Steve's Seaside Life

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Blackberry and Personal Productivity.

I have recently given up my Blackberry for economic reasons, and spent the money I saved on an IPAQ which I convinced myself would be more, “life enhancing”,  after a month I think I made the right decision but I do miss my Blackberry a lot and still feel it would add a lot of value to my work/home life if I still had it.  A recent report brings the issue into clear focus:

Research In Motion has today published the results of a survey it commissioned with Ipsos Reid into the benefits of using BlackBerry handhelds. Among the report’s conclusions is the compelling statistic that employers recuperate on average 188 working hours a year, or more than a working month(*1) for every member of staff they provide with a BlackBerry handheld. Employees also benefit from the improved productivity enabled by BlackBerry, salvaging on average more than 108 hours a year in personal time. This is the equivalent to more than thirteen days extra holiday a year (*2).

A 2004 DTI survey highlighted that 87% of employees would like more time to spend with friends and family and that nearly four in ten adults (38%) between the ages of 35 …

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Perfection – or good enough.

Every month or so someone tells me my work is too detailed, or that I am a perfectionist.  Ironically every week or so someone also tells me that I have not covered some topic or other in sufficient detail.  However the, “its too detailed”, or “too complex”, audience tends to be the one that pays the bills so they are more important to listen to.  I came across this nice little post on the subject, and I have extracted a snip from it here:

One important lesson I’ve learned about designing software is that sometimes it pays to smother one’s perfectionist engineer instincts and be less ambitious about the problems one is trying to solve. Put more succintly, a technology doesn’t have to solve every problem just enough problems to be useful. Two examples come to mind which hammered this home to me; Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and collaborative filtering which sites like Amazon use.

However I am not a person who likes to compromise so I am gradually working towards a way of solving this problem, and its pretty simple and obvious.  Stop writing documents and start writing web sites.  This post is an example, (although not a …

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Chocolat

A fine book, not in my view quite as good as Blackberry Wine, but then I read them in the wrong order.  Still a very enjoyable read, very nicely crafted, perhaps a little too short as I would have liked to see the characters developed a little more.  They were very interesting characters and I was left wanting to understand them a bit more.

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Outlook – Domino Connecter.

I was seduced, (for the third time), into installing the Microsoft Outlook Domino Connecter for the following reasons:

 

  1. I wanted a single place to manage my RSS feeds, personal email, tasks, calendar and work email

  2. My trial of mNotes completes in a few days and I needed to decide whether to buy it, or whether I could use Active Sync alone, (as my Local Notes replica would now also be in Outlook)

  3. I would get a unified search environment, (because X1 would search my Notes data, which would now be in Outlook)

  4. Graham said it works fine for him

 

I have tried it twice before, and had to give up both times, despite considerable effort.  I kept telling myself the problems were to do with the sequence I did things, by interactions with mNotes, X1 etc, because I did not leave it alone – i.e. I tried to use it!  Having tried again a few times these are some of the problems I have had:

 

  1. Synchronisation is painfully slow

  2. It does not synchronise according to a regular schedule, it just does it in the background, but not as frequently as I would like

  3. It affects …

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Inspired by interest in my humble office ….

Inspired by interest in my humble office …. 

There are two discussion threads active on the GTD forum on Offices.  The first is asking people about their home offices and I have replied to this with some links to my blog.  Inspired by the interest people seem to have I have updated some of the pictures and added a couple of new ones.  Of particular note is my new baby spider phone, (brand new and 2/3 off retail price off eBay!):

Then Eric Mack got into the act with this “not so tidy” desk post, and another post that links to his blog:

I cope with this by having a designated untidy area:

My wife and kids also have a desk each, and share this one in my office, which helps keep them away from mine:

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Superb article about the meaning of Open.

Jonathan Schwartz writes another great article about what’s important about the word Open in an IT context, he does this by comparing and constracting Open Source with Open Standards.  he goes further by showing the great work Sun has done to create reference implementations of their J2EE standard, and provide tools to verify compliance.  He provides a few real world illustrations of how the difference affects real business decisions.

Definately worth a read.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040808#rewriting_history_and_vocabulary

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Jenny and I go to the Cinema.

I had promised Jenny a “1 to 1” trip to the cinema which is always really difficult to organise as the other kids always want to come along as well.  So I chose a movie that I thought would only appeal to Jen, “13 going on 30”,  I was not really looking forward to the film, but was really looking forward to the time with Jen.  As it turned out we both really enjoyed the film, and not for different reasons.  The film synopsis follows:

Jennifer Garner (Daredevil, TV’s “Alias”) and Mark Ruffalo (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) star in this hilarious flash-forward romance about a pre-teen girl who goes from geek to glamorous. With the help of some magic wishing dust, 13 year-old Jenna Rink (Garner) becomes 30 and gorgeous overnight, with everything she ever wanted, except for her best friend Matt (Ruffalo). Now, this grown woman must create some magic of her own to help the little girl inside find the true love she left behind.

Whilist its true that there was a romantic theme to the film, I think what Jen and I liked most was that the girl re-invented the woman, sort of as follows:…

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I need help.

This is a posting that I made to the GTD discussion forum.

 

I am about to start a small research project into personal productivity,  I am going to be looking at the following main areas:

 

  • Personal knowledge management

  • Time, task and action management

  • Communication and collaboration

  • Team working

  • Subscription and research

As you can see these are quite relevant to exponents of the GTD methodology, and so I need your help.

 

First I wanted to explain a little about my personal experience with GTD and history in using similar techniques.

 

“I love to be organised”

 

I am one of those people who likes a clear desk, who like kids to have tidy bedrooms, who likes to be in control.  I invest a lot in my IT, and a lot of my time in researching how to be organised.   I can also invest a lot of time in establishing a new system.  But once that new system is established, I find it hard to keep going.  Here are some of the reasons why:

 

  1. I only tend to be motivated to create my list of, “everything that needs to …

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Spy Kids

Spy Kids. 

On our walk today we were playing Spy’s.  The kids used my Pocket PC to get instructions from Spy Central, and the camera to spot losts kids, (who glowed green), and other enermy spys, (who glowed red).  There were several model planes flying on the beach and they ‘radioed’ the owners to get them to take out the spies and rescure the kids.  They spent the rest of the day playing spys up in the twins bedroom, we are just off to go scooting on the promenade on their ‘hover scooters’.