A Wandering Mind

With the market trending as it has lately, I’m sure that many companies are feeling pressure to cut costs and make more efficient use of resources. Being in IT puts us in a position squarely targeted in this kind of a situation; after all, technology units are often basically glorified cost centers.

Given the gloomy outlook for the coming months, I thought it might be appropriate to post some thoughts on how we (as GTD’ers, especially in IT) can add as much value to our services as possible. Think of this as an expanded framework for determining what you should be spending your time doing, now that resources are likely to be tighter than ever.

One thing about the tightening budget strings is that it brings things like evaluating priority and value of work into clear focus. Now more than ever, it is important to approach your daily work with a rational, methodical, and clear-headed approach, as opposed to simply giving in to whatever is yelling at you the loudest. Needless fat must be trimmed in order to ensure that we are providing the maximum of value, with a minimum of cost.

In my job previous to the current one, I worked on a development team that followed a model of total baseline operation. That is, the only “cost” associated with our efforts was that of the set staffing; there was no “discretionary” bump in resources when the list of projects grew too long. As a result, we needed to adopt a method of carefully choosing how our time was spent, to ensure that we were providing as much value to the business as possible.

Each project submitted for possible work had to be justified in four key areas:

1. Reduction of risk – perhaps the project would allow for closer scrutiny of certain high-risk areas of operation, such as large dollar transactions, or fix a bug that had the potential to cost thousands in errors.
2. Direct cost savings – by automating a process, it would eliminate the need to hire additional staff to cover an increase in volume or additional services offered. Note: while we didn’t like to think of it this way, the opposite was also true, in that some of our projects likely got people laid off.
3. Client service – the project might fulfill the request of an important client or set of clients. Or, it might allow the company to provide services not yet offered, thus enhancing our appeal.
4. Reduction of system load – because a great deal of the processing work for my company takes place on legacy mainframe systems, increased system load can almost directly equate with increased expenditures (more MIPS = more $$).

If a project didn’t meet merit based on the above four-tiered evaluation, it was unceremoniously dropped from our list of work. We had to be brutually efficient at this triage; with no cost for our efforts, the projects poured in. Even today, I still consider it one of the best frameworks for evaluating potential projects.

So the next time you’re trying to decide how to spend your time, look at your project list with a critical eye, and consider what value it truly adds for your clients.

This past week, I was happily chugging away on my laptop, when suddenly, things went very wrong. The first sign of trouble was that one of my applications simply closed without warning or error. Next, upon trying to launch the program again, I was told that Windows couldn’t find the application in question. Not good…

Soon after, Launchy (an excellent program, by the way) completely tanked, and could not be restarted. Within around thirty seconds, icons on my desktop began spontaneously disappearing, until finally the entire Explorer desktop just vanished.

At this point I frantically tried to power off my computer, hoping that I can attach the drive later and recover some data. After successfully hard-powering my laptop, and placing it safely off to the side, I had a friend begin to download the latest SystemRescue CD.

But in the mean time, what was I to do? My job is highly computer centric, between e-mail and endless project planning details. But the productivity geek in me found it totally unacceptable to merely sit around while I was awaiting some technical resolution. So, what is one to do?

1. Get Back To Your Lists
   I borrowed a friend’s computer long enough to access Remember The Milk (a nice benefit of using a cloud app for tracking your lists) and printed out my Next Action list. While I could have filtered for tasks with a context other than “@computer”, I chose not to, since many of those tasks may not actually require a computer (but were marked only as a preference).
2. Cover Your Bases
   I also stayed on my borrowed computer long enough to set an out of office response. While I could have stood by the window and gotten good enough Blackberry reception to get e-mail, it would have been highly inefficient as a response device. Better to eliminate all unnecessary obstacles and stay focused.
3. Take The Sure Things First
   I started out by taking care of anything that could be done on the phone or face-to-face. This way, I can leave later time clear for those tasks that truly required use of a computer.
4. Pull Out The Old Moleskine
   While I prefer to use tools such as FreeMind for tasks involving planning or brainstorming, in this case I found the old pen and paper almost as useful. There’s something strangely rewarding in scribbling notes and free-drawing mind-maps; the physicality of it makes it really feel like you are accomplishing something. I just might have to do this more often, even with the computer around.

