Sprog #4: I want a polar bear.
Me: What?
Sprog #4: I want a polar bear.
Me: What? I don't understand.
Sprog #4: I want polar bear in your pocket.
Me: I haven't got a polar bear in my pocket.
Sprog #4: (pointing to pocket) Look in there.
Me: OK (looks in pocket and retrieve packet of mints with holes in) Ah, are these the Polo bears?
Sprog #4: Yes.
Grahame's Things to do Whilst Running is too near to the truth for some of us.
To his list I would add:
* adjusting one's microfibre shorts to avoiding much chafing of the nads.
* timing your run to coincide with the evening rush hour so as to experience the full range of asthma symptoms - asthma sufferers, you have my sympathy and best wishes.
* curse yourself for not remembering that nice bottle of water you got out of the fridge but neglected to pick up before leaving.
If you have popped by here earlier today, you may have found one of two things:
1. The site was inaccessible, offering only the ubiquitous 404 or 500 error pages.
2. A number of different index pages with very little on them.
The reason for this is that I am considering moving the management of my blog back to Blogger. The recent furore over the licensing of the new version of MT doesn't really have any bearing as I have no real need to upgrade my version to blog the way I do at present. Whilst my good friends Roger and Jason has jumped to WordPress, my other friend and host Chuck has gone back to the new and improved Blogger. Despite running several webhosting ventures and having a serious amount of hardware and knowledge at his disposal, Chuck has moved back because, as he puts it "I went the blogger route [because there is] less server stuff to worry about... and easy access from anywhere". Another plus is that whenit goes wrong the nice folks at Google/Blogger get to fix it, rather than Chuck or me.
So, I'll be messing around with a setup somewhere on blogspot.com and hopefully work out a way to import the MT content back into Blogger (judging by the forums out there, more and more folks are looking to do this). If I can get a setup I am happy with, there's a good chance that bignoseduglyguy.com will get an overhaul before long.
Just spent the day playing tourist...in our own backyard, visiting the London Eye and London Aquarium.
Kiwi scientists have set up a remote web cam to monitor a volcano. Some brave soul with an eye for the absurd promptly hiked up said volcano and strategically fixed a pink dinosaur in front of the camera. Top marks.
via bren.
Sitemeter's sm5 server died taking all my stats with it. A cast around a few regulars for opinions leads me to believe that my total was in the high 30k region so I have reset the counter accordingly.
Yawn.
I read and post to a number of online groups that are concerned with personal productivity. One activity or area of work that tends to receive fewer posts is, in my experience, perhaps the most pervasive and time-consuming of them all - email. Whilst what follows may be old news to many, a few friends and colleagues have asked me to post my experiences as a high volume email user and the solution that I use. Some of what follows is simple common sense, some based around key principles of Getting Things Done and some stuff I've picked up along the way. I hope that all of it is useful.
IMPLEMENTING
My work and personal emails are read and kept on separate PCs. My home email requirements are simple so I won't bother with them here, save to say that for virus avoidance and functionality, I tend to use applications such as Thunderbird and PocoMail rather than the ubiquitous Microsoft products. However, at work, email is one of my primary tools and so it is my work setup that I describe below. I am required to use Lotus Notes for email at work and the following has been implemented in my Lotus Notes R5 client which, in my opinion, is a far from ideal as email client - but that is another story. However,
the principles can be applied in any fully-featured email client.
One of the quickest wins for me when I first implemented the GTD principles was gaining real control of my email account at work. The sense of relief and security I got from processing my mail inbox and folders was out of all proportion to the effort required to process it - a valuable lesson learned and great start to using GTD principles.
PREPARATION
The first step is to create/rename the 'local' folder structure within your email program to make it as easy as possible to file reference mails. I have settled on a three-tier structure as this allows me sufficient subfolders to categorise stuff efficiently without having to 'drill down' too far to find it again. My top level folders fall into three lots; the default hard coded ones that come with the application, my GTD-type actionable folders and my reference folders. These are in the following order (explanatory notes in brackets)
Hard coded folders (not including those unique to Lotus Notes)
INBOX (all email not filtered by rules arrives here)
SENT (all email sent is here - copies are dragged to relevant folders if required)
ALL DOCUMENTS (LN's all documents view - useful for searching out that one elusive email)
ARCHIVE (mirror image archive folders on a separate drive - all 60+ day old mails get archived but are only a click away) - see note [1]
TRASH (self-explanatory)
RULES (folder where mail filtering rules are written and kept)
STATIONERY (templates for frequently sent mails)
GTD actionable folders
+Metrics (filtered and frequently-accessed daily metrics advisories)
+Statistics (filtered and frequently-accessed daily local call centre statistics)
@@ACTION (all NA mails until they're completed - I don't raise separate NAs in To-Dos as I'm used to working this way now)
@@DELEGATED (all 'forward' mails to directs with delegated NA actions until completed)
@@WAITING (mails upon which I am waiting for a response/reaction)
@@READ & REVIEW (rarely used - but useful for stuff that I will read if I have the time)
@@RUNNING ISSUES (not strictly GTD - all mails relating to all ongoing cases/tickets/outages escalated to me)
Reference folders
ALL COLLEAGUES (one folder per colleague for mails specific to that person - often X-referenced to other folders)
ALL CONSOLIDATIONS (all mails concerning lines of business being consolidated to my centre)
ALL CUSTOMERS (one folder per customer - plain and simple)
ALL INFO (my email equivalent of reference memos - one folder per broad subject area)
ALL PROJECTS (not GTD projects but company projects that are not consolidations)
HUMAN RESOURCES (all emails regarding HR policy & issues plus one folder (zJoe Smith) per person sorted to bottom by prefix)
PERSONAL (all non-business correspondence from colleagues, staff present and past etc - i.e. the jokes and URLs!)
