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A Peaceful and Productive Day February 27, 2006

Ingredients:

* Blue skies and sunshine are optional, but it’s not really as good without it.
** Fresh ground coffee is not optional!

Method:

Result:

Increased productivity and reduced stress while working at home. Actually, with the exception of the Chatterbox (which is actually attached to a “comms” laptop at home) I could have been using all of the above almost anywhere – home, Starbucks, wherever. The point is that I’m lucky enough to be able to work at home when my projects and commitments come together appropriately, and prompted by some posts I saw today about “working from the bag”, I thought I’d throw in my two-penn’orth.

  1. Office Phone Calls. I diverted my office phone to voicemail before leaving on Friday, although I could have done it over the web today if I’d forgotten (I like Cisco Unity!). Voicemail is delivered to my email as an MP3, which then forwards to my Blackberry. I can’t play the MP3 on my Blackberry, but I can see that the message is there, and decide when to retrieve it. Anyone who may need me urgently has my cellphone (Blackberry) number anyway, so I’m reachable, but this extra filter helps keep me moving along. If I needed to get into a “proper” work call, my Cisco softphone would’ve worked perfectly well. The same Bluetooth headset for my Blackberry would work with my laptop for the softphone.
  1. The Vosky Chatterbox is a quick-and-easy way to take personal calls, if I’m on a break or otherwise inclined, while leaving my hands free to keep working away at a keyboard. It’s also really easy, as I use Skype, to click the mouse a couple of times and make sure that any personal calls also go to voicemail.
  1. Physical Layout. From where I was working, I was four paces from the kitchen (and that nice, fresh coffee…), and twelve paces from the bathroom. I haven’t tried to calculate it yet, but I know that made a significant time saving today!
  1. Digital is great, but know when to use pen and paper. It was quicker to take my hands off the laptop and make a quick note in the Circa than it would’ve been for me to use multiple applications on the laptop today. That would have been a different story if I’d been working at my desktop, with the two monitors – the moral of the story is choose the right tools for the job.
  1. Contactability… Trillian on my desktop, Skype on my desktop and laptop, and Tello on my Blackberry, as well as email access on my laptop and Blackberry, and I think I’ve been pretty reachable! Given I work with an international team, and I also don’t sit anywhere near the folks I regularly interact with when I’m IN the office, this doesn’t throw any great issues into my workplace/working methods.

Not a lot of face-to-face, or (today) remote contact with the team and colleagues via IM, etc., but it’s the same general principle as the “out of the bag” posts – it’s not always about being “at the office”; sometimes it’s just about “what you get done”, and the overall benefits that can bring, and the comforts you can experience as a result of that.

All in all, a very productive, pleasant and comfortable day.

I’m going to do it all again tomorrow J


This week…

… I was going to buy a new iPod, probably one of the 60Gb ones.  And I thought the only choice I had to make was whether to get it in white, or black.

Seems I’ll have to wait a little longer to decide.

On Tuesday, Apple will be announcing “fun new products“.  As one of those products might be a new video iPod, I’ll wait…

And then on Thursday, Microsoft will be telling us about their Origami product, which the early reports (leaks) and speculation has as a multi-purpose, video, audio, etc. etc. handheld device.

So, hopefully, I’ll know by Thursday which device I’ll be going for.  Of course, if neither of the new products are going to be available any time soon, I’ll go with the iPod anyway - at least I know it’ll do what I want it to do, and it’ll fit into the rest of my computer/audio/video equipment quite nicely.


Spelling with Flickr

Just a little silliness to start the day…

Spell with flickr

GARY ese-dos.jpgLINGER


RIM/NTP Lawsuit - Hearing Today - Updates… February 24, 2006

Blackberry Cool are doing a post with updates on the trial hearing today. Head on over here.

Three updates so far (12:25 Eastern), nothing new or of import yet.

Update:

Update #5 - 1:02 PM EST:

Judge Spencer stopped short of ordering an immediate shutdown of millions of Blackberrys.

But U.S. District Judge James Spencer said there was no escaping that RIM had been found to be infringing on NTP’s patents and he would issue a decision on an injunction “as soon as reasonably possible.”

My personal thought - it is insane that the Judge is focussing on this.  “found to be infringing on NTP’s patents” - uh, yeah, that’d be those invalid patents, right?

In any event, the first sentence of the update is good news.


ITIL: The Service Desk February 23, 2006

Having established a configuration management database, the next key tenet of ITIL is the Service Desk. The goal of which is to provide a single point of contact for customers and end-users, and an operational single point of contact for managing incidents to resolution.

