Carey Island

From Left: Gibson, Constant, Gideon, Maglin, Joyce, Paul, Raynard, Cecelia, Celestine, Ann, Reginald, Christopher and Amama.

1997

Ways to Procrastination

Top 10 Ways to Procrastinate
Mike Gorman (The Anchor - Rhode Island College's Paper)

Coming up with something to write about this week was not an easy task. I knew my deadline was looming but still I thought “I have plenty of time!” and I told myself, “Your best works comes out when you’re under pressure!” So there I sat, 12 hours before this piece was do, staring at a blank screen. A wise sage popped into my office and said, “You know, procrastination will never get you anywhere,” and in that moment I knew I had to prove her wrong! Procrastination will get me somewhere, or at least get me through this week! Light bulbs flashed on in my head and that little man who sits on my shoulder all week shouted, “Eureka!” What better topic to discuss on a college campus than procrastination? College students are the best procrastinators on the face of the earth so I encourage you to sit back, put aside your work for a moment, and peruse this compendium of time wasters I think you may be familiar with.

10. Shopping What better way to waste time than to waste money?! Hours can be spent at the mall jumping from store to store looking for things you don’t need when you have deadlines breathing down your neck. One of the best one stop procrastination stops… Target! Or “Tar-jhay” as the cool kids call it. Under their one roof you can get a new outfit, the latest DVDs, a loaf of bread, and a brand new highlighter to help you organize those notes sitting on your desk.

9. Video GamesX-Box 360… PS2… PS3… N64… You know what these initials mean! I truly believe that when time travel is finally invented it will be linked to playing video games because when I sit down to play Halo I blink and four hours have passed. My eyes are as dry as a desert. I’m disoriented and generally confused as to where my day has gone. If you don’t believe me fire up your old school Nintendo system and pop in Mario Kart. Let me know how that worked out for you when you finally come back to reality two months later!

8. Getting Coffee We live in an area where there is pretty much a Dunkin Donuts on every other street corner and a gourmet coffee shop on the blocks in between. So it is a no-brainer that when college students need to procrastinate the caffeine machine calls their name! “You wanna get coffee?” “Want a coffee?” “Man a coffee would wake me up!” are all common phrases heard when some time needs some wasting. If you are going to Dunks though, can you grab me a Vanilla Chai and maybe a blueberry muffin? You’re the best!

7. Help someone else with their work. In my experience I have found that I am never more helpful to the people around me than when I have a million things to get done for myself. For some reason it is easier to help someone else write up flash cards than to finish that report for you. I would like to say it is because altruism is a human trait that rises to the surface easily but that would be a lie. Instead I think in helping someone else we get a sense of accomplishment while still being able to completely avoid our own lives… bonus!

6. Check Away Messages Oh what would we do if we could not use people’s away messages to track every single moment of their days? Compulsive away message checking is an increasingly troubling problem amongst our society today. Nothing annoys me more than when I see a friend and they are asking questions about things I know I did not tell them personally. Duh! If I post my itinerary in my away message, then of course people are going to know what I am doing. I sometimes think we use messaging programs more for checking away messages than actually chatting. Don’t believe me? Well then, go to your buddy list and see just how many people you have on there that you have never really spoken to, but you keep around nonetheless so you can constantly check their away message. Told you so!

5. Contact Family For some reason it is never more urgent to return that call from mom or dad until the night before a big exam. You will spend hours on the phone tracking them down then lamenting to them about how hard it was to find them and how much work you have to do for school. Would it have made more sense to just have answered their call when you saw their number come up on your cell’s call waiting in the first place therefore freeing up all this time for getting work done? Of course the answer is yes, but if you did that you wouldn’t be a procrastinator!

4. People Watch in DDC You’ve got no money for shopping or coffee. You have already run over your minutes on your phone for the month and your roommate is using your computer. How are you ever going to procrastinate now?? Pack up your books and grab yourself a corner table at Donovan. After settling in with a Nantucket Nectar and maybe some pita chips you bought with your last few points, start looking around. There are some damn interesting people passing through DDC throughout the day. You don’t know them or their lives story but you sure as heck can invent a back-story for them! The wilder the better.

