Diary of a Recovering Procrastinator (S01E03) Hack The System

After days and weeks of sole searching, my productivity had not improved after admitting to myself that I had serious problem with getting things done on time or before the due date. I was no closer to breaking this procrastination loop than before I realized I was perennially stuck in it.

With the beauty of the age we live in now, solutions and/or suggestions were not very far away and I happened to come across one when I actively decided to reduce the amount of time I spent on social networks I viewed as adding little value to my productivity. Out went religiously tweeting between waking up in the morning and lunch time and in came LinkedIn. It was there that was found a link to an article on 5 bad habits that are holding you back in the office. I went to the resulting website without hesitation because I hungered for tips to get me out of my continuous rut. That day, themuse.com become one of my favorite websites.

Since then the number of articles I have tried assimilate is astounding but I did manage to keep my focus on which advise to focus on. Here I was introduced to productivity ‘hacks’. Tricks to help keep the mind focused, sharp and those to keep at bay the distractions that often characterize your typical working day. I have been guilty of trying out almost every hack suggested, some yielding positive results while others don’t make it passed 48 hours of trials.

I have come to realize that embedding a hack has a habit takes work and dedication, and it is very easy to slip back into what seems natural (procrastination) and rationalize not using your newly learned trick. If being doodle, and I don’t mean this in any harsh way, has been with you for the best part of your life you should expect it to be a miracle cure. It is a process whose duration is wholly a function of your dedication.

My is Nigel and I’m a recovering procrastinator!

Diary of a Recovering Procrastinator (S01E02) Case of The Snooze Button

It's 4:55am, the alarm is gently chiming to its climax telling you its time to get your pursuit of happiness on the road but guess what? The inventor of the alarm also included a snooze button. Before you realize it the time is 5:45 and the time allocated to your morning meditation and yoga is all but gone. You're upset with yourself that you missed a critical part of your new me programme. If left unchecked, this single sequence of events could derail your day, sending your to-do list to the scrap pile with only 2 out of 10 items crossed out.

Discipline is difficult to instill if you're a serial procrastinator like I was. To develop the habit of ignoring the snooze option requires patience and practise, telling yourself what needs to be done to achieve excellence.

Simply performing an action for 21 days straight embeds it in you subconcsious and you can break free of hitting the snooze button repeatedly.

Diary of a Recovering Procrastinator (S01E01)

pro|cras¦tin|ate

[prə(ʊ)ˈkrastɪneɪt]

VERB

Delay or postpone action; put off doing something

Two days in the making. That took long enough. Getting started when you've been as bad a procrastinator as me is always the biggest challenge. You put off finding the right words till tomorrow, then the next day and the next and before you realize it you've been talking about starting a blog post series for two months from the date you originally hatched the idea.

What drives a procrastinator? Is it a lack of drive? Is it in your blood or did you pick it up somewhere along the way? From experience it feels like a combination of both. If you have self esteem issues or low confidence, you will put off what anything that challenges you.

I liked a girl back in my younger days. As a teen, she was a sight to be hold. My friend and I were both had the hots for her but I had first 'dibs’. Pretty juvenile concept this dibs thing but it worked in getting my mate to allow me to go first. Unfortunately, my low self esteem resulted in me always putting off asking her out because I was terrified she'd turn me down. Well, I blew my dibs, she dated my friend and rest is history. I figured I had more time and that is what most procrastinators think. We roll over a task every time it comes up until the deadline is passed.

How do you break a habit that ties into your character make up? Maybe not break it but reduce it to an absolute minimum.

Master or Slave. Does Technology Have You?

Some of man's inventions have mainly been an extension of the human mind or human interaction. Take the personal computer for example, it was made to possess a processor mimicking the cognitive centre of the brain; Read Only Memory is akin to our genetic make up that cannot be altered. So if technology is an extension of humanity, it's purpose to do some form of work for us thereby establishing a master-slave relationship. Man being the master, technology being the slave.

