Tim Teasdale's personal blog

New blogs, etc.

nospam@example.com (Tim Teasdale) — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 08:08:17 +0000

Personal productivity, customer service, anything vaguely constructive and/or sensible I might have to utter can now be found at timteadale.com

Random amusing things and the occasional attempt at comedy writing can be found at Flog The Bunny (oh, yes).

And I might even start posting here again on subjects of "other" - such as films, video games, my occasional forays abroad, etc.

Wonderful.

The Importance of Next Actions

nospam@example.com (Tim Teasdale) — 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

nospam@example.com (Tim Teasdale) — 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

nospam@example.com (Tim Teasdale) — 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...

nospam@example.com (Tim Teasdale) — 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!

nospam@example.com (Tim Teasdale) — 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

nospam@example.com (Tim Teasdale) — 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.

A new blog...

nospam@example.com (Tim Teasdale) — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 18:05:41 +0000

After my previous half-hearted attempt at writing a blog fizzled out long before the software running it exploded, taking the far more interesting Joey in Japan with it, I thought I'd have another go, and actually write something vaguely interesting this time.

Interesting to me, at any rate...