SharePoint Nick

See BDC Meta Man Web Edition in action

nick — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:57:40 GMT

Phill Duffy will be taking two web casts tomorrow that show how you can configure the Business Data Catalog application definition files from within the browser using BDC Meta Man Web Edition. If nothing else it’s an amazing demo of how you can use jQuery within SharePoint to build very powerful applications.

The sessions are

Wednesday 17th June 3pm GMT
Wednesday 17th June 8pm GMT

If you’d like to attend either of these please drop an email to support@lightningtools.com and indicate which session you want to attend.

Outstanding customer service

nick — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 06:35:49 GMT

We often spend so much time complaining on blogs I think it’s right that when someone does something good we mention it too. I was having dinner tonight at the restaurant that is part of the Marriott hotel in Redmond. As I sat down a large group of people were just ordering so I knew that I may have to wait a while but I had a book to read so no issue.

It did take may be 15 mins longer for the starter to turn up – but I wasn’t fussed and the manager was nice enough to bring over a free drink. When my main meal arrive just after I finished the starter I had an invitation for breakfast ‘on the executive chef’ as a thanks for being so patient. I didn’t have to complain or anything – it was all done without a mention on my part.

Needless to say what was a great experience in the restaurant due to great food became exceptional due to leaving with a nice happy feeling – and I know where I’ll be coming back to stay in Redmond next time.

Life without caffeine

nick — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:21:44 GMT

For the past 4-5 months I’ve been caffeine free having given up tea, coffee and diet coke. I never used to drink any coffee but could quite easily get through about 6-8 cups of tea each day and 2 diet cokes. Of course the caffeine rushes were great but then the lull afterwards always meant the need for another coffee. I also found it quite hard to get off to sleep each night.

At the end of the day caffeine is a drug and I’d rather my body not have anything going around it that it does not really need. My fiancé Sophie has given up caffeine for a long time now (I guess approx 5 years), but my previous attempts only lasted about 14 hours due to bad headaches!

Back at the start of the year I developed a very bad case of man flu and didn’t really feel like anything to eat or drink. 24 hours went past and without even realizing I’d not had any caffeine. I didn’t suffer from any headaches apart from the general lousy feeling that man flu brings. Halfway through the second day I realized that’d I’d not been drinking any of the evil stuff and so committed myself to continuing! The third day was the only time I had a bit of a caffeine withdrawal headache and to tell the truth it wasn’t that bad. 5 months later – and I’m still going! Some of the benefits of giving it up

- no highs and lows of energy, just a good constant flow

- sleeping much better at night now, which helps with the above point

- really enjoying some different teas that don’t have caffeine in such as Jasmine tea and Rooibos tea.

One small caveat to this is that I’ve not given up chocolate (although I have cut down) – so I sometimes get a little caffeine from that now and again.

I saw an interview with Gary Player a while ago talking about first tee nerves when playing golf. He commented how funny it was that 99% of club golfers always have a coffee or tea in the club house before playing. This pre round drink with caffeine in will raise your heart rate, thus making you more nervous on the first tea and more likely to swing too fast and hit a duff shot. So remember golfers – a glass of water or orange juice before tee off!

Taking pride in your work

nick — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:22:37 GMT

I’ve started taking the time to read a few blogs again. One of the blogs I’ve started reading is the famous Uncle Bob who I’m ashamed to admit I only really found out about relatively recently after his interview on Hanselminutes. Listening to that show and recent readings of his books and Crystal Clear by Alistair Cockborn have really put us in the right direction at Lightning Tools and also been incredibly motivating. Currently we do a lot of our development work remotely rather than all sitting in the same location but this is soon to change with the opening of Lightning Tools HQ – very exciting stuff!

Uncle Bobs recent post called ‘Why the sea is boiling hot’ struck a real cord with me - ‘I want developers to take pride in their work.’

Some people I used to work with may laugh at me finding that important – and I’m not sure if it is because I have got older and wiser or now run a software company – but it’s really a great question to ask some one – ‘are you proud of that bit of code’ when you’ve found an issue that really should have been picked up. Putting more processes in place when we get into the new office such as pair programming and maybe even TDD(!) will help developers become more professional and proud of the work they complete. David Heinermeier Hansson posted a response to Uncle Bob saying that as well as engineers we need artists – but I’ve got to agree with Uncle Bob in that these processes and systems that take care of the professional development process actually will allow developers to free their mind and come up with great new ideas and features.

