May 15 2007

What to do when you are very busy

Here are some of things to do when you are very busy.

1. Sleep Less

8 hour sleep is really for wimps — that is way too big a chunk for your day! And I am not even counting other associated activities that are attached to sleeping, or overhead on “context switching” using a technical jargon.

When you are busy, sleep less. People will be fine with 6 hours plus a few cups of coffee. Instant 2 hours!

2. Read Less

How many items are there on your feed reader? 50? 100? 200? What I found is that people spend way too much time reading news feeds on their RSS readers. Haven’t they realised that the entire blogosphere is nothing more than a big echo chamber, where B-list bloggers repeat what the A-list bloggers say, C-list bloggers repeat what the B-list bloggers say, and … ?!

Now, remove all those traffic jamming crap in your RSS reader, like Slashdot, Digg, Programming.Reddit, TechCrunch, TUAW, or even daily Dilbert! You will get much more time on your hands when they are not pressing J in Bloglines or Google Reader.

3. Blog Less

Did you realise how much time has been wasted on blogging? First of all, you need to spend time chewing intakes from the echo chamber (see point 2), and then spend more time paraphrasing what has already been said in your own words! Original content? Expect more time cooking these up in your head. I have just wasted 15 minutes writing this post, and I have not even reached the conclusion yet.

If it takes 1 hour to write a 500 word blog entry (which usually corresponds to another hour of research), write once a week instead of once a day leaves you 626 more hours each year! And trust me, no one is going to miss your writing.

* * *

Alright. The above is actually not my advice, but what I have been doing over the last week because there are just so many things to do. Busy busy.

3 Comments

  1. felixt on 15 May 2007 at 12:05 pm #

    couldn’t agree more. sleep is highly overrated anyway.

  2. william on 15 May 2007 at 4:48 pm #

    reading others and blogwalking does take plenty of your time. let alone typing a 500 word blog entry.

    i find it hard to wake up once i sleep less.

  3. Al on 17 May 2007 at 10:47 pm #

    I agree with the sleep statement, it is a waste of time. Some people say they need X hours of sleep per night; thats an excuse that they’ve accepted. What they meant to say was that they haven’t yet trained their body to work on 5 hours sleep; mine does it just fine.

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