Efficiency Overdose

Jul 8, 2014 | ,

This life is some work. I often feel like I’m ODing on trying to deal with this reality better, from a professional, business and personal perspective. Every day I’m reading, doing exercises, working to implement a more efficient way of tackling the day-to-day. There is no single manual to making it work. There is no one way of doing things. As with so many aspects of life, it’s about finding one’s own path amidst the multiple tools. And it is a work-in-progress. From David Allen’s Getting Things Done, The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan and Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly...

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Like A Girl

Jul 6, 2014 | ,

There’s something like a line of gold thread running through a man’s words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself – John Gregory Brown, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, 1994 My first child was a boy. I figured him out quite early. It’s always been easy to buy presents for him or to figure out the things that he likes. It doesn’t hurt that he seems to reflect me when I was his age so, often, the things I found cool are the things that he does. In terms of...

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10 Minute Books On Productivity

Jun 30, 2014 | ,

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body – Joseph Addison Growing up a bit of a bookworm, and raised by an academic who converted the garage into a study to fit all his books, I’ve always understood the power of reading. Starting out with comics and writing like The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Aesop’s Fables and the full gambit of fairy tales (from Readers Digest) through to Agatha Christie, Louis L’Amour and Shakespeare in high school, I have been fortunate enough to travel the world and learn from the experiences of others through their written word. A few years ago, I realised I...

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Things My Father Taught Me (Win With Chivas)

Jun 15, 2014 | ,

Life is about example. Having example and being an example. My father has been my main parent since I was about one. My mother died in a car accident. Everything I have learnt about being a man, a professional, a husband, a father, etc has stemmed from my father. I started working for him in the family businesses from a very young age so I learnt how to work and gained skills directly from him outside of school but, more importantly, watching him over the years – I am now 42 and he is 79 – has shaped who I am. Whenever I am asked about my role models, my father is always the first I name but...

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How To Become More Efficient With Your Time

May 28, 2014 | ,

Busy-ness has become the scourge of many an individual in this day and age. Technology has made us accessible and made it easier for us to access so much that we stay perpetually submerged in the noise. This is something I’ve been battling with and trying to make sense of for some years now. It doesn’t help that I am on every possible social platform out there, have worked – and continue to work - in multiple industries, have no less than 5 email addresses, try to be there for my family, regularly have 4/5 projects on the go in addition to my day job and will occasionally get in something I...

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Wrangler’s Instagram Campaign

Apr 23, 2014 | ,

When Facebook bought Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stocks in 2012, the main question asked was ‘why’? I don’t know that there was (or is) a clear answer but watching the evolution of how people use the platform has been interesting. I was drawn to it because I’d already been dabbling in mobile photography – using Flickr to store my images. It’s probably the only real hobby I’ve had over the last couple of years and I now have just under 2000 Instagram posts. In the last year, I’ve been seeing a lot more traction from ‘ordinary people’ in addition to the devoted IGers who have...

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