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On Kaizen

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Charm for Protection

Another post so quickly! Amazing, I know. Well, the reason is because I’m trying to stay awake right now (it is 3:55pm in the afternoon), because whenever I nap, it ends up being 3 hours or longer, which is much too long. So I’m keeping myself occupied, and hopefully I can keep awake until a reasonable bedtime (10pm?).

My topic today is kaizen, which is a Japanese word used to represent the principle of continuous improvement. This concept is not a new one, but it was brought to my attention today through a blog post by Sacha Greif of “Attack of Design” (here).  He explains it like this: “it simply means not resting on your laurels, and making everything even a tiny bit better each day.” Kaizen is a concept practiced in many companies today, and it can also be applied to one’s personal life in many ways. There are many accepted “definitions” of what it means to practice kaizen (you can see some in the Wikipedia article, here), but it is an open-ended concept. So here’s my interpretation:

Instead of coasting on your previous success, spend time on making those successes better. There’s always room for improvement. Fight the Law of Diminishing Returns, and finish your projects as strong as you started them. Don’t give up if you don’t see results right away. It takes time and hard work to see great results.

This is pretty vague, but as you can see, it could be applied to anything– relationships, fitness, homework, client work, personal projects… the list goes on. I think that I am going to ask myself at the end of every day– “what have I done today to make myself/my life better?” Now, this could include such things as: exercising, finishing a project, working on a project, actually finishing my daily to-do list, eating healthy all day, getting enough sleep the night before, drinking enough water, relaxing to get rid of stress, learning new concepts, keeping in touch with old friends, etc.

How could you apply kaizen in your life? Leave a comment :) .

On My Portfolio Website

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Current Portfolio Layout (as of February 12)

If you’re not the least bit interested in web design and development, you can probably skip this post. It’s basically going to be a jumping point for the redesign of my portfolio site (the main site on this domain).

So, it’s that time of the year again– the time where I start applying for jobs and spending hours writing cover letters and tweaking my resume (this may change too… more on that later). Although there are some interesting prospects on the horizon already, one major step for any multimedia student applying for jobs is to re-do or revamp their portfolio for submission. Last year, I was actually late (I re-did my site while I was employed at the time, not before getting the job), but it ended up not mattering too much for that job anyway. This year, if I want any sort of design or multimedia job which is actually relevant to my program, the renovation of my portfolio is of the utmost importance.

Now, web standards have been changing a LOT over the last few years. HTML5 finally appeared, jQuery has become commonplace, the CCS3 spec has been steadily advancing towards full cross-browser adoption, mobile internet devices have taken over the world, social media is everywhere. So what does this mean for my redesign? It means I have to finally change my method of working on websites. It was all nice and easy when most people had 1024×768 desktop or laptop computers on which they did most of their internet browsing. Nowadays, if your website takes longer than 2.1 seconds to load completely on an iPhone’s tiny display, you’re screwed (I made that number up, by the way). So, keeping this in mind, here are the problems with my current website:

1. Horizontal scrolling below 800px. This is especially annoying when I’ve “snapped” my window to the left or right on my Windows 7 laptop, and have to scroll sideways. For years, and perhaps even decades, one of the top rules of web design has always been- “never make your visitor scroll sideways!” Not only is it annoying, but the layout also breaks rather badly when one does scroll sideways. Whoops.

2. Plain. There’s no personality in the design, really. There’s plenty of personality in the content, because I tried for that deliberately, but for some reason, the design looks very uninspired. Mind you, it is quite nice and neat and clean, but it can be those without being bland.

3. No mobile optimization. This is a direct result of my not owning a smartphone, but that’s really no excuse. Now that it is fairly easy to customize one’s layout for mobile devices and netbooks, there’s no reason I can’t do that and save people a lot of scrolling on mobile devices.

4. Weird PHP page structure. I do try and minimize my URLs as much as possible, but they are neither memorable nor nicely linked.

5. Social media “dabbling”. I have links to my LinkedIn, Flickr, etc., but they are afterthoughts, not design features.

6. Layout disconnect between the main site and the blog (this site). They don’t even look like they belong to the same person.

7. No room for additional information about my bigger projects (or ones I am very proud of).

I’m sure there’s more, but this is what’s currently coming to mind. How am I going to fix these in the redesign? Like this:

- Main layout and navigation 650px or less (or whatever doesn’t make me scroll sideways when I’ve got my window “snapped”)
- Better design– more colour, better typography, no more Courier New as a body font– but still preserving the simplicity and clarity
- Mobile stylesheet(s)
- URL rewriting to make them shorter and memorable **I just tried this out on the existing site, and it worked! Excellent :)
- Feeds from one or more social media sources (I’m thinking Flickr)– or at least, have them featured more prominently
- Redesign of the blog layout to match the portfolio layout
- “Featured Projects” section or area

This is what I’d like to accomplish. I know that given enough time, I can make it work– the key is, can I make it work given that I really don’t have much time at all? We’ll see.

On Perspectives

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For some reason, that title sounds familiar. Have I blogged about perspectives before? Perhaps. But hopefully not from this particular… perspective. I have two things to talk about on this topic today, both of them different, but with quite a few similarities.

