Tour approaching

We are just over one month away from the world's biggest cycling race and unbelievably, we still don't know who won the last one. In fact, the saga has gone on long enough for the defendant to release a book about it!

Artificial Life

Recently I have been noticing media reports about goings on within a thing called Second Life. After a dozen or so, I figured it was time to investigate. Well, I am intrigued, and online world that isn't about killing dragons and casting spells that seems to have a large support base (I suspect that free entry might have something to do with it). My local government funded media outlet has recently purchased an island . The whole premise seems to have a very artistic/creative slant to it, promising life performances or lectures. I can't see myself joining anytime soon, but it is a concept worth observing. The whole thing reminds me of the book Idoru.

It makes you wonder where this stuff will end up. Will we one day work inside a virtual world? A lot of us deal with people via email or phone only anyway, never seeing the person in the flesh. Education too could benefit - that expert who lives on the other side of the world can now hold global lectures from the comfort of their own home. There would be a darker side too, with cults and criminal organisations using a virtual world to circumvent traditional communication channels.

Yes, something well worth watching.

GTD has stuck

It is several months since I started the GTD way and think I can say it has stuck. I still carry my lists with me and refer to them regularly. Even if a slip a little, I come back - its never a chore to go back to the lists; every time I think its all in my head a look at my lists tells me not to get cocky. It works because its simple, like most effective systems.

Even a major event coming up has a big piece of butcher's paper in the kitchen covered in 'next actions' on it. My partner is not quite getting GTD-ified, but she likes the list-in-visible-spot concept. She can point to it and remind me: "these are your responsibility. :)

Two months on

I have been using GTD now for over two months and it is worth making a few observations. Having lists for all my tasks is really useful and I am likely to continue to use this system for quite a while. It is quite mentally liberating to have my to-dos outside my head. The contextual names (i.e @Work) are really effective, even if most times I have to scan three or four. I am still persisting with a low-tech approach, with my lists being a set of index cards with a bulldog clip.

The tickler file I struggle with a little. I can see its value and I will add things to it, but remembering to check it every morning is tough, especially when I am on holidays. Also, it doesn't help that the nature of my work means that I already have two other calendars to check. That said, missing appointments is my biggest concern and I blame a lack of a unified calendar system - my phone software can't sync with Lotus Notes at all and has some difficulty with outlook. Also, there seems to be no online, standards based calendar solutions out there; it would be good to simply forward all my Notes and Outlook invites to say my Yahoo address and have everything captured there.

On a more subtle note, the temptation to write down tasks which cannot be completed never goes away. What this means is that the lists can be more like Inboxes, for example: "fix shoes". Now, I am not a shoe repairer so I cannot complete this task. The correct task should have been something like "Take work shoes to Bob's shoe repair". This goes back to processing an Inbox item, doing the thinking up front and then devising concrete actions from there.

My inbox is quite small for things other than email, so I often just process them straight to the lists without a holding area. This does get me into trouble when I am away from my lists and an Inbox item arrives. I would ideally like to use my phone's voice recordings for this but they don't work satisfactorily. Also, I scan my Projects list erratically, I do not have a scheduled time to do this, but it is still helpful nonetheless.

Defining yourself

As a consultant, soft skills are very important and along this line, a colleague pointed me to an online personality test, which I promptly performed. It is based on Carl Jung's psychological theories and called a Myers-Briggs test. I have been partial to Jung's work, reading a large book on the man some years ago and finding it to be quite sensible. The engineer in me can be skeptical about such things and a pet hate of mine is that Sigmund Freud gets so much attention in pop culture despite having, in my opinion, far more fanciful ideas. I have no doubt that his popularity is due to his fixation on sexuality as a key human motivator. Interestingly, Jung and Freud were friends, or at least Freud saw Jung as his Protege carrying on his theories, but Jung started to disagree and eventually parted company. One of his criticisms was that Freud's sample set was not wide enough to form theories on people in general - predominantly wealthy, conservative housewives. Flicking through Freud's Wikipedia entry, it appears he was a cocaine addict, with there being a theory that this increases sexual interest and obsessive thinking.

Getting back to my original topic, it turns out that I am an INFP. This is interesting because each type (there are 16) has relationships to all the others and this gives you pointers on how to deal with them. So I sent it out to a few of my friends and colleagues and got an interesting response. It turned out that my fiancee was an INTP who apparently make good companions to my type - a fact which empirical methods had already proven to be true. A close friend who I worked very closely with at school was an INTJ, the description of which is very accurate. The relationship between INFP and INTJ is advisor which explains elements of our friendship. I wonder if this interests me because of elements of being an INFP...

The next step would be to do this in an organised with my colleagues and see what comes out. It will be interesting to see if people feel comfortable having their character type freely known by their colleagues.

i(hate)Tunes

Love the iPod. Can I just say I really love the iPod? Makes me feel like when I first had a walkman with a decent tape collection. There's nothing like walking through crowded Sydney streets of a Friday night with Pnau blaring in my ears so loud that I can barely hear anything else. Its like having a soundtrack for your life. And watching video podcasts is cool. And audio ones too.

