Sleep Hacking

/ Leave a Comment

baby-22194_1280

Key Points

  • We need less than 6 hours to sleep during a day, but we need to have a quality sleep
  • Quality sleep can be obtained by getting enough deep sleep
  • Factors that improve deep sleep: less caffeine & more water, having the right light exposure, and controlling body temperature

Sleeping Less Than 8 hours?

Some people spend six hours per day for sleep, while some others might spend ten hours. Sleeping is something that takes a lot of our time. In common knowledge, the ideal time that should be spent for sleeping is 8 hours.

I’ve always wanted to reduce my time on sleeping, or at least get some quality sleep, so that when I wake up in the morning, I will feel energized. I guess in the current world, everybody wants that. There are a lot of articles or books about how to improve sleep, and this post is only one of them. One book even claims we can sleep for only 2 hours and still feel energetic. It sounds like a very interesting idea, but my very rigid schedule prevents me from attempting such method.

Quality Sleep

Before understanding how we can reduce our time in sleeping, we need to know how to gain quality sleep. To get a better sleep, we have to reach  the deep sleep stage, which does not happen all the time during your sleep, but instead is a part of a sleep cycle.  Failing to get to the deep sleep in sleep cycle will bring us tiredness, drowsiness, headaches, and inability to focus.

There are five stages in a sleep cycle. Deep sleep is in stage three and four. In these stages, we will have slow brain waves (delta waves) and our body will start to repair itself. Usually during this stage, we will have very little body movements. People will get enougg deep sleep after two cycles of sleep. After that, the sleep will become lighter and only alternating between REM and second stage for the remaining time. The complete deep sleep takes about 4-5 hours, so it doesn’t matter if we sleep longer. If we don’t get the amount of deep sleep required, we will still feel tired during the day.

Sleep Stages

Stages of Sleep (image copied from here)

Getting the Deep Sleep

Unfortunately, the cycles above do not apply for everybody. Some people need longer time to get deep sleep. But the good news is, we can control it through our behavior. Tere are few factors that can help you to reach deep sleep faster.

Less Caffeine, More Water

Everybody knows caffeine will help us stay awake, but actually we can wake up better without it and reach deep sleep better without it as well. The average half-life of caffeine—that is, how long it takes for half of an ingested dose to wear off—is about five to six hours in a human body. Drinking coffee at night may help you stay awake, but its side effect is actually giving you some trouble sleeping later. Coffee is not the only one to have this effect: soda and chocolates do too. What we need more is water. Our body needs to hydrate to execute processes during our sleep. Dehydration will stop our body to execute some processes, like oxygenation. Moreover, this will stop your body to adjust its temperature properly, and stop you to reach deep sleep. Let’s aim to drink 2 liters of water everyday.

Lights Exposure

Light has a part due to our melatonin production. Melatonin is a sleep hormone that we produce that responsible to make us tired and ready to bed. It will lower our body temperature. The lack of sunlight will increase production of melatonin. Ideally, we should have enough sunlight during the day and have less of it during the night, so that we can sleep on time. In practice, expose yourself with lights when waking up immediately and turn off the lights and stop staring at screens during the night. How about the other components like temperature and noise?  Having less noise will help to sleep better.

Body Temperature

The important concept on body temperature is the more drop you have during the night, the better your sleep is. That is why you will have better sleep after exercising. When we have an exercise, our body temperature will spike. In the night, it will drop significantly. Your environment also plays some role in body temperature. For example, keeping your room in low temperature during sleep will help reaching deep sleep.

Taking a Daily Improvement

We will not get less sleep benefit if we don’t apply it consistently. In fact, consistency is important since our body loves it. If we keep the momentum going, in general we are building a more sustained high temperature, and giving better sleep everyday. While above things are not easy to achieve in one-time. I tried to apply it gradually, by using a checklist of what I need to do everyday.