Essential Activities of The Service Desk

A Service Desk provides the following benefits to an Organization:

But you must be aware of the following (potential) challenges:

Some possible Key Performance Indicators for measuring the Service Desk could be:

The Service Desk

(the above is part of an ongoing series of notes I’m making as I review the ITIL processes I currently work to in my “day job”.  Other notes can be found by browsing the ITIL category here).


(Almost) Free Software February 22, 2006

File under “why not?” - it’s worth the five bucks on the off-chance the software might be useful.  The below describes the software as Project Management; the comments on the original post seem to indicate that it’s both project management and bug/issue tracking.

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Project Management Software Maker tries Memetracker approach

Project Management Software Maker tries Memetracker approach

OK, here’s a fun little marketing test. Axosoft is selling its $495 project management software for only $5 and it’s donating that to the American Red Cross.


Weekly Review - Checklist MindMap February 20, 2006

My GTD Weekly Review checklist was getting a little disorganized, to the extent that I was tending to ignore it. So, I spent a little time today cleaning it up, and producing it as a MindMap, so that I can have one, clean, sheet of paper that I can pin up over my desks. I usually do the Weekly Review on a Friday afternoon, in the office, but occasionally run through it at home on a Saturday morning, so you’ll see it’s from that point of view. I also tend to do a reasonable amount of processing as part of the weekly review - my expense report, if needed, for instance - which isn’t strictly in the spirit of the review as written by David Allen, but it works for me.

There’s an image below that will expand substantially if you open it up, or you’re welcome to download the MindMap here.

Weekly Review Mindmap

If you’re getting the message that I’m “into” GTD, and that I do a lot of process documentation, often with MindManager, you’d be right!

As always, if you get any benefit out of the above, or have anything else to say about it, please feel free to let me know in the comments section below.


CoComment’s Open February 19, 2006

If you hadn’t noticed from GTDWannabe’s comment, or his her post here, note that CoComment no longer needs an invite.

Recommended, and worth checking out.


On the Generosity of the not met*, Unexpected Surprises, and Written Responses February 18, 2006

These days, I tend to say, and believe, that it takes a lot to surprise me.  Been there, done that, and all that jazz.

Well, I came home on Thursday night to find a shipping company notification label stuck to my apartment door.  That’s how we do it around here – the apartment company accepts delivery for us, and we can go and collect the package when it’s convenient.  Saves having to have someone home.  (Sidebar – this is great, but if anyone from Post Apartments is reading, you having office hours of 10am to 6pm is “less than customer service orientated”.  Think about it – most everyone is going to have to leave for work before then, and not get home until after then.  So it’s a special trip to see you, or we have to wait until the weekend.  Not cool.).  But back to the topic at hand.

I was working close to home yesterday, so I swung by the apartment office after lunch and collected the package.  It was a package from Amazon, and there’s no great surprise there.  Except that I normally have my Amazon stuff delivered to the office.  I opened it up, and found it was a copy of “The World Is Flat”.  Well,  that’s definitely a book I’ve been meaning to read, since I heard it recommended on Manager Tools, and then listened to the author talk, on LearnOutLoud.com.  So, I wondered if I’d just put the order through, chosen home by mistake, and then forgot about it.  That would have been a lot of coincidences, though, wouldn’t it?

So I checked the shipping label.  Sure enough, it was a gift, from someone who has been reading this site, and had seen that it was on my Amazon wish list.  “Wow!”  OK – that surprised me.  And you know what?  In all the time that I’ve been using Amazon (trust me, a far greater percentage of my income has gone to Jeff Bezos and his merry gang than I ought to be comfortable with!), I’d never realized that you could do that with a wish list.  Thinking about it, it’s blindingly obvious, and of course, I could always have paid more attention to the web pages themselves, but I’d been using the wish list simply as a convenient “to do” list of books that I planned to buy myself someday.  I link it from my Reading Page for my own convenience.

So, this surprised me, and it was a very nice one.  And as I suspect that the person who sent the book is also going to see this post, let me now say “Thank you.  I appreciate it very much”.

And that takes me nicely into my next point – I’ve just written, and mailed, a thank-you note of the old-fashioned, pen and ink variety.  Now, I’m wondering, and fractionally concerned, that the book sender may have seen that I’ve received the book – the joys and wonders of package tracking, don’t you know – and wondered why I hadn’t said anything.  Well, with this post, I’m cheating a little – they get to see my instant “thank you”, and then get my real one when the USPS delivers it – sometime early next week.

Doug Hampshire and I both made references to hand-written notes in recent posts of ours about job interviews, and received both positive and negative feedback about it.  It occurs to me that in our modern world, with expectations of immediacy and always-on communications – there’s a Blackberry on the counter in front of me as I write this – that there’s a risk of perceived lack of courtesy or appreciation, in that gap of time between something being offered, received, or done for – whatever – and the acknowledgement and/or “thanks” making their way through the paper and mail system.

