Tim Teasdale's blog

Time Management at Manager Tools

Tim — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 21:52:36 +0000

Time management is tackled in an excellent 2-part podcast from Manager Tools. (See bottom of this post for links).

Mark and Mike detail a step-by-step process as follows:

Write out everything you did at work over the past 2-3 weeks from memory. No looking at your calendar or notes, or Outlook, your Palm, etc.
Gather material to help you to identify your key priorities.
Analyze the extent to which you are currently spending your time in those areas.
Start to schedule time on your calendar to spend on your top priority.

Essential listening, and well worth 45 minutes of your precious time.

I’ve now got some time blocked out on my calendar next week to work on what I need to be working on, all I have to do now is be strong and stick to it.

Download the podcasts from these pages:

Access everything, everywhere!

Tim — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 07:00:53 +0000

The goal

What I want is a system for accessing emails, calendar, tasks and notes on any of the computers I use on a regular basis (both Macs and Windows PCs), in an idiot-proof a way as possible. This should include both work and personal data. Ideally also accessible on the web when at someone else’s computer. This week I bought a new MacBook, and after installing Windows XP on it (twice – in both a virtual machine accessible while running Mac OS X, and on a separate partition so I can run XP natively), I can now reliably use Mac and Windows programs on the same machine.

The locations/equipment

Everywhere

Apple MacBook, (recently acquired, my main computer for everything except the day job) running:
- OS X 10.4 (including Windows XP home, running on virtual machine using Parallels Desktop)
- Windows XP Home (natively, dual-booting using BootCamp beta)

Work

Dell Desktop PC, running Windows 2000
Apple PowerMac G4, running OS X 10.3 – used infrequently, so not a priority

Home

Apple PowerBook, running OS X 10.3
HP Desktop PC, running Windows XP Media Center Edition – also used infrequently, mainly just acts as a media server.

Email

Work

Work email is available directly through Outlook from both work machines (Mac via Citrix, due to problems with Entourage), and available from any other computer using Outlook Web Access. So far, so easy.

Home

Slightly more complicated. I have been using Google Mail as my main personal email account for about a year. Accessed via Internet from any computer.
Before that I used my ISP’s email account which is accessible as webmail and also via POP. This ISP account was my main email address for about eight or nine years, so emails have been downloaded on a variety of machines over that period. Mostly things I don’t need to access, but having recently acquired a new computer, I have discovered how many little utilities I’ve bought online that I need to track down the serial numbers for.
As my ISP’s webmail interface is not that great, I have started using Fastmail to regularly poll my ISP’s account. I access my Fastmail account using IMAP using Apple’s Mail.app on my Macs, Thunderbird in Windows, and via the web for other machines.

Calendar

At the moment I’m using Airset for my calendar. I can access it online from any computer, it sends appointment reminders by email as well as the next day’s schedule every evening. If you’re in the U.S., you can also have it send alerts to your mobile phone. It currently syncs well with Outlook at work (Exchange server) and home PC (local database) with no major problems. I can add/edit/delete entries from work/home/online quite happily. Work and personal appointments are currently all in the same calendar, until I can sort out a sensible way of separating them without breaking the syncing.
For computer-free access, I keep 3 months’ worth of calendars printed out in my organization file, and “sync” regularly.

Tasks

For a few months I’ve been using MyLife Organized (MLO) Pro, which lives on a USB stick I carry around with me. Obviously this means it is losable/forgettable; MLO is set up to take regular backups on the hard drive, so I should never lose any data as long as I have access to those computers. If I forget to take the USB stick with me for some reason, I’d probably only be a day or two out of date, as a worst case scenario. I run it on my work PC, MacBook’s native XP installation, MacBook’s virtual XP machine, and occasionally my home desktop PC. Currently no “computer-free” access, other than printing out reports of relevant information every now and again. I also use Basecamp for some projects, particularly where I am working with other people (or may be in the future). It also syncs with Outlook. Expect a more in-depth post about MLO in the future.

Documents

I’m still experimenting with the best way to organize this. At the moment, a combination of using a USB stick, and my Apple iDisk, which is a WebDAV folder I can access from any computer, with added features if using it from one of my Macs, which both use a working copy and automatically upload/download changed files.

If anyone has any questions, or any suggestions on how I can improve this setup, I’d love to hear them!

Getting up early

Tim — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 21:34:57 +0000

I’ve been reading Steve Pavlina’s blog on personal effectiveness (amongst other subjects) on and off for a while, and one of the topics I’ve found useful is on getting up early on a regular basis. It’s well worth reading the article and its followups, but in a nutshell, the method suggested is as follows: get up at a fixed time every morning, and at night don’t attempt to get to sleep until you are actually ready to go to sleep.

