Thankful For Good Health

Tags

gratitude

I’m thankful for having good health.  I’m thankful for having enough time left on this earth to still dedicate my life to things that are meaningful.

Link: NYTimes: How I Became a Teacher

Tags

education

From The New York Times:

SCHOOLBOOK: How I Became a Teacher

A first-year teacher writes: “As a high school student, I never once considered the training my teachers had received or what their personal teaching philosophies may have been. I did not know what a lesson plan was.” Now she knows.

http://nyti.ms/w4rH4A

Sent from my iPad

Stupid App Idea: Goal With A Friend

Tags

brainstorm, idea

I was trying to convince Cate to work on this App with me, she didn’t really like the idea and thought it can be done with pen and paper instead.

App: Goal With A Friend
You:

• Set a goal
• Pick a charity, schedule a payment
• Invite a friend to help
• How much is it worth?
• Pay 10 percent first
• Pay 90 percent when done

Friend:

• Accept to help a friend
• Email, call friend to help
• Get instant 10 percent fee
• Get reminders to help ‘you’ to achive goal
• Get final payment in cash or paypal when done

At the End
If goal is not done, final payment is donated to a charity

Why this is useful

• We ignore reminders
• Things get done when a friend knows and remind you
• There are incentive for the friend and incentive for you

Your Immediate Team Members Are What Matters

I love working for my manager, Cecilia. She is caring, funny, a good listener and a good person.

I love working for my manager’s manager, my VP. He is strong, careful, a good listener and thoughtful.

I love my co-workers, they are good, smart, passionate and caring.

This is what makes me love my company, Yahoo!

Podcast: Living Without Work: The Long-Term Unemployed | KQED Public Media for Northern CA

Living Without Work: The Long-Term Unemployed | KQED Public Media for Northern CA.

Treat people looking for work with basic acknowledgement of receiving their resume, follow up quickly after the interview.

How I’m Learning To Getting Things Done Using Evernote and Remember The Milk

There are many articles and personal experiences of how people are using the GTD method to get things done stress free.  I think the human bring is not built to not remember things and when you should do them.  Hence the use of tools, paper to capture information is helpful.

Here is what works for me using these 2 tools.  Evernote and Remember The Milk.  You can search for Evernote GTD and Remember The Milk GTD

The important thing is for you to use the method that works for you every day, regardless of how it’s done.  I’m using the following as an ideal, but there are flaws in my executing them (as Katherine could tell you about following up on scheduling a doctor’s appointment)

Evernote

• I setup a private email address in Evernote so that I can email notes to myself from anywhere
• I do not use bookmark services when I come across something to read, I email it into Evernote with the #read tag.  Then I setup a smart folder for the tag ‘read’ in order to read it later
• When I’m on my laptop and want to capture something, I print it to PDF into Evernote.
• I follow this method of GTD with Evernote with 9 notebooks.   The most important folder is my 3_ASAP folder of my important projects
• All notes I capture using any other tools eventually goes into Evernote, that is my single source of truth for anything that is not time sensitive.
• I also have a 91_Passwords folder where I put in all my passwords but for a password, I either encrypt it in Evernote or if it’s one of my 10 or so passwords I use, I put the first and last digit but everything in between, like L…….1 just a s a reminder.

Remember The Milk

• I love the web interface for Remember The Milk to capture tasks and group tasks together.  So I create my personal projects and work projects and create tasks that is needed complete the projects.  I first create a search #project, #NNN then save the search.  Then every task I create falls into that project
• I also setup a private email address in Remember The Milk so I could email myself tasks with tags #project, #NNN, where NNN is the name of the project
• When I have something to read and if I think it’s time sensitive I would also email it into Remember The Milk with #read tag or with #project, #NNN tag

Daily Ritual

• On my Firefox bookmark, I have a Daily folder where I put in all the links I should visit at least once a day.  Yahoo!’s corporate portal, my bug list that I’m assigned to, the list of un-triaged tickets, 3 of my personal blogs that I should write something for, NYTimes.com, Mint.com to check my finances, Remember The Milk for my task for that day.
• Everyday I’m trying to get my Inbox to zero, anything I need to get to a later time, is forwarded to RTM or Evernote
• I schedule slots on my calendar to work on my tasks so no one can schedule meetings into those slots

Weekly Ritual

• Friday’s I tend to organize my Evernote, Remember The Milk list.  Review what I’ve done over the last week and make adjustments.

Monthly Ritual

• I review my job description and adjust if I’m not doing what I’m suppose to, or I may need to add/subtract something from my job responsibilities and write down an agenda to talk to my manager about

How Do You Manage Your Incoming Queue To Get Things Done?

