a case study in poor time management

I had a few things I wanted to take care of today. I’m starting a new job on Wednesday, so I just have today and tomorrow left before I’m back at a full-time job, and not easily able to run errands during business hours. Mostly, I needed to work on stuff related to my parents’ estates. To make a long story short, I ended up making three separate trips to the post office, two trips to the bank, two trips to the mail box down the street, one trip to Staples, and one trip to a local UPS drop box. If I’d really thought things out in advance, I could have cut out half of these trips and probably gotten all this stuff done before lunch. Oh well. At least I got a few important things done, even if it wasn’t in the most efficient way possible!

inbox zero

At work, I got my Lotus Notes inbox to zero today, for the first time since March, I think. And I got all the stray paper off my desk. Everything that’s actionable is in the system. Everything that’s not is in reference folders or the trash.

Over the last week or two, I’ve recommitted myself to cleaning stuff up and getting stuff into my system. I’ve also been experimenting with new tools (as I’ve mentioned in previous blog entries), but part of what I’ve learned from doing that is that I needed to tighten up what was already in my current system.

The basic way I’m working that now is that, if something is a clearly-defined programming project, it goes into Jira. If it’s got some parts that don’t fit there, then I also put it in Notes, and reference the Jira issue #. If it’s not a programming project, or it’s at a stage where it’s got too many moving parts, I just put it in Notes. I try to review all my “in process” projects in Jira every day for next actions. And I try to look at the next actions in my Notes to-do list every day too, though I’m not always so good about that.

Back on the subject of tools, I’m still kind of dissatisfied with using my Notes to-do list as my main GTD system. I previously mentioned experimenting with Chandler. I like Chandler a lot, but I still have a problem with the outgoing e-mail, which I mentioned here. I never got any feedback from the Chandler mailing list on this, and I’ve tried a few oddball things to see if I can work around it, but no luck.

Looking around at other systems, I don’t think any of them could be really useful to me, unless they either work well with Notes, or exist within Notes. The only one that could fit the “work well” definition would be Chandler, due to its interesting IMAP setup. For stuff that’s actually *in* Notes, the best system appears to be eProductivity, which is a bit expensive. I’ve also played around with the GTD for Lotus Notes template from Brett Philp. It’s not bad, and it’s free. And it’s just a plain Notes database, so I can go in there and customize forms and whatnot, if I want to.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably be upgrading our main Domino server from 7.x to 8.5 this weekend. I’ve looked at the new mail template, and, while it’s quite nice, I don’t think it really adds anything that will help with GTD. The to-do list, follow-up flags, and folder system all seem to be pretty much unchanged. (I’m kind of hoping that whatever messes up mail from Chandler in 7.x is fixed in 8.5. I’ll have to test that after the upgrade.)

David Allen books

I finally finished reading Ready for Anything today. I started reading it about two years ago. Since it’s just a book of essays, it was easy to put it down for weeks (or months) at a time, and then come back to it whenever I wanted to. I got through the last ten (or so) essays over the last couple of months. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. My pattern with this book was generally to just read one essay at a time, then spend some time thinking about it, using it as a starting point for a bit of self-examination. I’m going to keep it handy, near my copy of GTD. I suspect I’ll return to it occasionally.

I bought Making It All Work for the Kindle back in January; I’ll start reading that soon, I think. I’ve really got no idea what kind of book it is. The reviews on Amazon are mixed. I did notice one comment in there noting that the illustrations in the Kindle version are too small to be useful. That’s disappointing, if true. I’d hate to have to buy a hard copy of it now, after I’ve already shelled out for the Kindle version.

Chandler and Lotus Notes

I had a few spare minutes today, so I installed Chandler on my PC at work. No major problems with the install, or with creating an account on Chandler Hub. I played around with it a bit, and so far, I like it. It’s reasonably fast to load and use. Since it’s a cross-platform app written in Python, I was concerned that it would be slow, and maybe have some user interface quirks. Not that a cross-platform Python app can’t be fast and have a good UI, but a lot of the time, that’s not the case.

The e-mail integration, as I mentioned in my post yesterday, is a little weird. Chandler uses IMAP to create three folders in your mail file, Chandler Events, Chandler Messages, and Chandler Starred. When you drop messages in these folders, they appear in Chandler. That part seemed to work OK with my Lotus Notes mailbox.

Chandler can also send e-mail. That, I thought, would be straightforward. It’s just attaching to an SMTP server. I have plenty of apps that use my Domino server to send SMTP mail, so I didn’t expect any difficulty there. I didn’t have any problems just connecting to the server. However, I’ve found that the e-mails sent from Chandler don’t render correctly in Notes. A bunch of XML, which is probably supposed to be hidden, shows up in the message. I did some testing, and the e-mails from Chandler look fine in GMail, and in Apple’s Mail.app. They look like a mess in Notes though. Oh, and I tried Notes 7, 8, and 8.5 clients, and it’s the same either way. I did find, though, that the e-mails in Notes look fine when I’m accessing my mailbox from my iPod or BlackBerry.

