Today is a proud release of my Chronodex scheduler with GTD to-do list function! I had about 10 minutes of quiet time in the morning but then crazy whatsapp messages came in with lots of unfinished tasks, which reminded me of the importance of sitting down undisturbed to plan a good day.
It was first developed in November 2013 for my personal use and I've been filling it up with tasks in many of the busier days. I've modified it into a 3rd version and now ready to share with you busy bees. I usually use my Traveler's Notebook with two refills: A dated Chronodex Weekly Planner and a blank notebook for tasks, notes, drawings etc. However in busier days when tasks overflow or when I travel for business, a daily version is necessary. I've made it suitable to print on A4 paper, so that when you fold it two times evenly (a z-fold), you get a Traveler's Notebook sized task killer, simply slide it into the notebook and pull out quickly when in need.
There is not enough time for me to explain in details how to use it here, perhaps I can cover it later. But simply, one fold is a Chronodex daily scheduler with "TODAY'S FOCUS" and "GRATITUDE NOTE" sections to help you run your day with clear objectives and highlight the more beautiful things you find from your day. It also has small icons for you to track how many cups of water you have drank and weather icons to log your day.
The 2nd fold is the major GTD "Next Action" tab, where you want to lay your tasks in priority and kill them one by one. The 3rd fold is the usual GTD "Projects", "Waiting For" and "Someday/Maybe" tabs.
If you print it double sided, you can save a lot of papers because one paper can be used for 2 days. If you would like to use it without Traveler's Notebook, simply hold your pile of A4 papers with a binder's clip, it is a great way to have a dashboard like this on your desk lying flat.
It works great for me to plan my business trip days at terminals and coffee shops, I just needed to pull out the z-folded planner and start to write freely.
I've seen a lot of creativity from people using Chronodex without me explaining how to use it, perhaps someday I will, but for this daily version, I think it works very much similarly just with a GTD touch and self-explanatory. So, for now, that's all. Please download and share for free, but again it is entirely for personal use and please don't sell it. I will work hard to find time making Chronodex products into reality someday.
It is time for the release of the next 6 months' worth of Chronodex!
In 2011, my family received thousands of prayers for my father's condition, it was a lot of positive and calming energy and I still appreciate many of your kind messages to this date.
Chronodex as a creative tool was shared to make a difference in traditional and limiting grid-style scheduling. It was also shared to elevate positive energy for myself and my family. This time my wife needs your prayers, tomorrow she will go through an operation as the first battle against breast cancer, there will be a series of followup treatments I hope it will pass like a breeze. I hope to maintain a clear mind and yet being able to take it easy for why things happened the way they are, in terms of work, love, dreams and health (Did I just unconsciously telling myself that I've been putting these in the wrong priority?).
The Chronodex Facebook Page is going to be the center of version releases, news update, hacks sharing, so please do stop by once in a while to see what others are doing with their Chronie.
The Chronodex Flickr Group is a place where nicer photos were taken by users. The Instagram hash tag #chronodex allows you to find yet another bunch of interesting users and the crazy things they've done.
On the other hand, do Google up Chronodex for the fun of it. There have been a lot of mods in various paper sizes (A5, filofax, etc) or altered cores, as long as they are shared free, I'm ok. Some of the Chronodex super fans reported that there are people on Etsy selling Chronodex, that I'm not ok. So far, I've issued no license to anybody for commercial usage, but I will consider if it is a quality implementation.
Although creating your own ways to notate from a Chronodex core is encouraged, be it colors, pinpointing on tick marks or radiate from zones etc, I do have some tips I want to share in 2014. That's why I'm working on an upgrade of the core (now in its version 8, 9 and 10) which will allow you to draw with guides and simply look more elegant and smart. In the mean time, Maryanne Moll (Thanks Maryanne) did some nice videos on youTube sharing her way of using Chronodex, take a look:
For the fun of it, here's some beautiful Chronodex to look at:
(@momojin made this rubber stamp for herself by hand!)
(I've visited Seoul for business at the end of October, we had a great gathering of the Traveler's Notebook Korea User Group, they are absolutely amazing TN and Chronodex users, which I'm gonna talk about it in later posts. Jessica and several of her friends printed the Chronodex core on the passport size and kind enough to find a page not too personal to share here)
Finally, some of you already knew I have a Chronodex stamp under progress. It was too bad one of the parts maker went out of business so I had to find another quality maker to continue the project. I've tried many different ways and I found an elegant solution, I am determined to release a self-inking Chronodex stamp in 2014, you will love it!
