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Postage Stamps January 11, 2006

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It’s funny how little things can make you happy sometimes…

Just a couple of days ago, when the postage rate increased from thirty-seven cents to thirty-nine cents, I was talking with a friend about how the stamps in the UK say “1st” (for “First Class”), rather than the specific value of the stamp (it wasn’t always this way, of course, but it’s been that way for quite a while now – it started in the early ’90′s, if I recall correctly).

So, what comes into my (physical) mailbox today?  A flyer from the US Post Office, who sell stamps at cost, without shipping, via the mail.  And now offer non-denominational “First Class” imprinted stamps, by the roll.  This I like.  Sheets of two cent stamps are available as well to “upgrade” your current thirty-seven cent stamps if you still have any.

Like I said – sometimes it’s the little things!

Business 2.0 Online Now Free January 11, 2006

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The ever interesting and oft informative Slacker Manager links to the business 2.0 blog which is annoucing that the Business 2.0 web content is now available for free (previously it was only available to subscribers, or through a temporary access key published each month in the magazine itself).

Useful, and interesting – and I didn’t know about it, despite having a print subscription. It’s timely too – I’m about to go through all my print subscriptions and decide which I want to keep or stop, and if there’s any new ones I want to add to my list.

I do have to agree with one commenter, however, in that the new URL structure looks to be pretty, er…, “less than optimal”, shall we say?

links for 2006-01-11 January 11, 2006

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Yahoo Web Hosting – The Bad and The Good… January 10, 2006

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(still looking for The Ugly…)

My site went down somewhere around midnight Eastern last night. Went down in the sense that the MySQL database that holds the actual site data couldn’t be connected to, either by the site software, or its own administration module. “Hmmm”, goes I, “this is not good”. So I logged a web support ticket with Yahoo, and went back to watching TV and drinking a beer. Having logged a previous question-type issue with Yahoo’s web support, I figured it would take them about six hours to come back with anything. So – it’d be ready when I got up.

It wasn’t. And that’s the first bad – problem not resolved. Second bad, and actually more annoying in and of itself, no acknowledgement of the logged ticket in my email. Two strikes, folks.

Get to work, and log another ticket, under a slightly different categorisation, but with all the pertinent details again. Leave it an hour or so, no response (OK, that might have been a little hasty, but bear in mind this also means no response to the ticket that I logged some ten or eleven hours earlier). Right. Work through the support pages, and find the phone number to call.

That’s the first Good thing – I had to step through the web support pages, but I can live with that. The phone number was there, when I wanted it. Remember how hard it is/was to get a phone number for Amazon or eBay customer service?

Call the number, and get ONE prompt from the IVR. I like that. Yes, I was expecting to have to go through about ten minutes of voice-prompt hell, possibly made worse only if it was the voice-response type rather than the button response. One button press, and I’m told my wait time is going to be “less than ten minutes”. Heh. Yeah, right. Heard THAT before.

Second Good – a real-live human being came on the phone after I’d been waiting about 8 minutes. Alan, for what it’s worth – who knows, he might be reading this. A few minutes of security checking, me reporting the issue, and him verifying it, and yep – “we have a known issue, that started last night, and is now wide-spread”. I get an escalated ticket number, and we go our merry ways.

It’s a wash so far – two Bad things and two Good things. Interesting how the little things can change your overall perception of an issue.

Of course, what I really, really want right now is for the underlying issues to be resolved so that I can post this as a published post, and not just a saved note in Performancing for Firefox! ;)

Anyway, it’s coming up for 3pm here in the Eastern US, and I’ve just gotten around to checking – and we’re back! :)

Links for 2006-01-10 January 10, 2006

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Copying these in manually, as the automated process from del.icio.us couldn’t connect to my site last night.

