It all started with applying te Pareto principle when analyzing my workflows.
In 1906, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that the 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Pareto also popularized the term “elite” in social analysis.
The term “Pareto Principle” was introduced by Joseph M. Juran when in 1941 became aware of the work of Vilfredo Pareto. He began to apply the Pareto principle to quality issues. Generalized, the principle states that 80% of a problem is caused by 20% of the causes.
The Pareto Principle can be stated in the business as following:
In other industries:
Fixing the top 20% most reported bugs, 80% of the errors and crashes would be eliminated.
I applied the Pareto Principle to time management to help me identify the causes that produce the most delays in my daily work. When I identified these, I was able to work in the correct direction to fix the true cause of the problem.
In order to do this, I recorded the time that I used to complete my tasks, and I also included the time for interruptions, breaks or destructions.
I then identified the 20% of the activities that take up 80% of my time. Can I delegate some of these activities? Can I reorganize my work in a way to minimize the impact of these activities on the time I use?
For example, I have found that I use a lot of time to search for files or notes that I have taken in the past. I changed the way I file my notes, I used an electronic filing program and the benefits were amazing. I am using Evernote. It is an amazing program that allows you to create notebooks to organize your documents, pictures, business cards and thoughts. The most powerful feature are the Tags. You can create as many tags you need and categorize your Evernote entries. Searching using the Tags is powerful. I freed up a lot of my time. There are a lot of online programs to choose from according to your needs.
]]>20 minutes to success!
The secret of 20 minutes time intervals. You split the hour into three parts, accomplishing 3 tasks per hour. You can, alternatively, combine 20 minutes parts to accomplish a much bigger task. For example, you receive a task that needs 4 hours to complete. You can combine the 20 minutes chunks to build the 4 hours that you need to accomplish your task. You can even schedule a 20 minutes break after accomplishing the task. The 20 minutes break down of the hour is very efficient fo meetings too. 15 minutes is not enough time for a meeting. In 20 minutes you can have a well-organized meeting. If you need more time you can add another 20 minutes making it a 40 minutes meeting. This leaves you another 20 minutes to accomplish another task. I can write many examples but I think that you get the idea.
Dividing the hour to 20 minutes alone cannot bring success. For success to come you need also to discuss personal goal setting, the use of to-do or action lists, prioritization, estimation of the tasks, delegation, how to manage interruptions, how to beat procrastination, risk management and how to remain self-motivated at all times. All the discussion points presented previously affect either positive or negative your time management.
The topics mentioned above will be covered in future blog posts.
Have a great, happy and productive day!
]]>You are so wrong!
Your online activity is tracked with Browser Fingerprinting.
What is Browser Fingerprinting?
Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed in 2010 that from a sample of 470,161 browsers who participated in the experiment, 84% produced unique fingerprints. (94 % including those that supported Adobe Flash or a Java Virtual Machine). The attributes that fingerprinting was based on included user’s screen size, time zone, browser plugins and a set of installed fonts. All these attributes create a unique fingerprint for a computer.
IEEE Spectrum has a detailed article on how web advertisers stealthily monitor our browsing habits.
How can I test my browser?
You can test and see your browser’s fingerprint here.
There are a couple of tools (browser add-ons) that you can use. Two of them are Lightbeam and Ghostery.
Ghostery is available for all the major browsers. Ghostery has the largest tracker database available on the web. Ghostery profiles and culls over 1,900 trackers and 2,200 tracking patterns.
Lightbeam is a Firefox add-on that uses interactive visualizations to show you the first and third party sites you interact with on the Web.
What are your thoughts?
]]>One of the ebooks (1311 pages) is Programming Windows Store Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Second Edition, by Kraig rockschmidt.
MVA has added 3 New Free ebooks. You can access them here.
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Do you have more mistakes to suggest? Please feel free to add to the list.
]]>DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg in February 2008 in Valley Forge, PA (USA).
By May 2012, the search engine was attracting 1.5 million searches a day. The search engine currently gets over 120 million direct queries per month and this number is rising.
I want to keep my searches private so I am switching from Google to DuckDuckGo. What are you going to do?
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There are many questions for UAV delivery. Safety of the drones, security, privacy and many other issues.
Below is the footage of a test flight. In my opinion it is amazing. What is your opinion?
So, enough said, let’s talk about the Top 10 reasons to get your Project Management Certification list:
For me it remains a mystery(?) why some project managers prefer not to get certified. I have talked with many project managers without a certification and I have found that they do not know some basic Project Management knowledge areas such as proper scope management, risk management, process optimization, etc. These project managers, probably are afraid to take the test, they afraid of not passing the test. The fear of failure. Alternatively, they might be are so locked in with their beliefs that refuse to change and learn new skills. My advice: Be different, get certified!
What do you think?
]]>The 7 steps presented below helps you achieving more effective meetings.
Before the meeting
Preparation is a key element to success.
1. Scope: You set the scope of the meeting. What is the meeting about? Choose a title that represents the purpose of the meeting, like “New office planning”.
2. Time and Location: Instead of having a meeting title like “New Meeting 14:00” or a similar generic description prefer something more specific like “New office planning 14:00 – 15:00” which has a detailed title and also a starting and ending time. You guess it right! The place is missing. You have to state where the meeting is going to take place. “New office planning 14:00 – 15:00, Meeting Room 1 @ Main Building”. The duration of the meeting depends on the agenda of the meeting. If there are many participants allocate 40 or even 60 minutes for the meeting. If there are few participants you can allocate 20 minutes for the meeting. Proper time management is a key element for effective meetings. Needless to say, if the key persons cannot attend you will have to reschedule your meeting.
3. Agenda: You define the contents of the meeting. Write a list of the items that will be discussed during the meeting. This is the agenda of the meeting. Next to each item of the agenda, write the allocated time. You may also include the owner of the particular item and the objective of the discussion.
4. Agenda buy-in: Distribute the agenda by email to all participants of the meeting with a note asking for their feedback and to also add to the list any other item that they think belong to that meeting and send it back to you. Ask them particularly to reply to you and not to all. You do not want to start an email discussion before the meeting. Ask also to receive their reply by a certain date. You may also request their questions regarding specific topics of the discussion. Review the list and distribute it to all participants, latest at the next day of your deadline.
During the meeting
5. Time: Start immediately the meeting with the first topic for discussion. Manage the time and be careful not to overrun the allocated time.
6. Topics: Keep presenting the items for discussion. Ask for comments or questions. If no one has questions then move to the next topic. Give the floor to the owner of the item to present it. Make sure that the presenters stick to the allocated time. Sometimes this may be difficult especially if the presenter is a senior manager or your boss.
Ensure that the meeting stays on topic.
After the meeting
7. Meeting minutes: Send the meeting minutes to all participants. Ask them to add any item that feel that was left out of the meeting minutes. If there are items left uncovered schedule a new meeting.
Are you using these steps for your meeting? What would you add to these steps?
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