Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Productivity

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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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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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The Blogging Workflow

The blogging workflow. 

This is a very very nice summary of how blogs work by Roland Tanglao at Streamline, it complements my comments because it provides more details of some of the server side infrastructure:

1. Joe Blogger writes something and publishes it to his blog.

2. Joe’s Blog system updates his site’s HTML, updates his RSS file and sends a ‘ping’ message to the ‘Aggregation Ping Server’ indicating that his site has updated.

3. Search engines like Google and RSS specific services like Feedster, Technorati and PubSub periodically ask the Aggregation Ping Server, “Which sites have updated?”.

4. Since Joe’s site sends pings and has an RSS file and is easy to update frequently, Joe’s search engine rank is higher than a ‘normal site’.

5. Techie Teresa uses a program called an RSS reader to subscribe to Joe’s site. The RSS reader checks Joe’s RSS file for updates periodically (usually once/hour or once per day) and notifies her of Joe’s updates. Teresa no longer wastes time manually surfing Joe’s site. She just checks her RSS reader.

6. As a result, Teresa’s information flow is more efficient and she can monitor more sites in less time.

7. Joe Surfer (who …

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Maybe this is what I need!.

I just posted about the tough decsion I had to make choosing between an IPAQ and a Blackberry.  Maybe I should have waited for one of these!

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Use Virtual PC, then you need this site!.

Absolute goldmine, lists every OS you can image and provides details on whether its works on Virtual PC.  I was pretty amazed by the list, especially compared with VM Ware.  Where a product has issues it also has notes of workarounds.  Even better if you want to keep up to...

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Diagram of my home network

I described my Office in a previous post.  In this post I thought I would provide a bit on insight into my home network.  The following diagram should give you the basic idea.

  1. The hub of the network is a little 4 port 100MB switch.  All three servers and one laptop are plugged into this

  2. There are two dedicated servers on the network

    1. Server 1 is a dedicated application server.  It only runs Windows 2003 Server and GSX Server 3.1.  All application servers and some test desktops run on top of GSX server.

    2. Server 2 is a dedicated management server, and Active Directory domain controller.  This server runs the MOM Express 2005, and acts as a backup of my main file server, using Windows 2003 Volume Shadow Copy.

  3. My desktop PC also happens to run Windows 2003 server, as this allows me the flexibility to access it via Windows Terminal Services from anyhwere in the house, mirror my data files, and also runs as AD domain controller for resiliance.  It also runs VMWare Workstaton.

  4. When I need access to my company network, I run up a corporate standard PC in a VM on my Desktop Server and VPN from there, …