When things go wrong with e-mail rendering in Notes, it can be hard to figure out where things went wrong. First, the Domino server may screw something up before it gets to your mail file. If it’s not that, then it might be something related to your mail file template, or to the Notes client software. Since this problem occurs in Notes 7, 8, and 8.5, I’m guessing it’s not a simple client quirk. It could be something in my mail file template. That’s still on version 7, and I can’t really change that without upgrading my Domino server.

So, bottom line, if I can’t get the outgoing e-mail to look OK in Notes, Chandler is going to be mostly useless for me. If I can get that working, then it’s promising.

Oh, and one other interesting thing about Chandler. There’s a book called “Dreaming in Code” about the initial development process on Chandler. This book is frequently compared to Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, which is a great book about the development of a minicomputer back in the 70’s. Chandler’s development process, apparently, was a bit rocky. At the time the book was written, the program had been in development for several years, and hadn’t produced a workable 1.0 release yet. I think that the author’s original intention was to document the development of a revolutionary open source app that would really be a killer app that would compete with Outlook and maybe Lotus Notes. In the end, he wound up with a book documenting a lot of things that could go wrong with a development project, which is maybe an even more interesting book than he would have gotten if the project had gone well. (I haven’t actually read this book yet, so I’m generalizing from the reviews I’ve read. I do want to pick up the book and read it at some point.)

GTD

I haven’t spent much time thinking about GTD this year. I’ve got a system going that mostly works, so I have just been working it and not worrying about it. A few things have come up recently that have made me start thinking about it again though.

First, I have started offloading most of my programming-related task management into Jira. This has been working pretty well. I’ve got about 100 issues in Jira right now, over a variety of projects. I’ve got the other two developers in my department using it too. From a GTD perspective, I look at a Jira “issue” as a GTD “project”, though sometimes it’s a pretty small project. (Other times, it’s a pretty big one.) I don’t really have a great way of tracking next actions in Jira, but my basic goal is that any open, in-progress, issue in Jira should have a next action on it. I just add comments to the issue as I go, detailing what I’ve done, and what I still need to do. This has gotten most of the programming stuff out of my previous GTD system, which has basically been the Lotus Notes to-do list. (I’ve set up my to-do list based on the system set forth in this document.)

I just recently listened to a podcast from DavidCo on the eProductivity add-on for Notes. This appears to be a really great package that would take care of a bunch of issues I’m having now. It costs $400 though, and I know my company wouldn’t pay for it, so I don’t think I’ll be going that way.

I’ve also been looking at Chandler, an open-source program that looks pretty interesting. Chandler integrates with your e-mail in a bit of a weird way, using IMAP. It might be workable, or it might be too much of a kludge. I’m really not sure. One of the things I like about Chandler is that it’s multi-platform, and you can sync across multiple installs using Chandler Hub. I think I’m going to try it out, though I’m not sure when I’ll have to time to really sit down and mess with it, and see if it’s workable.

I’ve been trying to come up with a good description of the problems I’m having with my current system, but it’s hard to describe. To some extent, it’s really convenient to have all this stuff right in Notes, in my mail file. But, there’s really no intermixing of the mail and the to-dos, so I find myself copying & pasting a lot, both text and doclinks. Notes has some nice features for copying doclinks, but I run into trouble when I have old projects that I haven’t started yet, and I’m relying on doclinks to old mail messages that I may already have archived. It gets kind of confusing. Basically, I’d like to either move the GTD stuff out of my mail file (which Chandler would do), or just go nuts and integrate completely with my mail file, and just manage it really well, which eProductivity would do.

Oh, and don’t get me started on how I could access or manage any of this stuff on either my iPod Touch or my BlackBerry Storm. I don’t even come close to having a good solution for that!

FrontPocket review

I just installed FrontPocket on my iPod Touch. I stumbled across this program yesterday while I was working on my MobileMe issue. FrontPocket is an application that gives you (almost) full access to your Backpack account on your Touch (or iPhone). This is something I’ve really been looking for since I got the iPod Touch. I was hoping somebody would get around to coding something like this, and now someone has!

The program uses the Backpack API to access the info in your Backpack account, and pull it down to the iPod over the air. It caches the info locally, so you can still have access to it when you’re not connected to WiFi. I just did some testing, and it doesn’t look like the program automatically sucks down your whole Backpack account; it seems like you only have offline access to stuff that you’ve previously viewed online, and only the version you’ve most recently viewed, not necessarily the current version on the web. And it seems like you can’t add new notes or edit existing ones offline.