It will be simple things, like :

  • Avoid drinking coffee, especially after 2 pm
  • Drink 2 liters of water everyday
  • Exercise 45 minutes everyday
  • Expose myself to light immediately after wake up
  • Turn off lights at 10pm everyday
  • Stop seeing screens (laptop, mobile phone) at 10pm everyday

It will be interesting to see how it goes. Currently I sleep around 7 hours per day, and sometimes I still feel tired. I want to reduce it to be 5 hours, since that will increase my free time and give me enough energy.

References

Above content are quoted / referring from below sources :

Time Allocation

/ Leave a Comment

clock-611619_1280

Takeaways

  • Time is the most precious resources
  • Split big activities into small activities
  • Set 10 minutes time slot of each activities
  • Prepare a special calendar for time slotting

The Problem

Everybody has one resources in common, which is time. Time is something that you will never regain. That makes it the most precious resources. Once it wasted, it wasted forever.

I used to create my to-do-list in when the day is started. After it, usually I have a problem on deciding which one to start. This leads into indecisiveness and often brings me into doing small things that doesn’t matter much, like replying emails on issues that is not urgent. Later on, I find the day finished without completing all important things that I should do.

There are two problems that caused this. First is the task definition sometimes too big in scope, like “work on project X”, which looks like a big monster when you are starting it. Second is I didn’t commit myself to finish it in a certain time block. The undefined scope of activities makes me fail to identify how much resources needed to complete it.

Splitting the Big Chunk

When activities becomes too big and unclear. It is advisable to split the big tasks into small activities that doable. When you know what to do, then it will become a lot easier to complete things. You can use mind map or simply just listing down the tasks in Outlook to do this. Mine was the last one, and it helps.

Practical example for this is, to split activity of “work on project X”. I look at my emails, decide what I need to work on and what are the other things I should do. Emails will be marked as to-do, and other activities will be defined as tasks. Usually I have about 4-6 projects that is in-progress, and I have its colour coded categories to group these tasks. Categories represents the projects, and marked emails + tasks represent small activities.

How detail should we go? For me, I limit the definition of small activities into something achievable in 10-20 minutes. If it is unclear, there is an activity itself to make things clear, like by checking with line manager or colleagues.

Allocating the Activities

Coming back to the part of not wasting our most precious resources, I mapped these small activities into my calendar. This is one of the best thing that I learned that makes myself work.

Our digital calendar (Outlook, Google Calendar) usually have time slots in hours. By default, when you enter a new appointment, it will be an one hour activity. Previously I slotted time for each project, like two hours for project A, one hour for project B, and so on. Often this leads myself into confusion on what should I do in that hour, if I have everything completes, or unclear.

The better way of doing it is to map all tasks that I have defined earlier to the calendar. So we exactly know what needs to be done on that period. But putting it in hours will leads us to have no time to complete all. That is why I make the slot bigger, by changing it to 10 minutes. As I mentioned before, my tasks are a ten minutes activities. So in one hour I can achieve six activities.

This allocation is done in the morning, and usually I spend about half an hour to do. At first there will be some difficulties, but once you have sustain it, it will become a lot easier. This half hour activities should be done only for quick read and categorise activities, not for replying emails and start doing things. The real action should be done on the time slot that defined on it.

Special Calendar for Allocation

There is one additional things that If you put all tasks within your shared calendar, people will see it when they are going to schedule a meeting with you. I realised this on the first day implementing this, when my colleague see my calendar full of small things. To avoid it, I created a local calendar that is created specially for allocation or scheduling. I display it in overlay so that I can see both. So other people will not see it, but I keep my activities manageable.

Will it Work?

Yes for me, but not sure for you. I think it depends on your work style. I like everything to be organised. On the other hand, I learned it in hard way, after years of frustration of getting overwhelmed with a lot of things and always leave office feeling guilty. I also have some personal projects (like writing this blog, for example) which I never achieve because I could not manage my time well. Above had changed me a little, to end the day with more things done.

For me, it is always interesting to learn something new. If you are interested to discuss on this, feel free to put your view in comments or even contact myself through email.

* icon is created by Scott Lewis.