3. MySpace/Facebook “Stalking” If checking away messages is a problem, MySpace/Facebook “stalking” is a disaster! These two sites will give you more information about the people around you than you could gather if you stole their wallets (FYI – theft is frowned upon currently!) Of course I do not mean stalking anyone as that is just creepy and wrong. I just mean it can be fun to look at your friends’ pages and see what their favorite books are or their results to some inane quiz invented by a 12 year old in Minnesota. If you are truly a professional time waster you can spend hours dressing up your own MySpace page with unnecessary glitter and flashing videos. Need some help with that? I would recommend contacting a certain Sweet Hall Front Desk employee, as she is a MySpace pro!

2. Clean your room How can you get any work done when your room is a mess? This is something we all try to convince ourselves of as deadlines loom. “If I organize my desk, getting my papers down will be a breeze!” Sure, and clean laundry will make your exam studying easier too. Keep telling yourself that as you Windex your computer monitor and dust your desk drawers. However, if you are convinced that this tactic actually works, come on by my apartment some night. I could use your assistance!

1. YouTube.com Sure there are a million websites out there that you could visit to waste your time but why go anywhere else besides the treasure chest that is YouTube.com? Nostalgic for a cartoon from your childhood? It is probably on YouTube. Enjoy watching people make fools of themselves in any number of situations? YouTube is the site for you. Personal recommendations include the videos: “Shoes,” “Muffins,” and “Barney Lip synchs Tupac.” I should write something witty now to close this piece but I think the mail just arrived and I haven’t checked YouTube myself yet today to see what is in the top ten videos of the day, and I also should see what’s going on in the Facebook news feed… and I could really use a coffee! See you next week!

Our Family Picture

2006 - Mum's Birthday

From Left : Michael-Lydia, Lucille-Huei Jin, Christine-William, Agatha, Mum, Peter-Maglin, Sheen-Lydia, Cecelia-Kenny, Nancy-Alex

Celebrating the 25th Dedication Anniversary

Cathedral

Sacred Heart of Jesus

Johor Bahru

By

Archbishop Salvatore Pennacchio

18-2-2007

Bukit Indah

Gideon & Gregory

February 2007

Growing Up

Gideon @ 2006

Facial Expression

Gregory @ 2006

Nuri at Bukit Indah 2006

Gregory having his pictures taken with his classmates and teachers.

November 2006

K1 Nuri Bukit Indah

Bird Nest at Bukit Indah

Front Porch

Procrastination . . .

Take Action
BBC – One Life
The hardest thing about reaching your goals is taking that first step, but remember that every great book started with a single word, every great song with a single beat. So whatever you can do, no matter how small, is a start.
Fear of failure
If you don't get an 'A' in your exams it doesn't mean you're a complete failure as a person. See it for what it is i.e. that you're a perfectly ok person who has happened to fail at one particular thing. Try to learn from it and you'll have the strength to accept life's challenges. Don't beat yourself up for not succeeding, that's being unfair to yourself.
Perfectionism
What is perfectionism?
* The desire to jump in and do things yourself because others just can't do it right
* Not wanting to start on something unless you're sure you can do it well
* The need to finish the job, and worrying if things are left 'hanging'
Going through life as a perfectionist can damage your self-esteem. That's because the impossibly high demands you make of yourself and others will often result in disappointment. It will also make any rejection you might experience even harder to deal with. Preventing perfectionism begins by saying 'no' to unreasonably high demands. Make sure your goals are realistic and stop focusing on your faults.
Procrastination
Do you put things off?
Find yourself making excuses to get out of doing things? We're all guilty of procrastinating from time to time, but when putting things off interferes with your life, you need to sort it out.
# Know yourself. What style of procrastination do you take? Cleaning your room? Socialising?Reading? Running away? Day dreaming? Keep an eye on yourself and learn tospot the warning signs.
# Get yourself a diary and use it every day. Write down what you are going todo or have already done. Carry it around with you every day, make it a habit.# Plan ahead. Break down tasks into smaller goals, and give these goals deadlines. Write these deadlines into your diary.
# Make a 'to do' list that you write into your diary. Even small, easy-to-dothings could be added to the list. Tick them off as you go along.
# Break things down. Breaking a task down into manageable chunks usuallyremoves the threat of having to do a large task all at once. Also, completingseveral small chunks is going to make you feel a lot more positive than if youfail to finish one large unmanageable one.
# Organise your environment, Pin boards, calendars, an address book - workout what you need and put it in place.
# Fake it! Act as if you are a well-organised non-procrastinator.
Imagine how you would think and behave and you'll pick up the habit.Now that you've faced your fear and stopped putting it off, it's time to start contacting people!