USAGE
I have my email interface set up in the common three-pane manner with my folders in the vertical left-hand pane, my unread inbox in the top right-hand pane and the preview bottom right. With this setup, I can scan inbox mails rapidly and follow GTD guidelines to process them. I do this by strictly applying the 2-minute rule to all inbound mail as it is the only way I can handle the volume I receive whilst remaining sane and focused. This means that the process options I use are:
1. Read and respond in 2 minutes, using @@WAITING if necessary to track the thread of email exchange until finally filed.
2. Read and move to @@ACTION as a NA to be actioned later.
3. Read and forward and move to @@DELEGATED to track action by staff.
4. Read and move to @@RUNNING ISSUES if mail is an update on a current operational issue I need to track.
5. Read and move to the relevant reference folder - see note [2] below on attachments.
6. Read and Delete - my absolute favourite.
I used to employ a different method that works pretty well. It is based on the paper method outlined in the excellent 'The Manager's Toolbox' by John Mitchell and I include it here for comparison/interest.
1. Scan each mail for no more than seven seconds and then:
2. Allocate every item into one of three folders:
-ACTION (see below)
-READ (reference filing/Read & Review equivalent)
-TRASH
3. Scan each mail in the ACTION folder, again for no more than seven seconds and then:
4. Allocate to one of three further folders:
-DO IT NOW (items for immediate attention - NA equivalent)
-DELEGATE (items would be delegated and tracked - Waiting For equivalent)
-DO IT LATER (future actions/tickler/SDMB equivalent)
5. Action the mails by folder - normally filing and delegating before hitting the NAs.
OTHER EMAIL TIPS
The following two tips are nothing to do with GTD but everything to do with getting things done; both, if you are able to implement them, will help greatly, especially if you are a high volume mail user.
Lists
My email client at work is probably the busiest 'Inbox' I have. One reason for this is the nature of my work for I manage a large multi-lingual technical contact centre for a global data networks provider and my 'genuine' daily email count is always in excess of 200 emails. By genuine, I mean emails that I choose to receive, rather than emails that others want to send to me for the wrong reasons. More often than not, if I was included in the cc: or carbon copy
listing of an email in the past, I was there for one of several reasons:
1. The sender sought action by another but wanted to ensure my awareness - for me, the legitimate use of cc:
2 The sender didn't know / wasn't sure if those in the To: field were the correct contact for the action they required.
3. The sender was keen to cover their backside by copying everyone possible - a get-out clause if things went wrong later.
4. My name was part of a distribution list that they chose to include.
In this age of 'knowledge is power', we tend to be pressured or brainwashed into believing we need to read every email we are sent. If at all possible, request or negotiate your removal from every distribution list that brings you little or no value. It may not always be possible due to your position or company policy but, if you make a well-reasoned business case to your boss, they might just accept your reasoning.
Rules
Depending on the email client you use, you may have rules or filters that you can build and use to automatically file inbound 'information only' emails without you lifting a finger. These can be very powerful allies in reducing the amount of mail that you need to manually process each day. By 'information only' email, I mean those that you might need to refer to should a particular situation or circumstance arise but ordinarily are sent to 'all users' or some such as a mail out. Below are just two examples of the types of email (which my user-defined rules automatically route to their respective repositories) that I don't even touch/read/process until I actually need the information they contain:
- System maintenance advisories/outage alerts - if my team's case management system or diagnostic tools don't work, I scan for planned/emergency maintenance before reporting the problem to my IS team but, normally, I know because I scan this folder once a day to get a heads up.
- Weekly senior management metrics reports - each Wednesday morning I open this folder, read this week's metrics and transfer my key performance indicator data into my Palm T3 to report at the weekly manager's meeting.
Notes
[1] Archiving is essential in Lotus Notes as it becomes cumbersome and resource hungry if this isn't done - my company place a limit on profile size so archives are frequently prompted by the system. However, accessing the archive is just like opening a mirror set of folders and essentially provides me with two email profiles - my live and current mails and my massive data store of archived information.