But I really, really hate iTunes. Firstly for a piece of software that is only downloading files, why does it need to consume 60% of my CPU!? And not mention the times I left it on overnight to download podcasts or sync with the iPod only to find that it had crashed and no work had been done. Oh, and the fact that there is no resume functionality on downloads, so download 80% and the quit iTunes; when you come back in, it often won't even start again, it just tries and (due to there being a half downloaded file on the file system) fails complaining that the URL doesn't exist anymore - which is wrong! More: you can't control how many files are downloaded simultaneously, so when my bandwidth got choked to 64k (due to download exceeds) it still blindly tried to download three 100MB podcasts at once.

Regarding podcasts, I watch or listen to them and they become 'watched' and lose the blue dot, but often don't get deleted. But sometimes they do. So I have to periodically clean them up myself so I don't fill the hard disk. Annoying.

End rant.

So, what did you do on the weekend?

I have a confession to make. I went to the Rugby League International between Australia and New Zealand at the Dome. Sacrilege, I know... but I did spend the first half with my walkman on listening to the Melbourne v Sydney soccer match. As a Victorian, rugby is not my greatest love, although I have found myself appreciating the Union World Cup when it was on a few years back. Some of the rules are a bit strange, but as a cricket and AFL fan, I know that this is nothing to write home about. The crowd puzzled me. For most of the match, it felt like we were at a cricket Test - very subdued. The only excitement came when someone looked like they might get somewhere. Considering this was supposed to be an international with a lot of passion in it, it was pretty civilised. I would reckon that you average AFL home and away game would inspire far more crowd activity.

One other interesting thing (at least for sport loving Melbournians) is that the seat-moving-in feature of the Telstra Dome was in action. I heard about it at the time it was built, but had never seen it used. It looks like it reduces the seating capacity so that could be why they don't do it more often. But it looked cool!

The final point is that we only went because we had free Medallion club tickets, including car parking. I wouldn't have paid for what I saw.

Podding

A comment reminded me of something that I wished to mention. This may surprise some people, but I am the proud owner of a black, 80GB, video iPod. And a pleased one at that - the video quality and storage capacity are awesome. Now, Apple fans will probably be horrified to hear that not only did I not take photos of the packaging and various stages of its opening, but I actually threw the stuff out once I had liberated the iPod! In fact, I had ripped and torn the packaging during the act of opening it - a crime in some circles.

The upshot of it is that I have discovered the 43 folders podcasts and despite the fact that it looked about as interesting as listening to the sound of grass growing, it is actually quite good. I found myself relating quite quickly to their discussions. On a more entertaining front, I discovered Channel Frederator which is an animated/cartoon podcast and has some really good stuff.

First test

I have now come into some work that will keep me busy for the next month or two, and this will be a good test of my GTD skills. Initially I found I slipped on inbox processing, and have remedied this by trying to have a physical inbox on my desk (previously I just processed things as they came in). However, I am enjoying applying the 'what is this' process whenever something is processed, rather than just delaying that decision. Also, I think I am probably not writing down as many things on my lists as I should be.

Open your mind

It has been one full week since I started using the GTD processes. Practically, this means carrying my action lists and my tickler file to and from work. A few people have mentioned hi-tech options but the current set up suits me fine. Initial thoughts are that I really notice the mental freedom of not having to keep my to-dos in my head. Its quite relaxing to ride the bus in the morning and not have try to dig up all the things I needed to address, especially on a Monday! When I turned on my computer and looked in my email system's @ACTION folder, I saw that I had a code review to complete. I had no trace of that task in my active memory - and that felt good, meaning I hadn't spent any time over the weekend thinking about it. Yet at the same time, I was more likely to complete it.

While the title of the book makes it sound like the system helps you to do things, the real benefit is that it helps you to do the right things. Tasks that had been floating around for months were finally nailed down and completed. I also like the mental 'inbox' process: something comes in, say a phone message, and you force yourself to work out what the next step is - and that's what you write down. In busier times, I sure I will have a staged inbox cycle where I will process things in a batch, but now I can do most as they come in.

Initial experiences with GTD

It was been almost a week since I got started reorganising my personal planning system and its worth taking a checkpoint of what I have found so far. As my previous posting indicated, I am implementing the processes outline in the book Getting Things Done. Here's a summary of what I have done to date.

Day one: the first step was to gather my initial Inbox of loose ideas. This turned up some interesting things. Here is a sample of things that went in: a pair of brown trousers whose pocket needs fixing, a cat figure that my mother wants me to repair, an iPod brochure and a note that said "Study: Cupboard" on it. It definitely felt good to collect stuff into one spot. Luckily, my work situation at the moment meant that I could process that stuff from home too.

Day two: this was when the fun began. I had to work out what each of the Inbox items meant. Was there a pending action on that item or was it just reference material that needed to be filed? Also, as a result of going through this process I had to think about the contexts that those tasks needed to be done in and how I was going to remember them when that context came about. This is critical for me as I am a big one for having things that need to be done during office hours and completely forgetting about them once I get to work. One of the most well known parts of GTD is the Next Action lists with names like "@Home" or "@Computer." As a result I now have a set of lists for all the contexts I could identify, all stored in my very own Hipster PDA. My lists are: Projects, Waiting For, Agendas, @Shops/Errands, @Computer, @Work, @Home, Calls & Emails and Someday/Maybe.