Managing a Project

/ Leave a Comment

startup-594091_1280

Last August of 2013 my colleague moved to other team, hence one of her biggest project need to be transferred to me. It was a big project: establishment of interfaces between 3PL (third party logistics) warehouse management system with our ERP system and one legacy system in procurement. She was leading it on the IT implementation space.

There were a lot of pressure on the project. Business wanted to deliver it on October, despite only started the workshop by July. It was a stretch. Our consultants had been advising to move the go-live date to March 2014, but got rejected by stakeholders. After various discussions, business decided to split this project to two phases. One release in December, the other release in March. Still a stretch, but more doable.

When you work on a multinational company, there are a lot of process (read: bureaucracy) need to be followed. Things that technically can be done in couple of weeks can only be done in months in enterprise world. It is normal, just by looking at the number of teams that needs to be aligned, you will see why established processes are needed. We have our ERP consultants in Turkey, system integration consultants in India, legacy system consultants in UK, and Subject Matter Experts (SME) of integrations in Europe. One design has to involve all parties. The problem didn’t stop there. The project owners are in Singapore, but the users spread in Africa, Middle East, and Europe, giving additional headache for user acceptance test (UAT). Put it with a pressure from project initiator who still pushing for this year release complexity and other functions who overload with work.

This is the time spent for doing this project. About four weeks spent to get the functional design fully prepared, another two weeks to get it fully approved, and nine weeks of integration test & user acceptance test. I don’t know exactly how long does it take to develop, because it was done in parallel with functional spec preparation and test. But in overall, everybody pushed their limit to do their best.

Anyway, it was a good experience. There are couple of things that I learned.

Communication Overhead

Communication is a big source of problem. When information passed from one team to another, everybody will get different understanding. Combine that with the lack of business knowledge from the technical team, or the other way round. Informing something via email – although we think it is already detailed, were often becomes source of problem. We tried to tackle this by having a daily call during UAT and weekly call since the start of the project until UAT.

Escalation

One thing that I never like, but in many cases effective. Because many cases the directions from the top were aligned but the executors were not. On some other cases, directions were not aligned, hence it require escalation. In my experience, escalation helped to ensure work were being done, if you see it went for slow progress, stuck in a process, or people just not trying to be helpful, escalation is one of good option. So never afraid to escalate.

Time Adjustment

As mentioned above, the teams are located in many countries. Since most of them are in Middle East and Europe, we in Singapore tried to adjust our working time. I came to office at 1pm-2pm, and left at 10pm-12pm. Still about 9 hours time spent in office, but much more effective. Because if I stick with Singapore working time, I would spent most of the day unable to call or chat with other people because they would come at the end of the day, ending up myself sending emails, which would have a lot of communication overhead possibilities.

Regular Updates

Everyday me and the overall project manager send an email to summarise the progress to stakeholders. We didn’t know if it was being read or not, but at least we had a firm reference of the project everyday that it was progressing. This build confidence & trust, and ensuring everybody on the same page. I saw the effectiveness of this, because on the next day after report being sent, there must be some feedbacks came. Although sometimes it was not a good feedback, for example the comments were not representing what other team view’s of the progress, it was good to see that people tried to make everybody aligned.

Clear & Realistic

This is important. Not only we already had a problem with communication overhead, we need to be clear and realistic with the expectation. Sometimes people try to push. Even when they know it is on the limit, they keep pushing, after fail to understand what are the constraints. These are the thing that need to be controlled. If things are not clear, it needs to be cleared so that progress can be made. If something already progressing, it is good to keep understanding the expectation and keep our trust on it.

Don’t Make a Border and Build Relationship

Many people are trained so well on saying “no”. When it is good for stopping a big chunk of work to come to you, it is not good to keep important thing to progress. What I did was keeping the balance. Some things were not meant to be my work, but if everybody not taking any ownership, I took initiative to align everybody or did it, to not make things falling. And on the other hand, building relationship and trusts are what matters, because if you are too rigid, people will not try to approach you and open up new opportunities.

