The 5 Minute Crush

For the past 10 months my weekday morning routine kicked off with a leisurely breakfast around 8am, followed by a walk in the park with Kuri.

Not so Monday 18th February.

On that morning I wrote the outline of this post while riding the 8:11am train to my 6 month consulting IT gig.

Or rather, it was 8:11am when I thought of what I would be writing about later – because the train was too crowded to do anything but adopt an “upright meditating sardine” pose.

Actually, compared to the 90 minute 1-way commute on 3 different lines back in 1997, this 40 minute shunt’s a doddle.

Standing room only all the way but “sardine time” is a mere 5 minutes between 2 busy stations.

That’s just about long enough to do my current version of Betty Erickson’s light trance exercise.
(Remember to only do this type of self-hypnosis when it is safe to do so – and certainly not while driving or about to drive. I consider riding a train to be low risk!)

Most likely I will give myself suggestions for blog ideas to gestate during the working day – with the plan being to draft them on the homeward journey, and post at least one that evening for future publication.

Looks like the optimal way to continue to honor the intention I set for myself here, and I will be interested to see how it works out over the next few weeks.

Have you had any recent changes in direction, detours, or temporary alterations in your career planning?

Feel free to share and comment below.

- Mark McClure

Blog Posting Update

Just an fyi to my blog readers:
I am changing from posting every day to posting twice a week.
Most likely the posts will appear on Tuesdays and Fridays (Japan time).

Writing new blog posts (offline, using pen and paper) during my daily commute will continue and this changed posting frequency now gives me an opportunity to polish the drafts a little more.

And to be honest, the IT consulting gig is requiring some serious attention as I get to grips with the allocated projects.

At some future date I may return to posting more often – although that decision will also partly depend on what my readers are telling me.

Let me know.
- Mark McClure

Time Choices

There were 3 questions I left you with from this post on
time management.
Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Q1- What’s on your DoTO list right now?
A1- Setup Al Secunda interview schedule.

Q2- What’s your current IHTD project?
A2- Create an inventory of the software I’ve bought in last 3 years.

Q3- What is your Project1?
A3- Create next info product

How about you?
- Mark ‘Time lord‘ McClure

“Work Is The Arch Enemy Of Free Time”

Ricardo Semler, the Brazilian sometime CEO of Semco and author of the bestselling ‘Maverick’, is a very unique businessman indeed.

This blog post’s title is a quote from his second book, originally to be called “The End of The Weekend” – but which his American publisher then changed to “The Seven-Day Weekend”.
(That publisher no doubt well understands what it takes to market a business book in a crowded marketplace.)

The book is an account of how Semco is attempting to deal with an “always on” and increasingly busy and competitive world in which many employees and managers know they can no longer take (or in some cases, even want) every weekend off.

Interestingly, a seven-day weekend environment can result in some plus points too.

Continue reading

Still Think You Can Manage Time?

The time management material starts about 2 minutes into this 7 minute video.

(This is an excerpt of module 6 – from the IT Career Engineer Special Report. Now available on CD (This post updated Oct 2011). But it’s very relevant to anyone making choices over how they spend their time each day. The fundamentals of time management are the same everywhere.)

Questions from watching the video:

1- What’s on your DoTO list right now?

2- What’s your current IHTD project?

3- What is your Project1 ?

I will return to these questions in a later post.

- Mark McClure