And that’s a shame, because for some things, email just isn’t enough.

This post, incidentally, was drafted in a Moleskine pocket sketchbook, with a Pilot G-2.  I am somewhat biased in favor of the pen and ink way of doing things! J

* Because “stranger” isn’t appropriate, but I don’t know if “friend” is – yet.


links for 2006-02-17 February 17, 2006


ITIL: Configuration Management February 16, 2006

It’s been a while since I posted an ITIL map here, and I had a number of responses to it, both in the comments and via email. I am, as I mentioned, reviewing a variety of ITIL notes that I’ve accumulated and worked to and from, for a variety of reasons. I’ll post recaps here as I work through them (I’m not in “dedicated study mode”, this is something I’m doing as a part of my regular workday, and fitting around “real” work, and there’s no set schedule for this. If you’re interested in a particular piece of ITIL, let me know in the comments - no reason I have to work on these in any particular order!). Similarly, these are posted as high-level, refresher-type notes; I’m not going into a huge amount of detail - if you’re reading this and you’d like more information on specific items or elements, go right ahead and let me know in the comments, and we’ll go from there.

Configuration Management

Configuration Management is the starting point of the ITIL processes in that everything ultimately reports back into a CMDB - a Configuration Management Database. When you’re dealing with Asset Management, you’re tying the assets to the CMDB. When you’re doing Incident Management, that Incident is in relation to something that is recorded in the CMDB - in theory, anyway!

The goal of Configuration Management is to identify, record and report on all IT components that are under the control and scope of Configuration Management. In turn, Configuration Management provides the basis for Change Management, and Release Management.

Essential Activities for Configuration Management:


Tactical is the new Strategy

Great post by Chad Dickerson that I wanted to highlight, as it’s one of the “core values” that I try to work to. In summary: “Details Matter”.

Tactical is the new strategic — Chad Dickerson’s blog

“Strategies” are big and sweeping and inherently pass the task of implementation to someone else. Tactics are inherently about executing. The distance between “strategic” and “tactical” is measured in meetings, PowerPoints, conference calls, and, well, “not writing code.” Limiting (or even mostly eliminating) that distance is the key to making things happen.

I’m not saying that strategy isn’t important, just that strategy directly combined with tactical skill is the real killer combo. “Strategy” in the absense of tactical engagement is a loser’s game. If you’re a manager who gets down in the muck to make things happen (not to be confused with “micromanagement”), take heart: tactical is the new strategic.


Data Flow

Dataflow

Documenting some things in the office, I took a moment to look at some of the tools I use, and the data flow between them. I can see my self returning to this, and tidying it up some, as well as looking for efficiencies in the model.

(this is one of those “random, selfish” type posts that will hit the blog from time to time. It’s by me, for me. But if you find it interesting, that’s cool too).


Maintenance: Error 500’s February 14, 2006

Apologies if you’ve been browsing and had Server Error 500’s hit you - a couple of RSS feed pulls may have failed as well.  Yahoo! upgraded my site from RC2 of Wordpress to 2.0 in the background, and a couple of plugins were then “misbehaving” a little bit, it seems.  To the best of my knowledge, all the plugins now enabled are 2.0 compatible.  I’ll be checking carefully for similar issues in regards to an uprade to Wordpress 2.01.

In other words: “We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming”.

Cheers,

Gary


On Books, Virtual Coffee Tables, and Reading Lists February 13, 2006

One of my daily reads, Phil Gerbyshak, had me headed over to “Creating Passionate Users” with the post headlined “What’s on your (virtual) coffee table?” Nice idea - photographing books rather than making a simple list - as well as the tale:

…a new manager who was taking over a role where he knew the team was unhappy about the situation. Rather than do the usual “let me introduce myself” speech, this manager walked into the conference room with a pile of books he was reading, or that had been favorites, and laid them on the table and said something like, “Here, take a look at these and you’ll know more about me than I could ever explain. Borrow anything you like.”

There’s a couple in the photo’s that I’ve been meaning to read - “Blue Ocean Strategy” and “Mapping the Mind”, for instance. I don’t think they’ve made it to my Amazon wishlist yet, but they will.

I’m taking a similar approach to “sharing” my reading this year - see the “Reading 2006” tab at the top of the site page (or just go ahead and hit the link if you’re reading this in a feed). That’s where I’m at for reading this year. I’ll have to think about another list of images for “recommended” or “favorite” books… The last time I counted, my book collection ran to around three and a half thousand - I’m really bad about giving away or selling books!
I’m heading back to that first post now, to read the comments, and the booklists that people have referenced there, see if anything catches my eye…


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