Activity will be low for a couple of weeks, due to well deserved blog-holidays by his author. See you at my return!

I am thrilled: I can confirm I got all my elective choices. Other than the two courses I took last quarter (Advanced Marketing Strategy and Strategy 2: Corporate Strategy), I will be taking the following cocktail of Entrepreneurship, OB-soft skills, Finance and Marketing.

Analysis for Marketing Planing & Dec. Making
Capital Markets & Financing (previously Finance 2)
Financial Statement Analysis
Leading Teams and Organisations
Managing the Growing Business
Negotiation & Bargaining
Paths to Power
Financing the Entrepreneurial Business
Shadowing Project
Venture Capital & Private Equity

And those will be the courses for the totality of my 2nd year. I hope all my 2nd year readers got the courses they wanted too!

Finally, a quick MBA related advice: If you are about to join the MBA of your dreams after the summer, do exempt as many subjects as possible! I guarantee you that you will have plenty of “more interesting stuff to do” instead of revisiting “once more statistics”.

Probably, the tradeoff between some extra peace of mind now vs redoing IT&Business on October seems unclear now. But, please trust me on that one young future student, it will be a pain to sit trough classes you already have some serious knowledge about. Exempting now (exam, project, etc…) will not “totally spoil” your holidays, plus it can feel so good when you leave the room because you are not required to do course X, Y, Z and you can dedicate to explore some other interests.

What a year! I am getting into a reflective mode, doing a year balance (hence the illustration). It’s almost a year since we arrived to London.

Suffice to say, I am starting to evaluate the good things, and after one year the bad things of London appear clearly in front of me. What is getting on my nerves lately is how appalling are all sorts of public services. As a Spaniard, I can’t understand how filthy are things here. Let me explain myself. For Barcelonian standards,…

• the tube is old, dirty, crowded, utterly unreliable and expensive.
• the buildings are old, dirty, oftentimes with mice (see waste collection below), utterly unreliable and incredibly expensive.
• the NHS hospital I go is old, dirty, crowded, service is utterly unreliable and taxes are still high.
• the waste collection system in London collect only twice per week, leaving my neighbourhood of Westminster, 600m away from where Tony Blair leaves, looking old, dirty, and the taxes we pay to the council are quite high. Waste is everywhere, on every single street there are waste bags on the street. No wonder London has a mice problem.

Do you see a trend here? I am starting to believe that people in London have a higher tolerance for dirt than elsewhere. Otherwise, there would be riots…

The good thing has been the 1st year in the MBA. By far, the best decision and learning experience ever. Meeting with great people, opportunities, fun, everything!

Apart from the good vs bad things in London, I am reflecting on my efforts to launch a start up during my 1st year of the MBA. No matter how I put it, it hasn’t launched yet. Of course going through the 1st year is no piece of cake, but I am still frustrated by the delays in going to market.

True, the team is as close as we have ever been to getting to market. Still, we are not there yet. Starting up is hard to do!!!

While I am busy with the internship, I am also enjoying time to redevelop two general skills, with the help of two books.

The first skill is organizing myself: As mentioned in a previous post, I am using GTD, Getting Things Done, by David Allen.

Pros: Fantastic book, loaded with common sense and a lot of experience on how to organize your life to Get Things Done. It contains a very useful framework to understand the day-to-day processes of the “information economy”. And the system for organizing with .txt files that I use, requires minimal maintenance.

Cons: If right after implementing, you end up with a list of actions of around 150-ish lines, quite likely if you have a busy life, you might get stressed and/or anxious and stop doing it. I got the reaction, but I know how to manage it after reading “The Now Habit”, the excellent book by Neil Fiore about procrastination. Everybody procrastinates in some areas of their lives. Everybody.

To sum up the book, eye opening experience with a radical impact on my stress free productivity, assuming you know how to manage your reaction to a 150 next action list.

The second skill is running : I have been an on-off runner, due to chronical pain and tendinitis in my Achilles tendon. Guess what? It can be due to poor running form. I probably have quite a few bad running habits. But I am not alone: Statistics show that 65% of runners in the USA stop running in any year due to injury! So the promise of the book to get back, enjoy running and “Run injury-free for the rest of your life” is incredibly appealing. I am still starting with the book, so I have no final impression about it.

So that is some of the fundamental relearning that I am engaged with at the moment. At some point in life, it is important to relearn things, drop bad habits, strip of the superfluous and get back to the fundamentals.

