Striped:Shirt

I just finished clearing my Gmail inbox and it took me over 2 hours just to read, delete, reply and archive over 500 emails that haven’t been touched for the past month and a half. It’s a big waste of time so from today onwards, I’ll be setting fixed times during the day dedicated to checking my email: in the morning when I get up, after lunch and before going to bed. I’ll also try to spend at most 30 minutes per session.

I need to change my email habits. It feels good to have zero emails in your inbox at the end of each day.

Do you guys have any other email-related productivity tips?

I turned a year older today (a day and an hour and 30mins ago to be exact), and it was certainly different from the previous 21 birthday celebrations or at least the most recent ones that I can still clearly remember. Instead of having dinner out with my family or meeting up with the girlfriend and friends, I spent the day at home and alone. I decided to be productive today to hopefully check some stuff off my To-do list. I learned how to prioritize what I had to do (although there was the occasional Facebook checks and iTunes playing on the background). Here’s how I spent my 22nd birthday:

• Constructed an emailer for Artdicted’s last public event, Unwrap Me Slowly
• Read Chapter 5, Cash for Condoms, of Easterly’s The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
• Read another 23-page article about the debate over the effects of population growth on economic growth
• Answered case questions regarding the topics mentioned above (this took me two long hours)
  
• Read 20 pages of the SIA and Alpa-S dispute case study, Storms in the Sky
  
• Submitted a proposal to SMU OnTRAC’s system for my community service
• Cleared my school inbox
• Backed up my data from my desktop because I’m downgrading to XP this week (Vista is too slow)
  
• Read 3 chapters of Scoble’s Naked Conversations while waiting for chunks of data to move to my external HDD

That’s about it.

Oh and I had leftover food for lunch and pizza delivered for dinner.

I’ve been very lazy the past few days. I think it’s because of the lack of sleep that I’ve been getting. The week before the midterm ‘break’ was just exhausting. I could not recover during the weekend because of the work that I had to do plus the basketball game.

It’s mid-week already and I need to get myself out of the bed and start working on some projects. Found this very helpful article on how to boost my mood. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Get some exercise:  I’ve been trying to start this for the past couple of weeks but I just can’t wake up early in the morning to do so. I need to stop procrastinating.

2. Have a catnap: I like having naps. Everyday actually. But it lasts more than 2 hours, not 15-20 mins. as suggested.

3. Listen to uplifting music: Kanye, Maroon 5, Sean Kingston, Timbaland. It’s just a tad distracting though.

4. Take a break and have a cup of tea or coffee: I tried this but the coffee just keeps me up at night when I need to sleep early. For me, it’s more like, take a break and playing poker online for an hour.

5. Focus on the positive: This is my problem. I look at every school project as a very tiring thing to do at the moment. Need to change my attitude so I can start getting things done.

6. Talk to someone: I always talk to my special someone.

7. Switch direction completely: This is good. In fact, I just went shopping with the girl yesterday. The problem I have with this is I tend to get carried away and spend a lot more time doing something else less important.

I’ll take a shower now and I hope that wakes me up to get started on my project. Laters!

Mitch Joel recently posted an entry on the “10 Most Influential Bloggers on Public Speaking“. This is an interest to me because as much as I love presenting in front of an audience (which I used to used to dread by the way), I just can’t get the speech part right. A lot of time is spent on preparing the slides but when it comes to delivery I stutter or I uhm… get my words all mixed up. It gets frustrating sometimes. Since I was a kid, I always spoke too fast and people won’t understand what came out of my mouth. I slowly learned how to pace myself and enunciate better yet I still mess up most of the time.

I’ll go through Mitch’s list and see how I can improve my public speaking skills from there. It’s nice to see Garr Reynolds at the number one spot. I visit his site, Presentation Zen, perpetually to read his latest tips on effective slide design. He’ll be publishing his own book soon so watch out for that.

If I can learn how to design slides that help communicate ideas effectively, I MUST also learn how to deliver those ideas to make them stick.