Progressive Development : productivity

Motley says: "Spend less time in OneNote and more time in Visual Studio"

James Waletzky — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:58:00 GMT

Summary

Motley: OneNote is just like Microsoft Word, and is not a place where a developer should be spending time.

Maven: OneNote is perfectly suited to feature teams and developers. It provides simple, organized, efficient, and easy to manage method of organizing ideas and general content. It is a developer's best friend!

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[Context: Motley wanders by Maven's desk while taking a break and notices that Maven is spending a lot of time in one particular application]

Motley: Hey, Mave. I heard you typing like mad on the keyboard as it was time to take a break. I figured an interruption would do you good.

Maven: Yeah, thanks. I think. What can I do for you?

Motley: I was just noticing that you have a ton of content in that application on your screen. Why is there so much junk in there? What is the application you are using?

Maven: Ah, yes, the greatest application that Microsoft has ever shipped!

Motley: You mean Microsoft has shipped an application that you call "great"? Ha, ha. Just kidding. I couldn't live without Visual Studio, for example.

Maven: Always the character. The application I spend the good majority of my day in is Microsoft OneNote. It comes with the Office suite of products, and it is a software developer's best friend.

Motley: Shouldn't you be spending more time in Visual Studio as a developer? Are you slacking off again, Mave?

Maven: As a developer, how much time do you really spend coding?

Motley: Not as much as I would like.

Maven: Exactly. There are lots of other things to do, particularly as a development lead. For example, you have to build people's careers, write design documentation, investigate issues and plan for the future. I use OneNote to help me gather my thoughts.

Motley: Why not just use a Word document? OneNote just looks like it reinvents the wheel! Why do I need to learn another application when I am proficient with the 10 useful features of Microsoft Word?

Maven: OneNote is completely geared towards quick note taking. OneNote's user experience stresses organization and simplicity. For example, embedded within it is the hierarchical idea of notebooks, sections, pages, and subpages. Simple drag/drop operations let me organize my notes in this hierarchy. It hides the ideas of files - sure, there are files under the hood, but I never really ever have to see them.

Motley: Wait a second, Mr. Wise Guy. What about saving your notes? I have you there!

Maven: You're pretty smart, but you're question is misinformed in this case. OneNote completely abstracts away files and saves content changes under the hood. You never press a save button.

Motley: That's pretty cool. I wish more applications did that. As long as it saves frequently and I don't lose data when the inevitable crash happens.

Maven: I don't think I've ever had OneNote 12 crash.

Motley: I suspect you are lying, but enough about files. What else makes this thing a developer's best friend? I have never ever viewed Microsoft Word that way!

Maven: OneNote is always open on every PC I use - home, work or laptop. I set up a shared notebook on my home PC for personal stuff like to-do lists and blogging, and I set up multiple shared notebooks at work for work stuff. The first time you access the shared notebook from a PC, OneNote caches the notebook and you can make offline changes. The next time you are online, the notebook is synchronized. But you asked what I generally do with it. Here is a sampling:

I have one notebook for team-oriented stuff. I keep snippets of knowledge of the build system, source code, personal stuff, performance reviews of team members, recruiting information, and other miscellaneous stuff. No one has access to this notebook except me.
When I was a lead, I had another notebook that was shared across all team members. Each section was password-protected with a password only one person and I knew. We stored private content between the employee and me. The content included agendas for 1:1 meetings, information to remember at review time, and any other material specific to the employee.
My boss and I share a password-protected section where I track 1:1 meeting agendas throughout the week. I make updates as I think of agenda items so I don't have to think about it 5 minutes before the meeting occurs.
I have a personal notebook at home. I do all my blog writing in that notebook, track my ongoing to-do and to-buy list, create summaries of books I read, and put all my karate notes in it.

Motley: So you are telling me that OneNote is just a general scratch place for random thoughts. I COULD use a real paper notebook for that!

Maven: Yes, but then it would be difficult to search, difficult to modify, inconvenient to back up, difficult to embed content, and track the original source of the content (when you paste web content, OneNote automatically inserts the URL it came from). It's also very easy to reorganize my content and share with other people.

Motley: Yeah, but what if I share my notebook and I turn off my PC?

Maven: You always have the offline store, but you can choose to store your content on a file server or SharePoint site if you want constant online access.