In the end, I had a highly productive morning; time was not wasted, projects moved forward, and decisions were made. Because of this, I was able to grant myself permission to spend most of the afternoon performing a haphazard recovery of my hard disk (thank you SystemRescue CD and Linux), without feeling guilty about neglecting my other duties.

So what’s your DR (that’s Disaster Recovery in IT lingo) plan? If you’re computer, iPhone, or other technological “necessity” went down today, how would you handle it? After reading this post, hopefully not by running wildly about your office, screaming at the poor Help Desk folks to hurry up. Trust me, they do things much faster when not poked and prodded too often.

Well, it’s right about a year since my initial GTD kick got under way, and it’s about time for a review.

What Has Worked

1. Your Brain Is Not A To-Do List: I don’t know how I ever managed to come close to tracking all my responsibilities in my head, at least not without it swelling to the size of a watermelon.
2. Next-Action Oriented Thinking: Projects are much easier to move along if you know the one, clearly defined, physical action that will cause forward progress. Rather than having things languish in “Well I don’t know what to do next” status, I always know what needs to be done.
3. The Weekly Review: It took a while to turn this practice into a habit, and I’m still probably not as good with it as I should be. But it has helped immensely in setting goals for the coming week and ensuring that no project sits unnoticed.

What Still Needs Work

1. Operating At Altitudes Above 10,000 Feet: While I’ve gotten pretty good at organizing my daily tasks and projects, what is still missing is some overall goals for the coming year, the coming decade, my life, etc. The truth is, I have so much to do at what David Allen calls the “Runway Level” that it’s been altogether too easy to ignore this issue.
2. That (Dreaded?) Someday/Maybe List: To be honest, I don’t even have one at the moment! Yes, I know, I am ashamed. Here I am, trying to be something of a productivity geek, and I don’t have one of the core parts of the GTD system. *Smacks hand* I think this really goes hand in hand with what I’ve said above, in that I’ve gotten lost in the day-to-day management.
3. GTD In My Life Outside Of Work: Although I have improved since my last post on the subject, it’s still a weak area. I still haven’t quite found the perfect way to integrate these principles in my home life, especially the idea of universal capture. Example: I’m sitting reading a book, and my wife asks me to deal with the kitty litter. Do I stop reading immediately and write it down, or e-mail myself? Or do I just get a wooden box and have her throw things in it, much like an inbox? Anyone have suggestions?

So there it is, my one year review. Instead of being bummed that I haven’t gotten it quite right yet, instead I am excited that there is still improvement to be made! If GTD makes this kind of a difference now, operating at 60-70%, just imagine what it will be like when honed and tuned further.

So how long have you been practicing GTD? What areas do you have down solid, and what ones still need improvement?

So just how safe is this?

Everyone loves the convenience of e-mail. In minutes you can instantly send pictures of your kids, travel itineraries, love notes, or any other form of written or visual (picture or video) communication to far away relatives. It’s practically instant gratification, with communicators sending notes back and forth on a whim.

Degree of Difficulty: 3(Power User) for installation, 2(Normal User) for subsequent usage

Note: All tips published will have a difficulty rating of 1 (Grandma could do it), 2 (Normal User), 3 (Power User), and 4 (Geeks only).

But what lots of people fail to realize is that e-mail is inherently a highly insecure method of communication. For instance, did you know that:

• By default, your message is broadcast across the internet in clear text, meaning it is not scrambled or encrypted in any way.
• During its voyage, it may spend time on computers that are a) not owned or in any way related to the sender or recipient, and b) quite possibly not running the latest and most secure version of software, and are vulnerable to being hacked.
• In the case of (a) above, as well as on your ISP’s mail server, your e-mail can be read at any time by someone who has administrative (think super duper all-powerful) rights on that server. Imagine some poor, lonely, nerdy guy sitting at a computer terminal, busily reading your passionate love letter to your husband or wife. OK, that’s a bit of an extreme case, but you get the point.
• E-mail is inherently “spoofable”. That is, it is extremely easy to fake the sending address of an e-mail, making a spammer’s message asking for personal information appear as though it came from your good friend or spouse.

So what are we to do? Abandon all use of the medium, and resort to folded notes, sealed with wax and delivered by pigeons?

Well, no, that’s not really necessary, but we do need to take steps to ensure that either we a) accept the insecure nature of e-mail, and make sure we don’t talk about anything we wouldn’t want our neighbors knowing over it, or b) take steps to make our e-mail readable only to those the message is meant for.