While online, you can add notes, edit notes, add journal entries, and add reminders, so you can do pretty much anything you’d want to do. The program does not, though, render Textile or HTML, so you’re just viewing the text of your notes. And URL links are not active links, so you can’t click on them and have them open in Safari or anything like that. (And, of course, the iPod Touch still has no copy & paste functionality, so you can’t just copy & paste an URL out of FrontPocket and into Safari.) Oh, and it doesn’t render photos that you’ve stored in Backpack either.

So, overall, there are a number of limitations to this app that I really wish they could find a way to fix. Some of them are likely related to limitations in the Backpack API. Others could be fixed, though they might be non-trivial. The app’s only on version 1.1, so maybe we’ll see some new stuff added in the next iteration. (I wonder if there’s an open source Textile rendering engine out there somewhere that they could convert for use on the iPod/iPhone and just drop into the app?)

The thing I’d most like to see is a full sync option, where my entire Backpack site would get pulled down to the device. I’d even be OK with having to press a button in the app to initiate the sync, though it would be cool if it could be done automatically in the background.

The app does have calendar functionality, by the way, but I don’t use Backpack calendar, so I can’t say much about that works. I haven’t seen any indication that it integrates with the standard device calendar app, though I wouldn’t expect it to; Apple probably hasn’t made it easy for third-party apps to update the built-in ones.

syncing

I’ve been using MobileMe to sync contact & calendar data between my MacBook and my iPod Touch for a while now. It works pretty well. Today, I decided to go one more step, and set up MobileMe on my Vista desktop machine to sync with Outlook. The contacts were no problem; they synced up fine the first time through, and I then went through them and weeded out a few duplicates.

The calendar was a little trickier. I have three calendars in MobileMe: Home, Work, and Birthdays. The birthday calendar is populated automatically via MenuCalendarClock, a shareware program that just pulls birthdays from the Mac address book and puts them into iCal. These calendars all now show as separate calendars in Outlook. I had to basically push them down to Outlook, rather than doing a straight merge, though, to get them to show up.

There’s a default calendar in Outlook called “Calendar” that has now synced up the MobileMe (and hence my Mac and iPod). I never used the calendar in Outlook before, so this is just an empty calendar. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to delete it in Outlook, or to tell the MobileMe control panel not to sync it up. Not a huge deal, but a little annoyance.

And repeating events seem to be treated a little differently in Outlook vs. iCal. After I pulled stuff into Outlook, then synced back to MobileMe, then synced my Mac, every repeating event on my calendars showed as changed. I’m hoping this is a one-time thing, and I’m not going to have to push & pull every repeating event at every sync.

I’m also a little worried that, when I go to http://www.me.com/calendar/ to check my calendar online, I just see “Loading Events”, and nothing ever comes up. I think when something this has happened in the past, it would generally clear itself up overnight. Here’s hoping. Looking around online, though, this may have something to do with the way Outlook messed with the repeating events. I may have to do some work to straighten this out.

My reason for setting up Outlook with MobileMe, by the way, is because I’m thinking about replacing my old Motorola cell phone with a BlackBerry in the not-too-distant future. If I do that, I’m going to want to do full contact & calendar sync with the BlackBerry, and it seems like the easiest way to do that might be through Outlook. It seems like it’s possible to sync a BlackBerry directly with a Mac, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to set up my PC with all my data either way.

Making It All Work

I posted a couple of weeks back that I would likely pick up David Allen’s new book, Making It All Work, whenever the Kindle version dropped to $9.99. Well, it just did, so I bought it today. I just just thinking that our new president could probably use a bit of organizational help from David Allen. He’s got such an ambitious agenda, and in such a challenging environment, that I really think he should put a personal productivity guru of some sort on his staff. (Who knows, maybe he already has one.)

I’m not sure when I’ll actually get around to reading this book, though. I’m in the middle of a Doctor Who novel right now, plus I just started reading 1776, and I have John Adams on the Kindle too. Plus a boatload of SF and fantasy novels, both dead-tree and Kindle format, waiting to be read.

productivity books

David Allen’s new book just came out. I’ll probably pick up the Kindle version at some point, though I think I’ll wait and see if they drop the price on it. It’s $14.27 right now; the hardcover is $17.13. I’m assuming the Kindle version will drop to the usual $9.99 eventually.

I still haven’t finished reading Ready for Anything , actually, so I’m in no hurry to start the new book. Along similar lines, I’m almost done with the audio version of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits.

I don’t know if all this book-reading is doing me any good, really, but I like to think it’s helping.