Timeboxing

This is a technique I learned over the years from project management gurus to manage time and boost productivity. Instead of letting a task or agenda take as long as it needs to be completed, you set a hard deadline or “time box” for it.

A simple example would be the time limit we have for our daily meetings where we time-boxed it to 10 minutes. This means the meeting can not last more than 10 minutes and if it does, we just end it right away. This is very useful to make sure we don't waste everyone’s time and get straight to the point.

The Pomodoro technique also employs this strategy by time-boxing your task into 25 minutes interval separated by short breaks. (e.g. 3-5 minutes) This teaches you to break tasks into small chunks that can be accomplished within each interval.

Timeboxing has been very useful in software development. The limit forces you to aim for some sort of deliverables when you approach the deadline. It prevents you from spending too much time on a particular task and affects the deliverability of others tasks in the pipeline. The notion of a sprint in Agile/Scrum is basically a timebox of 1-2 weeks.

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Some examples of timeboxing we use when developing web applications.

1. Keep meetings short by timeboxing them.

2. Plan and schedule tasks that can be completed within a fixed time-frame (e.g. a sprint of 2 weeks)

3. Prevent yourself from spending too much time on certain process. For example, timebox yourself to only spend X minutes updating status or writing reports.

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This is not only useful for your work but also serves as a time management tool in your personal life. Start timeboxing your life and you may discover that you can get more things done.

Keeping in sync

Over the past year, our team have grown from 3 to 6 people. It is now much harder for me to keep track who's doing what and when. Couple with the fact that we are now handling more projects, things can get rather messy.

Luckily, we adopted the daily scrum meeting from Agile Development practices. It is also known as stand-up meeting or team huddle. It is a simple idea where the whole team get together everyday at the same time and place to update each other.

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How to run a daily scrum meeting

1. Same time, same place, everyday. Make this your team ritual.
2. Keep things short. E.g. 1 min max per person.
3. Decide who starts first. (Last to arrive, first to start or random)
4. Each team members start by answering these 3 questions in order
   • What did I do yesterday?
   • What I am going to do today?
   • What is blocking me from completing my tasks?
5. Deal with blocking issues AFTER the meeting

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BENEFITS OF THE MEETING

Ritual to start the day

The meeting acts as a daily starting point for the team. Although we practice flexi-time at our company, we make it a point to get together everyday at 11AM for the meeting. This let us start the day with clarity and focus.

Focus

The 3 questions are designed to keep the focus on what's being done. It keeps you accountable to what you did yesterday and also forces you to plan your day. And if there's any thing that is blocking you, it can be rectified as soon as possible.

PROGRESS & STATUS

The meeting also serves as an efficient way to convey progress and status between team members. Everyone will have a rough idea what others are working on and can also offer to help on blocking issues after the meeting.

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If you manage a team but have problems tracking progress and keeping things in sync, do try this out. Get the whole team to agree on a time and place to meet daily. Get each of them to answer the 3 questions and most importantly, keep it short.

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Photo credit: Ignacio Palomo Duarte

When to take a shortcut

In order to cope with our always-connected, attention-starved lifestyle, many of us rely on shortcuts for various aspects of our lives. We got so good at this that we have shortcuts for almost anything. Want to tie a tie in 5 seconds? No problem. Only got 2 seconds to fold a shirt, we got that covered too.

And we are not just creating shortcuts for physical tasks but also mental ones too. Armed with excellent pattern matching ability afforded by evolution, we rely more and more on our intuition and gut feeling to make decisions.

There is however a dark side to these snap decisions and judgments. We are so good at taking mental shortcuts that at times we may not be aware of it. In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell showed us how decisions made intuitively can be biased and misguided. Shortcuts may lead us astray.

Another problem with shortcuts is false proxies. Shortcut involves taking a shorter route to reach our goal. But there are times that we can’t directly measure our progress towards our goal, so we use a proxy instead. The most common false proxy for success is money. So, a shortcut to success may involve getting rich quickly but it may not lead to the paradise we seek.

Shortcuts are great though. They give us more time, which is arguably our most important resource. It’s okay to use a cheat code at times like to skip parts of a game or exploit the situation to get ahead so long we are not doing it at someone’s else expense.

But don’t get too obsessed over shortcuts. There are times where you have to resist the temptation to take the easy way out. After all, the most valuable things in life comes from the time and effort we put into it.

Our lives should not be about seeking the best shortcuts. Shortcuts themselves aren't the goal in the first place. It just gives us more valuable time to spend living the life we want. As they say, it’s the journey not the destination that matters. Shortcuts aren't the destination but merely a tool to get there. And there are some journeys you wouldn't want to skip.

A journey of passion

Last night, I was invited to present about Webcamp KK & INit.my at SEEDNite. I talked about why and how Webcamp KK was founded and also what we are trying to do with INit.my.

It is also my first time using Prezi and it is pretty cool. I've embedded my presentation below and to those who were there, I hope you liked the presentation.

Inspiring Action

For our last Webcamp KK of the year, we decided to round up a bunch of local talents to showcase their work. We had a film-maker, an animator, 2 web developers, a sound engineer and even a prop-maker showing their work and made it the best Webcamp KK, bar none.

Once again, it shows how passion is contagious, inspiring and universal. Seeing others working hard on their passion inspires all of us to do the same. We plan to keep showcasing and featuring local talents from all over Sabah regardless of what industry they are in. There are always something we can learn from each other.

But we wanted something more. A way to inspire more people to take action and do great things. So we created INit.my, a platform to inspire others with passion of our local talents. We plan to do monthly webpisodes that features the awesome work of Sabahan. If all goes well, we will have our first episode by the end of January 2013. 

Exciting times are ahead of us. There are a lot work left to be done but this is a start. And of course, as always, this is an effort from the community. We hope you can come check it out and support INit. Let us know if you know of anyone who is doing great things. We would love to feature and promote them.

Nothing inspires us more than seeing local Sabahan making it big. Of course, if you want to meet some of them, join us at our next Webcamp KK and be inspired!

From passion to action

Every month, we organize Webcamp KK where a group of web professionals, designers, developers, photographers, film-makers, animators, entrepreneurs and people who are passionate about web get together to share and learn from each other.

Over the past 15 months, we have a small but passionate core group of members who would meet up despite their busy schedules. We are very grateful to have people who share their knowledge and insights, who volunteer to help organize events and those who show up to give their support.

When asked what is Webcamp KK all about, some would say it's a gathering where people share and learn from one another. Some would see it as a networking platform where you get to meet passionate people from different industry. At times, it might look like a techie meetup or when the stars aligned, a session filled with creative passion and entrepreneurial spirit.

I would instead like to think that Webcamp KK is where people who have passion in their craft come together to share, learn and ultimately collaborate to create awesome work together. A place to nurture raw passion into effective action that impacts everyone.

This isn't a change in vision or direction for Webcamp KK but rather a confirmation that we are heading towards the right goal. In our last gathering, Team Sprocket and Asgardian School of Art showed us what is possible when your work is driven by passion.

So for the final Webcamp of the year, we will be getting action-takers to showcase their work to inspire us to also act on our passion and work on something great.