Daily Quote: Compassion Brings us to a Stop

Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves. - Mason Cooley

The time has come when we cannot just rely on others to make the world a better place – each one of us has to do our bit.

It is therefore time for people to be more and more aware about their Personal Social Responsibility (PSR).

PSR is all about doing to others what you would like others do to you. It is about recognizing how your behaviour affects others, and holding yourself accountable for your actions. For example, contrast someone being well mannered and kind, with someone being rude.

And this brings me nicely to the theme of this post – being kind to others.
Kindness is contagious – and as part of Personal Socially Responsibility you might want to consider carrying out random acts of kindness on a daily basis.

It is truly a win/win/win situation. The person you are being kind to benefits through your help. You feel good for having helped someone. And the world is a better place through your kindness.

Never underestimate the impact of a single act of kindness. I still remember, after many years, the time someone stopped and helped me after my car had broken down down. Since then, I have stopped on the road myself and helped stranded motorists a number of times. All because of that single act of kindness by a stranger.

Also, it is important to carry out your acts of kindness without expecting anything back.

29 Ways to Carry Out Random Acts of Kindness Every Day

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Meet the translator: Laszlo Kereszturi, who brings you TED Talks in Hungarian and Romanian

language Open Translation Project

TED Talks are available in 94 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 8,500 volunteers have created the upwards of 33,500 translated talks. To celebrate this accomplishment, every week the TED Blog is bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific translators. Today, meet Laszlo Kereszturi, pictured above right, with his family.

Where do you live? And what do you do by day?

I live in Oradea, Romania, and I work as an information security professional at a telecommunication company. I translate in Hungarian and Romanian.

What drew you to TED?

Due to my job and my living place, I have feel a lot of negative emotions every day. Before 2006, I escaped in the realm of science-fiction — but watching TED Talks has proved to be a better way. TED Talks are about positive ideas, people with real great initiatives, happening now — not in the distant future. And since 2009, when TED OTP made it possible to translate TED Talks, I am truly happy that I can contribute.

What was the first talk you translated and how did you pick it?

Hans Rosling: Stats that reshape your worldviewMy first talk was “Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen“. This talk just found me; I knew I had to translate it after watching the first five minutes. “Robert Lang: The math and magic of origami” was the second talk I translated. I knew about the art of origami before, but its implications in real life — from space exploration to medicine — were very worth sharing in my language.

What have been your favorite talks to translate? Why?

“John Hodgman: Aliens, love — where are they?” because it is funny in a clever way.Ben Dunlap: The life-long learner Its final part really moved me. I also enjoyed “Ben Dunlap: The life-long learner“, because it presents his personal experience with Hungarian people and is just a great story. And “Joseph Pine: What consumers want“, because this was the first TED Talk I ever saw and is about being authentic. I have dozens of favorite talks, but I’ll stop there for brevity’s sake.

Which talk was the most difficult for you to translate and why?

I’ve translated talks on a wide range of subjectsSteve Keil: A manifesto for play, for Bulgaria and beyond and have deliberately chosen many difficult ones. A good translation takes time — you can’t rush it. Difficult translation for me means that I have a very short deadline, or the process took too long.

The most difficult translation was exactly the one I expected to do in a very short time, for a TEDx event: “Steve Keil: A manifesto for play, for Bulgaria and beyond“. It’s not a difficult talk and I had already translated it in Romanian, so it looked like an easy job. But it wasn’t, because I had to do it during the week, after work.

Bruce Schneier: The security mirage Another talk that was hard to translate was “Bruce Schneier: The security mirage“. It’s about information security, so shouldn’t have been hard for me. But my knowledge about the talk’s content made me very careful when choosing the words and the “diamond polishing” process took more time than usual.

What’s a phrase in your language that you wish would catch on globally?

We say in Hungarian: “A jó pap holtig tanul”. Meaning: “A good priest learns until his death”. This is very true today in the lifelong learning era.

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Meet the Translator: Matti Jääaro, who brings TED Talks to life in Swedish

TED Talks are available in 94 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 8,500 volunteers have created the upwards of 33,000 translated talks. To celebrate this huge accomplishment, every week the TED Blog will be bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific translators. Today, meet Matti Jääaro.

Where do you live? And what do you do by day?

