Technology As Innovator

Now this is a well-known time management matrix many people use to manage their daily tasks.

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Crises Pressing problems Deadlines	Prevention Capability Enhancement Relationship Building Recognizing Opportunities Planning
Not Important	Interruptions, some calls Some emails, some reports Some meetings	Trivia Some emails Some phone calls Some chats Time wasters

***

Using this table, the first step many people take would likely be neglecting Not-Important trivia and spending efforts on Important-Urgent matters. And so these matters grow. The problems get bigger and bigger and all energy will be used to manage problems and deadlines.

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Crises management Problems management Deadlines management
Not Important

***

How about Important but Not-Urgent endeavors?

They may never get done since Important-Urgent are consuming all the time and energy.

But it’s Important + Non-Urgent matters that make the difference. They are usually long-term vision, planning, expectation management, capabilities enhancement, maintenance and opportunity realization.

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important		Vision Planning Expectation management Capabilities enhancement Maintenance Opportunity realization
Not Important

Focusing on Important + Non-Urgent issues is opportunity-minded, more than sheer problem-solving-minded.

***

How to focus on Important and Non-Urgent matters

Neglecting Non-Important requires some techniques:

• Say ‘No’ to trivia
• Tell the phone caller you’re busy and will call back
• Check emails at fixed times and solve all unread emails all at once. Of course, in some conditions you’re required to open email application but if not, consider not letting it disturb your concentration

But then to avoid falling into pressing matters and to focus on Important but Non-Urgent matters requires more than techniques.

It requires vision, imagination, desire, discipline, commitment, and balance.

Vision

You need to have clear visions of your life. Where do you see yourself in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, at 60, till the rest of your life?

Many industries change dramatically, but organization doesn’t change that much. Societies evolve rapidly, but many social values don’t change as fast.

Have your vision.

Because without visions it’s easy to get lost in circles of life and even trapped in your own decisions.

Imagination

To be able to build visions, imagination is crucial. You can imagine how and what you will be doing towards your goals of life. Then how and what you will be doing after accomplishing certain milestones of your life.

Desire

Have had a vision? Desire it with all you’ve got. Desire is different from greed.

Desiring a vision keeps you on-track and over temptations on the way.

Discipline

Following a vision requires high discipline. Almost no one but you yourself keep track of your progress, so fit yourself in your schedule.

A plan without deadlines is no plan.

Commitment

Even higher than discipline, it requires commitment. Commitment to your vision, your values, your goals, your targets. Commitment to what’re truly important to you in the long run.

Balance

Persistently following a vision is painful and it’s easy to be off-tracked or lured by temptations.

Mental and physical balance should be met for you to always focus.

***

On Organization level

I’ve discussed leadership and capability development on individual (or personal) level.

The same principles apply for organizational leadership.

Leadership is different from management is that leadership points out the direction and builds up long-term capabilities to reach the goals.

Spending efforts on strategic planning, developing capabilities reduces risks and put crises under control.

Take one example in Human Resource. It’s wise to develop some practices:

• Develop the skills of resources, both for immediate tasks and long-term development business needs
• Encourage self-learning
• Backup and rotate resources
• Utilize the right person with the right skill for the right job

***

Conclusion

This articles encourages shifting the focus from Urgency to Importance which, if done, can create positive energy in your life and/or your organization.

Tai Tran's Lab: Technology As Innovator

Social Networking is definitely fun, but some players are feeling lost

Haven’t even experienced Social Networking fatigue…

It is predicted that Social Networking will reach its peak in around 2009 before experiencing gradual decline.

2 years is too far away, at least to an average user. Why not have all the fun today?

The truth is, I am really enjoying Facebook and all it’s got: relationship-centric network, mature core functionalities, rich applications, nice gifts, intuitive design…

Mini-feed is also a great idea! Whale done, Mark! With it I can explore what my friends have just been doing and so can they. A great way to know more about other people.

…but I just realized one important piece is missing

You can explore what your friends do daily on Facebook. Very good already…

Consider it more deeply, have you identified what are missing here?

