April’s resolution to watch the eating went really well. Even though the “no eating past 11pm” resolution was hard to stick to (especially for a night owl like me), I definitely felt better at the end of the month. In fact, I need to repeat this resolution sometime during the year.

I took a long time thinking of what I wanted to do in May, and I’ve settled on clearing 10 items of “stuff” on a daily basis. I gotta admit I’m quite a hoarder and a packrat (both of physical and virtual items), so my goal is to follow the GTD principle of touching each item once and settling where they should be, deleting/throwing them or performing some action on them. Thinking about all the stuff in my room, a few hundred bookmarks in my “read later” folder and another 300 notes in Evernote and numerous files and folders on my hard drives that I can look through and prune, this should help unclutter my life and brain a little bit.

I’m running out of resolutions to make, so if you have one to recommend, leave it in the comments please!

Last year I managed to read 17 books, a far cry from the annual 30 target that Wanida and I set since 2006 (actually, we’ve never reached it). It’s actually a slip from last year (19 books) despite the year being slightly freer than last.

Fiction
Austin Grossman – Soon I Will Be Invincible
Dan Abnett – Ravenor Returned
George R. R. Martin – A Clash Of Kings
George R. R. Martin – A Game Of Thrones
Heroes: Saving Charlie
Interworld
Robin Hobb – Assassin’s Apprentice
Robin Hobb – Royal Assassin
The Bad Twin

Ravenor Returned

I was pretty focused on books in series this year. The two best were also drastically different: On one side of the spectrum are the first few books in George R R Martin’s fantasy series A Song Of Fire And Ice, a huge sprawling epic series with a multitude of characters and action. On the other is the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb (reviews of the first two books here and here) which is very much a character piece focused on no more than ten main characters throughout each book. I also moved on to the second book in the Ravenor series and enjoyed it immensely.

The disappointments were Soon I Will Be Invincible (by Austin Grossman) and Interworld (by Neil Gaiman). The former was a painfully slow story, the latter one that didn’t demonstrate huge originality, which was a surprise as it comes from Neil Gaiman, the man behind Sandman.

Non-Fiction
Seth Godin – Meatball Sundae
Joseph Jaffe – Join The Conversation
David Allen – Getting Things Done
Cult Of The Amateur
Timothy Ferris – 4 Hour Workweek
Keith Ferrazzi – Never Eat Alone
Nikki Stafford – Finding Lost
Nikki Stafford – Finding Lost S3

Join The Conversation

The highlight of my non-fiction readings are probably Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, which has totally changed the way I look at productivity. I can’t say I’ve mastered it, but I’m definitely working at it. Join the Conversation was a great book for me as well (review here). The first real “social media” book, but certainly not the last. Never Eat Alone wasn’t so much a revelation as a very good action map that I really enjoyed, and Nikki Stafford’s Finding Lost books were a great companion to my Lost obsession.

Hands down the worst book (not just for non-fiction, but all year) goes to Cult of the Amateur (read my review here). The digital revolution is happening, like it or not.

What were your best (and worst) books of 2008, fiction or otherwise? What are you most looking forward to reading in 2009?

The work is really piling up this week, but on the bright side, I’m beginning to get the hand of instantly recording down stuff I need to do so that a) I don’t forget it, and b) I can schedule the next action. Combined with this cool weekly schedule task planner template, I feel like I’m going to stay on top of things for this week.

Real quick, the highlight of the week is not going to be work (surprise!) with a trip to Montreal with QSEAC (Queen’s South East Asian Club) together with Ava, Joyce and William. From all appearances this is going to be a party trip (the fee for the trip includes cover charge to two clubs), and I’m catching Jack’s Mannequin on Friday, so I predict this weekend is going to be one of the best ever in Kingston!

In other news the gym routine has been working out pretty well. Managed to squeeze in three sessions last week and two for the week before that. I weighed myself the other day and I’m at the same weight as when I left Singapore, so that’s a good thing.

The one thing I really hope to catch up on this week is reading. Web Analytics: An Hour A Day has been sitting around forever, and new stuff from Amazon just came in last week, so I have no shortage of reading material. What I do have is a shortage of time, since I’m behind my academic reading as well.

Finally, I found the time to get on Facebook and upload new stuff taken in Queen’s, and also pictures from way back in 2006 with SMUBE. Check them out!

Yikes I realise I didn’t paste last week’s even though I did it. Sign of a crazy week!

The good news is: I’ve finished my major work for this week so I have absolutely nothing that needs to be done for the rest of the week, so I am going to be catching up on some much missed blogging,TV watching, gaming and reading. Not necessarily in that order.

This Friday there’s an Asian Semi-Formal, it’s supposed to be really fun, so I can’t wait for that!

Lots of reviews coming up in the near future. The Heroes novel, “Saving Charlie” and a couple of graphic novels, as well as a few “about me” segments that I’m adding to the mix, so stay tuned for that! (Are you subscribed for free to RSS yet?)

Thanks for reading!

Wow this is obviously four days late and I can’t believe it. My excuse is that I had an assignment due on Monday and a presentation on Wednesday. Not truly excuses but anyways…

I’m going to break the format since this is a quick post.

First, I must say the idea of blogging all of this down was a good one. Whether or not anyone is reading, I did feel the pressure to get it done and write it down. Guess there’s an accountability involved when blogging.

Next up, I did get my work (at least the academic stuff) done for the week. I’m a little bit behind blogging for the personal site, but I should make up for it over the weekend.

On the social/weekend front, I’m traveling to Toronto tomorrow for a weekend of concerts, including Panic At The Disco, Dashboard Confessional, Plain White T’s and Metro Station. I’m going to try as much as possible to make it a “no work” weekend.