Artificial intelligence on which the movie "Terminator" is based maybe decades or centuries away but it seems that while we went about making things that are supposed to make life easier and more enjoyable we flipped the master-slave balance in favour of technology. The smartphone is meant to be a problem solver in quick reach yet we find ourselves wholly dependent on it. Social networking websites started out as ways to connect people separated by vast distances but have slowly replaced the need for actual physical interaction. The Internet, which I call the ring leader, was built as a way to interconnect the globe for information sharing but now we spend a good portion of our waking breaths doing something that involves the Internet. If your service provider suffered an outage right now that was projected to last a week, would you just say OK or think about switching?

An argument may be put forth that there is no master-slave relationship, only pockets of people addicted to technology and that argument may have merit. Some are able to use technology when they absolutely need to but from my observation a good number have already fallen victim to this silent addiction. Need proof? Download an application that monitors how often you unlock your phone to use it. If you're like me you'll be astounded by the results.

The best way to make sure you don't fall into this master-slave trap is by practising disconnection; time away from technology be it hours or days. Then you'll discover that you only us gadgets when absolutely. Make technology work for you and not the other way around.

On which side do you sit...the master or the slave?

"Where's My Traffic Alert Message?"

I don't understand .... Why would i have to wait for a news report on the radio to here that traffic in some parts of town has been blocked because of riotous behaviour by students from the University of Zambia. Shouldn't The Road Transport and Safety Agency (RTSA) have some form of real-time messaging system to inform every motorist residing in a specific town about the situation on the roads?

Every person getting a licence or registering a motor vehicle supplies their mobile number and town. An automated script can single out numbers  for those in an affected town and send a broadcast message. I honestly think it's that simple to do.

Apart from this, I think we should have started creating some form of traffic control centre that monitors traffic on all roads whether it has traffic lights or not. Imagine the people charged with road safety being able to adjust the behaviour of traffic lights at peak periods to make driving around much easier. Only if all roads had traffic lights. The one with roundabouts are a special case but at least they (RTSA) would be able to see things build and send an officer to regulate.

Road fines is another area that could benefit from some technological advancement. You get stopped at a road block or randomly and are found with expired road tax but instead of having your car 'seized' or licence taken from you, all the officer does is charge you for driving with expired road tax, scans your vehicle registration barcode, puts a marker on the vehicle that this record must pay a fine before renewing and marker on the driver's licence as well or a reduction in points for deserving a licence. All this in real-time. Think of the accountability and easy of use. Cars with outstanding fines as well as drivers can be deemed not worthy to be on the road if they default. Its impact on bribery is another topic because all together though. And all this is not that farfetched, we already scan our vehicle registrations when purchasing road tax.

The Road Transport and Safety Agency has made some botched technology advancements though, they ordered a machine to assess vehicle fitness that didn't work very well initially. I do not know if the machine is being used now but it would be a case in point for apprehension over making leaps into the unknown of technology. Proper research and consultancy is needed, reports on all the options provided and government to sign off on the one that meets cost and objective.

At the time of writing this, the RTSA website, www.rtsa.org.zm, has been down for more than 3 weeks which is not acceptable. In the meantime, be a responsible motorist and let your fellow drivers know about road blocks and demos via Facebook or Twitter.

Technology and Governance

Disclaimer: The following is based on online research and may not be a complete account of the technology situation in government.

With that said, shall we begin.

There was a time when computers were rare in government, only available to a select few. Those days are long gone and we should be happy with that but we question to what degree this technology is helping our leaders govern our country. I ask the question, "is having computers in a ministry enough?" The answer is most certainly not.

For ministries like Finance, Commerce and any of the rest that do number crunching, the use of technology is more evident. They churn out expenditure reports, budgets etc. For others like Foreign Affairs, Works and Supply, they obvious do have reports being created what remains to be seen is the extent to which processes and decisions are built on the backbone of ICT. If a spot request was made for the number of vehicles on the government books, which are runners and the like, how long would it take to get a response? Do ministers rely on computer based Management Information for decision making? Government would gladly sign off expenditure on a management information system to be set up as an information repository and/or report generator. What needs to be seen is the will to make full use of such a system.