Tags

gtd

Hallway conversation with 2 co-workers today went like this.

Tony: “Hey L., how come you were able to get your ticket resolved?”

L: “Oh I commute with G. and he did it for me”

G: “Happened to walk by, yeah, it was easy”

Tony: “But if someone else asked you G., what would happen?”

G: “It goes into my queue, because I trust L”

——
So, if your queue of things to do is too much work to do. How do you prioritize the queue?

I assume your queue is

1) Your Inbox
2) Your bug list
3) If you are using scrum, then your current sprint
4) You have some stuff in your brain
5) Favors you do for people you trust
6) Your goals that you set for yourself
7) Other todo list

I’m curious how do you figure out what to do next?

How much of your actual time are you spending on the following 4 bucket

1) Important non-urgent
2) Important urgent
3) Not important, but urgent
4) Not important, non-urgent

Do you have a way to determine which bucket your queue item falls into?

How To Lead By Influence And Trust

I have learned a lot from John Thrall. while working at Yahoo! in the last 3 years.

John became the leader for Yahoo! Media during a transition of the leadership position a few years ago.

From the point of view of the rank and file, he looked to be young, high energy but an unknown from our perspective.

I worked with him closely for 2 years to build the new Yahoo! Publishing Platform. He mentored me quietly through the life cycle of conception, buy in from executives, prototype, design validation and finally execution.

All along I appreciated that he never micro managed. Instead, he paved the way for me by evangelizing my role as the architect and encouraging different approaches for me to double check my assumptions.

One of the most important intangibles qualities John demonstrated is his commitment. Famous quote (I paraphrase) : “I’m not going anywhere, I’m here at Yahoo! for the long haul. Let’s do this right!”

He probably has no idea how reassuring and rare it is to hear the commitment spoken out loud and be believed.

T

Why I’m re-energized to work at Yahoo! after Livestand iPad app launched

The Livestand from Yahoo! iPad app launched on Nov 2nd and became the #1 News iPad app and #2 overall app on the iTunes AppStore in 1 day.  Today on Friday Nov 4th,  it became the #1 app in 3 days on iTunes.  You should try it yourself and compare it with Flipboard and Zite and see for yourself which one you like.  Perhaps it’ll be another app on your iPad to satisfy your reading needs alongside those other great apps.  There is always room for 3.

It’s  testimonial to the great work done by the Livestand team, Alison, Jin, Mike, Ric and the engineering members whom I don’t know personally.  I know internally it was great feat for the following reasons.

1. It’s a BHAG within Yahoo! not just to build YAA (yet another App).   It’s forward looking to build a platform for our users, our advertisers and our publishers.
2. Along with this launch, Yahoo! also launched a platform to deploy HTML5 applications called Cocktails.
3. The entire iPad experience runs on HTML5 (CSS, Javascript), inside of another Yahoo! platform which provides the native iOS services to Livestand.  This Yahoo! platform will also be ported to Android as well a open sourced in 2012
4. Pause:  The Livestand app launched alongside 2 brand new platforms!  3 launches at once!

Why am I re-energized to work for Yahoo!?

1. I haved worked on a project for the last 2 years on rebuilding Yahoo! publishing system call Yahoo! Publishing Platform and I have seen our ability to excuted on BHAG.  We have launched almost 100+ Yahoo! media sites (OMG, News, Movies, TV, Sports, Finance) in more markets that I’ve seen in my 12 years at Yahoo!
2. Livestand is another example of launching a product and platform at the same time and our ability to execute in less than a year shows that we can execute as an engineering community
3. I found the internal docs to setup a Livestand development environment, I ran the scripts, got Livestand built on a iOS simulator and open up Safari and was able to run Livestand on my browser, in .. less than 1 hour!  What?  that is just awesome!
4. The Cocktails platform is just a start for Yahoo! to build more native-like apps in less time and at scale
5. Even with all the crap going on in the press, internally our leaders are focused, supportive and willing to tackle more BHAG
6. We have been working hard at 2012 planning and I’m even more excited to see what we can excute on in the next few years

Thanks Livestand team for injecting more energy in this 12 year Yahoo! veteran !

You might also like: Why I Came To Yahoo! And Why I Am Still Here?

Livestand from Yahoo! – #1 App on the Apple AppStore

Livestand from Yahoo! becomes #1 News App on Apple Store

On November 3rd, 2011 Yahoo! Livestand becomes the #1 News app on the Apple AppStore and #1 overall free App

Livestand T-shirt buys my loyalty

Yahoo! Livestand: addictive horoscope publication

I love this publication on from the Yahoo! Livestand iPad app. You spin the wheel on the rigth to see the horoscope.