Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Productivity

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Exploiting your infrastructure

I have been frustrated for years at just how little attention most businesses give to exploiting their IT infrastructure investments.  I recently came across the book, Seize the work day, which asks the question:

Have you ever wished for a solution to a near out-of-control work day? If you are like I once was, you have often longed for a way to get and stay ahead of your work load. You have felt frustrated by hours of meetings that leave you little time to complete tasks during the day—by having to work late, night after night, to catch up on those responsibilities. You have felt frustrated by losing track of, or losing time for, commitments you have made. Frustrated by an avalanche of e-mails you cannot get to, by important documents you cannot find.

Well I guess that applies to most of us, and the book is a great example of just how much thought and attention can be applied to improving productivity and just how great the payoff can be!

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OneNote and a new way to improve meetings

I recently had the opportunity to try out a new way to manage and a record a meeting using my Tablet and OneNote, here is how it went:

 

  1. First I created a main page for the meeting, where I recorded the location, attendees, objectives etc

  2. The I created sub pages with all of the material that I had been sent about the meeting, embedded as background images, (drag and drop word documents onto OneNote and it provides this as an option).  I was then able to quickly jump to these and mark them up if I needed to

  3. Then I created a sub page to keep my hand written notes

  4. Finally, I plugged in a $10 microphone on an 8’ lead, put it in the middle of the room, and recorded the whole meeting. As the recording proceeded, I made short handwritten notes when key points were made.  The key thing is that I did not try to take thorough notes, just jot down a memory clue that I could use later.

  5. Because I did not take extensive notes, I could remain focussed on the discussion, which is a major benefit

  6. On the way home (I travelled …

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Maybe theres hope for mainstream inter-enterprise collaboration afterall

I have been frustrated since the beginning of the Internet at the difficulty of collaborating inter enterprise.  The current techniques don’t work for me.  They frequently depend on too much inter-enterprise coorperation, expensive client software, too many firewall ports opened etc.  Well it seems that a mainstream solution is finally on the horizon with Microsoft’s LCS 2005 product.  Here are a few snipits to get you started:

The product, formerly code-named “Vienna,” is expected to be available in beta sometime in June or July. Microsoft is looking for customers to test the product in beta, leading to a general availability release of LCS 2005 by the fourth quarter.

and it allows inter-enterprise connections:

Chief among the new features in this version will be support for federation of IM and presence so that customers can extend the technology to their partners, suppliers and customers. This will allow users to see presence information across, not just within, enterprises, from other applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel and SharePoint Services.

fairly firewall friendly:

Users from outside the network will use the Windows Messenger client and tunnel into the network using Session Initiation Protocol over firewall port 5061, Microsoft officials said. Full encryption and authentication …

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Welcome back to the Tablet!

Back in June I handed my TC 1100 Tablet back to the project I was working on and wrote a farewell blog article where I wrote up my on off love affair with Tablet PC computing.  In that article I concluded that a Tablet did not really meet my needs a home worker.  Well as time has progressed I have missed the Tablet more and more, and eventually a great deal on eBay offer seduced me and I now have an older TC1000 with 768MB of memory and a cheap TDK PC Card Bluetooth adapter. So what changed my mind:

 

  • I realised that I loved the slate format but hated the keyboard on the TC1*, and that all of the usage scenarios were slate format ones.  I had been trying to use my Tablet before in a multi-purpose role, I don’t do that now I have a range of machines that I use for specific purposes.  For example, almost all of my writing, evaluation and analysis work is done at my desk using my three monitor setup driving 2 Windows 2003 servers.  All of my company mobile working needs I use a IBM T40 …

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I installed google desktop search, but not for long …

A friend recently pointed out that google have just released their desktop search product in beta, everything google does seems to be in beta, a few hours before almost everyone on my blogroll also reported the fact!

Anyway like thousands of other bloggers I quickly installed it.  At first I was none too happy with it though.  It did not ask me where to store its index, what file types to index, which areas to index.  In fact it seemed way too simple to setup.  So I uninstalled it worrying that it was going to go away and index every file on my two 120G disks.  Well I should have looked a bit harder at the FAQ and when I did I realised that it can take such a simple approach to life because it only indexes Office documents and HTML files, and these don’t take up anywhere near as much space.  However I guess, but have not checked, that it did index my multiple backup areas.

So having reinstalled it what do I think.  Well to be honest I don’t like it all that much.  I have huge numbers of files, often many versions of the same file and …

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Six Thinking Hats

I have just started to think through some of the processes, I take for granted.  One of these is “researching and descision making”.  One of the first approaches I cam across was the “Six Thinking Hats”; approach it stunned me that a process I am so familliar with could be so dramatically improved through applying more structure.  What particularly appealed was how the approach works within teams to avoid conflict.  Here’s a summary of the approach:

  • White Hat:
    With this thinking hat you focus on the data available. Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.

    This is where you analyze past trends, and try to extrapolate from historical data.

  • Red Hat:
    ‘Wearing’ the red hat, you look at problems using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also try to think how other people will react emotionally. Try to understand the responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.

  • Black Hat:
    Using black hat thinking, look at all the bad points of the decision. Look at it cautiously and defensively. Try to see why it might not …

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BlackBerry Enterprise Software v4.0

A new version of the BES has just been announced.  Loads of great features, my favorite being finally getting rid of desktop sync, which never worked reliably for me.  Worst feature no improvements in task management, and wireless task and address book management.  More details follow: BlackBerry Enterprise Software v4.0...

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The future of OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.Org have published their marketting plan.  ZDNet UK has a good article on the topic.  The full plan can be found online here.  I particularly liked the following quote:

“Microsoft, our major competitor, has a marketing budget of five to 10 billion US dollars, while we have 25 cents in a PayPal account,” said McCreesh.

OpenOffice.org have identified the following target markets:

According to the OpenOffice marketing plan, the main markets for the office suite are government offices; education establishments; public libraries; small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); not-for-profit organisations (NFPs); own equipment manufacturers (OEMs) building PCs with pre-installed software; and Linux distributions looking for an office suite to bundle.

Although StarOffice has more ambitious target markets.  Overall the plan targets OOo having a market share of apprximately 50% by 2010.

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Seven rules for email

One of the researchers who works for my company produced a great guide on the uses and abuses of cummuication and collaboration technologies a few years ago.  When I first read it I was impressed but at the same time depressed at the neglect that most companies have of their basic (common) business processes.  I have continued to be interested in how companies can extract maximum advantage from simple IT infrastructure technologies by focussing on how to use their tools to best effect. 

The following post therefore caught my eye – seven rules for e-mail – it would be great to see a best practice debate on how the phone, SMS, email, syndication, IM and conferencing technologies should be used.  The seven rules above provides a good but limited start. 

As an illustration of such a debate in action, albeit on a slightly different subject, there is no better example than the getting things done forums.

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All the buzz about weblogs is really about one thing: Making publishing to the web as easy as writing an email

Or so says a really interesting presentation posted here http://www.37signals.com/blogprez/ but blogging for me means much more to me than that.  It’s about being able to craft for an external audiance, a view onto what I am doing, what I think is important, and why I think its important.  Even though my blog is essentially for an external audiance, I often find myself posting articles to help me shape my ideas, or as reminders of things that I want to work on in the future.  Its suprising the extent to which my blog has become a sort of personal reference library. 

I have never sustained a Journal before, but my blog is now probably the longest lived personal productivity tool, and personal development initiative I have ever used, so their must be something to its more than easy publishing.