Last Monday, Ashok sir took a very good session on 'Effective Time Management'.
One of the key things he explained was about 'Important Urgent Matrix', also called 'The Time Management Matrix'.
Currently I have started categorized my weekly tasks with this matrix.
As per the matrix, Tasks you have decided or assigned can be categorized as urgent or not urgent & important or not important. So we have 4 quadrants.
Now its up to you to choose the perfect quadrant for each task you decided to do.
Few examples for each quadrant.
Quadrant 1: Crises, Projects with short deadline
Quadrant 2: Planning, Recreation, Analysis
Quadrant 3: Interruptions like phone calls, Replying emails, Some meetings
Quadrant 4: Some time-pass mails, Chatting, Watching meaningless TV Shows, In short all the things which wastes your valuable time.
Based on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) by Stephen R. Covey
Are you a Web Developer?
We know that, there are so many web developers, who called themselves master of web technologies or they consider themselves the best.
But the real thing is.. if you are a web developer, you must be having the knowledge of these web techniques.
Amit Kumar Singh, project manager at 'Pune IT Labs' is saying about the 5 key skills of a successful web developer. I just read that, let me tell you all that in very short and I also added few things from point view as well.
- Layout of site : HTML
- Look n feel of site : CSS
- Client side scripting : JavaScript
- Database : SQL
- Server side scripting language
Front-end of most of the site is because of HTML only. Website is nothing without proper look n feel & proper layout. May be server side scripting is optional, but HTML is must.
If you only know about only 'tr', 'td' tags, that's not enough. Get a look into 'div's as well. Follow the w3C standards for HTML or XHTML.
CSS
The design of the website, made using CSS. There are lots of attributes in CSS. Get a knowledge of the basic CSS applications. Also make sure you understand the browser capabilities as well.
JavaScript
Doing anything dynamically on client side needs JavaScript. In old days it was used only for the purpose like alert, open pop-ups, animate mouse etc. But these days, there are the lot many JavaScript frameworks in market. You will hardly find a popular site, which is not using any JavaScript framework. You, as a web developer might have used or at least heard about Ajax. Its in JavaScript only.
Another thing that you should keep in mind is, the DOM (Document Object Model). Just go through it. JavaScript is much easy if you know the DOM very well.
Database
Database driven sites are common now a days & since long. Yes, as a web developer you are knowing the basic thing of SQL. Be a master of not only SELECT, UPDATE queries, but also of Database design as well. Implement Stored Procedures if required, and the most important thing Joins.If you know the Joins, you can reduce the number of database calls.
Server side scripting
I don't want to tell more here, because you already doing these. PHP is my favorite language, so I will tell you all here in terms of it. Make sure you must be having the basic knowledge of core of the languare. Because most of the people are using frameworks from starting of the career. So they never have to look into basic syntaxes.
Rank yourself out of 10 for each of the above skill, then consider yourself, whether you are a successful web developer.
Ahmedabad, the economical capital of Gujarat was hit by series of more than 17 bomb blasts on Saturday, Jul 27, 2008.
Few minutes before the blasts.
Around 6:25 pm, Shailesh called me, "What you doing yaar, lets have some snacks, I'm hungry."
"I'm sleeping, let me sleep", I replied on the phone.
"Ok, I will be at your home, after few minutes.", he said.
I told him. "k, fine, come after 10-15 minutes, I'll be ready."
"As I need to fix my spectacles' frame, lets have some snacks, & after that we will go to the the "Drashti chasma ghar", I told him.
He said, "OK".
On the bike, We about to reach 'Karnavalti vada-pau', near the location of first blast and suddenly bike started coughing, Shailesh found that the bike was in reserved. He told me to give some fuel for the bike first. I agreed & he changed the path towards the patrol-pump instead of 'Karnavalti vada-pau'. We went through Lilanagar, the area was normal as usual. Patrol-pump was in totally different direction from the 'Drashti chasma ghar'. I don't know why, but now Shailesh was not in mood to go to the pump. He turned the bike towards Thakkarbapa nagar. As we reached there, the area was crowded with lots of people near 'Kuldevi Tea-stall'. Also more and more people were rushing to the location. But we thought, there might be small issue between some people & they were fighting. So we reached to the shop of spectacles, I gave my spectacles to the person in the shop. Inbetween, people inside the shop were talking about the crowd, they told me, there was a bomb blast there. In just 2 minutes the person fixed my specs & returned me.
Now we were outside the shop, on the main road, everybody talking about the blasts, somebody told us there were blasts near 'Sardar Patel Diamond Market' & in Sarangpur area as well. I called my dad on his cell, but the line was jammed. So I called on land-line phone at my home. I told about the blasts to my mom, as she wasn't aware about the blasts.
We left the bike there only, and started a walk towards the 'Kuldevi Tea-stall' with the people, as road was blocked for the vehicles. We reached the sight of blasts. This was the place, at which me & my friends enjoyed Tea lots of time. But this time, Terrorists enjoyed the blasts over there. Police pulled the people back, so we also had to pulled ourselves back & we left the place. We were eager to know about the other blasts near 'Sardar Patel Diamond Market'. We decided to go over there on the bike. We reached near that, but road was blocked. Now, instead of going anywhere, we decieded to go home. So we had to choose the long path which leads towards our home. At about 7:10 pm we reached the home. At that time news channels were giving news about 5-6 blasts in Ahmedabad.
At the end of the day, figure of blasts reached to 17 and death toll rised to 40.
4 of the total blasts were in Bapunagar area only, In which I live.
Two blasts were outside the main building of 'Sardar Patel Diamond Market', which you will find always crowded with diamond merchants. After the first blast at this location, police found a live bomb & was trying to take the people away from it & suddenly it blasted, but luckily nobody injured.
Other two blasts were near 'Kuldevi Tea-stall'.
Another live bomb was found in Lilanagar, which is a sub-area of Bapunagar, luckily it was defused.
All three locations I mentioned above are just few meters away from my Home. Its like, these locations are on the perimeter of a circle and I live in the center point of that circle.
Not only me, nobody in Ahmedabad can forget this evening.
Here are some differences, I noticed between Bill Gates & Steve Jobs.
| Bill Gates | Steve Jobs |
| He is a PC | He is a Mac |
| He does rethinking after launching new product | He does inventive thinking, then launch new product. |
| Always try to add cool features to pathetic old things | Always find new cool things |
| Presentations | |
| He wears Suit with Tie and well polished shoes or wears Sweater in cold. | He always wears cool black jersey with full sleeves, blue denim jeans and sports shoes |
 |  |
| His speech is more vague and filled with abstractions | He's relaxed so the audience is relaxed |
| His slides contains lot many characters and small images | His slides contain very less no. of characters and bigger images |
| Uses Blue, Green, Yellow etc. colors in slides. | Uses White and Black & Blue colors mostely |
| Uses terms like "rich capabilities," "rich fonts," "rich way". | Uses terms like "cool way," "cool features", "amaizing..". |
| Drinks water in a glass. | He puts the neck of a sports water bottle in his mouth and drinks water |
| Others | |
| Has a home with lots of Windows | His Home, may be called iHome with no Windows |
| Has windows explorer, can run on Mac, in which Bill gates can hide himself. | Has a Finder which can find Bill gates as well. |
If you know more or want to share more, post your comments.