This again brings me round to thinking about Getting Things Done – as many things seem to these days. One of the barriers people put up to David Allens GTD processes are that they are of an artistic nature and do not want to be boxed in by the processes of GTD. The reply that is always given by GTD’ers is that by letting GTD manage your projects, tasks, inbox etc – your brain is free from having to keep track of these things and actually gives you more of an opportunity to use it how it should be – in an artistic way thinking up new ideas, product features, writing songs, painting pictures or whatever you think being artistic is!

SharePoint Podshow and doing things you enjoy and learn from

nick — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:27:22 GMT

Rob posted up the other day that we’d hit the 100,000 download mark with the SharePoint Podshow (we’re actually well over it now). While a nice milestone – I thought we’d actually get there quicker! So if you know someone who isn’t listening get them subscribed. Whether they are into SharePoint or not doesn’t really matter!

As Rob said in his post we really enjoy recording the shows. I obviously work with Brett so we get along well, and I’m yet to find someone who doesn’t enjoy talking with Rob – and so it all goes along nicely. Of course the important people in the podshow are the people we interview and thankfully we’ve had many volunteers come forward to speak about what they do and share their knowledge.

Enjoying what you do and continually learning in the context of the SharePoint Podshow reminded me of something I read in a book called Mental Ketchup which I finished just before the weekend. The book covers training your brain for high performance – both in terms of sport and business, I highly recommend getting yourself a copy.

Anyway, the book describes a triangle with the words results, enjoyment and learning at each point.

(sorry for my badly drawn triangle)

Too many people get themselves too far into the results corner of the triangle and although things may start off well – without the other two areas to balance things out the quality will be effected and results will in the end suffer.

The best place to be is right in the middle – so you are continually learning, enjoying what you are doing – and quite often the results will follow and improve without you even realizing.

I managed to use this myself at the weekend in a golf competition. All last year I was very focused on wanting to win and counting my score as I went round. I ended up being so nervous and stressed about the score on each hole I didn’t enjoy it and my scores were bad. Last Sunday it was a lovely sunny morning, I kept focusing on how great it was to be outside – while still thinking each individual shot though and planning it carefully. I didn’t focus on the score of each hole though. Low and behold I get in the club house and I am in the lead – and it finishes up that way – a great start to the new golfing season!

So whatever you get up to – sport, blogging, twitter, work – make sure you stay in the middle of the triangle and you’ll get the enjoyment, learning and results you really want.

Nottingham SUGUK meeting

nick — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:49:01 GMT

SUGUK is spreading its wings a little further this month with the first meeting being held in Nottingham on April 30th! Steve Smith and Mark Macrae are presenting 2 great sessions so get your name down to attend:

http://suguk.org/forums/thread/18475.aspx

Steve and I have also penciled in the dates for meetings up to August – as soon as we have venues secured we’ll post up the dates as we know people want to put them in their diary as soon as possible.

Golf Books

nick — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:04:49 GMT

Doing a little spring cleaning today and gathered all my golf books up together! Think I need to ban myself from Amazon for a little while!

Out of all these, the two I would recommend are Dave Pelz’s Putting Bible and Short Game Bible.

(I haven’t read all these yet by the way! I just like collecting :-) )

SharePoint Best Practice Conference Roundup

nick — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:07:11 GMT

Last week was the SharePoint Best Practice Conference (BPC) held in London, organized by Combined Knowledge. There have been a couple of BPC’s in the US, but this was the first in Europe – as it showed with a great attendance of around 450 people. Lightning Tools were there with a stand and we had a chance to speak to lots of people about what we do and the values of the BDC.

This was also the first chance Rob, Brett and I had been in the same room since starting the SharePointPodshow – so we had a few drinks and a bit of banter to catch up on!

Rob and I did a couple of joint presentations on Business Value from SharePoint and the Business Data Catalog (of course). This was the first time I did a joint presentation and although I enjoyed it (and it felt like a podshow!) I don’t think we were as prepared (or practised) as we should have been. If you have any comments or feedback on them I’d be keen to hear it.

It was great to see a number of the US SharePoint MVPs at the show. Wondering around London was good fun as I never pay much attention to the tourist sights but to see others get excited kind of spurred me on.

The whole three days would have been perfect other than the football on Wednesday night! I reckon Liverpool can pull off something special on Tuesday though.

Well done to Steve, Zoe and the rest of the CK crew for organizing a great event.

G20 – where does the money come from?

nick — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:20:13 GMT

Been watching the news today on the $1 trillion promise by the G20. I thought everyone was broke ? Why are the news programs not saying where the money is coming from ?

Perhaps I need to read a book or two on economics.