Keeping Family Aligned

This is something that many people forget when they have a lot of work. Your family need to know and understand. When I decided to adjust my timing, I ensured my wife understand. We have a baby and need to be taken care. So in the morning I spend some time taking care of him while my wife can have a rest. In many cases, I had to work at weekend, and luckily I have a wonderful wife who understood with the circumstances.

Other than above points, I learned many other things such as processes at warehouse management, understanding of procurement business, and of course technical things. It was a good experience. The project already went live as per December 2013. It was a successful one, and I am looking forward to the second phase that will bring me same trouble like the first one. Behind the trouble there are a lot of new things to learn!

* Image created by Jessica Lock

Rapid Skill Acquisition

/ Leave a Comment

work-731198_1280

The next habit that I want to apply is to consistently learning something new. There are many things that I always interested to learn. But the lack of commitment and support by myself causes me to forget about it.

But there is a talk in TED which reminds me that learning is something that is not difficult and takes time. Josh Kaufmann, the author of Personal MBA, explained about this idea. This idea is published in his book – The FIrst 20 Hours. I bought the book once I saw it. It is very good. It has combination of both concept and practice.

One interesting concept that Josh introduces in The First 20 Hours is the difference between skill acquisition & learning. Take a look on below snippet. Josh learned Spanish while on the other side Carlos learned English. This is written as Josh as first perspective.

…

my friend, Carlos Miceli, grew up speaking Spanish in Argentina. In high school, Carlos decided he wanted to speak fluent English, so he made an effort to strike up as many conversations as possible with native-English speakers. In the process, he discovered Skype and set up his own website, so he could practice speaking and writing English regularly.

…

In school, I learned a lot about Spanish. I learned thousands of vocabulary words, verb conjugation, and the rules of grammar. I learned all of these things well enough to pass the tests with flying colors.

Those tests, however, had nothing to do with my ability to exercise the skills of speaking Spanish intelligibly and understanding a native speaker talking at full speed. If my goal was to be able to speak Spanish fluently, a few weeks of trying to converse with people in Spanish would’ve produced better results than four years of schooling. At that time, speaking Spanish fluently wasn’t my goal. I just wanted to ace the final exam.

Carlos, on the other hand, skipped the classroom and simply started practicing. Instead of doing verb conjugation drills, Carlos was practicing what really mattered: communicating with other people in English.

How long does it take from does not have the skill at all to be good enough? Only 20 hours! It is very less. I red Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The idea of 10,000 hours mentioned is something demotivating, remembering that I am close to my thirties. But understanding the fact that requirement of 10,000 hours is for becoming a world class is important. It doesn’t apply to everybody. If I want to learn how to play guitar, I don’t aim to be the next Paul Gilbert. I just want to reach the level where I can enjoy myself playing the song I love.

So how we can learn the new skills rapidly? Four steps:

  • Deconstructing it to a smallest level of sub-skills
  • Learning good enough knowledge to self-correct during practice
  • Removing all barriers (physical, mental, emotional) are gone before the practicing start
  • Practicing the important sub-skills in the next 20 hours

What Will Happen Next?

In the past one week, I have been spending my first two hours per day on learning to develop an application on my mobile phone. It is a simple thing that I always want to learn for the past few years. By the end of today, I have spent almost 12 hours of practicing. I just need to continue it for the next one week. I already know the knowledge part, because I learned about it in my recent study. Next week seems to be a good time to review it.

Note

If you interested to learn further about The First 20 Hours, I recommend to check the summary in ChangeThis.

* Image created by Pete Facteau

Improving Productivity

/ Leave a Comment

productivity
Everyday I overwhelmed with hundreds of email coming to my inbox, twenty unrecorded tasks to be done, a dozen of personal activities that needs to be done (like bills!), and a lot of articles in my digital reader. I don’t feel like I have time to do all of it. Every task seems to be urgent, hence I can’t have a peace on my mind.

It is not that I am not trying to find solution. I have been a very regular reader of all productivity porn. Again, there are thousands of articles, hundreds of books that provide you promise to improve productivity. But I never found one that I can sustain for even one week.