Exams, projects, starting to work, farewells, parties, exams, projects, taking care of Raquel too, friends, talking to family in Barcelona, 36h mini holiday between school and Reuters,…

To regain some mental peace and control over my life, I NEED TO close some chapters (basically, close the 1st year academic chapters that are still open) so these do not interfere too much with the rest of my life. Three courses to go (Macroecon, Strategy 2, Advanced Marketing Strategy), and a lot of work to be put into these.

Wish me luck!

P.

It's been a week since I bought "Getting Things Done", following…

.a. how popular the book was in Silicon Valley (43 folders and similar)
.b. an email in the internal Portal of the school.
.c. a reference by Al Martine http://www.abigpond.com/blog/2007/05/28/getting-things-done

and coincidentally in time with the book acquisition and comment by RusGirl http://rusgirl.blogspot.com/2007/06/getting-things-done.html

So now that everybody is talking about it, it's my turn to discuss it. First, if you want to get an idea about how it works, definitely look at the previous posts. I am going to focus on the outcome and how I use it.

Warning: If you haven't read the book, this post might sound like gibberish to you.

I still have no final opinion on the system. First impression is good, it looks like a system with tons of common sense and practical experience implemented. I am giving it a serious go, because I truly believe I can benefit from it.

Plus starting up a business while doing a MBA and doing internship practices while having a life is quite challenging in terms of organization. That's my main motivation to try it: I am sure I could get better organized. And the book promises "stress free productivity!" How sexier can it sound?

== HOW I DO IT: ==

I use a simple, relatively low tech approach, similar to the one described at  http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/15/how-does-a-nerd-hack-gtd/

I use simple .txt files for most of my professional tasks. The only exceptions are the small paper notebook I carry with me to write down tasks and ideas (that later down I translate into paper) and a "physical next action" binder I have set up at home, for those physical items that become the reminder themselves (like the films to be processed or new batteries to buy).

Back to the text files, I have the basic lists in the system implemented:

# _@nextactions
# @inbox
# @waiting
# @someday
# Projects list
# Plus the Google calendar for my commitments.

== HOW AM I DOING? ==

Three days ago I collected a huge "inbox" of items that required my attention, and today I processed it, resulting in plenty of "next actions".

How do all these files look today after a lot of work?

# _@nextactions 117 lines of text (not all actions, there are some empty lines and context spacers)
# @inbox empty, as it should be after processing it. My email inbox is empty too. :D (double smile)
# @waiting One item only. I suspect there should be more, I need to get used to track more items here
# @someday 40 lines of text, a reasonable amount of things to eventually do in the future.
# Projects list Huge with 95 lines. That's what stresses me the most, the number of projects has multiplied. It should simplify slightly with finishing the 1st year, but the MBA is not the lion's share of my projects (Oops!) Need to streamline a little bit more, I believe.
# Plus the Google calendar for my commitments. (all the commitment, the hard landscape is there)

Now all the actions seem in place. Still, the system feels unnatural to me now, we'll see how it goes.

== Next developments: ==

* I need some extra work to put onto the projects, to gain better control and planning
* I want to explore better the filing system. Both the reference A-Z and the 43 folders for tickling.

I will keep you posted!

I am astonished!

I just found my old Volvo, the one I drove in the USA, perfectly captured in the new “street view” application in Google Maps.

Here is the screen capture:

And here is the link to the walk online.

Of course that is where I lived in Stanford, and that proves that pictures were taken either 2005 or first half of 2006. Unbelievable! I was playing with the application and everything looked so familiar, because even my car was there!

Now I feel a little bit spied!

Today I did something totally old-fashioned! I went to a shop to process two picture films! Yes, 35mm camera film. Unbelievable, I know. I felt like a Flintstone character

Here is the story: I had a couple of those relic films running around the house. One of these “to do items” that lay around the house but never get around doing. From the time when I actually had a 35mm camera, circa 2003!

So I went in, I got a receipt for my two camera rolls, completely ignorant of their content, waited for one hour, and got a CD with the results… What did those rolls contain?

Surprise, surprise! I got 2003 pictures of a picnic, the climbing of a small mountain, a family gathering in Barcelona, and my wife posing. Nothing unusual, but quite fun nevertheless! It was like a time capsule, only 4 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised that, after almost 4 years, the pictures still hold, with reasonable quality (the camera was not that great to start with!), after moving twice during these years.

Funny thing about technological innovations: They become the default after a while! Now, it seems unthinkable to wait to develop the images, or the need to go to a shop to get the satisfaction of viewing the images. Actually, I expect yesterday’s stream party to be already published and distributed on “the facebook”!

This is how technology changes the experience and the defaults!