What do we need to do to improve governance?

A lot. To start with, mindset or cultural change. I remember a photo of the late Michael Chilufya Sata, may his soul rest in peace, hard at  work at his desk with mountains of paper work and no computer in sight. If I could ask him, he'd say computers are before his time and a needless bother. As the generation of leaders gets younger, we need more emphasis from them on rooting how the country is managed. It should not be seen as "by the way" thing.

Record keeping should be computerised. A paperless government may be pushing it but if 40% of the paper stored in archives can be cut out, imagine the space freed up and the cost of that paper channelled to other things or banked as savings.

Our registration systems need to be linked or made into one. When you get a National Registration Card (NRC), getting a passport should be seamless as the passport office can make an easy query for the rest of the information required. Extend it to birth and death certificates, as well as voters registration. Plus road licencing.

As part of the freedom to information bill,every government wing must make available key operating data and information for the public to use in their research or to know what that said wing is doing. Of course, this does not mean giving us classified information but a good amount of it on websites. Having a website as a ministry should be the norm not the exception. As a side note, I was very disappointed by the Bank of Zambia website when I was looking for old quarterly statements for financial institutions. I found nothing. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Information is key in decision making, our leaders need to put the processing of such information as a priority. ICT gives them this capability.

All parts of government should have computer systems to take away this manual paper-filled routine we have grown to accept. The Ministry of Lands has a computerised database of deeds, why shouldn't the home affairs one have a database of fingerprints, criminal records, etc?

Works and Supply could employ a fleet management system to track the massive number of vehicles government owns. I believe a lot of money is wasted on vehicles.

These are some of things I could think of and I'm sure someone reading this has thought of their own was we can really move with the times as a nation.....

Your Smartphone, Your Best Friend

To many, a smartphone is merely a means to take communicate via instant messaging like WhatsApp and Blackberry Messenger and/or Facebook and tweet. But for a good number, yet to be quantified, the smartphone has many faces. If you're like me, it does the above and a whole lot more.

A Smartphone is

1. Your Office....

More than one email account is set up. Be it personal and work mail connected to your corporate network via some form of secure authentication, you're able to respond on the go, receive and author documents whether it's spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations, scan and copy items. It's your business centre without the printer. I blog straight from my phone to the Internet. The beauty of technology. It is my office in my pocket.

2. Your Organiser...

Phones now help us know what the time is. Coupled with Facebook integration, we get reminders for our friends' birthdays and special events like anniversaries. The phone truly came to save us from our lapses in memory. Let's not forget that we can use them to draw up to do lists that came be backed up to your cloud storage service of choice. You have diary apps if keeping personal journals is something you can't do without.

3. Your Playmate...

As the old adage goes, all work and no play makes your smartphone boring stack of transistors. For those moments when you social networking is not entertaining enough we all need a set of games to call upon. From the hardcore gamer with a scaled down version of FIFA 15 or Assassins Creed to those that play Candy Crush or Snake. There is something for every one. If you don't have a single game on your phone, it's time to get one for emergency purposes.

4. Your Pocket Book...

Keeping track of your finances made easy. You have expense apps galore. Better apps would be those that integrate with your bank and perform your reconciliation automatically but that's for the future. I found vehicle management apps to track what you're spending on your car, give you service reminders and act as trip logs.  Online shopping is no longer restricted to the desktop. Amazon, eBay, Gumtree and even TradeCarView have apps on the leading platforms to get you on the go.

There are many functions your smartphone is able to perform and mine is by no stretch is an exhaustive list. If you use it for these 4 then I believe you're getting value for your purchase. If not, your decision to upgrade phones should be held off and until the current phone totally depreciates.