I’m from Stockholm and live half time in Hong Kong where my wife works as technical designer for a Swedish fashion company. When I don’t run my small IT consulting company I try my best to live according to the Holstee manifesto.

What drew you to TED?

I ended up in a conversation with two friends at a party — they were both sleep-deprived from watching too many TED Talks and could not believe I had never heard of it. I thought that being addicted to online lectures might be taking the whole geek pride thing a step too far. But, I had to see what it was all about, and few days later I had watched 30 talks myself. Open Source software, sharing ideas and participating in global collaborations around computer software is something I have always taken for granted —- but I kind of assumed was a concept that only worked for a certain type of person in the high-tech community. However, here I saw all kinds of people; students, artists, business leaders, ex presidents. They all shared this same urge to run out and tell as many people as possible about their new ideas, rather than locking them in a safe. I realized this was something bigger, and that I had to be a part of it.

What was the first talk you translated and how did you pick it?

It was Renny Gleeson’s talk on antisocial phone tricks, and I have to admit that the main reason was that it was short. (It’s a three-minute talk.) I had no idea back then how much work a translation would be, or if I would have a hard time meeting deadlines. It turned out that a month is plenty of time in most cases to finish a translation.

What have been your favorite talks to translate? Why?

Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness.This is my all-time favorite TED Talk. The beauty of doing a translation is that you really have to take in and understand every single sentence in a text. You don’t just do a direct translation of the words, you really need to sit down and think about where the speaker is coming from and what he is trying to convey. I must have watched this one at least five times before I started translating it but still learned so much that I had previously missed or not fully grasped.

Which talk was the most difficult for you to translate and why? 

Lucy McRae: How can technology transform the human body? When June Cohen from TED Media said that “All of our speakers are on the edge of their fields, and therefore on the edge of language”, she couldn’t have been more correct. This was one of those talks where some of the terms don’t even exist in my language. Sometimes Lucy also uses a poetic way of expressing herself — which meant I had to break apart those sentences, find the inner meaning, and then reconstruct them in Swedish. It took a lot of teamwork between me and my reviewer before we were finally satisfied with the result.

What’s a phrase in your language that you wish would catch on globally?

The English phrase “Speak of the devil, and he shall appear” is “Tala om trollen så står de I farstun” in Swedish. It translates to, “Speak of the trolls, and they’ll be on the porch”, making it much better adapted to modern day chat rooms where trolls outnumber devils five to one.

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Interested in getting to know more TED translators? Check out more Q&As we these global wordsmiths.

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Web App Review: Doit.im Brings a Cross-Platform GTD Experience To The Masses

I try very hard to not stray down the path of GTD web apps as it usually leads to me thinking that some other app is better for some other reason and I change my whole entire system over to find that it really has nothing to do with the system in the first place. But, there has been one GTD application that has caught my eye for at least the past year because of its ubiquity and general adherence to GTD principles.

Doit.im is available on the web, on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, and with a Mac client coming soon and is a full-featured GTD task management app.

I’m not all about making a system into a GTD system; I’d rather have a system that was built with GTD in mind and that is why we will be taking a look at doit.im and how it stands as a full project and action management solution.

Like I said before, I have been watching doit.im for about a year or so now and have seen new features and tweaks added to the app as the time has past. The app definitely tries to take the idea of GTD and automate it. You will find the normal “Inbox”, “Someday/Maybe”, and “Waiting For” categories as well as the use of the “Context” and “Project” terminologies. The app’s layout is clean and there are two different versions. The older version takes a “wired notebook” type of look, that in my opinion is annoying. The newer beta version has a sleeker and more clean look and is the one that I have used more. I will say that neither are completely appealing to me.

One thing that I noticed right off the bat was that the app seemed very slow when accessing online. I tried Safari, Firefox, and Chrome with none of them being noticeably faster. It looks like the developers need to work on the speed of the web app. I found that the beta version was much slower than the “older” version of the app.

Where Doit.im lacks in speed and looks the app makes up for it in organization and work flow. Actions and projects are easily added to your lists and applying context and projects to tasks is easy as well. Scheduling tasks for a specific due date works well and adding repeats and reminders is just a click away.

