Productivity
I Forgive Myself For Being A Lousy Blogger
Tuesday, July 10, 2007 2:17 PM (permalink)
Sure, I have been blogging up a storm here, here and here, but I have sadly neglected my personal blog here for some time. I'm sure any other bloggers reading this can sympathize--months pass without a post, and then when you finally do get around to it, you hesitate--why bother? You haven't written anything for months, so why start now? Whoever reads this has deserted you long ago, so what hope do you have of recapturing readers? Are you not, in fact, a loser?
I am not, in fact, a loser. I just finished reading Mark Bernstein's The Tinderbox Way, which is not only a deep dive into the workings and design decisions behind Tinderbox (my preferred tool for notes), but also a considered look at why we take notes in the first place, and what a personal blog really means. I have lots of outlets to write for readers, but this is meant as an outlet to write for me. Turns out, I need to write a bit today, so here it is.
Hi, my name is Tom, and I am a lousy blogger. I forgive myself.
But I will try harder!
Presenting Data Vs. Telling a Story
Monday, July 9, 2007 10:04 PM (permalink)
I have been giving a lot of presentations lately--some good, some bad. In my business, clarity is Job #1. I often scour the Internet for mentions of my presentation or the data I give not out of vanity (though I have no small amount of that) but out of the fear that the data will be misrepresented, miscopied, or otherwise butchered. I always get one or two of these, and those I chalk up to the writer either reading what they wanted to into the slide, no understanding research in general, or just making a typo. When I find more than one or two specific examples, however, I know that I was the butcher.
For instance, I gave two different presentations over the past couple of weeks that came out very differently-one pretty good (at least for me) and one not really up to my standards. In both, I was presenting data-slide after slide of data. But while I left the first one, a presentation to the Country Radio Broadcasters about the state of Country Radio partisans, with a good feeling, I left the second one, to the Corporate Podcast Summit, feeling like I hadn't done my best.
For both I was well prepared, knew the data cold, spoke confidently and had few nerves. But there was a big difference in how I felt afterward, and it taught me something. In the CRB presentation, I went through about 50 slides in an hour--with only 30 or so complex data graphs. In the podcast presentation, I used 40 slides in 25 minutes, and actually skipped 4 or 5 slides as I raced to leave myself enough time for my conclusions.
I have read lots of advice about how many slides you should have in a presentation, and most of the experts say that you should count on one slide for every :45 to 1:00 of your talk. That might work for a Tom Peters-esque slide that says nothing but "FOCUS" or "WOW!" but not so much for tracking the purchasing habits of two distinct lifegroups over 4-5 years. So I think I am going to make myself a new rule. The Internets love lists, so here is my "list of two":
- 1. Allow at least three minutes per slide for a data-rich chart or graph
- 2. If you can't talk for three compelling minutes about a data-rich chart, cut it.
The last bit will be the most difficult for me--after all, I have all this great data--why not tell it all to the world? But I have learned that even in a presentation filled with exciting, really new-to-the-world data, less is more. I found myself in the podcast presentation really racing through some slides (and, in hindsight, they weren't that important) while spending 4-5 minutes on others. It is the slides that I spent 4-5 minutes on that really told the story, and are the ones that no one got wrong, miscopied or otherwise corrupted when I read the write-ups later.
I think if I have to "fill" a certain amount of time I wildly overestimate the number of charts to use, and this is, I am sure, a crutch. After all, if I run out of things to say in a 30-minute presentation, it is comforting to know that I have 60 slides of data to blow through as a safety net. Unfortunately, this results in a less-than-memorable presentation, though I used to congratulate myself for "not even using these slides--that's how great I was!" Now I see excess material as a real failure--a lack of proper planning and foresight to what the story really is.
Looking back over the podcast presentation, I had 7 or 8 really great charts, and then a bunch of charts that were best left as conversation bits at the cocktail hour. Had I gone with that, I probably would have given a 22-minute talk that told the same story, only better. That is the best 30-minute presentation advice you'll ever get!
Productivity on the Road
Monday, July 9, 2007 10:04 PM (permalink)
I think so many of the productivity pr0n sites out there (Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Web Worker Daily, etc.) are tremendously useful for the infrequent traveler, but once you hit the 50,000 mile mark and beyond for a given year, relying solely on technology starts to become an exercise in coping. One of the things I hope to do with this blog this year is to present tips and tricks from senior executives and consultant friends of mine who have insane travel schedules. If your productivity solution depends on wifi access, or even something you have to plug in, what do you do when you are stuck in an airport for a 3-hour delay, as frequently happens to me, and you can't find a plug and there are no T-Mobile Hotspots? That is why so many of the folks I work with and see on the road have paper-based solutions. They aren't luddites, certainly (and neither am I), but so far I haven't been able to find anything to replicate my paper planner that will work 100% of the time, in any situation I find myself in. As a side benefit, I get great battery life!
