Unproductive? Stressed out? This might help...

How can you be more productive at home and at work, while ridding yourself of unnecessary stress? These are a few tips I have found along the way:

Pending matters (personal or work) tend to stick to your brain through the day, even though you are not focusing on them. They are like a cancer that cuts off productivity, just like a person who is going through divorce or difficult times will have trouble coping with work and friends, this holds with any kind of personal activities that have been left pending.

• If you take email seriously, divide it into “personal” and “work” folders. Attend to personal mail before leaving to work each morning, or at night before going to bed.
• Write down task lists (Use Google Calendar, Outlook, Google Tasks or even pen and paper) and divide them into days. You can’t do everything in a day, so be realistic. Try to do everything that is personal at home, and everything that is work related at the office.
• When you don’t accomplish a pending task, don’t leave it “hanging”. Set it for a later time (after work maybe?) and remove it from the “overdue” list. If it was something urgent you couldn’t accomplish and it involves someone else, let that person know (email? phone?) immediately that it will take you another day to finish it.
• While at work, be sure to have your pending activities listed appropiately and go through them in order, remember you can’t do everything at once and it will only stress you out thinking about how much you have to do, specially when you have a deadline.
• If you read personal email at work, try to archive (or store) personal emails that arrive, and mark in your calendar that you must attend to those emails when you get home. If it is something urgent, reply at once that you will attend to the issue at a later time.

By following these steps, hopefully you will be able to clear your mind at work and start to focus on what you have to do, not what you had to do and didn’t do, nor what you have pending and might have to do later. Everything at its time.

Now get to work!

Someone named David

I went for a stroll through the graveyard the other day. It was a random event, however, enjoyable to a certain extent. I didn’t intend to make a photoshoot out of it, however, I found some interesting scenes and moments along the way.

I was thinking about the people who had gone through life and were now buried in the cemetery. What might their lives have been like? How must they have looked? Could there be a trace of history they have left behind? What will their descendants think or know about them? Did they even have offspring at all?

It’s interesting when all these questions come to mind as you start formulating all these stories about lives you know nothing certain about, except for their last words. I sometimes wonder about what will my last words be, I would at least hope for them to be somewhat meaningful. Or maybe something completely random would do just as well.

Boston Dynamics PETMAN humanoid robot

“Boston Dynamics, makers of BigDog, i.e., the coolest robot ever made, are in the process of building a dynamically balanced humanoid. PETMAN is their new 2-legged robot sponsored by the US Army for the purpose of testing chemical protection clothing for the soldiers.

Boston Dynamics has not released much information about PETMAN other than that the project has 2 phases : phase 1 has a 13-month duration focused on design and phase 2 has a 17-month duration for building, validating and installing the robot. The company expects to deliver the robot in 2011.”

via Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

An Ode to the Inverted Question Mark

Yesterday was National Punctuation Day in the U.S.A. and although I do not live in the US, I wrote this short ode to the Inverted Question Mark:

I am in love with the inverted question mark “¿”. It hangs like a light bulb, with such charisma and curves. It is but a mere symbol, however, a symbol so special to me. I am in love with this question mark, as it states the unraveling awkwardness of the world, a strange world in which I grew up in. ¿Is it true, my love, that a question should start with you? You represent a world with many languages, many signs, and many symbols. My inverted question mark, you represent change, beauty and awkwardness. My inverted question mark, you will always be my true undaunted love.

Purple Sea, Purple Sky

The atmosphere ringed on for ages, with purple-green horizons staring back at me. And the eyes grew from deep within the trees. I knew I was there, at the right place, at the right time.

I wandered around the tree, one that would be cut down in the following months. I heard sounds of acoustic guitars rattling by near my head; while the bass drum, suspended in mid-air, bang swiftly to the rhythm of drum and bass.

The climbing plants created envelopes around me, and the canvas was covered, bloodshed. I new it was the place, but was it the time? I felt the grass whispering to my feet, don’t strangle me please, don’t kill me. And the buzzing of the birds, and the tweeting of bees, it rang through my brain, tormenting.

It was all going to fast, I could barely understand. It might be the time, but it might not be the place.

And I turned to the tree again, shivering. Icicles formed on the branches of the climbing plants. I was sweltering in the 40ºC mid-day heat. The sky turned orange, then purple again. I did not understand, I felt the violins scream around me. Or they might have been guitars, squelching at incredible speeds. Key change.

I touched the tree, as it slowly faded away into dreams, dreams of a past taken away from me, dreams of a photograph erased, dreams from a lost post, dreams from a memory.