The reasoning is that if you’re in bed lying awake for more than a few minutes, you’re probably not tired enough. Your body will learn that it has a fixed wake-up time, and therefore you will feel tired at a time when you should be getting the amount of rest you need. You could then be ready for bed at a variety of different times depending on your need for sleep. A yardstick for this time is if you can’t read more than a page or two of a book without your eyes closing involuntarily.

Now I think I tend to go a bit past this stage, possibly due to activities that are too stimulating; sitting at a computer (whether doing something mentally taxing [like writing this post!] or just browsing email/news) seems to keep me awake, whereas if I get into bed and then start reading a book, I will often immediately start feeling tired. So I really ought to start on the dead tree-based reading material earlier.I first tried Steve P’s how to be an early riser technique a few months ago, aiming to get up at 6 a.m. every day, weekends included. I didn’t quite manage it on a regular basis, but I at least got into the habit of getting up at a reasonable time on weekends, very rarely sleeping in past 8, and usually getting up earlier than this.Having recently re-read his posts on this topic, I have attempted to re-commit to getting up early, now aiming for 5 o’clock. It worked for the first couple of days, but I have been gradually slipping back towards 6:30-7 over the course of last week.

I’d really like to get back into it, as whenever I do manage to get up early, after a short period of feeling very tired (maybe 10-15 minutes after getting up), I find I tend to be a lot more productive for the whole day, as well as having an extra hour or two to do things before I leave for work. The problem is, the version of “me” that has to try to get me out of bed is totally oblivious to the upcoming productivity boost, and resists movement of any sort as much as possible.

Referring back to Steve’s website, how does he suggest you overcome this inability to get up at the time you’ve set for yourself? By conditioning yourself to react to the stimuli in question, i.e. “practise” lying in bed in your pyjamas with the room darkened, waiting for the alarm to go off, switch it off, get up, and repeat until it becomes second nature.

It may yet come to this… I’ll see how I get on tomorrow.

Customer service observations

Tim — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 21:16:38 +0000

Customer service observations from spending Saturday in Oxford:

Oxford Castle : recently opened as a tourist attraction, one thing that struck me as being odd was that neither of the guides who spoke to us as a group introduced themselves by name. And the guy manning the gate to climb the castle mound really gave the impression he didn’t want to be there.

G & D’s (Little Clarendon Street) : We were standing at the counter waiting to be served. There was someone fiddling around with the till (adding or removing change), completely ignoring us. Now bearing in mind they were fairly busy and even if that task was more important than serving 2 customers, the least he could have done was to acknowledge us, and say “sorry, someone will serve you in a moment”, and maybe check someone else had seen us and was coming to help. Not up to usual standards. Nice pecan pie, though.

The Importance of Next Actions

Tim — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:42:39 +0000

I had an insane day at work on Friday, the sort where new things to do ASAP just keep flying at you.

At one point there was a small queue of people forming at my desk, which is always a bad sign.

Anyway, I was carefully making a note of all the things I needed to do on an index card which was propped up in front of me, things I really ought to do that day.

This then overflowed onto a second index card. These cards just sat staring at me as I attempted to do some of the stuff on them, without stopping to go through them and find a Next Action for each in a sensible Getting Things Done fashion.

Needless to say, much of it was left undone when I left work approximately 3 hours after official “home time”.

When I left, I added the todo cards to my Hipster PDA, which I consulted when I got home. Only then did I start thinking about Next Actions.

Had I taken the 5 minutes out from the flailing about in a panic earlier, I would have realised that several of the Next Actions were along the lines of “ask X to do Y so I can do Z”, which would have at least got the ball out of my court.

However, I think a lot of the time, I was working out the correct Next Action, but subconsciously thinking “X is far too busy to worry about this at the moment”, but it would at least have moved it on further, and hopefully X would have looked at it at a sensible time for their schedule.

Note to self: always think of the Next Action! And if it means writing a very short email, just do it there and then!

Spurred into inaction

Tim — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 12:05:42 +0000

I’m beginning to think I’m incapable of organizing even the most simple tasks. The other day I was standing by the kettle making a cup of tea, and the 2 next actions in this “mid-morning snack” project were “get milk from fridge” and “get biscuits from cupboard”. (OK, I didn’t actually set it up as a proper GTD project… that would be weird. Although maybe I should have…)

The fridge and the appropriate cupboard are in totally opposite directions. So instead of arbitrarily picking one, I found myself doing a bizarre shuffle where I took half a step towards the fridge, came back, took half a step towards the cupboard… and then did the same thing again, in the space of about a second. I think I’ve got procrastination down to a fine art.