And on that note I’m going to wrap this up and hopefully the WR schedule will return to normal this Monday!

One more week and it’ll be a full month of doing the Weekly Reviews (WR). I must say it has definitely helped me work the week out in advance, the only problem is my attention tends to waver towards the end of the week.

So reviewing last weeks goals:

• 3/5 chapters studied for the Media & Pop Culture midterm, check.

• Assassin’s Apprentice done, check. Started on Saving Charlie, check. Review of Assassin’s Apprentice, this week.

• Rss feeds – trimmed.

• Making Nadnut’s potato salad – ran out of ingredients and no time to go to the store, postponed to this week.

• Multimedia theme – as you can guess, postponed.

1) Expenses Review
Actually didn’t spend a whole lot this week, so thumbs up!

2) Social Review
Exchange fair just happened tonight (videos soon) and May Jin’s birthday on Thursday. It’s Thanksgiving on Monday so it’s a long weekend, we’ll see what plans come up.

3) Learning Review
I did make it through another chapter of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, but it’s proving more technical than I thought it would, so the pace is slow.

4) Goals For The Week:

• Prep workload for the next two weeks

• Plan & buy concert & train tickets for gigs (halfway done)

• Finish studying for the Pop Culture quiz

• Finish the postponed activities.

Two days down for the week already, time to get cracking!

I’m posting this a day late because I did all this on paper but forgot to blog about it! Terrible me!

Reviewing last week’s goals:

• I did find an omlette recipe that worked well on Sunday, so I fulfilled cooking

• Earl Grey cookies were swapped for cranberry orange cookies which turned out fantastically. I really outdid myself this time.

• I’ve settled all the concerts, or at least the dates. Jason Mraz, Cobra Starship, The Hush Sound, Panic At The Disco and a very, very unlikely Metro Station (and I’m bummed about that)

• Managed to shove all the academic work into one Saturday afternoon and got that out of the way

• I literally went through and cleared about 200 bookmarks. Rss pruning will have to be pushed to this week.

All in all, I’m really happy about stuff last week!

On to the reviews:

1) Expenses Review
I didn’t blow my budget this week. Which is a good thing.

2) Social Review
Ottawa on Saturday is a possibility, but I haven’t decided yet. 4hrs to and fro in a cramped bus gets me really grumpy.

3) Learning Review
I finally did my Cult Of The Amateur review. Haven’t managed to read much of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, but I should be ploughing through it this week slowly.

4) Goals for the week

• To marginally study for my Film 240 midterm in two weeks. It’s the same week as the Mraz concert, so I gotta start early

• Finish Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb, do a review, and move on to Saving Charlie (the Heroes book)

• Trim my RSS feeds

• Try making Nadnut’s potato salad

• Find a good multimedia theme for my personal blog (pictures, rss feeds, videos). Any recommendations?

Last week’s Weekly Review (WR) worked pretty well for me, but not perfectly, which was to be expected for the first time.

Reviewing last week’s goals:

• Baking – done successfully
• Clearing bookmarks – transferred to this week
• Reading 1 chapter a day – succeeded (more or less)
• Academic stuff – done

On to the reviews

1) Expenses review
I blew this last week with shopping in Montreal, hopefully this week I’ll cut back by half or so for it to even it out

2) Social review
Wide open this week, which is not always good because it means things might have to be pushed aside

3) Learning review
I skipped the Cult of the Amateur last week so I’ll have to get down to it, as well as numerous posts on Podcamp Montreal which are at least thought of, if not half-typed.

4) Goals for the week

• Find one dish to cook this week
• Try out the earl grey cookies recipe
• Discover and decide on concerts I must watch (Jason Mraz October 13!)
• Work out some academic deadlines before they pass me by
• Clearing my RSS feeds and bookmarks

Not ambitious this week, largely a rehash of last week, but I’m glad I’m blogging about it to keep me going! If you’re using GTD as well, let me know if you have suggestions for improvement!

I’ve been reading on-again, off-again about Getting Things Done (GTD), and one thing I’ve decided to implement is the Weekly Review (WR), and what better way to make sure I stick to implementing it than to blog publicly about it?

The basic idea behind the WR is to process stuff that went on during the week, get things out of the way and refocus on the next week. There are various ways to do it with varying specifications, but as a starting point, I’ve picked three points from Scott Young, as well as one of my own.

1) Expenses review
I’m usually pretty meticulous about this in Singapore, but the combination of traveling and using cards has meant I haven’t kept an eye on expenditure since I left Singapore three weeks ago. While I’m not revealing this part explicitly, I have set a budget and in the next update, will tell you whether I managed to stick to it or not.

2) Social review
This is really just forecasting what social stuff I have this week so you know when to schedule what.. Outside of Podcamp Montreal, where I’ll head down to Montreal from Friday to Sunday, it looks like a large portion it is going to be spontaneous and unscheduled.

3) Learning review
I finished Cult of the Amateur this week and will review what I learned (don’t worry, it’s not much) on my other blog by Wednesday.

4) Goals for the week
This is my section and I have a few things I feel I’ve been putting off for the longest time:

• Get down to baking – I didn’t bring my recipe with me, so I hope Google serves me well
• Various academic stuff – I shall not bore you with the details
• Clearing my bookmarks and GMarks – This is easily going to take me half a day
• Read a chapter a day of the books I’ve gotten from Amazon – I’ve picked Assassin’s Apprentice and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day
• Laugh at my investment banking friends – This is only semi-serious, but I just gotta do it

Writing this down, it doesn’t seem like much, but it’ll be a good stepping stone for the WR, which I’ll revise again next week. Wish me luck!