Since I couldn’t take it anymore, I am bringing this into action. Reorganise my life, to become what I feel as productive. Looking at my bookshelves, I have three books related with productivity, that I can takeaway and apply as one small project within next week. I will focus on daily productivity which brings peace on my mind. Let’s look at the plan.

Define – Putting All Actions Together

As we live in information era, the most difficult task of knowledge worker is defining what should be done. First you need to pick the right things. I believe only 20% of my emails will need execution. Choosing among them is the first step, next is to define executable steps on it. Next is to translate it into executable action. What do I need to do? When it should be finished? Those questions will need to be answered.

An interesting approach that I see for organising this is David Allen’s Mastering Workflow in Getting Things Done: Collect, Process, Organise, Review, Do.

In Collect, we need to capture everything into the list. No matter how important it is, and no matter how big or small the scope is. It is releasing it from your mind to another place that you can trust. I need an inbox of tasks – physically & digitally, to store whatever coming.

In Process, I will define the tasks as four category. Do, Defer, Delegate, and Discard. Things under Do will go to schedule after following next process. Defer will be reviewed in the next review, Delegate will be send to the respective person, and Discard will be either deleted or archived.

In Organise, I am taking Pozen’s approach. First to put time dimension on each tasks whether it is career aims, objectives, or targets. Targets is the things that actionable. If it is aims or objective, put it into category for the targets – to define priority. Then I will quickly estimate how long does it take to put into schedule. I need to see mismatches. If one Low activity is taking most of my time, then I should adjust it to be later in my schedule.

In Do, I will assign attributes for each tasks in terms of context, time, energy, and priorities. Priorities is something that you can get base on objectives and aims. This will be transported to schedule, which I will cover in next part.

In Review, I will have a defined time for reviewing all my workflow & tasks. I am planning to do small review on daily basis and extensive review on weekly basis.

One thing that is good to be highlighted is elimination. Although I am not a full fan of his quick solve approach, I like the idea that we need to eliminate things. Sometimes we are in the illusion of working hard, which actually doing the non important things. I also need to ensure I have a low information diet. I will remove all newsfeed that has no benefit on me, less browsing or watching television, to give time for myself to finish things.

Schedule – Putting Actions into Calendar

What that all people have in common, in terms of fairness, is time. Everybody is given the exact same allocation of time in one day. It is a matter of expose its potential or waste it. I like the idea in Extreme Productivity to focus on final products, by putting desired result for each schedule on your calendar as result driven. The sample of how it should be applied is like below. For this, I will define it in my Outlook calendar.

One thing that I know would be difficult to be scheduled is small stuffs : queries from colleagues and urgent requests from your boss can really annoying sometimes. Especially if it comes with one line. I am planning to allocate 1.5 hours for this everyday.

The next thing to be highlighted as important is review. At the end of the day, I will spend one hour to review all actions, reviewing schedule for next day, sending follow-up emails and reminders. This is the small review that I have talked about.

Last but not least. I need to ensure that I have proper rest & practice in daily basis. I have to schedule for 8 hours of sleep and 30 minutes of running everyday.

System – Single Source & Processes for All Actions

This is the thing that sometimes will become my barrier of sustaining my intention to work better. One day I put flag in my Outlook, the next day I forgot to follow up on that. It is like I am not be able to find the right machine to operate.

Speaking of this, there is one very interesting TED talk on racing with machines by Erik Brynjolfsson. It hit my mind because it reminds me again that I sometimes too obsessed with technology, but never got into working together with it to achieve the best things.

Racing with the machine beats racing against the machine. Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.

Especially on my objective here, I need to race with the machine, especially since I have a very complex steps defined above. I need to have a robust:

  • Checklist for all my tasks and priorities
  • Proper calendar that is accessible everywhere for achieving my objectives

That I can get from digital systems. But on top of that system is not only about technology. System is all that surround us, including

  • Set of defined steps that I need to execute to ensure all tasks and priorities are defined, including reminders and review
  • Environment to ensure there are less distractions
  • Support from family & co-workers

What Will Happen Next?

Whatever I have learned above, will be applied on next week – 29 July 2013 – 3 August 2013. After that I will write at the end of the post as review. What I have learned? What went wrong? What went good?

