It is a very known fact that being merciful to others is a very noble thing to do. Somehow I was reminded of the movie Gladiator where the crowd cheers – “Maximus the Merciful”. Anyway… moving on.

Merciful simply means that we take into consideration our feeling when we can do it either way. For examples, when we wins in a contest. We can be a jerk by making fun of the losers but to be merciful means that we should honor the losers by being humble.

There are some occasion however where we have to be merciless. Meaning – putting aside all our feeling and display less caring about anything. I’m referring to occasion when your time is wasted. Here are some examples:

1) Email
Fortunately for us, Spam Filter was created. If not, I wonder how many hours will be spent just to delete the spam. To be merciless in your email handling is to just read the title and if nothing good can come from reading it, just immediately delete it. If it really irrelevant, put it in the spam filter.

Learn how to filter email properly, and be merciless when deleting emails.

That goes the same thing with writing an email. Email was supposed to be very straight to the point. There’s no need to ask the weather, or how’s the new house. Unless of course the email is meant to ask about the weather and its effect on the house.

Time is everything, and if we can save some valuable seconds from handling email, why shouldn’t we?

2) On the phone time
Unless you are talking to family or catching up with old friends, there’s absolutely no reason you should spend 30 minutes on the phone with your colleague.

Cut it short, just say that you have some other urgent things to do. In fact we really do have other urgent things to do, like living our life 🙂

3) SMS / IM
SMS are generally a short form of short message system, If you are sending / receiving SMS more than 10 times to one person, isn’t it just easier to call that person. I know that SMS is so much cheaper, but is your time just as cheap?

IM or Instant Messaging is very similar to SMS but they are totally free and far more efficient. In fact they are so efficient, I would recommend it. However, sometimes chatting can have a very addictive effect, especially when people are usually funnier in chatroom than when they are in real form.

Log out immediately if you find that your goals have been met, or the whole discussion is going nowhere.

One thing in common with these three points is that family should NEVER be treated mercilessly. In the end, if we neglected our family, what else do we have?

4) RSS feed
This is another time waster. For the benefit of those who might not familiar, RSS feed is basically a method to read multiple blogs simultaneously. The application will retrieve all the new post from the blogs and listed them down for us to read. I am currently subscribed to about 30 blogs and I read them daily.

But of course I am very merciless when it comes to reading RSS feed, I just have a glimpse through what the post is about, and if it is not related to me, for examples, about a convention in Las Vegas or about things I already knew, I will delete it in 2 seconds and move on.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

5) Newspaper
I once a perfectionist, read the newspaper from the front to the back, not missing any news. I was at first trying to improve my English. Then I started to have this desire to know everything there is to know.

It doesn’t take me too long to realize that that is an impossible things to do. And what benefit can I gain from reading about the stock exchange when I am not at all interested in it.

Be merciless with your newspaper reading. Read only the headlines and if anything interest you, read the first paragrapah, if that continues to interest you, scan through the whole articles. Never read it word by word. You may have to start over when you finish 🙂

– I wonder –
Any other things we should be merciless on?

——– Personal Note ———
I am currently the secretary of the Mill’s Safety Committee and we have meetings every 3 months. Generally, the meeting is to discuss any safety related issues.

I have to consistently pull them back to the agenda at hand 🙂 which is not a very popular thing to do.

Photo credit : deonstrauss

I am thinking of starting an experiment today. An experiment that if done correctly, we will achieve more in one day compared to what we achieve in one whole week. It’s very easy and I’m sure we can all benefit from it. Ready?

Task 1 : Family
Take note of the time and set your alarm in your phone to 1 hour from now. Answer this question – What two things we can do now (not later, not tomorrow, but NOW) to show to our family how much we love them?

Quickly figure out the answer to that question. To kickstart the experiment, here are some examples of answers :

• I should call my mother over the phone and really talk to her, asking her this and that
• I will write a very short letter addressed to all my family members and put it in writing of how much I love them

There are only 3 rules to the experiment

• We can only do 2 things for each questions, so it is very important to choose action that will have the best impact.
• The answers must be in term of action, not something vague like “I want to be nicer to my parent” or “I will make them happy”. It is also very important that the action is an action we can do immediately. For example, if you’re on a plane, write a thank you card maybe
• You have only 1 hour to finish your task. When the alarm goes off, do the next task. Of course if you finish the first task in 5 minutes, you can choose between straight away do the next task, or wait for your alarm.

Interested? Here are your next task

Task 2 : Spouse / Loved One
What 2 things you can do now to appreciate your spouse?