Getting Things Done and Me

nick — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:26:51 GMT

I’ve been putting on Twitter about when I am doing my Getting Things Done (GTD) weekly review and replying to a few friend that have mentioned the book. Some people have asked me how I’ve been getting on with the whole thing and so I though the best thing would be to write a blog post about the system I’m using, the benefits of it and also where I need to improve and things I want to look into next. First though a little background into what got me into this…

Getting Started…

As you’ll know from following me on Twitter and this blog that I love reading plenty of books. I first read Getting Things Done by David Allen about 3 years ago. I can’t remember how I found it – but I was excited by what I read. I implemented a system based around OneNote – with a separate page for each project. To start with things went very well and I did feel more organized but after a few weeks things started going back to the usual thing off my inbox being full of emails and that was what I tried to use as my todo list. The problem was I knew I needed to be more organized and really wanted GTD to work for me.

A year or two went by with me struggling on with todo lists scribbled on paper and my inbox full of emails. I noticed on Twitter people were mentioning a new book by David Allen called Making it all Work. I bought the book and looked forward to it being delivered. This is definitely a follow on book from GTD and after reading the first 10-15 pages I knew I had to go back and read Getting Things Done. I got it out from the attic (I’m ashamed to say) and sped through it in 3 days. Things had certainly changed since the last time I’d read the book for me – I had more projects, more responsibility, more to generally do! I’d also realized something important – writing things on paper had a much more important meaning to me. I think this was where I went wrong before – of course I’m all for IT solutions but there is just something about pen and paper that means if it’s written down, you’ve made a conscious commitment to the task. It is just to easy not to open OneNote, Outlook, Notepad or whatever your application for storing tasks in is, and doing a select all – delete. Of course you need to be able to take your management system with you. The choices of this get better and better with iPhone applications and OneNote on Windows Mobile but paper is still easier, nicer, and more of a commitment once it’s written down.

I’m not going to explain the GTD methods here, rather jump straight into how I’m doing things at the moment.

How I do it…

Inbox, outbox, reading tray

The first important part of my system is the inboxes I’ve arranged. I’m lucky enough to have quite a large office to work from (I work from home so have taken what should be a second double bedroom!) so had some space to arrange an area for an inbox, outbox and reading tray. The little shelves I bought to put them on were supposed to be blue! It wasn’t until I had them home and unpacked them for assembly that I realized they were pink.

All letters and receipts go into the inbox ready for processing each Friday as part of the weekly review. If something looks like a cheque coming in for payment or something else important I may open it and deal with it there and then, but generally all letters go straight in.

I subscribe to quite a few magazines such as Inc, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and a golf magazine. These all go straight into the Reading tray and I’ll grab something to read at lunch or if I fancy a 20 minute break from work. If there’s an article I like and want to keep I’ll often cut it out and put it to the bottom of the reading pile knowing I’ll come across it one day. To be honest I probably get more magazines delivered each month that I can possibly read so the pile is slowly growing. I read from the top down so look at the newest and most relevant stuff first. In a few months I’ll have to purge a lot of the stuff – maybe quickly scanning or just binning it without looking at. The material maybe so old by then it just doesn’t matter – the good thing about always reading from the top!

The outbox is the most simplest and is usually empty. Letters that need to be posted, cheques – that’s about it.

Projects and Next Actions Management

As I said earlier – it’s now pen and paper for me. I have a green folder that I can add A4 lined pages into for each project. I use a folder rather than a notebook as I can add, remove and reorder pages as needed.

The front page in the folder has a few important things on there:

- emails to send – may or may not be project related. Grouped together on the first page so I can batch process the emails all at once.

- items delegated – things I’ve asked others to do that need to be chased up. I include the date they were delegated also – so I know how late they are! :)

- ad hoc tasks – things to do that are a single action, such as a video to watch or a book to buy. Anything that is made up of multiple tasks is a project.

Before I get to projects I have some folder dividers that separate different areas of my life. Currently these are things such as golf, Lightning Tools, home jobs etc…

Within each section I have a lot of projects, each being it’s own page. Lightning Tools is the largest area as each product is a separate project as are a lot of other things some people may think of as a single task – such as a blog or web site article. Actions are written in the order to do although I leave a line free inbetween each action so I can add things in. Quite often during the weekly review I’ll rewrite a projects action list to clear it up and maybe even re-order it.