Day three: I guess this is when I started using these tools in earnest. One of the biggest themes that came out of my Inbox processing was that I had a very messy storage system. So, a lot of my next actions were tidy this or clean that and this is what I spent most of my time looking at. Boy, did I throw out and delete a lot of rubbish - and there's still more to come. In my two email systems, I have no inbox items, with every email being processed in some way. My personal file storage is now unified so that I can add a file to my laptop and sync it to my USB key. That study cupboard is still on the todo list.

Next steps: I have read to the ninth chapter so far where the author is talking about how to prioritise next actions. At this point I am happy to just see how the general process goes and fine tune it a bit. My current level of busy-ness is such that I can probably delay thinking about the priority mechanisms for now. I'll read ahead anyway, just to soak it in, but I suspect I'll need to revisit it at a later date. Beyond that there are topics about deciding how formal to manage the projects and then three chapters on the philosophies behind the processes. I think I'll do alright to work on the mechanics of the system for now.

All in all, I feel good at the moment, knowing that all my actions are tracked in a simple, easy to access format. This does not mean that I am more likely to do them, but it does mean I spend less time trying to remember what I need to be doing.

Trying to be productive

Some time ago, someone recommended the book Getting Things Done to me. They had noticed my fondness for running a tight ship in terms of detailed task tracking and realised I may be a candidate to take it to a new level. When I am leading a development team, I always end up employing XPlanner, which I will openly admit is not perfect. But it is simple enough that it fits my methodology quite well. In my system, its key job is to track what is and isn't done such that when Bob is sick, Jane can pick up where he left off, and don't have to walk the beat to find out where things are at.

Early in my XP journey (some four years ago), I worked under a regime where no work was done unless there was a task listed for it, with estimate, on the wiki. I liked this system, as the tasks were small enough to guarantee completion within a day and you could go home at the end of the day not having to remember any 'todos' for the next day. The following morning you came into work, had Stand Up, looked at the roster to see who you were pairing with and the went to the wiki to select a new task. It was such a mental freedom to not have to remember (and thus forget) all kinds of little tidbits. I actually believe that this created a more creative state, making it easier to solve difficult problems.

This brings me back to GTD. The key concept the resonated with me was capturing tasks in a logical trusted repository outside of your head. It sounded a lot like what I had experienced before, and was certainly the hook that got me in. Now, the book is quite detailed and at the time I was involved with a project that was not moving particularly quickly so, after reading the first section, I put it on the back burner.

At moment, though a lot of projects of various size and shape are coming up and I believe that it is time for me to delve further. I figure that having experience with such system will hold me in good stead for when I get really busy.

Thommo's gone

The St Kilda football club have taken a bold and probably timely step and decided to change coach. Unlike in other football codes, especially soccer, this is a big event in AFL where coaches can be in place for many years.

While this was probably a tough blow for Grant, I think it is ultimately what the club needs to move to the next level and win a flag. Saying that, he can look back on his achievements with pride as the team he inherited was a shambles. Ill discipline and a self destructive culture was the order of the day. It is enough to say that Barry Hall used to play at the club and was only notable for his getting dragged at least once a match. You could say that the fact that the coach was surprised by his sacking means that it was timely, rather than too late; it meant he was doing his best until the end. Ultimately it is his employer's job to judge whether or not that is good enough.

So where to from here? Well, comparing last Friday's game against Melbourne with the subsequent Sydney and West Coast game, it is clear that the new coach needs to bring tactical nous to the position. Injuries are a part of the game and a lead is a lead - it must be defended at all costs and this is where football thinking comes in. It is conceivable that a radical plan could have allowed Saints to hold on, no matter how ugly it turned out. Interestingly, in AFL, tactics are much harder to see, but finals footy is where you really see what happens.

V for Victory

My football team won over the weekend. Which helps to deal with the fact that my other football team lost.

Blogging

I have decided to begin blogging again after a year or two break from my initial attempts. This time, I feel that I bring a new (and hopefully better) approach to it. Last time, I felt I should be a blogger and therefore I tried to, with the inevitable result that I struggled to write, probably because I was trying too hard. Also, I think that this time I will set the bar low in terms of frequency. I tried to write too regularly (at least weekly) last time and I have to accept that there are some people who have more to say than I do.

My summary of my new philosophy is this: write a minimum of one posting a month and write on any topic. I am hoping that initially, I might use it like a newsletter and schedule a writing time to look back over the month for something to blog about. As it becomes more natural, I expect the blogging to match the occurence of interesting events. Also, I want to use the blog as an outlet for exercising my written skills, which these days is normally restricted to emails.

I have chosen to use Blogger for this new venture because, as a online service user, I really enjoy using services that upgrade themselves and I have confidence that a Google-backed system will follow suit. Other online services that I regularly use are: Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, del.icio.us and Remember The Milk.