Task 3 : Career
What 2 things you can do now that will help you be promoted?

Task 4 : Knowledge
What 2 things you can research on the internet now and remember for the rest of your life?

Task 5 : Health
What 2 things you can do now to sweat?

That’s already 10 things done in 5 hours. Not bad! Of course there are more topics to cover and I’m sure you can help me there.

Most of the time, the best way to get things done, is to just plain do something about it. Imagine we spend every hour in our life, doing something that really matters like your answers above (Of course among other things).. That person must be very successful 🙂

– I wonder –
Do you have any other suggestion of questions to be answered and practised?

———— Personal Note ————
Just come back from the mill. There’s a contractor installing gearbox and its corresponding motor. However they left the work unfinished, the alignment is all out. So I have to call up my foreman and work together with him to correct the situation. It’s 1 am and I’m very hungry and tired. Good night everyone

Have you ever tried meditation? Do you even know what is meditation? 🙂 Well there are a lot of advance meditation technique out there. They even have book on it. So when there’s a book specifically about meditation, it usually must be important.

In fact, it is important. Let me get this straight first, you will not be able to fly with meditation, and you will not be able to communicate with spiritual being. The whole meditation is actually just a way for you to restart your day, without having to go to sleep.

Imagine you are waking up early in the morning, you are supposed to be refresh then right? That’s exactly what we want to achieve by meditating, that refreshing feeling. So now you know what to expect from meditation.

Ok, so what’s the rule? is it hard to do? I can guarantee you that it is one of the easiest thing to do. Let me show you the basic of meditation. Believe me, all the advance ones are based on this.

1) Close your eyes
You need to close your eyes to meditate. About 80% of our interaction with our surrounding originates from sight. So by closing the eyes, we should have 80% more success to focus on our meditation

So please… do not meditate while you’re driving kay 🙂

2) Breathe
This is it.. the big secret. Meditation is all about breathing. You focus just on your breathing. Feel the air you inhale, try to pause for while then exhale it back and pause a while before you start the cycle

Hear the air going in and out, nothing else. It will help if you don’t speak too 🙂

3) When swayed, hear again the breathing
This step is so important, I’m putting it as step 3. Your mind will wander when you meditate. What’s to blog? How long have you been meditating? etc.

Just remember, when your mind wanders, slowly come back to hearing those in and out breathing. No need to get frustrated. That’s just how our mind works.

So how long are you supposed to do this.. Take as long as you want. You will be surprised at the effect afterward 🙂

– I wonder –
How do you practise meditation? or calm yourself? Any other tips?

———— Personal Note —————
I know that most of you may already be familiar with meditation. Well, I just started learning about meditation a few years back, and it had done wonders to me. So this article is meant specifically to those who are not familiar with it.

Care to share how it helped you?

Photo Credit – 3amfromkyoto

One thing I heard from my manager that I will never forget is the word – “Follow Up”. Not because it is any important but because he almost always scream the word to me. 🙂

However that word really is one of the most important word in management. You want to be a manager, you have to practise the word. You start a project, you will need to do follow up even though your project had been 2 years completed. Check through if there are any complication, arising issue, hidden problem etc.

And once you’ve done that, plan your immediate action to address the problem and finetune the whole operation.

Lastly.. can you guess what’s the next thing to do? You guess it right.. Follow up again.

It is with great pleasure however, for me to announce that the above description is actually just an introduction to today’s post.

I actually want to ask you this question. How’s that 2008 Resolution going?

Some had resolve to lose some weight, some may want to start a new hobby. Mathematically speaking, we should actually be 1/12 successful with the resolution by February 1st. So what about you guys? If you can put a percentage on your resolution achievement, what percentage would that be?

A working example – your 2008’s resolution is to save $6000 as your emergency fund. And after checking on February 1st, the amount saved is $400. You can now say that your resolution is now 6.7% achieved. Congratulation! 🙂

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this one. The most important step is NOT the percentage of achievement. It can be 0% or 10%. The most important step is actually “FOLLOW UP”. We need to check back every now and then on the progress of our resolution.

The progress can be positive or negative, no matter. But when we follow up we will know our status and hopefully after that we can structure our plan to get back on track.

– I wonder –
What’s your resolution’s achievement percentage?

————- Personal Note ———–
It’s sad, but I have to say that my percentage is almost zero. It’s not a total zero, since some of the resolution involves this blog progress. And I’m quite happy with that now.

Next week will be going to be busy busy busy. I will drive back to Kedah (about 550km from here) and start the preparation for DaPocket’s wedding. I will be official photographer of the event. Need to brush up my skills then 🙂