Monthly Archives: May 2008

Work Like Water

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Posted by Phil on May 29, 2008 – 3:34 am
Filed under Critical Thinking, Philosophy, Productivity

In the quiet moments early in the morning I sometimes wax philosophical in pursuit of understanding my day-to-day existence. What is it that I really am doing? What difference does pushing 0’s and 1’s around? To the degree that I am successful, what makes my work stand apart from another? Is it creative ingenuity to solve problems? Yes, I think I have some of that. Is it a strong work ethic? Well, everyday I get up and do it again. Is it work done with integrity? Yes, I am not one to cut corners. At the end of the day I think a secret to my success is just getting stuff done. It has served me well.

I recently read a rather didactic book on productivity, familiar to many techies called "Getting Things Done." The basic premise of the book by David Allen is to immediately categorize info into buckets thereby either doing it, defering it or delegating it but not ignoring it and letting it pester you until you do something with it. By creating systems for storing tasks and projects you can literally forget about it and focus on solving real problems. I identified with it as something my first boss taught me many years ago.

While the system is tried and true, it didn’t help illuminate in my brain the way I work or more importantly the way my brain works. I have to categorize stuff constantly and come back to it frankly because my memory is just not that good. Half the time I forget my cell number or confuse numbers with my wife’s when asked by someone. So that’s fine and good.

Right now I’m staring at some pretty daunting deadlines this summer to launch an intranet, produce a video and create a website for an international symposium, develop some flash presentations and drive forward the regular agenda’s for development and upkeep of the main site at work. This doesn’t take into account the myriad of other processes and events happening outside of work.

I have come to see work like water. I have never been one to step-down from a challenge, but in the realm of productivity often I find from hour-to-hour the path of least resistance is the most productive. When it’s an opportune time to get a task done, do it. Constant evaluation of the full landscape reveals crevices in projects that I can fill.

As a random nonsequential thinker, I don’t know if I truly understand my thought processes. Left-brained thinkers like to break it apart for other left-brained thinkers. That is all fine and good and I appreciate its instructiveness. For me though, in the rubber-hits-the-road reality of today, this morning with much to get done, it’s just water flowing to the lowest points on the horizon.

Just hoping I don’t drown in the process.

Power of Delayed Gratification

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Posted by Phil on May 24, 2008 – 6:20 am
Filed under Just for Fun, consumerism, remodeling

New Tile Floors

Good things do come to those who wait. It’s a very unpopular concept, especially in our commercial driven culture that screams-out for us to constantly spend now and pay later. As a culture we have grown so accustomed to living in debt that it seems normal. In fact, prior to World War II, only 2 percent of Americans had a house mortgage and now it’s the opposite with only 2 percent of homeowners not having a mortgage.

In September I wrote the post, "Delayed Purchases Pay Huge Dividends". It featured a lovely picture of my dog laying on a concrete floor in my living room. I decided that living on concrete was better than our old dirty carpet that was a little past due for replacement. The idea was to save-up and wait until we had cash in-hand to have tile laid in our house.

The day finally came, after painting, replacing hardware and other upgrades, we had the funds available to pay for the materials and labor. Having freshly laid floors is like living in a new house and we are enjoying it very much. Best of all is that every single tile is ours paid-in-full. We don’t owe the bank or the legalized mafia, the credit card companies a nickel for them.

Quite a Daydream Huh Jason?

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Posted by Phil on May 8, 2008 – 6:37 am
Filed under Just for Fun

Finally American Idol caught up to me this year. I’ve never been an avid watcher but I think having pre-teens in the house is what got me hooked. Jason Castro was by far my favorite singer. I like his laid-back style. Well, it was nice while it lasted. Hope to see and hear more from you soon Jason.

10 Dependable Desktop & Browser Utilities

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Posted by Phil on May 6, 2008 – 5:47 am
Filed under FireFox, Google, Productivity

A quick search on desktop utilities will reveal a plethora of bells and whistles. Sometimes it’s challenging to discern between the helpful suggestions and self-promotion. After trying many utilities, there are a few that have worked their way into my daily work life, utilities I depend on to help me through my day.