  1. Recordable Dvd Quality Page 1
    to howto misc reference technology video dvd dvdr dvdrip

  2. How to add a Google Map to any web page in less than 10 minutes
    to google howto maps

  3. Steve Richards – Adventures in home working :: Skype experiences so far
    to skype telephony review

  4. Create an e-annoyance, go to jail | Perspectives | CNET News.com
    and this is in the “Violence Against Women and Department of Justice
    Reauthorization Act”? Section 113, “Preventing Cyberstalking”, is the
    relevant piece.
    to internet law news technology web

  5. Vongo.com – Choose Now. Watch Now.
    to vongo video @tocheck

  6. Russell Beattie Notebook » Avvenu Rocks
    to avvenu mobile @tocheck

  7. Mr. Speaker » Blog Archive » Hacking Windows Pinball
    to humor

  8. free business books on accounting, economics, mathematics, statistics, Exce.
    to books business

links for 2006-01-09 January 9, 2006

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Implementing Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry – Part Three January 6, 2006

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Part One and Part Two dealt with the Collection stage of Getting Things Done. It’s time to move on to the Processing stage.

As I said originally, I’m not trying to teach GTD per se – I’ve a reasonable presumption that if you’re reading this, you’re at least broadly familiar with the “normal” GTD processes, and you’re just looking for comments or information on “tweaking” it to work with a Blackberry.

So – Processing. You’ve already got this built into some form of regular routine, at the very least a Weekly Review (seen as a tagline: “If you’re not doing a Weekly Review, you’re not Getting Things Done”. I’d attribute it if I could remember where I saw it originally). I’m going to suggest that if you get into the habit of using a Blackberry for the Collection phase (there are perfectly valid reasons why some folks would only use a Blackberry for the Doing part of their lives), then you need to be slightly more rigid with your Processing, and consider the idea of a Morning Review.

I’m calling it a Morning Review, because that’s primarily when I do it – I commit to myself that at a minimum, I will spend some time at the start of each day processing everything that I’ve collected or pre-processed through the Blackberry. If time permits, and I’ve been “out and about” during the day, I may also do it later in the afternoon. And on the flip side, there’s been more than one occasion when I’ve been out and about, away from my desk and computers, for several days. One “mega”-Morning Review followed each of those to get me back on track.

SIDEBAR: Pre-Processing
Imagine you leave the office at 5:00pm (heh. That’d be nice!) with a GTD-standard empty inbox, and all is well in the world. Then you head out, see some friends, swing by a bar, grab some dinner, end up in various conversations, and through the course of the evening find that you’ve:
- programmed a dinner date directly into the Blackberry;
- emailed yourself a reminder note about checking out a movie review;
- emailed yourself an address change for an acquaintance, to update later;
- answered half-a-dozen “urgent” emails that came in.That first entry doesn’t need anything further doing. It’s where it needs to be. The second and third ones are the subject of the Morning Review that we’re talking about now. The last item, the emails you answered, are also going to be dealt with in the Morning Review, but you need to process them slightly differently, as by answering them on the Blackberry, you have already processed them once, in some form.

So… The Morning Review. Technically, you could do this on the Blackberry. It supports copy and paste, creation of new categories, filing of messages into sub-folders. But honestly, I don’t recommend it. It’s my belief and recommendation that the Blackberry be used the way it was originally intended – as a companion device to a PC, whether that PC be a desktop or a laptop. I’m further going to recommend that a decent, heavyweight mail/contact/calendar application be utilized. I’m not going to debate Microsoft vs. anyone else here – there are good and bad points to be made for each side of the debate. It’s undeniable that Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange are heavyweights in this arena, they happen to be the programs that I’m most familiar with, and will be the basis of my examples and commentary here.

Technically, this part of this series of writings – and part of the reason I’ve broken it up this way – isn’t Blackberry specific. I’d prefer it if you read this part as well, but if you’re only looking for “pure” Blackberry and GTD hints and discussion, go ahead and skip to the next part. I’ll understand.

SIDERBAR: The Blackberry“PC Companion”. There’s a term that’s been around for a while. I think I first heard it about the original Windows CE devices (back when it was PPC and HPC…). I don’t know if it was used about the Palm devices. It’s a very descriptive term – it means you use the device alongside of a PC, not in place of one entirely.

But technology moves ever onwards, and you only have to look at the latest batch of, for instance, Windows Mobile 5.0 devices (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/default.mspx) including the shiny new Palm Treo 700w (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/palm/default.mspx) to think that perhaps these devices now ARE suitable as replacements for PC’s, for some users.