An Actual Joyent Workflow, Redux
Monday, July 9, 2007 10:04 PM (permalink)
I get a lot of requests about fixing my Joyent workflow post, which lost all 6 of its images when my server got fried--I hadn't saved local copies of them, and the article makes little sense without them. I keep intending to do this, but in all honesty over the past few months as my travel schedule became insane I found myself gravitating to off-line tools, and eventually back to paper. I hate PDA's, and so after a few months of trying to square my hundreds of to-dos and appointments with some kind of online productivity solution, I cut out a step and stuck with a paper planner. I still transfer notes into Tinderbox regularly, but my to-dos and next actions live in my planner, which always works (even in the wifi-less Sioux City Airport, or SUX for you aviation buffs.) So, while I feel some remorse about not recreating those graphics, I haven't been able to motivate myself to do it yet. I give anyone with such motivation full permission to make some graphics and repost this on their blog, if it helps anyone!
Is Anyone Really 'Getting Things Done' Out There?
Monday, October 23, 2006 8:34 PM (permalink)
From David Seah, this link to GTD Gmail, which is a plugin for the Firefox Web Browser that integrates Getting Things Done with Google's GMail service. Also this week a Firefox extension for Getting Things Done is due to be released, and OmniGroup is working on a GTD application of their own. Really, there are a frightening number of GTD apps out there now, both on the web and on the desktop (not the least of which is David Allen's own GTD plugin for Outlook, which works just fine).
All of this begs the question--with so many people writing GTD apps, writing about GTD apps, beta-testing GTD apps and playing around with multiple GTD apps, how are any of us "getting things done?" Seriously--I work with a lot of senior managers in my profession--station managers, C-level executives and VPs of this-and-that, and almost all of them rely on two productivity aids. One of these, of course, is an assistant, which I recognize many of you may not have--but assistants don't prioritize your work, or even generate your to-do list. The other is a notebook--generally a lined legal pad. The latter is the primary tool for at least 70% of the executives I work with.
Whatever works for you, works for you--don't get me wrong. It just seems like a tremendous amount of resources are being committed to GTD that has to be cutting into our national productivity somewhere. I read once that the Atkins Diet caused a one billion dollar shift in our economy. GTD has, I know, increased productivity for many senior managers and executives. But what has it done for software and web developers, I wonder?
Here, then, is my only point--if you are signed up and using more than one tool for GTD--you need to re-read the book, and maybe hire David Allen himself to come clean up your hard drive and delete your bookmarks.
Possibly Related:
How Google Ruined my Writing, and Two Letters that got it back again
Monday, October 23, 2006 8:25 PM (permalink)
Back when I was in college, we didn't have the Internet--we had a library. I wrote all my papers on a smokin' hot Commodore 64, complete with cassette tape drive and a sweet dot-matrix printer exactly like Strong Bad's. Since all this goo was in my room, and the library was a 15-minute walk across campus, I had to actually think about planning my research and my writing as separate activities. If I had to look something up while I was writing, I couldn't very well stop each time I had a question and schlep all the way over to the library and back--there is no way I would get any actual writing done.
Somehow, over time, I forgot those halcyon days waiting for my printer to grind away all night on a 25-pager, and now find it hard to believe that there was once no such thing as Google, Wikipedia and Boing Boing. Where once my research and writing were separated by geography (and laziness), now they happen on the same lil' MacBook Pro (no more Compy 64!--oh, Compy...come back to me Compy....) This means that whenever I have even the slightest question about something, I can very easily stop writing and click on over to Google and get lost for an hour.
Convenient, yes--but it completely ruins your writing flow. The best way to improve your writing is to just keep writing--to plow through and put your time in just like noted plodders like Dickens and Thackery did. Nothing steals your writing mojo any faster than stopping to do research. Now, I am not suggesting that you do away with research--of course you need to look stuff up and/or plan ahead for future sections. But, for those of you who may not be aware of the most powerful took in the journalists toolkit, I have the solution in one simple two-letter "word": 'tk.'
This old chestnut has been used by print journalists for decades, and simply stands for "to come." Next time you are elbows deep in writing, and you have a question that requires some research, use my rule of one--if the very first link on Google doesn't answer my question (and I do allow myself that 10 second interruption) then I whip out the old 'TK.' Say I am writing about a road trip, and I can't remember the name of that little town in Montana I drove through that had the great Buffalo jerky--I just substitute 'TK' wherever I need that name and plow on, blissfully forgetting about it and pushing the inquiry to the back of my brain.
Later, when I am in 'research mode/mood,' I just spellcheck my document (the TK's light up like ATC at Newark) or just do a Find Next and write down all the things I need to research on a page or two of my notebook and then do it all at once. It turns out that economist TK was right about all that "Division of Labor" stuff. If I stopped to care about facts, how would I ever get any blogging done at all?
An Actual Joyent Workflow
Saturday, June 24, 2006 4:32 PM (permalink)
For the past few weeks I have been revisiting the Joyent collaboration suite as, at the very least, a brainless way for me to archive emails from my IMAP server at work, since it is very easy to add Joyent to Outlook and write a quick rule to send a copy of everything to Joyent's inbox. I got a Joyent account as part of my hosting package with Textdrive, but after some initial frustration with its earliest iteration, decided it just wasn't baked enough yet to be of use.