Jakarta - February 2, 2007

Jakarta feeling the flood this time

Haze in Singapore & Malaysia

PutraJaya

KL TwinTower

Straits of Malacca

Penang Bridge

Fraser Hill - October 2006

End Procrastination

Throw Away Your To Do List and Learn Good Time Management Techniques
April 15, 2006
Jim Bird, CEO WorkLifeBalance.com

In today's choice-challenged environment, the absence of time management skills can leave you feeling overwhelmed in your everyday life. Your most vital to do's, the ones that will create the most value and balance in your life, are often put off in a perpetual "as soon as" trap. Here are four easy-to-use time management techniques that will end procrastination, put you in control, and make the most important things in your life happen NOW. (Average reading time 120 seconds)

Use a planner of a size that you can keep with you at all times. If you regularly use a planner, you know how valuable this is for time management. If you have never used a planner, or started but didn't stay with it, please listen up. I don't sell planners or own stock in any planner companies. This is objective advice gathered from measured statistics with tens of thousands of clients. Of all time management techniques, this one alone will end procrastination, reduce stress, and add value and balance to your life.
One of the best time management techniques is to buy either a paper planner/calendar with one to two pages for each day or an electronic planner. One or two pages per day give you the room to write not only your scheduled items for the day but notes for each meeting, directions, and other comments relevant to your day. Write everything in one place, your planner. Do not write an appointment in your calendar, the phone number on a napkin, and the directions on a notepad. That's Stress City. When you are rushing out to that appointment, you won't be able to put your hands on all those things. Have them all in one place - your planner.

Throw away your to do list. Delete it from your computer. To do lists are an out of date time management tool. They create inefficiencies and add to your frustration and stress in life. HOWEVER, before you throw your to do list away, you need to do one very important thing.

Take a couple of seconds on each item and ask yourself the magic question that ends procrastination, "When am I going to do this?"...."I have to do meeting planning in the morning, this phone call to a client I'll do on Thursday, taking some additional college classes I don't intend to do until fall - I'll put that down in early August to check out." Then for the best time management, transfer each item from your to do list to a day in your planner/calendar when you intend to do it or start it.

And don't transfer your entire To Do List until tomorrow, a poor time management technique. Breaking it down by days takes what is often an overwhelming list and sorts it by time into manageable segments. When you get to the day for doing it, act on it - or again, at least start it. When new events of the day try and crowd out what you had planned to do, ask yourself, "Is this new item more important to do today than what I had planned?" If so, do it. If not, stick to what you had planned and write down the new item on a future day in your calendar.

And don't be stressed out by having to transfer planned items to another day because higher priorities come along. The act of transferring is motivational and serves a time management purpose. After you've transferred something three or four times, you will say to yourself, "Am I ever going to do this?" Sometimes you'll answer NO, this isn't that important, and you'll delete it. More often you'll say, I'm tired of transferring this, and you'll find the time to get it started that day. That motivation created by transferring becomes one of your valuable time management techniques.

Every time you decide to do something in the future, take 3 additional seconds and answer the magic question, "When am I going to do it?" If you're driving home from work and you think, "I really want to call my Mom," or "I need to get that report to my boss soon," or "I want to take my spouse out on a special date," don't write it on a to do list. Take a couple more seconds and ask yourself, "When am I going to do that?" Then immediately write it down on the specific day in your planner that you intend to do it. The best thinking and best intentions will not help with overall time management unless you make a commitment in time when you are going to do something about them.

Open up your planner every day, one of the most important of all time management techniques. At least 80 percent of the value of any planner system for time management comes from only two things. When you decide to do something, immediately writing it down on the day you intend to do it AND opening up your planner everyday. If you will do these two things, you are getting at least 80 percent of the value of the planner, and for some more than 100 percent of the value. Why more than 100 percent? Because some planner companies try and sell you so many pages or functions full of bells and whistles that your planner becomes overcomplicated and burdensome, and you quit using it as one of your time management techniques. Immediately writing down your activities on a daily page and opening your planner up every morning will greatly reduce procrastination and increase the achievement and enjoyment levels in your life.

Simple time management techniques that produce powerful results. Why not try them out?