Firstly, I logged into Facebook today and was faced with a news feed made up of condolences. I don’t have details (and I would prefer not to go into them here anyway), but basically it looks like a girl I went to high school with just lost two close family relatives in a freak accident. I can’t even imagine what her and her family are going through right now. Just trying to imagine the sheer magnitude of that pain and loss managed to smack me upside the head quite forcefully earlier. Something like this really forces you to take a step back from your life and regain some perspective. Even just this morning, I was stressing about all of the assignments which are coming up, but really? They’re not that important. School isn’t that big, in the grand scheme of things. Relationships are important. People are important. This annoying programming assignment, or that quiz? Not so important. Anyway. It was a good wake-up call. One of those every once in a while is something I find extremely helpful.

Secondly, an opportunity is available right now for me to apply for (and potentially get) a job at a cutting-edge multimedia company in Ottawa, starting in the summer. This is pretty much every B. IT’er’s dream job. The question is, do I have the drive, skills, and motivation to (a) land and (b) excel at this job? There are so many reasons I can think of why I’m unsuited for this job– the job description requires all applicants to have a strong portfolio– I don’t believe mine is up to this standard quite yet. I can only hold the job for 4 months, not longer. I haven’t got the best grades in my year. There are other people more creative than me. Etc. Etc.

And yet… it feels like it will be the right thing to apply. I will, of course, have to overhaul my portfolio rather drastically, come up with new pieces, and upgrade my skills in a few things I’m not very good at currently. This will take time, which is already at a premium for me. And, even after all of that, I may not get the job. So why should I bother? But when I look at it from the other side, it can’t possibly be anything but beneficial to me to try. Even if I don’t make it, (a) my portfolio will be polished, (b) I’ll have plenty of new pieces, (c) my application will be on record with this company, increasing my chances of a job with them in the future, (d) my skill set will be up to par, and (e) I’ll have learned plenty of new things, including what can/can’t land me a job at a company like this. Also, by the end of that process, I may have successfully defeated the school-year creative block which tends to settle in from September to April.

Lesson learned from today? New perspectives can come from both tragedies and opportunities– you just have to be ready for them to creep into your mind when the time comes. :)

On Pettiness and Reactivity

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I feel like being petty about something and being reactive go hand-in-hand. I got to witness it firsthand today, and it made me think back over the last few years, where I have intentionally been petty about something. It’s actually a pretty immature response. Seeing it in other people (adults) disgusts me at first, but then the second response is guilt. I can’t point the finger at other people’s pettiness without acknowledging it in myself as well. But I’d like to think that I’m not nearly as reactive as I used to be, and not as immature as I once was. I’d especially like to think that I’m above petty things like… well, being petty.

In my opinion, being reactive is simply just reacting to every problem or thing which goes wrong with some disproportionately strong emotion, whether it’s anger, annoyance, loud frustration, or even over-the-top happiness. I try not to be this way myself, since it would go against my view that things will unfold the way that they are meant to, but the more I am around reactive people, the more reactive I become. It becomes difficult to accept things the way they are, minute by minute, if everything suddenly strikes me as an interruption, disruption, or unexpected occurrence. And then, due to that interruption, it becomes very easy to be petty, because suddenly it’s justified. Irritation begets irritation, anger begets anger. Grudges appear out of nowhere, small annoyances which could just have slid past suddenly become mountains, a rift opens up between people. Negative feelings abound. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if people were much less reactive and more forgiving? Less petty and more laid back? Less angry and more happy (happier)? Of course, I’m not perfect myself, but when I see things like this happen between other people, I take one more mental step away from reactivity and one more towards positivity.

Maybe it’s good, then, that some people around me are reactive. How else would I be motivated to improve my own mental outlook?

It’s been an odd day.

P.S.: Slightly more than a year ago today, I posted the lyrics to “Say (All I Need)” by OneRepublic. It’s in my head right now. Check it out with the sound up loud and your eyes closed:

On Usefulness

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Just a quick post on something I had not intended to blog on today– usefulness. I do a lot of things on a daily basis which are not inherently “useful”; that is, they do not help me fulfil some goal or purpose. The most obvious example is Facebook checking. Now, these things are fine in small amounts, but I tend to get slightly annoyed with myself at the end of a day when I look back and realize I have not accomplished anything “useful” that day (this is not referring to today, by the way– I did accomplish quite a few useful things since waking up). That being said, it’s not that I measure EVERYTHING in terms of its usefulness (human relationships, for example, should be pursued regardless of their utility– spending time with people who make you happy can’t be either useful or useless), but it’s a good tool for moderating what one spends their time doing.

Some examples of useful things which I can do every day: work out (I can do this at home, it’s just a matter of making time), work on my portfolio site overhaul, read through the slides from that day (during the week) and take notes, clean my room/declutter, read through recommended readings for school, learn vocab and pronunciation for another spoken language, learn syntax and conventions for another programming language, make meals/meal plans for the week, take pictures with DSLR camera as practice for school, make a portfolio piece, etc. There are so many useful things I could accomplish in any given day, that it’s actually quite a miracle that some days I don’t manage to do any of them.

Is it too late to make a pseudo-resolution that I will accomplish something useful every day?

(P.S.: I got 212 unique visitors today O.O. To put that in perspective, I got 29 yesterday. I haven’t figured out yet what was responsible for the spike, but that’s pretty awesome any way you look at it).