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Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Planning Your Weekend


Like most people I know, I look forward for my weekend. It's the time for me to relax and do nothing. I usually look at my list of movies and just watch them the whole day. My agenda for the weekend usually looks like this:

Recently, I realized that the best way to enjoy my weekend is make the most out of it. So I decided to plan my weekend. I used my Trello Board and placed one column to contain all activities for my weekend. It looks like this:

I realized that a well spent weekend is key to gaining momentum for next week. Last weekend, I planned 4 hours of work just to digitize my personal documents. It was an amazing feeling to complete that project. 

The key to make the most of my weekend is to plan parts of it. Yes I still leave room for spontaniety but I make sure I plan on how to have an exciting weekend.

I am ecstatic thinking about my weekend. I find determining the things I want to do and listing them down exciting.

I encourage you to plan your weekend. Don't leave your activities to what you feel like doing at that moment. Plan it and find yourself enjoying more your break than just spending 12 hours in front of a TV set.




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My ubiquitous capture tool.

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If you are familiar with GTD or Getting Things Done you probably heard of 'ubiquitous capture' the idea is to have a way for you to capture ideas, to do, style, dates, and others so that it will not wander in your conscious mind.

Try this exercise: 
1. Get a pen and a sheet of paper.
2. Go to a comfortable place (a quite one would be better)
3. Unload anything and everything that tou think you need to do or that are important to you by writing them in that sheet of paper.

You will find yourself freer and more creative. The idea is to fee your conscious mind from anything so that you will be ready for new things.

This is the reason why you need to have a ubiquitous capturing tool. For years, i have used notebooks to capture things. I sometimes find them inadequate but most of the time it works for me. Now, i use my smartphone to help me do that.

I recently found a tool that helps me in my life and work. It's called Trello board.

I call my board Office and the universe.


It contains what is on my mind and what is the needed context for that action.

You can try using the concept of ubiquitous capture and free your mind from taking mental to do list.


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Sunday, July 13, 2014
Eyes on the board - guide in overcoming adversity.


It is puzzling when you see two people start out in financial trouble and you see one person say, "Never again! This will be the lowest point in my life. I will strive and become better!" while you see the other person fall into self pity.

I believe that each one of us has the capacity to overcome difficult odds. Deep inside of us is an unquenchable fire to overcome adversity. I also believe that each one of us has a breaking point, a point when we think we could not take it anymore. But even in that very moment there is a voice in our heart that asks, "What if I will not give up now?". 

Me and my wife, Joyce, have a saying that helps us persists in hard times and it is this, "eyes on the board". When we are discouraged that saying is reminding us where we are focusing in. "Eyes on the board" mean pay attention on the right things. It is easy to get discourage if your attention is on the problem so we encourage each other by saying, "Sweety, eyes on the board." It can mean that we are focusing too much on the problem and not on the solution. 

Recently, we went into some financial problems. It was discouraging and disheartening. But we know that if we persist we will eventually get out of it and we will be on better position. We kept reminding each other to set our eyes off the problem but the solution and the ultimate outcome. It was difficult but it helped us gain a bitter perspective.

We may not have a choice on the circumstance we are in but we have a choice on what we focus on. Eyes on the board!
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Creative consulting Anita's Story



I am staring at this pieces of papers in a coffee shop together with Dr. Marites Khanser and her assistant and I am told that these are research materials for the book titled, Anita's Story. 

I am now serving as Dr. Khanser's creative consultant. I am not quite sure how I came to be a consultant or what is it that I really do. All I know is I get called to provide suggestions on how to approach a book project. This is not the first time that this happened because I also did this on another book titled, The Lost Disk.

It is quite an honor to be doing this project. Madam Anita is very prominent figure in our city. She is the owner of Anita's bakeshop. I have not personally met her but she seemed very interesting and very wise.

Maybe once this book is finished I will be able to meet her.


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Saturday, July 12, 2014
Digitise your Personal Documents.



After working for a huge corporation for the past 10 years, I found myself with a bunch of stuffs most of them documents that I deemed important. I actually took a photo of my office one last time and as you can see I have boxes on the floor that contains documents that I have not processed. I actually had two huge pile of stuffs. Because I didn't have the time to process them I just placed everything on the box.


This taught me two lessons:
1. Bring only what you use in the office.
2. Digitise documents as much as you can.

This post is about the second lesson: Digitise documents as much as you can. Over the years I have accumulated documents in the form of applications, contracts, receipts, billing statements, and etc. As much as I tried to sort and throw away as much as I can I always end up getting a bunch of paper documents that I don't know if I can throw them away.

Let me share to you what I did with my documents.

I started with this folders and envelops.

I have to say that I was force to do a pre-work in processing my documents as my new employer asked me some requirements and documentation that I have to swim through my box and searched for them. In the process I was able to throw away some documents that I don't really need.

Since I could not do this during the weekdays I decided to spend the whole afternoon on a Saturday to process this.

Here are the tools you need to do this:
1. Mobile phone or camera
2. Laptop (if you can do everything in your mobile phone then you don't need this)
3. Cloud Server (there are companies that offers free space like Google Drive, Evernote, and Dropbox)
4. Internet connection.

Step 1. Group you documents per context.
In my case, I separated contracts, credentials, certificates, receipts, and others.

Step 2. Take photos of each document. Make sure the you are getting a very clear image.

Step 3. Upload the photos (using your laptop or mobile phone) to a Cloud Server. I am using Google Drive. This is the screenshot of my drive.


I titled my cloud folder "Digital Self" and then created separate folders per category. One thing I like about Google Drive is that you can later on go to your email's search bar and just search for your document and it will come up easy. I heard and read about how this works with Evernote and Dropbox also but I have not used them.

Step 4. Rename / label the uploaded document for easy search later on.

There are tools now that actually uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to help you do convert your documents as a word document but you need to pay for them. If you have the means then it is a good way to make sure that your document is searchable.

Do this for every document in your pile. And in the process throw away documents that you think you will not use.

Once you are able to digitise your documents you can now keep them in one place and have the peace of mind that you now have a digital back-up in case the original documents gets lost/stolen.

Putting them in a cloud server enables you to access them as soon as you are connected to the internet.

There you have it. Happy digitising your documents!

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