I have to admit to really liking the Windows Mobile 5.0 stuff. And it’s not hard to find folks that prefer them to Blackberries (http://winzenz.blogspot.com/2005/12/my-new-toy-imate-jasjar.html).

But when did one of these devices get five to seven days of battery use, like my Blackberry 7290 does?
Or was allowed into a “no cameras allowed” zone?

I’d make comments about push email as well, but that will be resolved with Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2, so I’ll let that slide.

My point is that different devices suit different people, and that for those folks that are looking for a relatively simple, extremely reliable, proven device, the Blackberry has quite a lot to offer still, despite it’s recent legal wrangling with NTP (hit “Blackberry” in the sidebar Categories listing if you want to see more on that subject).

Back to the Morning Review, and processing it with Microsoft Outlook. As mentioned earlier in the series, I strongly recommend the Netcentrics GTD Outlook Addin (and for the record, I have no financial incentive or affiliation in this recommendation; I’m just a happy, paying customer, and you’ll get my copy of it from my cold, dead hands!). It allows me to process emails extremely quickly into their appropriate buckets. It adds a toolbar to Outlook that offers the following options:

Each of those options above is a simple menu click, and then an appropriate dialog box pops up to deal with your choice.

So, the Morning Review sequence of events goes a little something like this:

  1. Check calendar for any timed events for the day. That sets the awareness of how much time I have for doing things, and when.
  2. Check calendar for any all-day events. Those need a place in my consciousness as things to resolve at some point that day.
  3. Hit the Inbox. Any unread, urgent items? If so, eyeball those first to see if they’re going to have to take precedence (I work in an interrupt-driven environment. “Your mileage may vary”, as they say).
  4. Sort inbox by subject. By definition, everything that’s in here now is (a) new since I left “yesterday” (yesterday being the last time I was able to do a review in the office), and (b) has been processed in some way on the Blackberry.
  5. Process each item in turn. It should be less than one minute per item, as we’re doing a combination of collection & processing here, and we just need to get those items into the correct place in the rest of the trusted system. My “record” is processing something like 150 emails in about 30 minutes (remember that there may be more than one email relating to the same issue. So, I might see ten messages all saying “RE: Availability Question” that I know has been dealt with and resolved. They’re sorted by subject, so click on the first, shift-click on the last, and I can delete them or file them as appropriate).
  6. That’s it. You should be looking at an empty mailbox again now, so go on with the rest of your day the way you normally would, with your own personal interpretation of the system.

SIDEBAR: Delete or File?
I file everything, except the truly transient (“Donuts in the downstairs Kitchen!”, etc.). It keeps my inner-lawyer happy… Your choice in this matter may be personal, it may be corporately dictated. There’s a time and a place for both. If you do go with File everything, I’d suggest you also go with either the MSN Desktop Search Toolbar which I use, or the Google Toolbar (the Firefox version, or the “figure out what browser I have” version). Use either of those, and you should be able to find anything (including documents outside of your mail client) without issue. It also makes the actual filing concept easier – I only have one filing folder under my Inbox, for instance, called “Old Inbox”. Everything gets filed in there, if I’m going to keep it. I find it with the search toolbar. I used to use hierarchical folders – until one day I realized I was seven layers into the tree, and still couldn’t find what I was looking for. If you’re using an Inbox folder structure that exactly matches a physical file structure, you may have different experiences. And this is very much one of those “diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks” issues.