There are so many small things you collected from travel, train/plane tickets, travel pass, postcards etc. You don't know what to do with them, you don't want to make a scrapbook out of them coz you are not sure if they will look good or you simply don't have such kind of energy to complete such daunting task, you obviously don't want to throw them away.....
I asked my flight attendant friend, whom I met years ago from tap dance group, to get me some of the tickets and paper stuffs she could collect from her trip to Russia, so that I could pretend I went there. Posted this picture on Flickr, then all of a sudden problem solved, see the conversation below:
Shanti: I'd be interested to see what you do with these. I've got a little shoe box full of tickets and receipts I've saved from wherever in the world I've travelled and I'm yet to plan what I will make with them.
Patrick: hahah for things I don't quite care about keeping, they will be used on some of my notebook refill covers. I suggest you to lay them flat on scanner and scan, not for archiving purpose, just to have a random collection of things from places you travelled to, then laser print the scanned collage on a large piece of A3 paper, use that A3 paper for decorative purpose on your stuffs (notebook refill cover, boxes, etc). This way you get to keep the original and you can enjoy seeing the copies of them here and there. Good tip? :)
Shanti: Great tip! Why haven't I even thought of scanning them? I'm sure some of them are probably faded by now. Ooo! I'm excited to get them out and look them over again now:) Thank you!
Patrick: oh gee, I haven't even done that before too, such a great idea come to think of it ..... hahahahah ;)
I'm heading Shanghai tomorrow for 1 week (like every month), so here's an update before I leave.
As usual, my Dad needs your prayer, which has been helpful in many ways. He was admitted to hospital because of fever last week, he shall be fine and come out in a few days, just wish him less painful and more happiness.
Things Organized Neatly is a very nice place to see the beauty of neat arrangement. I hope one day they will post my arrangements. Yesterday I was just thinking about how to effectively carry nothing but a few essential objects yet all of them look beautiful, kind of impossible for tomorrow's travel but a little thought experiement is always pleasing. Carrying my Turtlejacket Tri-Eye on a leather holster worn on cross shoulder leather strap sure got me a lot of attention :) I had a dinner with the guy behind Turtleback last week, they will have some beautiful lenses coming out soon which fit the Tri-Eye. I'm so happy he lusted after my DIY holster the entire time :)
As for the Chronodex self-inking stamp many has been asking for, I nailed the way to keep the wooden cover attached to the body by adding magnets, problem solved. There are still a few adjustments here and there in millimeters, but the outlook is great.
I can't let somebody carry the Chronodex stamp without the most stunning look (in my own terms), so the cover will be laser engraved! Been simulating how it will look for days, I still have a few technical problems to solve on the specification but it won't be long to start production, yay!
My day job is full of excitement to see future products and challenges with people and systems (social and computer), mind boggling to think things through, switching beta and alpha all the time. But I'm glad, the satisfaction is within. Gee I wish I had this new Fisheye Baby 110 camera with me for the trip starting tomorrow, super cute and handy, they didn't let me keep it.
Every year our Managing Director would send out a long email thanking everybody and sum up our achievements, one sentence stood out this year: "we never put 'maximizing sales and profit' our company's core value". I guess he detected an imbalance somehow, so I'm gonna quote him once in a while in difficult situations :) Some people thought it was just a lie coz any business is after profit afterall, but I look at it differently and I hope this little voice won't die, working hard on it.
Remember I introduced nLostnFound shop a while ago? I've finally come into agreement with the owner to create a corner with a little more content than just focus on selling products. The first implementation will be something related to missal books and bakerlite, hopefully we will set up the shelf in Times Square city'super right after I come back from Shanghai in July. Every antique item is hand picked by the owner and we hope we can share the stories we know about these objects to people visiting.
Smartphone photography is definitely the future, probably 95% of us will not carry a modern day camera 95% of the time, besides Apple just patented a changeable lens phone system, that tells a lot about our future too. Smartphone photography gadgets are popping up here and there, just that it is not yet a viable business for many. Like the iPhone cases ecosystem, one great innovation will change everything. Anyway, we have so many photos we take everyday, we never print them out anymore. So we worked with Fotomax to offer printing service for smartphone photos, after 2 months of testing and procrastination, finally it is moving forward, customer can now print square photos, make Instagram photo stickers and photo books. This is a comparison of their booth revamp (in Harbour City city'super) simulation vs. the actual outcome, proud to be able to faciliate ideas into reality. If you can visualize your ideas, making it happen is just a matter of gathering all necessary elements. I hope I'm not sounding too arrogant here.