[2] More often than not, I will detach attachments from the mail and file in my GTD one tier style folder list on my data drive for easy access later.
Two week's without a single post is an indication that my life has, through necessity, shifted a tad on it's axis. I have come to the decision to try and curb my PC/internet habit somewhat - too many screen hours at work and then again at home means that nagging pain of my RSI/CTS never really goes away, which cannot be a good thing. So I have cut back on my PC-based activities to give my mouse arm/hand a chance of regular recovery and hopefully avoid permanent damage, which I suspect is quite likely if I carry on regardless. The self-enforced downtime has also made me realise that I can only really and effectively use one PDA at a time so I sold the Psion 5mx - running it alongside my T3 was simply never going to work, I think I just needed to revisit Psion usage briefly to confirm that I had moved on, so to speak.
Work has been particularly trying but, suffice to say, there have been moments of triumph and enjoyment among the dark drudgery. Meanwhile, the running has been going well despite a small setback a week ago. The legacy of aggressive and probably-with-hindsight unnecessary knee surgery for chondromalacia 23 years ago came back to haunt me for a few days, after my hour long easy Sunday run became a test of will. Instead of ignoring the signs and carrying on, I backed off for a few days and applied the RICE treatment (namely Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation) to treat the problem. A very gentle potter on Thursday and 20 minutes run and recover work yesterday meant that I was able to do 30 minutes at a moderate pace on a treadmill (to minimise impact) this morning. Fingers crossed, I will be able to work back up to the schedule I am following to prepare for the 10k run in June.
That's it for now. For those that (used to?) drop in regularly, I will try to post more often - especially as I have had a couple of unsolicited but very welcome compliments recently. Whilst they fell short of the 'Here's £125,000 for a year's worth of pithy and funny articles' type of commision I hope for, I am very flattered that anyone has taken the time to write. You know who you are - thanks.
As hinted at in a post or two over the last few weeks, I have recently taken up running again - seriously, this time. I say running to accentuate the difference between what I am trying to do now and activities like jogging, wheezing, staggering and sweating, all of which I have periodically indulged in individually and collectively over the years. The cynics around me (and out there, no doubt) maintain that this is all part of a mid-life crisis that, having reached forty this year, I am now desperately trying to reclaim my youth and virility like a pale imitation of Lester Burnham. Be that as it may, I am enjoying the experience more than I have ever done before and I hope to maintain the interest so I can improve my fitness and boost my health. I seem to have made good progress so far as I seem to be sleeping a little better, paying more attention to what I eat and how much and feeling a little more energised despite working long days with 4 hour commutes.
In the first few weeks, I used some old training shoes and running kit that I had buried in a drawer and got out every other day, following a training schedule drawn up by Mike Gratton, winner of the '83 London Marathon. This beginner's schedule, amongst others, can be found on the website for the Chris Brasher Memorial 10K run, which takes place in June and seems to be a sensible target to aim for. Having got some kilometres under my belt, I began to notice that my old shoes were no really up to the task and were not providing the support and cushioning needed. With a little rainy day money in my pocket and a marathon-running friend's advice in my ears, yesterday saw me standing outside The London Marathon Shop as they opened the doors at midday. Once inside, my needs were attended to by Gary, who couldn't have been more helpful and patient in helping me choose the right shoes and in offering straight advice on a number of other things like an ultralight shell jacket and two-layer socks. It is not often that one can command the undivided attention of a knowledgable retail manager/sales person for an hour in a West End store but that is what I got. What is more, I was guided with sensible advice about what my budget could purchase (last season's version versus this; entry-level shoe versus a mid range one), rather than just being pointed at the most expensive stock and given a jargon-packed lecture (as I had ensured briefly from hyperactive sales assistant in a store that should know better the day before). I left the store with less rainy day money but clutching new shorts, socks, shirt, shell and a shiny pair of Asics GEL Nimbus Vs.
Just in case my fellow geek friends read this and think that I have completely renounced the world of pasty white skin, carpal tunnel syndrome and junk food diets, I should point out that running has also opened up a new world of gadgets like the watch/heart rate monitor I picked up yesterday and some software I have loaded. I am logging my runs with Runner's Log both on my XP box and my Palm T3, recording all necessary details so that I can measure my progress. In order to to calculate the distances I am running, I am using the excellent AccuRoute to do so from readily available maps from a variety of sources on the internet.
This morning, being a Bank Holiday Monday here in the UK, it was pissing with rain when I set out for a short run but, even in these far from ideal conditions, the new shoes made it a pleasure to run and the shell kept the rain out without letting me cook inside. As for keeping to the program and making running part of my daily routine, only time will tell but I hope I can because I feel the need to raise my game health and fitness wise - especially as I enjoy my food. If this means I having a mid-life crisis, then that's OK by me.