You don’t know what your friends do in real life. Furthermore, you don’t know what they THINK!

Knowing one’s activities on one platform is great, but would it sometimes drive you to the assumption that you know what others are doing and thus spend less time interacting with them via more traditional but human way or reading what they have to write?

How do people express their ideas? Via what they have to write down (Blog!), or take photos on (Photoblog!), or produce video clip for (Vidlog!). Less likely via sets of pre-designed virtual gifts

No, I don’t mean that gifts don’t represent the hearts. I still treasure each and every gift my friends have been giving me, but I’d appreciate it more if they simply write in their own words or post their own design.

Because we’ve been bringing content to Social Networks…

I have emphasized many times that Social Networking is totally different from Blogging. However, due to the two facts that they are born so close to each other and that several sites offer both simultaneously such as Live Spaces or Yahoo! 360, the two are often mistaken to have to be together.

Let’s, for now, consider them cousins anyway. Who should follow whom?

It happens all the time that Blogging has to follow Social Networking, mainly because:

• The number of people ready to send pre-defined gifts outcrowds the number of those willing to write about what they think
• The inertia to connect with quick messages outdoes the urge to share well-thought ideas
• Social Networking activities are less time-consuming and less effort-consuming so they are done more frequently within the day. On the contrary, Writing takes time and efforts and Reading is usually done for once. In comparison, users visit Social Networking sites much more often than they do Blogs. “More times of visits” makes the impression of “being bigger”. Smaller ones always have to follow bigger ones don’t they?
• More times of visits per day means more ads generated and higher click-through rates. Subsequently, more revenues for site owners and more investments are expected.

User-generated contents, if applicable, may be integrated into Social Networking profiles via RSS and/or addons. Correct me if I’m wrong, though it takes much more time and efforts to write posts, the section containing these posts is not the center of the majority of Social Networking profiles, and is often depressed by the higher density of other quicker and painless activities.

…but why not the other way around?

After following me down here, is there any reason you can think of to do the other way around, which means to bring Social Networking functionalities to Blogs?

Shaking head?

What’s the point?

Any profits doing so?

I’m answering this question: Yes! There are.

Those serious about publishing their own content will not be hindered by limitations. The will to write will push the authors to overcome the (possible) difficulties.

How the world floats

We’ll see how people do the hard job of bringing Social Networking to Blogs.

MyBlogLog: more than merely $222 per blog

MyBlogLog builds communities around blogs and provides bloggers the ability to be updated of activities of their connections. Activities here are content-centric: read and comment.

The recent $10 million acquisition by Yahoo! has raised interests in MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog reports 45,000 registered blogs. A simple math gives us the price of each: $222. An innocent question comes following: will Yahoo!’s ads cover this cost?

Come on! Don’t pretend to be that naive. An acquisition doesn’t necessarily offer tangible benefits today or even next year, but the truth is that the concept and foundation of the seller then becomes more powerful in the strong hand of the buyer.

Acquiring MyBlogLog belongs to a grand strategy of Yahoo!. “MyBlogLog - a Yahoo! service” will not generate handsome profits alone, but will do so greatly when the platform is integrated with other legacy Yahoo! services such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Mash, Yahoo! Blog platform.

I am bringing networks to my blog with MyBlogLog.

DiSo: what should always have been

Distributed Social Networking is the next ambition of Open Web community. It brings

Visualize this:

• All things are done on your site without having to push your content to a small box in your Social Networking profiles
• You can add other bloggers as friends instead of simply putting them in your blogroll
• You can offer people your RSS feeds
• You can see your connections’ updates such as: Tai reads ‘Kafka on the shore Review’ on Lisa’s blog in 19/12/2007
• You have your status on your blog
• You see and can choose to pose list of recent readers of your blog
• You can send friend requests to other bloggers
• All things are done on your site. No tight boxes in other places

What does this mean? It means your content is the center of your site. What takes the most of your time and efforts deserves meritorious position.

How does it sound?

How do you feel about its future?

I know you care, so please just share…