The Morning Review is a critical component to me for dealing with those “In A Hurry” emailed-to-self quick notes that I mentioned in Parts 1 & 2 of this. Imagine I get a phone call at 7pm asking me to email document X to person Y first thing in the morning. Here’s how it gets done:

  1. Create email to self.
  2. Subject: “Email document X to ”
  3. Send it.
  4. It obviously comes into my Blackberry as an unread email almost straight away, so next time I happen to look at that screen, I mark it as read, and then forget about it.
  5. Total time for the above 4 steps = less than fifteen seconds. I can forget about this action now until I’m in the office in the morning. Obviously – if you’re on an extended trip, you need to modify this approach slightly!
  6. Next morning, processing through the emails in turn, I come across this one. Following the two-minute rule, I try to immediately send the document via email. I realize that I don’t have a soft-copy of this particular one, just a physical one.
  7. I hit the “Task” button on the Outlook Addin toolbar. The appropriate details come up, and I assign this to “@Office”, as those are the first things I’m going to look at on my task list. The subject line “Email document X to ” defaults into the new task, but it now isn’t really the next action.
  8. My personal method for dealing with this is to change the subject line to say “Scan document X -> Email document X to ”.
  9. Save that into my task list, and done.

Call that one two minutes, end to end, to get it to the top of my list of next actions, once I’ve finished the Morning Review.

The Morning Review, incidentally, is in my calendar as “hard landscape”, same time, every day. It’s also scheduled for 90 minutes, to allow me to deal with any contingencies, deal with issues in different time zones ahead of where I am, and, on a perfect day, give me some clear thinking time, before I start scheduled events.

If you’re not automatically synchronizing your Blackberry over the air for some reason, the Morning Review is one of those times when you should cable-sync. Process the Inbox, deal with anything immediately outstanding, get yourself synchronized, and you should be set for the day.

Conclusion

The above really was more of a “ramble” about my own particular approach to time management, but I honestly believe that it’s a necessary part to the bigger picture of using a Blackberry for this stuff – if you have a very small number of items to process, you may well get away with doing them directly on the handheld. But there’s a reason they call them Crackberries, and the volume of information you process through them does tend to expand to fill the time you spend with them, thus necessitating the extra, “real PC” processing.

I’ll continue on with “proper, Blackberry specific” suggestions and comments in the next couple of days.

If you’re still reading – thanks! I appreciate the comments, feedbacks and links I’ve received over the last couple of days. Any comments or questions in relation to this welcome – just leave them below.

Continues…

Coming up in following posts:

Part Four Can Be Found Here

Interlude… January 5, 2006

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The next part of the “Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry” is coming tomorrow…  Real work and life has been taking priority…

links for 2006-01-05 January 5, 2006

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Implementing Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry – Part Two January 3, 2006

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Part One Can Be Found Here

Creating Tasks and Next Actions

OK – the heart of the GTD system. Next Actions, represented within the Blackberry and Outlook world, and then mapped back to contexts through the use of Categories.

Task input on the Blackberry is relatively easy – from the home screen, hit “Tasks”, and then do one of two things:

Remember I said that the Operating System had to be v4.0 or above? This application is the major reason why. If you didn’t check your version earlier, look at the Task screen – no Category line, no GTD compatibility. See you cellular provider for an OS upgrade.

Blackberry Tasks - Setting Categories

Now.. We get into an area where the Blackberry will work. It won’t necessarily work in a pleasant, user-friendly and screen-attractive manner. I said yesterday “…if you work with the tools that you have, and are open to adaptation and interpretation (of the processes and methods), you’ll probably be pretty happy with the results”. This is one of those areas.

Scroll down to the category line. Hit the space-bar, and you’ll be taken into the category selection list. First compromise point – you’re going to see categories from every aspect of Outlook – Calendar, Email, Contacts, Tasks, Notes. Second compromise – the categories turn up whether they’re populated, or not (for instance, I have a context/category @Calls that I use very rarely. It shows up on the list every time – good from a creation perspective, bad from a retrieval one, and the Blackberry doesn’t discriminate).

Third Compromise – the Blackberry doesn’t prioritize the “@” symbol alphabetically. So, on mine I see “@Agendas”, followed by “Bars” (a contacts category), followed by “@Calls”. Caveat: the Blackberry emulator that I am using for screenshots for this work DOES correctly sort the “@” symbol. The version number of the emulator is slightly higher than my actual Blackberry OS as well. Thus, this may have been fixed in a newer release for the actual handhelds. If you have experience confirming or denying this, I’d be interested in your comments.

