Here is an excellent guide to recharging in the afternoon. I’ll post more on this Saturday with this week’s feature review.
Continue readingNapping 101
Post Category → Productivity
Speaking and Carnegie Hall Require Practice
Today the Uncluterer website posted an excellent article on giving presentations. I do quite a bit of presentation work and following years of hard knocks I’d have to agree with just about everything the author says. Especially the part about practice. Presentations don’t happen magically. Unless you are some sort of freak, the only way to come off smoothly is to practice. Believe me. I’ve tried it the other way and it always turns out ugly.
So when I know I’m about to give an important presentation, I practice. No one and no thing is safe from my practice. Mirrors, co-workers, traffic, family members, unsuspecting door to door salesmen: They are all liable to be dragged through an opening statement, a presentation, or a particular analogy that I have yet to get just right. It is good to know I’m not alone.
Manage Tasks Under Fire
I write about personal productivity quite a bit. What I don’t do often enough is talk about how much I truly suck at it. The day job has been real busy lately. A looming jury trial and a colleague’s vacation have combined into a perfect storm of anarchy in my life. The last three days I’ve been putting out fires, and completely ignoring my OmniFocus data while watching the unread email multiply like rabbits.
Finally, this afternoon I shut the door, put the calls on hold, and did what I knew in my guts had to be done. I got caught up. I sorted and processed emails. I prioritized and adjusted projects. All in all, it took about an hour and a half. Several of my projects have been pushed back but at least they are done so under my terms. Of course in doing this I found several time bombs which I was able defuse in their last seconds. I am so much less stressed now that I have a handle on what I’m up against and amazed at how quickly things can descend into chaos when you don’t pay attention.
This whole exercise of falling off the wagon and getting back on reinforces something for me. When you have the least amount of time available for keeping track of your projects and tasks is precisely when you need to stop and do it the most. In other words, when the chips are down, you really need to suck it up.
World’s Best Presentation Contest
Guy Kawasaki (yes, THAT Guy Kawasaki) posted links to winners of the Slideshare World’s Best Presentation Contest on his blog. The presentations are very well done and if you do any amount of presentation work yourself, worthy of clicking through.
Continue readingMail Notification Liberation
A friend asked me how I can work without any mail notifications. Are you kidding me? How could I possibly work WITH mail notifications?
Apple has done a great job of building in several mail notifications into OS X. Mail.app can stick a badge in your dock and make a very cute little “dingy” sort of sound every time a new message arrives. That is not all though. Using third party software you can make your system growl and even shoot off fancy graphics every time you get a note from Amazon about something “you may want to buy” or even a message about “cheap prescription medication.” I asked my friend, “How on earth do you get anything done with all those pyrotechnics?”
I just don’t believe it is possible to keep your focus if your eyes and ears are trained to jump like a Pavlovian dog everytime someone (or somebot) decides to send you a note. Think about it. If you get an email every 5 minutes, that is 12 interruptions an hour and 96 interruptions in an 8 hour work-day. Just think how much faster you could work with 480 less interruptions a week.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t want my system to check email for me. I just want to be in control of the situation .. not the other way around.
The way I accomplish this is a few simple checkboxes in Apple Mail.
New Mail Sound: None = No ding.
Dock Unread Count: None = No tempting badge.
That is all there is to it. Note I did not turn off auto mail checking. When I do decide that I want to process mail, I want it already loaded. This gives me the benefit of current email without the devastating interruptions.
If you are carrying a smart phone, you also need to turn off the notifications there as well. On my iPhone it is done as follows:
This is all found under the “Sound” menu of the “Settings” button. Before everyone starts firing up your email to me, I *know* sms notifications are still turned on. There are only a few people who text me and when they do, it (usually) is a legitimate interruption.
Continue readingInbox Mayhem
The Tools for Thought blog had a very good post today explaining you should never check your email.
“Never check email. Ever.”
Instead, Andre recommends you “process” your email. This is very similar to my email workflow in that I deal with each item either immediately or dump it into OmniFocus for later process. I explained it in detail during the email sorcery screencast.
This stuff isn’t rocket science, but it may help you build a rocket. How are you processing email?
Hitting the Wall and Back Again
The last few days, well last few weeks actually, the day job has been a real grind. Coincidentally, I’ve been helping some friends get their arms wrapped around OmniFocus. It has been really great handing out a few tips and watching the light bulb go off as people find ways to use these tools to get their work done faster and spend more time doing things they love. The funny thing is, they all seem to think that I really have it together. In fact, things are quite the opposite. Lately I’ve been a jumble of loose ends. What I really need to do, is take my own advice and spend about four hours auditing all my various obligations.
Keeping things together is difficult for everyone. We all have our tricks and Band-Aids, but you can never let your guard down. Chaos lurks behind the door. My solution is to table the whole mess and take a few days off and go to Las Vegas with various members of my extended family. While I’m not much of a gambler, I do intend to geek out with some HDR photography and catch up with my inner nerd. Yes, the MacBook Pro will be accompanying me so you may hear from me. When I return Sunday night, the big audit will occur.
Holy Toledo! Another GTD Application
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water . . .
So I spent my $30 and licensed OmniFocus over the weekend. Of course today the MacSparky radar picked up yet another task management application brewing for the Mac, Things. This application takes a different spin on task management abandoning the more traditional field approach of OmniFocus for a Tag focussed indexing system. There is a very good screencast demonstrating it right here. I’m intrigued by this different approach and I will be following up with this application to see how people use it. That being said, I really like OmniFocus. It is the first task application I have ever used that really tames my crazy lists of tasks. Whether it is writing a trial brief or cleaning the fish pond, OmniFocus is my master.
New FileMaker-lite Product Bento
Today Apple owned Filemaker announced a new product that appears to be a lighter version of their relational database. There is a public preview that will work until the product release in February 2008. I’ll give it a whirl and report back here. If you are interested, you can download it here. I confirming email is now 30 minutes overdue so I suspect their server load is pretty large today. You can also get more information at the TUAW entry on it right here.
Continue readingLess Dangerous Multitasking
I think multitasking is a bad thing. If a thing is worth doing, it should be done on its own. Trying to do multiple items at one time only leads to you doing none of them properly. On a more basic level, allowing yourself to be pulled into mental jijitsu on a repeated basis would be exhausting and not healthy. Anyway, WebMD has a nice article on “How to Multitask Without Losing Your Mind”. My advice still remains, avoid it if at all possible but if you must, read this.
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