Motley: Well, you seem to have an answer for everything, don't you! Looks like Microsoft has really covered the user scenarios on this one.

Maven: I couldn't agree more. It's the best Microsoft product to ship in a long time. Another way to use it from the developer perspective is to set up a shared notebook for the feature team. OneNote supports the idea of templates of new pages. Marcus' team does Program Manager specs, design documents, and test specifications all within OneNote, applying a different template when required. The coolest thing is that OneNote takes care of the synchronization, so multiple people can edit the same notebook, section, and page all simultaneously! That way they have random notes, formal documents, and other team communication all within the same container.

Motley: What about diagrams? Design documents are full of them.

Maven: OneNote also supports ink. You can draw a diagram on your Tablet PC if you have one. If not, draw it up in Visio and copy it in to one of your pages.

Motley: I'm not usually this easily convinced, but I need to give this application a shot. It sounds like it might bring some organization to my life. Hopefully Microsoft doesn't bloat the feature set in future releases like they did for Word.

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Maven's Pointer: Setting up shared notebooks is great. Watch out for one circumstance, however, when it does not work very well. OneNote synchronization works well, but avoid combining it with other synchronization mechanisms like Windows Vista offline files. If you edit in one place and someone edits in another place, OneNote does the right thing and tries to synchronize within the native file format. Vista sees a conflict at the file level, however, and you may end up with lots of conflicting files.

Maven's Double Pointer Indirection: Another interesting feature of OneNote is that you can click a button in Microsoft Outlook to start a new page for meeting notes. OneNote imports the appointment information directly into your notebook including meeting attendees, time, place, and agenda if you included one (and you should).

Maven's Triple Pointer Indirection: Try turning on audio recording within OneNote while you are in a meeting. You can type notes and record voices at the same time, and OneNote takes care of synchronizing the voices to the written notes automatically!

Maven's Resources:

OneNote Home Page: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/default.aspx
A fairly thorough list of Frequently Asked Questions about OneNote: http://www.factplace.com/onenotefaq.htm
Blog from one of the creators of OneNote: http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/david_rasmussen/

Motley says: "E-mail is sucking the life out of me. I can't keep up."

James Waletzky — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:09:00 GMT

Summary

Motley: I am a developer. I am paid to develop, not write e-mail all day. E-mail is sucking the life out of me and I can't keep up.

Maven: Use your Inbox as your to-do list, keep your Inbox to < 10 messages, categorize and/or create folders, use server-side rules to redirect e-mail, do quick triage of e-mail, use search, shut down your mail client.

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[Context: Motley is expressing his frustration over not getting any "real" work done lately. Maven, of course, is curious as to why that is]

Maven: Whoa! What the heck was that?!?

Motley: You had better take a step back if you want to avoid my fists of fury. I am not having the greatest day.

Maven: What's up? Anything I can do?

Motley: Every time I blink there is a new e-mail in my Inbox. I can't keep up. I am now about 200 messages behind. I can't get any work done because I keep getting e-mail. I am sorry that my monitor has to take the brunt of my frustration, but you weren't around. How do you deal with the barrage of e-mail Mr. Smarty Pants?

Maven: E-mail is a tough problem. It can absolutely consume your entire life if you are not careful. There are a few tricks though that can make your life much simpler.

Motley: Like deleting them all with one fell swoop?

Maven: Not quite. Firstly, get off all distribution groups that do not add you value. As a senior guy, I know you want to be in touch with everything, but sometimes you have to let go. Ask yourself how many of those messages are actually relevant to your activities. Anything that doesn't qualify, unsubscribe. Missing an e-mail conversation will not inhibit your career.

Motley: I'm already trimmed as far as I can go, but I still get a ton of messages.

Maven: Next, use Outlook (or whatever e-mail client you use) to set up some folders for categorizing mail. I typically use a few folders for general discussion e-mails that do not contain any high priority items (e.g. the Mobile Devices daily news, CNET news, etc.), and a few folders for more specific work-related functions. I then set up some server-side rules to automatically move incoming messages that fall within those categories directly to those folders.

Motley: Yeah, but if I set up too many folders it won't solve my problem - I'll just get confused as to where things are that matter.