Final compromise in respect of the Category functionality on the Blackberry – if you have a Filter applied, so that you are only looking at one context (i.e. you were previously in retrieval/processing/doing mode), and you create a new Task, the Blackberry will NOT automatically try to apply that Category. In general use, I don’t find this a nuisance, as I may add an “@Call” item, then a “@Shopping” one, and finally a “@Computer” item. That “@Shopping” one though… Adding five or six grocery items, and having to set the category every time – gets old after a while.

So, that’s it. Task created; reminder and due dates created as you see fit for your own implementation of the system, and a category applied. Save it to the Blackberry, and let it replicate to Outlook.

From a Blackberry perspective, if you were to go into any of the retrieval stages – processing, organizing, reviewing, doing – that task has had all you need doing done to it. If you want to be able to do any of those stages within Outlook – as part of a morning review, or a weekly review – there’s one more step to be done, if you’re using the Netcentrics addin.

The Netcentrics addin adds specific fields to the Outlook forms for “Action” and “Project”. I’m not going to cover the Project field – it’s got it’s pro’s and con’s. Action though is key to being able to use the views that are added to Outlook. If you’re not using the Addin, the chances are that you’re using Outlook views that work around the Category field, so you’ll be OK. Addin users – look at your tasks list, by Active Action, and look at the actions that have filtered to the top with no Action. Those are the ones you need to open up and allocate the appropriate Action code (and Project too, if you’re so inclined). That data won’t synchronize back to the Blackberry, but it’s a necessary extra step to be able to use both parts of the system to their fullest extent.

There are a couple of aspects to retrieving tasks that need to be converted further – those will come in the next sections – this section is meant to focus on the Collection stage of the process.

When you’re in a Hurry

I mentioned this in yesterday’s post as well, but it bears repeating here – don’t want to create a new task, find the right category (indeed, create the right category if it doesn’t already exist), set the right date details (if you know them), and so forth?

Just send yourself an email.

If you’ve got “Dial From The Home Screen” disabled (from the phone screen, go into Options, General Options, and it’s towards the bottom) then you have hotkey access from the home screen to most applications. “T” for Tasks, “L” for Calendar, “M” for Messages for instance.

There’s also “C” for Create. You can create email, SMS, MMS, PIN Messages, whatever. The system will default to email if you use shortcuts – my surname is Slinger, and I’m in my own address book as that, with my correct email details. I can get to it by hitting “C” from the home screen followed by “SL”. That selects my name. “Enter”, and I’m creating an email. If your own name doesn’t lend itself to such access (I hate to pick on “Smith” and “Jones”, but you get the idea), consider creating a fake entry for yourself – “zz” for instance. “C Z Z Enter” and you’re in. Four keystrokes from the home key.

Fill in as much detail as you feel you’ll need to be able to properly interpret and process the item when you come back to it as part of your Processing stage, Send it to yourself, and you’re done. This step alone is a major reason I put a “Morning Review” into my GTD & Blackberry methodology when I started it – I’ve been known to enter thirty or forty notes to myself in this manner in the course of an evening, and then taken about ten minutes the next day, on a proper computer, to process them into the system. It would have taken me a lot longer than that to directly enter them on the Blackberry. Some of them also came under David Allen’s two-minute rule – 20 seconds to send an email to myself, versus two minutes or more to actually record it properly, and then the next day, on reading the note, less than two minutes to process, and delete the item, keeping it out of the “proper” system entirely.

More on Morning Reviews in the next installment.

Continues…

Coming up in following posts:

Part Three Can Be Found Here

Implementing Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry January 2, 2006

Posted by Gary Slinger in : Uncategorized , 10comments

I’ve had a number of entries in my referrer log regarding “GTD and Blackberry” or “Blackberry and Getting Things Done”. I mentioned in a previous post that I’d be writing about it soon. “Soon” had to be redefined somewhat due to some work and personal issues, but here we go.

Implementing “Getting Things Done”, while using a Blackberry

Assumptions:

I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with GTD – if you’re not, you should first check out the David Allen website, and/or the book itself. From a technology perspective, I should disclose that I use Microsoft Outlook 2003, connected to an Exchange Server 2003. Added to Outlook, I have the Netcentrics GTD Outlook Addin; there’s also a Blackberry Enterprise Server in the mix. Major elements of the process and such that follow will work without having all of these elements, but the results may not be as “smooth” in implementation.