The Lock-Box Methaphor of Key-Based Encryption

We all know that to “encrypt” something means to somehow scramble its contents to the point where without knowledge of how to decode the message, it appears as nothing more than garbage.

One of the more common encryption methods is known as “Public Key Encryption”.  Here’s how it works.

Imagine for a moment that you are in possesion of the following items:

1. An unlimited number of boxes with nearly impenetrable locking mechanisms.  These boxes can hold letters, pictures, video tape, etc, and can be sent through the mail.
2. An unlimited number of keys that can lock these boxes; however once closed and locked, this key cannot be used to open the box and view what is inside.
3. A single, master key, which can be used to open any of the boxes.

Let’s say you have a significant other who lives across town (or across the country, for that matter), and they have something private they want to send you: their bank account number, a steamy love letter, perhaps some rather, err, “personal” pictures? Use your imagination.

Now if you’re friend were to simply send these through the mail, your friendly-yet-nosy postal service worker could easily open the package and view its contents.  So, being a saavy and security conscious person, you instead give your SO a bunch of these boxes, as well as one of your “lock-only” keys.  Now, they simply need to put the incriminating item in one of your boxes, lock it up, and send it on its merry way.  You can both be confident that only the two of you will know what contents lie within.

As an added bonus, imagine that your friend has sealed the box with one of those old-fashioned wax stamps, using their finger as the source of the impression (ouch! that’s hot).  Now imagine that you have some fool-proof way to verify that the seal was in fact made by your friend, and not some impostor.  This is called “cryptographic signing” and is yet another benefit to using public key encryption.  But we’ll get into more detail in later parts.

Do I have your attention?

For now, all you need to know is that by the end of the series, you’ll be able to securely send and receive e-mail with your friends and family, without spending so much as a penny.  You can do this on just about any computer, with any e-mail client from AOL to GMail (though as we’ll see, some are easier than others).  For the difficulty of this task, I will give a hybrid 3 (Power User) / 2 (Normal User) rating, as the installation process is a bit tricky.  If you’re not comfortable with the instructions I give, you may want to have someone computer friendly and trustworth carry them out for you (note: do not let some anonymous Geek Squad employee do this for you, as you will essentially give them the keys to your e-mail).

Tune in next week for Part II of our series, when we’ll be talking about the first steps in installing the software necessary to undertake our operation.

“Hi folks, my name is Josh…”

…and after careful consideration (and with a little guidance from some important people in my life ), I’ve come to the conclusion that  I spend all together too much time on my computer.

I would estimate that (outside of work) I spend 2 hours per night reading blogs, doing research on personal projects, or just zoning out.  On weekends it’s probably even worse, with somewhere around 5+ hours per day spent doing the same thing.  What’s even worse is that I’ve found that most of my time is spent doing rather mindless browsing, without any clear purpose.

Well, all that is going to change, starting now.

The New Rules Of The Game

1. No computer after dinner, except on Mondays and Tuesdays when I write posts for this blog.
2. No more than 3 hours per weekend day on the computer.

Now obviously this does not include work or any after-hours emergencies; I don’t think “I’m trying to cut down on my computer usage” would be a very valid excuse for neglecting my job duties.

I’m hoping that in addition to the obvious benefit of more time with *gasp* real people, this change in policy will help in other ways.

With Limits Must Come Efficiency

Because I am limiting myself to a set amount of time, I have two choices on how to proceed: 1) Continue browsing mindlessly and fail miserably at getting the important tasks done; or 2) Cut out all the crap and only do the specific, necessary work. Which one do you think I’m going to choose?

As a side effect, this will force me to more closely define my personal projects and initiatives. Certainly at work, I’m relatively disciplined in terms of scoping out projects and planning the necessary work before beginning. At home though, I tend to be more spontaneous and unplanned. Not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly it does not lend itself to efficiency.

Do you set limits on time spent with technology? How do you make sure that what time you have staring at a screen is used most efficiently, both at work and outside?

Stephen over at Productivity In Context posted a nice series on how to plan and run better meetings. I don’t know about you, but useless, directionless meetings are a huge problem where I work. If people followed Stephen’s guidelines, I would bet that we’d all get a lot more productive results.