English is a funny language

Tim — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 09:52:45 +0000

While having a quick procrastination break from writing an essay, I was musing on the delightful way in English that 2 sentences or phrasings that sound as though they should mean the opposite actually mean the same thing.

For example:
“I take the bus to work” and “the bus takes me to work” mean exactly the same thing, even though the subject and object are reversed.

You can also both stand as a candidate in an election, and run as a candidate, which taken literally would seem to mean very different things, but they are equivalent.

Eat yourself cool…

Tim — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 09:50:17 +0000

When it’s far too hot, there are the obvious comestible remedies, such as cold drinks and ice cream (see end of Joey’s post), but a rather nice alternative is frozen cakes.

Not the sort you’d normally find the the freezer section of the supermarket, but something like a chocolate muffin that you’ve frozen yourself. I’ve only tried it with chocolate muffins and madeira cake so far, but it’s really rather nice, and as they don’t have any cream, etc, in them, you don’t get little bits of ice to kill your teeth.

Delicious, nutritious, and cooling.

It works!

Tim — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 18:01:16 +0000

Who’d have thought making notes about things and making sure you review your notes helps your organization!?

One or 2 nights ago, just as I was going to bed, I noticed there was a nail sticking out of a floorboard near my bed, waiting to destroy my socks and/or feet. So, trying to get everything out of my head and into a trusted system in a GTD fashion, I wrote down that it needs fixing on a handy scrap of paper and threw it in my ‘in’ box before going to bed.

On going through the contents of my inbox today, I came across it, identified it as something that could be done in less than 2 minutes, grabbed the appropriate tools and fixed it. What was the first thing that went through my mind when I came across the note? “I’d forgotten all about that…”

First steps in GTD

Tim — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 21:07:00 +0000

Being a thoroughly disorganized sort of chap, but wanting to attempt to do something about it, I have of late been reading good things about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system, and thought I’d give it a try.

Having keenly read several sites (such as 43 folders), and tentatively got together a Hipster PDA (which consists of a collection of index cards clipped together – much less effort to quickly jot something down on an index card than use an electronic PDA, although of course you lose the automagic backup/synchronization with your computer), I ordered Getting Things Done the book.

My next step towards the new organized me was losing my notepad. Having helped deal with laptop/projector at a meeting, which had to be disassembled and taken away very quickly as we had overrun and the people for the next meeting were already coming in, I was halfway back to my office when I suddenly discovered I didn’t have the notepead I’d brought with me. Being loath to disturb the already delayed meeting that was now taking place, I went back to the meeting room first thing next moring to see if it was there. It wasn’t. however, during the day I returned to my desk to find it with a note attached saying “is this yours?”. So all was well. Made mental note to label notepads with my name & department. Haven’t done it yet, obviously. Disorganized, you see?

All this digression brings me to my first step towards implementing GTD-esque methods – setting up Outlook at work according to Adrian Trenholm’s suggestions. Not only did this give me an insight into the ways that email views can be customized in Outlook that I hadn’t really looked into, but allows you to hide items in your inbox that don’t need dealing with yet.

By this stage, I had not yet read Getting Things Done (at the moment I’m about 3/4 f the way through), but had got the idea of some of the general GTD principles from my reading on the web. However, having set up the 2 email views as set out in Adrian’s article, I was then galvanized into a fairly serious email sorting session, which resulted in several hundred redundant emails being deleted, and Next Actions and Due Dates being added to many more. Having not fully cleared out my inbox, I am currently in the position of having to to scroll from the top of my inbox to check new mails to the bottom (there are still about 200+ emails in “in”) to find those emails with a prescribed Next Action, but I now only have 2 places to look rather then having to scroll all the way through inspecting individual emails and trying to guess why they’re flagged – I had no idea efore that you could edit the text that says “Follow Up” by default when you flag an email.

Today has seen me starting to organize the home side of things (inbox: the floor), where email is handled by Entourage 2004 on Mac OS X. This doesn’t seem to have the features that Outlook does (adding due dates & next actions directly to an email), but to compensate has a means of linking items together (e.g. linking an email to a task), and also has a “Projects” feature, which can be used to handle projects as defined in the GTD system, that is anything that has more than one action needed to see it to completion.

There will be more to report when I have more of a feel for GTD and how I’m going to implement it (and how to deal with the home and work aspects), and how I’m going to set up Entourage at home.