On life and work between Dublin & Berlin

I finally got around to tweaking this when it was the last straw. Here’s the link

I think it was this article (or one of the similar thousand) where I inferred probably the most important lesson on productivity that really works for me. The idea is “do your most important task first” before you do anything else when you start your work day (or evening/night). Thereby psychologically minimizing the potential effort and resulting stress of the work/tasks for the day. I’ve also heard of this lesson being called something like “eat that frog”. You see where the analogy lies.

But my take on that lesson is this. I don’t go to the gym and jump on the bench press with 70 kilos on it. I need to warm up. And I certainly don’t want to get all the heavy lifting out of the way early on to ease things up. So what really works for me is rather than placing any emphasis on any tasks whatsoever (logically taking into account emergent or exceptional cases) the trick is just to get started on anything that is related to the goals of the day. The first thing that comes to mind, the first thing at hand.

I agree totally with the article that the effects of doing anything productive before procrastinating are amazing. But by ignoring priority, size, difficulty, you’ve already got something done and started that momentum rolling without having to eat any frogs or whatever.

I suppose I would call this “The art of effortless momentum“. Just don’t think about it. Just sit down, pick a task and get going, build up some momentum.

Stephen Fry, a linguistic genius, really loves technology and he has deep understanding of it. Check out his new website:

www.stephenfry.com

I’m meeting an old acquaintance tonight along with some other techie friends for an informal workshop. Both of us are quite entrenched in our own camps. He works a lot with .NET and I only develop with Ruby on Rails. I haven’t seen a line of ASP since back in the British Telecom days in Dublin so It’s going to be really interesting to see how .NET has progressed over the years and to see if I’ve got the Rails chops to impress upon them how great it is.

w00t! I’ve just tested out the position of matthewling.com in the Google Index for the search term “matthew ling” and it seems to have finally filtered it’s way to the top. Nice!

Ohman, if you want to laugh, first watch this video on the BigDog which is creepy but cool …

Then watch this video on the BigDog which is halarious …

Aston Martin’s new One-77

What: Drink a “Brandy Alexander”

Why: I just found out what a Brandy Alexander is. Originally I heard the song from Ron Sexsmith, featuring Feist. Then subsequently found out that Feist had written the song with Ron. In its original form a Brandy Alexander is a cocktail. So, when Ron plays on the 23rd of November, I know what drink I will toast the gig with.