How to Sleep Less & 'Live More'

I thought I would share something useful I have read with my lovely classmates in this free-style last post for this class. I have read an e-book by Kacper Postawsky titled "Powerful Sleep: How to Sleep Less and Feel Far More Energy than Ever." I have used his techniques and tips for a long time and I can say this guy knows what he's talking about. It's a totally different feeling when you wake up in the early morning very energetic, alert and excited about what this new day has in store for you. On the other hand, it's very depressing, at least for me, to wake up at 2 or 3 PM only to find out that more than half of your day has been nullified, canceled, gone.

I've always wondered why many babies and children sleep for much fewer hours than adults do. And I guess that besides the physiological reasons, kids have such exciting lives to lead that sleeping is so boring for them in comparison to what they can do when they're awake. They have so much to learn and experiment with. New words, or rather, an entire new language, new experiences, new skills. (I'm always in love with the magical moment of a baby's first few walking steps :-). I think everyone's lives should be one of such excitement and vibrancy, but the sad truth is that most adults forgot what it's like to be really alive and have fallen into the day-to-day boring rhythm of urban routine life. Here are some tips from the aforementioned book if you would like to enhance your sleeping system and make room for more waking-life excitement:

• Expose your eye to more indirect sunlight because it increases your alertness and inhibits the secretion of sleep hormones. (That's why we sleep at night and wake up in the morning:-). Open the curtains and don't overwear sunglasses.
  
  
• Take power naps. But make sure you take it at the right time -when you feel really sleepy in the afternoon and avoid late naps as they are night-sleep destroyers- and for the proper duration- the shorter the better. any nap longer than 45 minutes would turn the benefit into harm.
  
  
• Exercise in the morning right after you wake up for at least 15 minutes. When you start to move, it increases your cardiac rhythm and your temperature and slows down melatonin.
  
  
• Drink enough water. Proper hydration makes your sleep a lot more restful and deeper, because, remember?, during sleep all the important immune metabolic activities take place. And it all requires a great amount of water. (Which is why many people wake up thirsty)
  
  
• Make sure you have total darkness in the room your sleeping in.
  
  
• Have fixed rising and sleeping times every day. It programs your body to automatically rise and sleep at those certain times.
  
  
• Find your ideal wake-up time; the time you feel you are most alert you almost get out of bed automatically without any effort (or for some folks, battles). The way you find this time is through trial and error. Keep trying different wake-up times everyday, in 20-minutes variations, until you hit your target.
  .
  .
  .
  etc

The book is so cool. I recommend it to everyone who is struggling with his/her sleeping schedule.

How Would Web 3.0 Look Like?

Picture taken from www.asiamediasoft.net

With the web 2.0 applications being very well-established with websites like Youtube, Myspace and Facebook, one has to wonder what is the next big thing? If there is gonna be a Web 3.0, what would it look like? From what I read, it seems to me that there is gonna be a huge contrast between the way web 2.0 content is presented and the way web 3.0 content is gonna be.

More free content in 2.0, but less shared content in 3.0. Many issues about privacy in 2.0, but fewer issues in 3.0 since it is expected to have more strict policies and restrictions to quite the huge amount of privacy fears present in nowadays social networking sites. When marketing companies are getting into the picture to try to take advantage of the abundance of personal information available on those sites, users are freaked out and many people actually delete their accounts or never create ones.

The huge openness of the web 2.0 reflected by sharing very personal stories, appointments and media is being ardently questioned by analysts. How far could you go on trusting that what this person is telling you is accurate or just totally made up? No one can tell and it's not very easy to tell. Personally, I don't completely trust the profile unless I personally know the person in real life because, again, there's no way for me to tell. Maybe web 3.0 developers could do something about this .. Who knows?

Digital Convergence, This Era is Yours!

Pictrue taken from http://www.businessinnovationinsider.com/

I wonder if one day, I wake up and all I need to do before I go outside is to push a button for all the morning routines to be performed. Quite a stretched thought, but that's what the "Digital Convergence" trend will lead us to if it continues to go on forever. Digital Convergence is "the technological trend whereby a variety of different digital devices such as televisions, mobile telephones, and now refrigerators are merging into a multi-use communications appliance employing common software to communicate through the Internet" [source]. It's very intriguing that as time passes by more and more functions are performed by fewer and fewer number of devices until we reach the degree that we only need one or two devices to perform most of our daily tasks.

It's like the humorous definition of an expert; "Someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know nothing." Electronic devices are surprisingly becoming experts on serving us! And I think mobile social networking or "Mobile Storytelling" is only one aspect of this huge phenomenon. When someone uses his mobile phone to report something, it's only one use of the multiple converging functions the device is increasingly possessing. Camera, calendar, browser, music player, voice recorder, planner, GPS locator, alarm ... and a phone all in one.

