’ve got what they need, they will go away. Well, that’s it. I am done with these annoying meetings. Do nothing for a couple of hours in office is better than serving others without pay. Always ask for less. Less works, less problems.
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One Thing At A Time
We will prioritize every tasks in the week. Whenever a task is not important to the current situation, we will put it to the back of the queue. The most important thing is asking why and what at the moment. While it may look short sighted, it save me tons of time for useless tasks. Constraint is always good to let you know what is truly important.
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No Networking Events
FinTech, Big data, AI / Machine Learning, Startup, IoT, etc. All buzzwords put in front of a conference. Who fucking care about these shits? Probably newbies and outsiders, or someone who wanna promote something. I didn’t find that I took something in my pocket after I attended an event.
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Learn Guitar
What is the best way to spend your saved time? I will invest the time in a new interest. Sometimes I found Guitar was quite similar with programming. You can learn guitar on your own like programming. But the learn curve is as stiff as programming. My target will be playing a few songs of Cheer Chan (Taiwan singer).
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Meditation
Sitting and doing nothing looks like a waste of time? Well, it can teach you a good lesson in a fast-paced city. An empty cup may fill with nothing. But it can also carry all liquid, whether water, coffee, alcohol or even ice cream. Meditation can teach you how to think again with a beginner mind. Reading may fill in new knowledge into your mind, meditation can be another worthy “mind technology” to sort things out.
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Machine Learning course taught by Andrew Ng
This is a very challenging item. Not sure if I can handle so technical stuff after graduated for many years. You can take a look on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning . Free!
