I reached work at 8am!

Yep. The title says it all. Today was the first day that my wife's lecture starts at 8:00. So, we woke at around 6:30am (she woke up earlier since I take like 5 minutes to be ready). I did a quick breakfast and we were off at around 7:05am. We thought it would be smooth traffic but we were unpleasantly surprised that there was a bit of a jam. Anyway, I was in office around 8:10am.

Since it's kind of low volume market, I was tempted to relax a bit in the morning. So, I got to Starbucks, bought a cup of tea and read the newspaper. Went back to work at 9am!! Cool.

It's a bit sluggish, thankfully at least in terms of "issues". Nonetheless, still had a few things to sort out. Was kind of checking how many emails I replied for one week and it was around 300? That's replying. I don't want to count received emails since there definitely are "forwarded" threads. Ensured that I'd get 3 temp staff for at least the next 3 months and that was about it. It is indeed the perfect time to start on some major projects and other major initiatives. Thinking of wikis and blogs. Wikis can be a good platform for knowledge sharing and even project management.

The key to all these are 'collaboration' and 'ease' of use. I've tried mediawiki and PBwiki and am now trying google wiki (well, they don't call it wiki). Mediawiki seems a bit complicated. I've started PBwiki but am now deciding to use google sites. For the simple reason that I think they'll innovate most! Also relooking at Zoho as well as BaseCamp. There are so many out there. If we don't do anything, nothing will get done. I am very tempted to take a pick and start using it (start small) though I should be prepared to move to a different platform such as Ms Sharepoint if necessary.

I realised that it might no be easy to instill in our staff the same drive to achieve and to come up with new initiative. It's not easy because their priority is to learn. We should change our University syllabus and ensures that we have some courses that cover special technical skils such as doing a good flow chart, planning projects etc. Sometimes, the problem is that staff does not have the time, which is probably true most of the time.