I checked back on Joyent last month, however, and was pleased to see that progress had been made, and while the app still feels like a beta, it is, at least, pretty usable and extremely flexible once you get under the hood. The Joyeurs have promised another update very soon which will solve the main problem--speed (GMail puts it to shame) but it works, and it works surprisingly well as a central tool to organize your workflow.
Let's say you are a devotee of David Allen's ubiquitous Getting Things Done, or GTD methodology, and you loves you some lists. Well, Joyent's flexible framework of notifications, smart mailboxes and tagging system actually works very, very well--much better than GMail, if your desire is to tie your central task list to your email.
Here's how I do it. First, I work primarily in two areas of the site: Connect, and Mail. Connect is the primary collection screen for Notifications, which are used as a collaborative tool to flag emails, dates or files for others in your workgroup and add tags and comments. But Notifications are also great when you are El Lobo Solo, an Army of One like me. I need to have two sets of lists--a list of actions by context (stuff I can do on my computer, stuff I can do while traveling, etc--fairly standard GTD here) and a list of my active projects. The Connect tab lets me keep the two lists separate.
Start on your Connect page, and start making yourself a series of smart groups by clicking the '+' next to smart groups, and entering a name (@Calls) and adding a tag of the same name. I have a bunch of these, all preceded by an '@', to signify an action I need to take.
Since this list is sorted by context, not priority, I also created an additional smart group, seen here as '@!!!', for things I have to do TODAY (I also tag them with the appropriate context as well). If I don't finish things in the @!!! the day I tag them, I suffer gastrointestinal distress. (No, really. You don't want an endoscopy if you can help it.)
So here is my list of smart groups;
Your mileage may vary. I also have a smart group for my travel itineraries--it's just handy for me. So now you have a bunch of context/actions in smart groups on your Connect page. Now it is time to click on the Mail tab, and start creating Smart Mailboxes, one for each active project, as opposed to context--this keeps everything nice and segmented. Here is my current list:
These are created the same way that Smart Groups were made on the Connect page--just hit the '+' sign, name the mailbox, and then add a tag for the project.
So now you are ready to work--and the workflow part is pretty easy. All you do is get your mail into Joyent, and then process it on the mail screen. I open each mail, and decide if I need to keep it. If I don't I delete it, but if I do or it triggers an action I tag it with at least 1 and up to 3 or 4 tags. The first tag is the project (which should be an active project, so it should already have a smart mailbox--you need to use the same tag.) If there is an action associated, you also tag it with the correct '@' context. So, in this example, I have an email related to my upcoming presentation at the Corporate Podcast Summit:
I tag it with 'podcastsummit' (which matches the tag I used to define my 'Podcast Summit' smart mailbox) and, because it is an email I need to write, I tag it '@computer."
This will put the mail itself archived in the right mailbox (which I can delete when the project is over--it is just a virtual box, after all--the orginal email and its tag persist and can always be recreated) and put it in my @Computer Smart Group on the Connect screen. If I need to add a clarification about what the task is, I simply add a comment at the bottom of the email in the Comment field, another great Joyent innovation.
Finally, if the email triggers an actual hard action that I have to do (as opposed to @Waiting For, @Someday or @TravelInfo) I take one more step--I add a notification:
Since I am the only user, I click on me (duh!) What this does is put the email itself into the main message list of my Connect screen, so it becomes a master task list of everything I have to act on:
You can see that I can click on the various contexts if I need to make calls, or collect stuff to take with me on my next trip, but the main screen lets me see everything I have to do, all at once.
I then move the email to my Filed mailbox and get it off my mail screen. Job done.
When I complete an action, all I do is select the message on my main Connect screen, then de-select the @tag and the Notification (but I leave the project tag). It then disappears from my Connect screen and the @context smart group, so it is no longer a task--but it stays in the Smart Mailbox for the project so it is there to review.
When I am offline, I can either print the @Calls screen to take my calls on the road, or I can subscribe to the RSS feed for the smart group (everything has an RSS feed, another great feature) and access it on my phone from NewsGator Mobile.
Anyway, as you can see from some of these screenshots, this is a working system, and I have lots in it at any one time. As ad hoc tasks come up, I either just do them immediately or pretty soon, or I just send myself a quick email to my Joyent account and process it later. Works for me, maybe it will work for you.
An Awesome Pen For 15 Bucks
Saturday, June 3, 2006 1:35 PM (permalink)
I love good pens--the Mont Blancs write very well, but I am NOT spending $200+ on a pen. I am just not wired that way. Don't get me wrong--I leak money like a sieve at Best Buy, but I just can't bring myself to spend any more on a pen than the 2 bucks my Pilot G2's cost. That is why this is such a great hack I had to pass it on. I am getting my utility knife out right now...
