Sharpening the saw
October 14th, 2007
Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.
“What are you doing?” you ask.
“Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.”
“You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?”
“Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.”
“Well why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire. “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.”
“I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing!”
Excerpt from Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 habits”
sharpening part one
We just returned from one week of vacation (first time in 10 years without kids – what a joy to revive the relation with my wife…) in Mühlheim/Mosel (Hotel highly recommended), Strasbourg (city is great, the “hotel” is not recommended) and finally Colmar (great hotel from 1565, great food). Even though I brought the laptop, I didn’t work – and it was good.
sharpening part two
I have written a lot of code and a lot of text in the last months (you will read more about the writing soon), and I’ve gone through 3 or 4 keyboards (two white Apple keyboard; they are just lousy, a Microsoft “ergonomic 4000 something” lousy one and now one of the new Apple aluminum ones; which I adore – so far).
Still, my hands and wrists hurt a lot. Triggered by Giulio, I started to look into Dvorak and played a bit with it. Further research led me to the german biased NEO layout. I’ve been struggling with it for the last few days. It’s a pain to unlearn 25 years of QWERTY and my current typing speed is abysmal. But there is (slow) progress. And you have to love a layout that makes it easy to type :-).
sharpening part three
Watching the following, final lecture by professor Randy Pausch who has a life expectancy of 3-6 months, is an amazing experience. Carve out the 90 minutes of your day and be inspired!
(via TechCrunch)
sharpening part four
Enjoy! (there are several parts)
(play that bass)
sharpening part five
Enjoy!
Technorati Tags: covey, keyboard, neo, dvorak, randypausch, saw, stanleyjordan, victorwooten
Entry Filed under: Uncategorized
4 Comments Add your own
1. Sanjay M | November 10th, 2007 at 19:30
hey nice site :) I too had wrist pain and have written a lot of approaches I took to solve it – maybe you could have a look sometime. Just search for rsi on my site – cheers :) (my site seems to be down right now else I’d given you the exact link)
2. Sanjay M | November 11th, 2007 at 08:41
ah here it is…
My RSI story…
http://msanjay.weblogs.us/entries/3/my-rsi-story
Another interesting link is the transcript here…
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/pauschlastlecturetranscript.pdf
3. a common man à ²¸à ²â€&hellip | November 12th, 2007 at 19:16
[...] Src: invisible blog [...]
4. How Nice People Come Acro&hellip | December 5th, 2007 at 19:00
[...] Build margin. Leave earlier. Don’t insist on jamming every waking moment with something to accomplish. Spend some time “sharpening the saw.” Or listening. Or just watching people. [...]
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