Category: Productivity

Coming soon…

I have so many things I want to write about right now. Starting with some of the really productive conversations I’ve been having with staff and students about how they use IT, and ending with everything I’ve learned over the last few days at the UCISA conference in Edinburgh. I reckon that’s probably at least a few thousand words of writing, but as I’ve got a few other things to get finished first, I thought I’d at least make a list for my own benefit.

  1. The move towards phones and tablets and away from traditional computers, and what this means for service delivery and support.
  2. Why job descriptions, job titles, and what we actually DO at work should be as closely aligned as possible.
  3. Balancing innovation and stability.
  4. Google Apps, live@edu, and email for life.

I think that covers most of it for now.

Writing about writing

Over the last few days I’ve been writing two assignments for the management course I am currently undertaking, and it’s surprised me how easily I’ve slipped back into being able to write a large amount of fairly literate text in a short amount of time. I genuinely enjoy writing, and at various points in the past have spent a fair amount of time on all sorts of writing projects, but I’ve not really written anything more involved than a blog post for a few years now.

I was chatting to my co-worker about this, and about how I can still pretty much sit there with a blank page and know that something meaningful will eventually appear. She suggested I thought about trying to write something other than what I had to write, and I must admit the idea appeals to me. Of course, this involves having something to say and having an audience that want to read it, but I thought I’d articulate the idea if only to keep it on my radar.

Of course, I need to finish these assignments before I start working on anything else, and writing to order was never one of my strong points.

The Chokehold of Calendars

Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Chokehold of Calendars.

Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time.

In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening.

I largely agree with this. For a while I’ve been booking out huge blocks of time to ensure that I actually do what I need to do and to match the tasks I have to complete with the time of the day I’ll be at my most productive.

It makes me wonder why more people don’t do this, because from where I’m standing it really works.

My first stab at self-interview

In my last post I mentioned The Setup. This is my attempt to answer the questions.

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Andy, and I work for IT Services at the University of Birmingham in a Service Desk management/development role. In my spare time I listen to and write about music, dabble in free and open source software (mainly Ubuntu), and am sporadically involved in the Isles of Darkness live action roleplay society.

What hardware are you using?

At work everything is largely generic. I have a Dell desktop that is coming to the end of its life, but that is still more than capable of dealing with most of my emailing and calendaring needs. It is plugged into a 17″ Sony monitor that has been with me for about 4 years now, and which I keep holding on to as it is one of the few desktop monitors I’ve used that doesn’t give me a headache after hours of staring at it (yes, I know a new monitor and more breaks might be a more sensible plan).

Most of my actual work is done on an (again) fairly generic Fujitsu Siemens laptop, which I started using a couple of years ago, and which allows me to type for hours without my wrists hurting. I wouldn’t recommend this laptop above any other, but it does the job.

At home I have pretty much left desktop computers behind. My main workstation is a Sony Vaio VGN-NS10l (dual core, 4Gb ram), which I bought a couple of years ago and deals with anything I throw at it. I’ve also got a 10″ Dell Inspiron Mini, which goes everywhere with me, and is increasingly becoming the computer I do most of my web browsing, email and writing on. My backup machines are a G4 iBook and a EeePC 701, and we’ve also got another Mac and a Wii plugged into the TV downstairs. My wife has several other computers which I’ll not mention here except to say that we have more computers than there are rooms in our house (by quite a lot). And that’s not counting the ones that are propping open doors or otherwise not really being used for anything productive any longer.

And what software?

Work is a mix of Windows XP (desktop) and Ubuntu 10.04 (laptop). In Windows I largely use Outlook for email and calendaring, office communicator for collaboration, and very little else. In Linux I use Firefox for browsing (with Chrome and Epiphany for testing), Evolution for email, Empathy and Dropbox for collaboration, OpenOffice.org for creating documents and spreadsheets, and (generally) Bluefish for coding. Recently I’ve been using GIMP a lot too, and have also been dabbling with a few command-line image conversion tools. I also maintain several instances of Mediawiki, as well as a full LAMP environment for development, and use google calendar to plan and maintain my work-life balance.

At home both of my laptops are running the latest version of Ubuntu, which I’ve used as my primary OS since 2005. I use largely the same software as I use at work, although I’ve recently reverted to using gedit for writing blog posts and other bits of text, and only venturing into OpenOffice when I want to make something available to other people. Home is also where I spend a lot of time playing with WordPress and Virtualbox, and where I use Rhythmbox to listen to music (and Last.fm to catalogue what I’m listening to). I’ve also recently started using Google Reader, and I now don’t know how I coped without it.

My Macs run a very stripped down version of Leopard, and really only get used for iTunes and other media related things now (although I’d still use my iBook as my main portable computer if it weighed a little less). They also run Dropbox (as does every computer I own), and I’ve been syncing all my important files between all my machines for a couple of years now. I still can’t understand why more people don’t do this, and I’ve lost count of the number of times this one piece of software has got me out of a hole.

What would be your dream setup?

I change my mind about my ideal working environment a lot, but what I basically want is a laptop that is thin, light and stylish, and that can perform at the level where I could use it as my only computer (including storing 100gb of music). The nearest thing I’ve come across is the 13″ Macbook Pro, although I’d be happier with something the size and weight of my 10″ Dell Mini with all the power and stylishness of the Macbook Pro. Being able to run OS X and Ubuntu at the same time would also be great.

