David Ornstein's WebLog : Productivity

More blog from David on MSN Spaces

dornstein — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 01:24:00 GMT

So MSN just launched a beta sevrice called Spaces which is a pretty soup'd up blogging environment. I've been playing with it for the past few days and it's pretty nice. I'm at least going to keep my personal blog over there and I am seriosly considering moving my work and FlexWiki-related blogging over there, too.

Here is my new blog.

ClearContext - more email overload help?

dornstein — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 00:48:00 GMT

OK. I'll admit it. I'm an Outlook tools junkie. Partly it's because of the firehose pointed at my inbox and because I need every bit of help I can get to prevent it from overflowing. I've run across another candidate: ClearContext. The main thing this seems to have going for it is that it will order everything in your inbox based on priority as determined by sender, your level of participaiton in the thread, etc. I'm a bit skeptical, but I'm going to try it out...

What have I learned so far using GTD?

dornstein — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 19:54:00 GMT

Well, I haven't spent any time writing Outlook add-ins as I'd imagined. Instead, here's something positive and something nagative from my experiences so far with Getting Things Done and the Outlook add-in:

On the plus side:

Contexts are great. Putting things onto a todo list and pre-categorizing them based on the context in which you want to do them is great. This is super helpful. When I have a few quiet hours in the morning, I can do the things that require concentration. When I'm between meetings or only have a few minutes free here or there, I can work on lots of those thigns that take 5-15 minutes. For me, I've created two key contexts that I use for work @small and @medium. @small things are the ones I can do really anytime (when I'm at a computer -- which is almost all the time I want to be actually working). @medium ones are the ones that take more then 5-10 minutes. Those I actually try to schedule onto my calendar into slots that don't have meetings. I've just started this new approach (using TaskLine to lay out the tasks automatically for me). We'll see if it actually works.

On the negative side:

Lower priority items can drift forever. This is one of the things that I wanted to solve when I started using GTD. The basic problem I have is that something gets assigned a low priority when I put it on my todo list. And it really is low compared to other stuff. Then I work on my high-pri items all the time. And I have enough high and medium-pri stuff to do that I never get to the low priorities. Which is fine and appropriate for a few days or even a week. But sometimes these things just keep slipping out forever. Very bad. Maybe some way to raise the priority of things as they age?

Managing time and getting stuff done (faster, better, cheaper)

dornstein — Sun, 20 Jun 2004 00:07:00 GMT

OK. I'll admit it. I'm a tools junkie. I often think that tools can help me (and others) get stuff done faster, better, cheaper, etc.

As a program manager at Microsoft it's very hard to keep my head above water. So much email. Day after day of meeting after meeting. A task list with 150 things on it... Arg.

So I try tools. Outlook is the thing I spend most of my time in because communicating with people is basically my job. So my schedule and incoming and outgoing email are the most important things. I've tried a bunch of time management systems. Especially those with add-ins for Outlook that can automate the methodology. I tried the Covey add-in, but I found the software clunky and the methodology somehow a good idea for people who are less busy that I am. That's not a slam against their software and maybe it's something I'm doing wrong, but I just couldn't figure out how to be effective by sitting down at the beginning of each week to schedule out activities that would help me reach my goals. By the beginning of the week my schedule was already booked out 80% with meetings. :-)

About a month ago I got the Getting Things Done add-in for Outlook. It's pretty nice. The software is well-integraed with Outlook. So far I think it's the best I've found, but I seem to have run into a challenge: Important Things Disappear.

I love that you can click on an email to take Action later. A task gets created, linked to the email and the email is moved out of your inbox. Awesome. The only problem is that it's almost too easy. Now I've got a very long todo list and really important things can get lost in there with all of the not so important things (but ones that I still need to act on at some point). Ideally I'd be able to somehow mark them as important, but that classification is somehow much more dynamic. It doesn't necessarily start as important enough to stand out (for example) in the MUST DO BEFORE I LEAVE TODAY category, but over time it can need to move there. Maybe it's something I promised to do for somebody. Maybe events have occurred that make it more important. Often this important changes after the item has left my inbox. Maybe I just need to review my task list more often and reasses priorities (though even that can take a while with such a long list).

Then there's the problem of small easy things that don't get done for a long time. For example, I run a hosted server inside Microsoft that project teams can use if they want their own FlexWiki namespace. They send me mail asking me to set one up for them. It takes about five minutes to set one up. But when the request comes in I've always got more important stuff to do at the time. So I send the person a note saying “sure, I'll get to it over the next few days.” And then this item just gets pushed out and pushed out because it's never quite big enough to reach the gotta-do-it-now state relative to everything else.

So, I'm still working at it. I continue to try to figure out what works and what doesn't. And to improve. And to automate what I can.

I've finally decided that I'm going to bite the bullet and build an Outlook add-in that will help automate some of what I need. The first problem it solves is Important Things Disappear. I've set up an Outlook view that shows me all tasks that haven't been modified in a week. One of the things I'm going to start doing every day is checking this list. The Outlook add-in (which I'm going to name “Faster, Better, Cheaper“ without really thinking about it too much :-)) adds a touch toolbar button that will allow me to update the modification time of a task quickly just to say “yeah, OK, I remember this one and it hasn't slipped my mind just because it's buried on a big long task list.“

I guess I'll start posting again to this blog about my experiences trying to get my personal productivity improved. This is the inagural post in the new Productivity category. Suggestions welcome!