Jason Ishibashi

Goals: gettin’em done

A friend recently posted her 2011 Summer Goals and even managed to accomplish one the very first weekend. Impressive right?

While she is without question ahead of the game, (have YOU updated your goals recently?) the question now is: “How do I avoid ending summer with a list of unaccomplished goals?”

Tip 1: Make S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Your goals should be specific so that you can create a plan to accomplish them. Let’s look at the the goal take more photos. What does this entail? A better goal would be, replace five photos in my portfolio. This goal is also measurable and attainable. Having a stretch goal (difficult to attain) is great, but to prevent yourself from burning out or feeling like Sisyphus you need goals that you can finish, and you need to be able to figure out exactly what you need to do to finish them.

You goals should be relevant. Taking an amazing landscape photo does not help you very much if your portfolio focuses on, say, wedding photography. The five great photos you’re looking to take this summer should help your portfolio tell the story of who you are as a photographer. Finally, your goals need a time-frame. When are you going to accomplish your goal?

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting works for any field, not just photography. How would you improve upon the goal blog more or learn Spanish? Have you set your summer goals yet?

Tip 2: Go Social

Tell your friends. I guarantee this will make far more interesting conversation rather than what you did at work/school today. You can help each other stay motivated and keep each other on task. You will find it much more difficult to put tasks off when others expect to hear about your difficulties and accomplishments along the way.

Looking to blog more? Talk about how you set your goals, how things are going along the way, how you feel, how you distract yourself, how to handle the difficult aspects, or anything else that comes up along the way. You’ll find that you want to write about these things making the task of blogging much easier. You’ll probably also find that people will actually read about these stories.

Fill your Twitter with little tidbits. You can reference longer blog posts, or just keep your friends up to date on how things are going. People who don’t talk about SOMETHING do not last very long in my feed. They are not interesting to read.

Tip 3: Just Start

Habits are hard to break. Once you are used to doing something, you keep doing it because it feels natural. Don’t worry about the best way to get involved, just get involved. Do it today. Do it now.

Let me know:

What are your summer goals?
Are they SMART?
Tell me about them along the way!

1 June 2011 ·

A Win Is A Win… Except When It’s A WIN!

It’s the sports situation every boy dreams about. You know, full-count in the bottom of the ninth or inbounding the ball down by two with 2.3 seconds left.

Imagine standing at the free-throw line in the last game of the season of your senior year with a chance to put your team up by one. Make the shot and play 3.3 seconds of defense to win the game. Think you can handle the pressure?

What if I told you the win would break a 310-game conference losing streak streching 26 years? How about the pressure now?

Ryan Elmquist is no stranger to accomplishment. Perfect ACT. Landed a job at Google. Helped the CalTech Beavers win a basketball game. In the last game of his career, Elmquist, sank his freethrow with 3.3 seconds left ending a losing streak that started before he was born.

“When you’re president of Caltech, you witness scientific breakthroughs, Mars landings, and any number of other memorable events. Storming the court with Nobel laureate Bob Grubbs will certainly rank high on my list of Caltech memories.”

Dr. Jean-Lou Chameau, President, California Institue of Technology.

A win is a win. Unless a Nobel laureate storms the court. Then it’s a WIN.

24 February 2011 ·

Because We’ve Always Done It This Way…

The following is an excerpt from an article written by James Bennett. It is a joke that should be in the preface of every LEAN book written. Read why we do things the way we’ve ALWAYS done things.

There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a fire hose.

You build a nice big room-sized cage, and in one end of it you put five monkeys. In the other end you put the banana. Then you stand by with the fire hose. Sooner or later one of the monkeys is going to go after the banana, and when it does you turn on the fire hose and spray the other monkeys with it. Replace the banana if needed, then repeat the process. Monkeys are pretty smart, so they’ll figure this out pretty quickly: “If anybody goes for the banana, the rest of us get the hose.” Soon they’ll attack any member of their group who tries to go to the banana.

Once this happens, you take one monkey out of the cage and bring in a new one. The new monkey will come in, try to make friends, then probably go for the banana. And the other monkeys, knowing what this means, will attack him to stop you from using the hose on them. Eventually the new monkey will get the message, and will even start joining in on the attack if somebody else goes for the banana. Once this happens, take another of the original monkeys out of the cage and bring in another new monkey.