Maven: You don't want to have too many folders, but you want enough to get a significant chunk of lower priority messages out of your Inbox. Your Inbox then only contains messages that require prompt attention. You may treat your Inbox as your to-do list. If it contains thousands of e-mails, you'll find yourself lost. Try to get to a state where you have < 10 (or a screen full) mails in your Inbox, and stay there. When you do a mail check, either address it right away and delete it, categorize it, or move it to another folder. Moving to another folder and categorizing can be the same thing. Some people have three different folders for high priority (urgent and important), medium priority (urgent), and low priority (not urgent or important, but needs to get done eventually). Others, like me, use categories in Outlook and arrange the Inbox by category with high priority items at the top. The category names I use are:

"3. Important" (colored red)
"2. Medium Priority" (colored yellow)
"1. Low Priority" (colored green)

You can use the number at the beginning to sort the Inbox with the important items first. I sometimes use reminders as well to ensure I get to an item by a certain time.

Motley: Less than 10 e-mails. Are you crazy?!? I have about 900 messages in my Inbox, of which 200 are unread!

Maven: Spend a bit of time cleaning that up. Get down to < 10. Make it a daily goal to keep the number low. Start each day with an initial triage - look at the subjects and delete anything that is not of concern. Consider whether a rule is necessary to get that kind of mail out of your Inbox. I also like to color-code messages with me on the To: line. Those messages are generally more important than messages sent to a distribution list that I belong to.

Motley: What about all the stuff you put in folders? You have to get those at some point! It's also a lot more places to look for a specific message.

Maven: Yes, perhaps once a day. You don't want distraction throughout the day on messages that are less important. Set aside time once per day to scrub non-Inbox messages and perform bulk deletes as necessary. If you find one that requires your attention, move it to your Inbox and consider modifying the rule for the future. For finding messages, name your folders intuitively. Also, most e-mail clients these days have quick search functionality built-in. Leverage it.

Motley: Even with all these rules in place, I'm still going to get 25-50 messages per day in my Inbox. That's still a lot of distraction wise guy. And if patterns hold, half will be from you!

Maven: You exaggerate. I am sure I don't send that much mail. Firstly, though, you need to turn off that annoying pop-up new mail indicator that most e-mail clients (like Outlook have). It is distracting. Next, shut down your mail client. Open it once in the morning, once around lunch, and once at the end of the day at most. Set the expectation with your co-workers that you will not respond instantaneously to e-mail. I bet that one action cuts down on your e-mail. Of course, then you have to take care of in-person distraction. Shut your door (if you have one) when you need concentration time, find another place to work with your laptop or throw on some headphones.

Motley: Apparently they say in Alcoholics Anonymous that the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. I admit it - I can't turn off that mail indicator. If I do I'll just be wondering whether someone just sent me new mail.

Maven: At least you admit you are an addict! Trust me, though, once you see your productivity rise because you limit e-mail checks to three per day, you will thank me. I wonder how you will feel when I suggest that when you go on vacation to set an out-of-office message indicating that you will be deleting all e-mail while you are away unless it has "SAVE:" in the subject line?

Motley: Get lost. I could never set a rule to auto-delete mail like that.

Maven: I have found that's the only way to a stress-free vacation. It worked for a 3 month vacation that my previous manager took. Just try out the above tips and see how they work for you. Cutting down on e-mail is a huge key to developer productivity, especially in a large company. I've heard that Microsoft culture revolves around e-mail.

Motley: Sucks to be them. Although I guess we are in the same boat to some extent, just not to that same magnitude. Ugh. I'll try anything.

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Maven's Pointer: It is a great feeling having an empty Inbox. It's a great to-do list, and there is certain satisfaction in addressing all the items on your to-do list. There are many strategies out there for handling mail and no one strategy works for everyone. I do believe that keeping your Inbox clean, however, is the best way to go. Regardless of how you do that, it is a valuable and effective technique in organizing your daily life. One last tip: if an item stays in your Inbox for more than a few days, it's probably not important and something you are not motivated to deal with. Delegate it (if necessary) and delete it.

Maven's Resources:

The Zen of Zero Mail, by J.D. Meier, http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2008/01/14/the-zen-of-zero-mail.aspx
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen, Penguin, ISBN: 0142000280, December 2002.