So I have to wonder; would that affect the quality of each individual service or function the mobile phone has as the number increases? In other words, if the number of functions is the denomenator, would that decrease the individual quality of each service? Maybe .. maybe not. I don't know!

Is More Always Better?

Picture take from www.netsnake.com

Since the dawn of the internet, everyone has been flooded with storms of information and hurricanes of irrelevant web content. Yet, it has been looked at positively most of the time. It brings people together; It makes knowledge available to everyone; And it makes the world a small global village. But rarely do people wonder if this overwhelming stream of information is always an advantage.

To me I think it depends on the perspective you're coming from. I think we can rate walks of life in terms of what I'd like to call their "weboresistence" (God bless physics and the abundance of fun terms it supplies ). Politics, in my opinion, would score the highest on this measure. Everyone is using the web to merely affirm their stands and go further down the line of polarization. The net has strengthened the opposition, provided each party with more weapons in its campaign arsenal, and has proven to not have this much of a unifying effect on the field of politics. From this perspective, more information; more tools, did not mean better position at all.

In the field of finance, some research shows that additional trading information does not always mean better decisions and higher returns. The value of the information varies greatly with the nature of its source and content. Even in marketing and advertising, it is known that more exposure, bigger ads and longer videos in social media is only better to a certain extent.

As I said, it depends on where you're coming from. More information is not always something you want to look for.

Blog Your Career Into Existence

Picture taken from http://www.kaushik.net/

I was very happy I had the opportunity to attend the career night the Information Systems department at Kogod held last Thursday. We had great panelists that shared their wonderful experiences with us on how to find our passion within a certain career path and excel at doing it. It was a great event that I benefited from so much. Lots of sweet food, too :-)

One of the things they all emphasized and repeated more than once was to watch what we put out to the cyber world of the internet. "What you publish online is who you are to your employer. If you won't share it publicly, don't upload it electronically." They also said that if you have anything you don't like your potential employer to find out about you, begin the cleaning process immediately because it's not a quick one neither is it easy to completely remove it from the nervous system of the net.

Furthermore, on the positive side, if you want more opportunities and greater career advantage, show your talent online. Display what you're good at on your blogs, your profile, or whatever. If you're a tech savvy and can answer tech questions professionally, use your online activities to show that. If you have an innovative idea or a creative solution, show the world your talent because no one is gonna hire you based on your resume. "The blog is your new resume!"

News Prosumers: Let's Make What We Take

Picture taken from http://www.textually.org/

I remember last year when the bridge in Minneapolis fell apart, my friend who lives in the same state, told me that a very interesting phenomenon took place there. It wasn't only newpapers and TV journalists. Everyone there was taking photos and videos to share with the world. The "citizen media" phenomenon was born (at least in my mind back then :-)).

I think what this means to media companies is that they have to rethink their tradional methods of top-down distribution becuase people who used to be at the consuming end of the channel are now shifting towards to production end. Smart newsmakers can use the eruption of this phenomenon to gain better communication with their customers and increase the shared circle of understanding with this "used-to-be" audience.

The tools are exploding! It's not just blogs and media sharing websites, there are the wikis (from which the most famous user-generated website, wikipedia, emerged) and mashups that take data or services from more than one place and combine them, and much more on its way to see the light. The key is to ride with the wave and understand what's in this inevitable transition.
"Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or a greater Benefit.” ~Napoleon Hill

Not Facing Each Other; An Advantage

I like the idea of looking at being virtually connected rather than being in physical proximity as a boost to the team productivity instead of an obstacle. I've always heard people complain and state "lack of face-to-face" on the disadvantages side, but now more people are recognizing how it can actually help.

What if I personally prefer my desk rather than a round table in a conference room? I'd join a virtual team. What if I hate frequent travelling, the tiresome jet lag effect and the awful airport delays? What if I believe in the "No-Place-Like-Home" philosophy? ... What If? What If? What If? ... All of these are valid reasons to prefer a virtual team over a physical one.

But it's always a matter of weighing pros and cons in a subjective judgement call. What about the time difference? What if the team finds a convenient meeting time to most members, but it's 3:00 am in the morning where I live? How can I -as the group manager- maintain trust between the members? What if I get more motivation from being in a group- physically in a group- rather than being alone with a laptop? ... What if? What if? What if? ... All of these are also valid reasons to prefer a physical team over a virtual one.

As I said, it's a subjective judgement call, I believe.