After repeating this a few times, there will come a moment when none of the monkeys in the cage have ever been sprayed by the fire hose; in fact, they’ll never even have seen the hose. But they’ll attack any monkey who goes to get the banana. If the monkeys could speak English, and if you could ask them why they attack anyone who goes for the banana, their answer would almost certainly be: “Well, I don’t really know, but that’s how we’ve always done things around here.”

This is a startlingly good analogy for the way lots of corporations do things: once a particular process is entrenched (and especially after a couple rounds of employee turnover), there’s nobody left who remembers why the company does things this way. There’s nobody who stops to think about whether this is still a good way to do things, or whether it was even a good idea way back at the beginning. The process continues through nothing more than inertia, and anyone who suggests a change is likely to end up viciously attacked by monkeys.

10 February 2011 ·

Programming Cheat Sheets Perfect For Cubical Walls

Web Designer and Developer David Child’s playground AddedBytes is informative and beautiful, but there is a particular section of his playground that I love: http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/

David makes well laid out cheat sheets for verious programming languages that are both visually appealing and useful posted to any cubicle wall.

While you’re there, check out David’s blog which often contains useful tidbits of web design, web development, and typography.

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9 June 2010 ·

Use Ketchup As A Meeting Manager

Ketchup uses a very plain interface that does what it promises and nothing more. When you need an easy and basic way to track an activity for a meeting, Ketchup could be the solution. With Ketchup you can keep track of agendas, attendees, action items, who said what, and more.

Ketchup could not be any simpler to use. The registration takes mere seconds, and it takes less than two minutes to figure out how to use every feature. Simply start using Ketchup.

If you want to share online, simply tick a checkbox to make it public. You be given a URL to allow others access to your meeting and notes.

Since it’s still under development, Ketchup is free, “but pretty soon [they’re] going to start charging for it.”

I signed up and grabbed my “early access” account, and you should too. I still think Google Wave will be my go-to collaboration tool, but the simplicity of Ketchup certainly has it’s charm.

Ketchup (http://useketchup.com)

13 January 2010 ·

Left Your Flash Drive At Home? No Problem.

hokorii:

Technology has spoiled me. On my way to work this morning I realized I left my flash drive at home. I immediately thought “damn, I wish I could browse my Home and transfer the flash drive to my Car without having to go back” T_T …

Ah, yes, the good old days of USB flash drives. So, what do you do when you leave your flash drive at home? I guess you’d have to go back home and get it, but what if you didn’t have to carry around a flash drive.

If you have access to the Internet and are able to download files to the computer you’re using, then you do not have to.

DropBox (http://getdropbox.com)

getDropBox.com is my go to place for all my files. Simply sign up on the website and you have 2GB of online storage, but if you get me to refer you we both get even more storage space (hit me up on Twitter or facebook).

There is a very good demo video on their home page if you want to skip the rest of this post.

“But you could do that with Google Docs or Gmail!” you exclaim.

It gets better. getDropBox.com has a client program that will install on Mac, Windows, or Linux. It runs in the background with very little fuss. It creates a folder on your computer called a DropBox and every time you create, delete, or edit a file or folder within that DropBox the changes are automatically synced to the website and to any other computer running your DropBox account. That way you never have multiple versions of a document to confuse you. The website also keeps old versions in case you accidently deleted something, or in case you wanted to go back and see what any file looked like a week or even a month ago.

You can also share files and/or folders with other people via the website, or even keep in sync with other getDropBox.com users which makes it a great collaboration tool.

They also recently launched their iPhone app and have a mobile optimized website for Blackberry and other users.

Additional space is available for a monthly fee, but 2GB for free is a great deal considering all it does.

Make DropBox More Powerful with SyncToy (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…)

You can download SyncToy for free if you’re using Microsoft Windows. Simply set up a sync between your DropBox folder and your USB key and voila! There are options as to set which direction or both to sync. SyncToy is a great tool for Windows and is highly recommended for backup purposes as well.

Apple Solution

For those of you with MobileMe can always use iDisk.

10 December 2009 ·