The Blackberry Itself

I personally use a Blackberry 7290:

Blackberry 7290

Provided you’re using a Blackberry with an Operating System of at least 4.0, the Blackberry examples shown here will be consistent, other than the appearance of the keyboard if you’re using a 71xx model, or the aesthetic differences of the case.

The Operating System

A key concept of GTD is “contexts”. These are represented in this methodology through “Categories”, which are replicated between the Blackberry and Outlook. Versions of the Blackberry prior to 4.0 don’t have the Category functionality in the Tasks application, so it won’t work out. Using the Netcentrics addin facilitates pushing next actions into the Tasks section of Outlook, and hence the Blackberry.

To check your Operating System version on your Blackberry, start from the home screen, go into Options, and then into About. You should see something like this:

Checking the Blackberry OS Version

You can see here that I have a Blackberry running version 4.0.2.49. If you have a 3.x, check with your cell provider – they should have an upgrade available for you.

Using The Blackberry For Getting Things Done

David Allen breaks the GTD process into five distinct stages. I’m going to use these as guides, and map how I personally use the Blackberry in each stage. I think that Collection and Processing, the first two sections, are the most involved and important.

Remember that GTD is a process, and concept, that each implementer has to adapt for their own needs. There’s no application to load on to a Blackberry that will magically implement the GTD processes, and there’ll be aspects of the implementation that you don’t like in all likeliness. But if you work with the tools that you have, and are open to adaptation and interpretation (of the processes and methods), you’ll probably be pretty happy with the results.

Collection

While I try and have pen and paper with me all the time, the Blackberry, by virtue of also being my cellphone, is always with me. Thus collection – getting commitments, obligations and ideas into the trusted system, where they can later be processed – is a key element of the Blackberry’s usefulness to me.
Items to Collect with the Blackberry:

Calendar Commitments

Almost goes without saying, doesn’t it? You make a dinner date, or agree the time and date of the next project review meeting, or whatever – just key it into the Blackberry at the appropriate time and date, let it synchronize back to Outlook, and you’re done.

Don’t forget that you can do all-day events and foreign time zone events directly into the calendar though – the former for “must do on day X but at any time” type next actions you have (“Call Dad” is a fairly typical one of mine). The latter… If you work in a multi-national company, have friends or contacts abroad, etc., then this trick is handy. For example, let’s say you live in Florida, you’re visiting Texas, and you need to schedule a call to England, but you can’t remember if the time difference is five, six or seven hours. Open up the Blackberry calendar, and create the item, recording the time details at the time you want it to happen at the destination. Then change the time-zone field to the destination time zone.

Time Zone field in Calendar Entry

Save it, and you’re done. Open it back up to check, and you’ll see that it’s been changed to the correct local time for you. THIS DOES REQUIRE that you have your current time zone set correctly in the Blackberry in the first place. From the home screen, hit Options, then Time/Date and make sure that the first entry matches up to your current time zone.

Setting your Time Zone

Contact Details / Phone Numbers

Chances are, if I’m being given an address when I’m out and about, it’s either on a business card or in an email. So I process that normally, back at my desk. Phone numbers go straight into the Blackberry though – don’t forget to assign a category when you add a new contact (although if you forget, you can always deal with that as part of the next “morning review”, of which I’ll go into later).

Very occasionally, though, it may be too long-winded to go into the address book application, and create a record “properly” – in that instance, I just fire up the email application and send a message to myself. I can create a new email to myself from the home screen with the following key presses: “C”, “SL” (first two letters of my surname) and “Enter”. I can use that to quickly enter a note (about anything, this isn’t just relevant to phone numbers and such) in shorthand, that I can then process into my system properly during the next morning review.

If your own name doesn’t come up on the addressing screen with just a couple of key presses, consider adding a “fake” entry to your address book, such as “zz”, with your own email address against it. Same net result.

Continues…

In the interests of keeping this post a manageable length and size, I’m going to break here.

Coming up in following posts:

Part Two Can Be Found Here