Of course, having used an iPad for the first time recently, I’d probably have to add that to my wish list, just because it’s a really stylish and functional piece of kit.

I also wonder if having a desktop computer with two large monitors would make me more productive. I have a feeling that most of what I do can be achieved on a single small screen, but it would be nice to have the opportunity to experiment with these things.

Question format borrowed from The Setup under the Attribution-Share Alike license.

Making more time

Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself running out of quality time to do things. It’s not that I don’t have enough time as such, it’s just that when I get to the point in the day where I’ve done everything I have to do, I find myself with very little energy to do the things I want to do.

This state of events does not surprise me. Every area of my life is at least as busy as I would like it to be, with some areas taking more time than they really deserve. And I actually think the fact that I’m fairly good at work-life balance is contributing towards my general feeling of not having enough time. As work gets busier, I think I subconsciously try and take on more outside of work to maintain the balance and the level of productivity I’m currently at. And while this is great in the short term, I think I hit the point last night where I realised I just didn’t have any energy left to devote to anything (be it work or non-work), and that what I really needed was to spend some time somewhere isolated and uncluttered to recharge my batteries.

I plan on doing very little this weekend, which should help a great deal, although I’m already feeling hot and sticky and it’s not even 9am.

The Art of Community

I’ve written about this before, but after reading the whole book this weekend I thought it was worth another mention.

It’s a book about communities, written by Jono Bacon (Ubuntu’s Community Manager). What I like about it is that it gives a great insight on what it is like to be part of a community where creative people work together to make something great, but where the reward is not financial. I think anyone who is involved in any sort of voluntary activity would get something out of it, and I’m certainly looking at my own community involvement in a new light as a result of reading it.

The Art of Community is available to buy (or to download for free) from http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/.

Finding wifi on the move

During my recent trip to London, I decided that I’d try and stay online as much as possible, whilst at the same time not paying for (or in fact stealing) an internet connection. It was actually a lot easier than I thought, and made me realise that if I lived in London I’d not really need a 3G dongle or an internet capable phone in order to conduct my online life on the move.

What I found out was largely as follows:

The hotel I was staying in advertised itself as having free wifi on the ground floor. It did, but the signal was no greater than 40%, and as I was on the 7th floor I had to come down to the bar to use it. This was fine, and I used this for my morning and evening email sessions.

There are lots of University buildings in London, some of whom subscribe to the JANET Roaming Service. As I’m a member of a participating University I can use their networks for free. This got me a connection on floor 7 of the hotel twice, and would have been an option in a couple of other places as well.

The rest of the time I generally used The Cloud, mostly in or around Pret A Manger stores. It’s possible to get free wifi in a fair few places (largely pubs and cafes), and my most productive session of the whole trip was the last hour outside Euston station where I got through all my home and work email with a near 100% signal.

So yes, I managed to stay up to date, and maintained Inbox Zero throughout the trip.

Why collaboration is a good thing

Over the last week or so there have been a few occasions where I’ve felt like I’ve been banging my head against a brick wall regarding some project or other I’ve been working on. And on each occasion I’ve ended up getting past the brick wall following advice/information from someone else, and on some occasions actually learning something I would never have learned otherwise.

I think the lessons to be learned are as follows:

  • Everyone knows something useful.
  • Someone knows the thing that will eventually make your life easier and allow you to succeed.
  • Talking to people who don’t know the technical intricacies of a project can sometimes help you regain focus.
  • You will never know what you can contribute until you know what needs to be contributed.
  • Sometimes the simple act of being thanked means a whole world more than monetary reward.

I’d also probably add that I like being busy, but that I can live without finding out at what point my capacity to achieve is affected by the length of my to-do list.

Inbox Zero

I get a fair bit of email (up to 100 messages a day), and I think it could be quite easy to get swamped, and to miss something important. Over the last year or so I’ve been looking at methods of dealing with email, and in particular have explored variations on Inbox Zero.

My current routine for dealing with email is quite simple:

  • I only have two mail folders; Inbox and Dealt With.
  • Everything comes into my inbox, and doesn’t leave my inbox until it has been dealt with.
  • Dealing with a message could include reading it, replying to it, or using it as the basis for a calendar entry, a task, or a block of time put aside to work on a particular project. Once the item exists elsewhere, then the email itself is dealt with and so it can be moved.

I do this with all emails; at home and at work. Home emails are really straightforward, because most of them are from mailing lists or are for information only. I use Thunderbird at home, with Google Calendar to manage my schedule and tasks. At work I get a lot more mail, and it is a lot more important. I use Evolution for everything (or Outlook on Windows), and if a task is suitably complicated it gets converted into our call logging software and becomes a task/project with a target date and time put aside to work on.

As far as backups go, work email is backed up centrally. Home email is copied to the mail/file server in our study as soon as it is delivered, so that if I accidentally delete anything I have a second copy.

My other mail rule with email is that I have times in the day when I will always clear my inbox. In the morning before work I clear my home inbox. I then go to work, and clear my work inbox as my first job of the day. Then I clear it again before I leave. I then do home email again when I get in, and then again before I go to bed. I never leave work or leave home with messages that have not been dealt with.

And that’s how Inbox Zero works for me.