One thing that I believe lacks of all articles or books of productivity is the actual experience after executing all methodologies. Feedback is important. To give a prove that it is working or not.

Results (Updated at 4 August 2013)

Last week has become a good productive one for me. I responded fast, able to finish more things at work, and outside work. I feel happier, cause there are some accomplishment. It is a small one, but good to take a baby steps.

What Went Right:

  • Task Definition – I found a very good tool called Trello last week. For me the tool is very suitable. There are groups, boards, card list and for each boards I can define my own flow. I have 3 groups of works: Personal, Family, and Work. Each group has multiple boards. For example, in work I defined one group for each function I am performing business partnering (people-based). For the flow, I defined two type of flows. If it requires a long time to finish & involves me only, I put it as “To Do | In Progress | Done”, while if it is requires short time I put it as “To Do | Pending | Done”. It is a simplified version of what has been taught by David Allen, but it is more effective. Below is the example of my board for Family.

Home___Family___Trello

  • Scheduled Activities – Previously I overwhelmed with work and feels like I don’t have time for other activities. I always feel tired every time I go home. Actually it is not that bad. Since I have a system that I trust above, I am able to spent my first two hours in early morning for my personal projects, and spend my time in the night with my family and houseworks.
  • Quick Action – Since I have system that I trust. I can focus on my work. I discarded my email management last week. Now I don’t sort my emails anymore. I just flag anything that needs to be done / pending and work based on that – by referencing with my task list in Trello

What Can be Improved

  • Small Things – I don’t know it is because last week is busier than before, or because I responding faster, there are more queries coming to me. In one way it is good because it shows people are trusting you. But on the other side, the amount of work increased dramatically. In an environment that speed is very valuable, in many cases I end up responding on these small things. Which if all combined will ate up all my time for more important activities. Saying no or assigned specific time will help. Last week I have a plan on this, but not able to really done it.

In overall. More things were done. It is a good sign. Will keep improving this and start another project next week.

References

Bringing Learning to Action

/ Leave a Comment

0D4B7B7FED
I am a kind of person who enjoy learning. Bookstore or library is a place that I always comfortable with. Internet is the same place. It offers me a massive resource to find anything that I want. I have a lot of books, together with subscription of online courses like Udemy or Coursera – my favorite learning platforms.

But there is one problem. I always feel that my interest of learning does not always reward me an advanced capabilities in the domain that I have studied . For example, I have read dosens of business and self-improvement books, but I never reach myself a satisfying level of effectivity while doing my job.

So then I did a small research on this topic, and found a bunch of topic of learning process. Again, when I capture all the information, many of it I have heard through training, articles, and other means, but how many of it has been applied in my life? probably very little.

It is widely suggested that learning has to follow the 70:20:10 model. This is based on the work by Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo in the 1980s. At that time, they suggested that the best leaders develops their best through means other than formal training. The first chunk, 70%, is coming from informal, on the job, experience based, stretch projects and practice. Basically what we do. The other 20 % is taken from coaching, mentoring, developing through others. I believe everybody will realize once we start to teach anything, he or she will understand better. The last part, 10%, comes from formal learning interventions and structured courses, the one that people mostly chasing for.

In John Zenger’s book How to be Exceptional, learning is something that need to be actioned, which they call action learning. Basically it means the learning process should focus on creating action rather than only passively captured. Together with constant review to see whether our action is performed in the right way.

learn_by_action

But doing it several times does not help to make the learning result applicable in the long run. It is always the case that we study very hard before an exam and ends up forgetting everything the next day. Sustainability is the key here, which consists of 5 key components to make it possible.

learn_by_acition_sustainability

So it is not an easy task to capture something and learn it, but to sustain it to yourself, will become the bigger issue. It requires discipline and constant progress. But I believe that is the beauty. Once you step it into action, and getting the “aah” feeling when you apply it into real world problem, you will realize that that’s the joy of learning. By writing this post, actually I am acquiring the 20%, by sharing the knowledge to people.