Last week a colleague of mine thought I knew someone who could fix a phone, but I don't, so I took the challenge myself. Err, not an iPhone but a retro rotary one with a slightly improved 1970s circuit board. Everything worked except the unbearable noise on the speaker rendering conversation impossible. First I thought it was a problem with the phone line plugging into an ADSL broadband line so the separator screwed up, but after checking with the phone company that was not the case. So I picked up my screw driver and tempered with every circuit route inside with a magnifier. Turned out it was caused by a poor circuit board layout design, there is this one place where a screw is supposed to fix the board onto the phone but the screw was not insulated by eyelets, so the circuit was damaged, not enough electricity could pass through at that point. A simple bypass using wire fixed the phone. I had so much fun so instead of charging her HK$200 to fix a HK$165 phone, I wavied it :P Like how I used to play with making Gundam models, it is tremenduous fun to isolate problems and create solutions for the fun of it. Great education, are kids exposed to these experience these days? Probably not from the system.
So now the topic changed to kids. This is an evil kid, on the surface :) My niece is actually a super cute kid with a lot of smile and very talkative. She was just playing a disturbed look with my fisheye lens, don't worry we are good. Her dad my little brother is a hard working architect building schools. We just had a family gathering in this Dragon Boat festival.
And a week ago, we had a gathering of 14 kids on a squid hunting boat trip on a rainy day. We got nothing, not even one squid, and it was funny that all their energy were used up in anticipating and preparation so the boat trip was like the last stop of a great hang out :)
Watching them all together was a bit sentimental, they were kindergarten friends, some went to other schools some stayed and more of them will definitely scatter. Where are my kindergarten friends? They were so close to me and we are no longer in touch, we don't even remember each other's name anymore. This generation of kids is probably the best connected kids ever found on earth, at least their parents have facebook. I wondered, when we/they look back in 14 years, how will they feel about this video and their time spent together? Well, in our next gathering, I'm gonna ban iPhones and iPads, they are evil products in this type of gathering.
The other day I visited one of the remaining traditional print shop in Tai Kok Tsui (大角咀) together with a pro photographer. "Can we take a look inside?" Shop owner for more than 35 years Mr. Kwan said "sure, help yourself!"
Very humble and friendly Mr. Kwan said "these are quite useless, I'm gonna sell them to junk shops in time". He was talking about his collection of letterpress types. "They used to be sold in pounds from 5-6 type making shops in Hong Kong, nowadays there is no such need anymore and these became obsolete."
Yet his Original Heidelberg kept running behind like a living and breathing workhorse, spitting out serialized invoices page after pages.
How often do you need to do serious maintenance of the machine? I asked. "There is no such need, I bought the machine second handedly almost 35 years ago when I started Happy Printing (快樂印刷, his company). It costed me about HK$30,000 at that time, a huge sum of money enough to buy me a flat, but this machine gave me a business and raised my family".
I wish there were initiatives like those in Taiwan keeping these treasures (the people, the machines, the stories) alive by giving them new purposes: cultural preservation and education. "Don't throw them away!" we said, "I will give you a call when I decide to close for business" Mr. Kwan said.
Blake Mycoskie: Start Something That Matters I don't know why I couldn't finish this book, maybe it was the tone it was being written. Gotta get back to it someday, or not. (**)
Paco Underhill: Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping--Updated and Revised for the Internet, the Global Consumer, and Beyond Read this book 10 years ago. To read this updated copy is to refresh my memory of how things were done back then and what's changed recently. Although at the beginning it is kind of boring and you may not agree with their research methods, but later in the chapters you will find hidden wisdoms. Just follow the author's logic and see what you can learn from it. (***)
Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs Love hearing the stories all over again, some of them especially what happened in the past few years are new to me. Most importantly it is a closer portrait of Steve than all other books about him. Isaacson recorded audios during his interview with Steve, check out 60 minutes special and you will hear Steve's own voice. RIP Steve. (****)
Richard Branson: Losing My Virginity Read it like a novel coz you'll find it attractive as a story to follow through. Learn from his character through stories! (****)
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