The one thing that I can’t wrap my head around is how the inbox is handled. My idea was once you added a context or a project to a task that the task should be removed from the inbox and be considered “processed”. This isn’t the case. It appears that you have to either schedule or move the task to Someday or Waiting for to get it out of the inbox. Not necessarily the most intuitive thing, but once you get the workflow down, it shouldn’t be that big of a problem.

Doit.im is absolutely full featured and I would consider it to have almost everything that a GTD practitioner would want in a system including:

Cross platform goodness (available on the web, Windows (Mac coming soon), iOS, and AndroidCreating tasks with context, due date, repeats, reminders, and project criteriaAllows for totally separate projects to sort byA nice calendar view to see when stuff is dueAbility to create custom tags and contextsFull sync with web, Windows, Android and iOS clients

The only real feature that Doit.im is missing for this GTD geek is the start date field. I have confessed my love for start dates before, and without them my system starts to feel weak. For some this may not matter at all though.

The mobile interface for Doit.im has vastly improved for both iOS and Android since the last time I have looked at it. The design is clean and unique and gives the user access to the most use features of any GTD app; the inbox, context lists, projects, due and scheduled items, waiting for, etc. The app also has a cool new way to add tasks with the “Quick-add” feature which gives the user a task entry bar with the task attributes in button form below the entry box. It’s a super fast way to add new actions to your trusted system.

The app syncs very quickly and gives the user the option to sync after a certain amount of time or even a “Real-time Data Uploading” feature. This pushes the updates directly to the server as you make them on the device. The developers of Doit.im have made a compelling UI and experience for the mobile apps. In fact, I prefer the mobile apps over the web app.

Like a said before, searching for better GTD apps can turn into an unhealthy obsession. Us GTD geeks like to look for new shiny tools more than we like to use them. I have drawn my line in the ground with OmniFocus, mostly because if I could I would change my tool every week. But, if you are a GTD practitioner or a new GTD wannabe and are in need of a cross platform, full featured, task and project management app, Doit.im is extremely compelling. Plus the app is free online and in the respective app stores. Try it out and see for yourself. While you are at it, let us know what you think in the comments section.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He studies MIS and Computer Science at Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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Balance Brings Comfort

Comfort is associated with balance. We feel most comfortable when our lives are in balance. Looking at our world today and the chaotic busy lives we lead, you might think that we are most comfortable with busyness. But, few of us would say we’re comfortable with the pace of our lives. I suspect we have lost sight of balance and don’t know how to get it back.

One way to consciously commit to a life of balance and the comfort it brings is to strive for balance in the energies of our homes and offices. What the heck does that mean?  Feng shui teaches that what we have in our living and working spaces anchors energies that affect what happens in our lives. So, if we want more balance in our lives, let’s create more balance in our environments.

We know what being out of balance looks like in our personal lives. We have too much work and too little play, too much work and too little family time, too much rushing around and too little relaxation.

Let’s see what being out of balance in your environment looks like. If we look at being out of balance as having too much of something that is not desirable and too little of something that is desirable and apply it to our living spaces, what we find are spaces with too much stuff and too little storage, too much darkness and not enough light, too much clutter and not enough order. What immediately comes to mind for me is closets packed to the gills, attics full of stuff that is rarely touched, piles of paper and other clutter, more things than storage room. Other ways it shows up is having too much furniture for the size of a room, rooms that have white walls, and rooms that have very little color in them.

Balance, by the way, is relative. Balance for one person may not be balance for another. For example, a few years ago I visited a friend who had taken great pains to create a lovely, comfortable, clutter-free home.  Everything in the space was carefully chosen to be in the space. There was plenty of storage space for all of her belongings even in her small house. I was so impressed. And yet, her house seemed stark to me. It may have been perfect for her, but I needed more in my space to soften it up and make it feel cozy.

Seeing her space, however, and feeling the pleasure that comes from a space with fewer items talking to me (the energy of things actually communicates with us), I realized that I did want more of that. I came home motivated to go through parts of my house and clear out things I no longer wanted or used. By looking at her house, which to me seemed a little stark, I could see that mine, though attractive and generally comfortable, was still out of balance in terms of the ratio of stuff to space.

Do you have balance in your life and in your home? The question to ask is “how comfortable am I?” How comfortable am I with the pace of my life? And, how comfortable am I in my home? You are the only one who can improve the balance. Take at least one step today to bring your life into better balance!

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