Filing Cabinet

Hugely important to be able to easily file away stuff. Bank statements, invoices – they all need to be put away, but in a nice organized fashion so you can easily find things. If it takes to long to file things – you’ll put it off, so keep it clean and well organized. It’s difficult to write more about a filing cabinet as they aren’t really that exciting! But without a good way of putting away your important pieces of paper whatever other GTD things you implement I reckon you’ll be doomed!

Email

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them! I hate email – even these days when I have things really under control. Complex folder structures for storing emails and using my inbox as a task list and storage area are completely out. I have only three folders for emails

Inbox – I do InBox zero generally 3 times a week and keep my inbox with with few enough items in it so it doesn’t take up more than a full screen. When going through and processing things to inbox zero items either get done (ie a reply sent), put on a project as an action and placed in the reference folder or just deleted.

Reference – if an email is going to take longer than 2 minutes to deal with the action (or actions) it needs go on the related project page or maybe it becomes a project all by itself.

Receipts – this is just a folder to keep emails about purchases and recurring monthly charges. A safe place to keep them. We use hosted Exchange so backups and safe keeping should be taken care of for me.

Calendar

Part of Outlook and Exchange also – the biggest change GTD has done is I keep my calendar sacred for concrete appointments and meetings. I used to put things on my calendar that I felt as though I wanted to do that day, but it was just pointless – I just let things roll over day by day and they’d be on my calendar for months.

Journal

This isn’t necessarily part of GTD but something I’ve recently started doing since the start of Feb. I never kept a diary before when I was younger, but am quite enjoying writing 5-6 lines about each day. I also list 5 good things that have happened each day. Seems hard to list 5 things when you start writing but it gets you in a positive frame of mind and you remember what a great day you’ve had! I’m also really looking forward to reviewing at the end of the year or maybe in 6 months to see what has been accomplished.

Weekly Review

This is probably the most important part of GTD, and if you don’t do it at least once a week you’ll struggle to keep GTD’ing. I do a mini review every couple of days just to review my projects and make sure the priorities of next actions are how I want them.

The main weekly review I do each and every Friday morning without fail. It’s in my calendar as a reoccurring event and nothing but the most important thing is going to change that. I do it first thing at 9am in the morning so to give me some time during the rest of the day to perhaps catch up with anything important I’ve missed during the week.

My weekly review can take up to 3 hours, but to be honest I don’t care because 1, I really enjoy doing it and 2, after it’s done I’m probably the happiest I am all week as I know where everything is and what’s important. My weekly review includes:

1, Empty and process of physical inbox – file letters and use the same general rule as always. If it can be done in 2 mins do it, if not add it to the ad hoc task list or relevant project page.

2, Empty and process of email inbox – same as above but this time with emails.

3, Review project list, actions and priorities – sometimes I’ll have done a task and forgotten to have crossed it off, things that happen during the week will change action priorities etc.

4, Review calendar for next week – take a look over my calendar. Now I make sure I set reminders far enough in advance, and see where I can fit some golf in!

Next Steps

Check calendar more regularly – I need to get in the process of checking my calendar daily to make sure I know what’s coming up and more importantly to ensure I haven’t forgotten something that’s coming up that day. I generally set 6-8 hour reminders giving me plenty of time to prepare for things in case I have forgotten about them. Once or twice though I’ve left the standard 15 minute reminder on and then missed something – most annoying as I’d done the hard work of putting it in the calendar in the first place!

Look at how to use SharePoint – although I use pen and paper for most of my GTD system I obviously work a lot with SharePoint and I know plenty of others prefer an IT type solution. Anybody want to work with me on a SharePoint based solution drop me a message – it may just be guidance on how to use all out of the box features.

Work on distractions – email, IM, TechMeme, Twitter etc. Keep feeling as though I have to check each of these and another few things every 60 seconds! Attention Deficit Disorder – maybe, but I need to make sure I can focus on tasks I’m trying to complete.

Resources

Books – the obvious ones:

Getting things done – the original and most important book of the three.

Ready for anything – 1 or 2 page chapters of GTD type motivational stuff. Good to keep you on track.

Making it all work – great follow up material to the original book. Make sure you read GTD first though, and maybe even re-read GTD if you read it a while ago.

GTD Connect – relatively new web site that requires a membership fee, but makes lots of resources available that can help keep you on track. Forums, whitepapers, podcasts – and lots of other stuff. Of all the things available I love listening to the podcasts while working.

The final thing to say really is what David Allen keeps repeating. It’s all about knowing what you’re not doing – by being able to see things laid out rather than in your head you can decide what’s important, and what can wait – or not even be done at all! When your mind is free of clutter – that’s when you can do the really good thinking and problem solving!