  1. Keepass – I don’t know what I did all those years without a solid way of storing passwords. What a conundrum it poses. On one hand, best practice says to use unique passwords that are long and cryptic. On the other hand there needs to be a system for storing them. Perhaps I’m showing my age but I find it more and more difficult to do so. Keepass is a small utility that stores passwords in an encrypted file on your desktop. I also heard of some IT folks storing the file on a server and opening it locally for a shared resource.
  2. Google Calendar SyncGoogle Calendar Sync – After years of ambiguous and conflicting appointments between work and personal life, I’ve started syncing my work calendar in Outlook to Gmail. For Getting Things Done enthusiasts, this one is a no brainer. It’s nice to open-up my calendar mindspace and not worry as much about calendaring conflicts.
  3. Beyond Compare – This little utility, free for the 30-Day trial then $30 to by, allows you to synch files between two folders. Originally I used it to synch web folders but have found it very useful for backing-up documents to a network drive.
  4. YouSendIt.comYouSendIt.com – Moving large files around the globe can be a real hassle. Our intranet system is in development and sometimes there’s no more efficient way to get stuff to folks than uploading it to a second party. The service is free though as a department we’ve subscribed to their first tier of service. They also offer secured service if you have highly sensitive information.
  5. Google Adwords EditorGoogle Adwords Editor – The Adwords Editor just makes life a little easier for maintaining one or more accounts. Management of the campaigns can be handled from the desktop and then sync’d when done. Works nicely when multiple folks are working on the same account as well.
  6. FireFTPFireFTP – This FireFox plug-in gets constant use. It keeps life streamlined for me to pop open an ftp client within the browser. It’s quick to launch and works pretty darn good. I’ve used it for upwards of a year now and have very little complaints.
  7. Gmail Manager – Another FireFox plug-in, but probably the most used utility I posess. It enables me to keep a constant eye on email w/out going to the account. If there were such a bird for Outlook my work life efficiency would be near shangri-la.
  8. MeasureIt – A little FireFox plug-in that measures anything on the screen. MeasureIT Firefox ExtensionI should mention Colorzilla as well though for some reason just don’t use it as much. MeasureIt is uber handy for getting dimensions when modifying graphics for a web page.
  9. Ad-awareAd-Aware – We use Norton Anti-virus at work and to put it mildly, it’s under par as an all-encompassing anti-virus utility. I prefer AVG Anti-virus which is free though I have a paid subscription for my home computing environment. Regardless of the version of anti-virus software I use, Adaware does a decent job of catching malware and spyware that they others let slip by.
  10. Microsoft PowerToys Image Resizer
     – This little utility performs a nice function to resize images with a right-click. While I absolutely love working in Photoshop, it’s a real hoss in terms of launching the program and a pain when a simple resize is all that is needed. Image Resizer is an ideal utility especially for blogging.

There are many other utilities that are credible and that I use fairly regularly, but these mentioned above range between hourly to weekly, stuff I depend on. What ones could you not live without?

12 More to Lose by 40

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Posted by Phil on May 2, 2008 – 6:27 am
Filed under Goal Setting, Health, Just for Fun

Another update in keeping accountable with the world in my quest to lose weight. So far I’ve dropped ten lbs. from my tubbiest 202. But officially I set my starting weight at 200, so I’ve really lost eight pounds. With four months left it’s a good start, but just the beginning. My pants certainly fit better. The shift in weight has come from some minor dietary changes. I’ve not yet gotten into any consistent exercise program which would help me break the 190 marker.

If it weren’t for those all-day staff meetings and working lunches I’d get there much sooner. I think that’s one of my major downfalls. Still, to get anywhere near 180 I’m going to have to work much harder. From what I’ve heard the first ten pounds are always the easiest. I’ve never gotten serious about weightloss before so this is new ground for me.

Efforts like this remind me of how challenging it is to make fundamental lifestyle changes as one matures in age. Hard but not impossible. I for one do not want to be one of those folks who gets more and more set in my ways as I grow older. I think you have to fight the force of habit all along the way. Otherwise I’ll wake-up one day fat, sedentary and suffering as a result of it.

Tech is the Easy Stuff

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Posted by Phil on May 1, 2008 – 6:15 am
Filed under Productivity

Just this past week I was appointed team lead on an intranet implementation team. Endeavoring to structure a site in a meaningful way that will serve the needs of different departments in multiple locations in America, Europe and Asia is more than a little challenging. It reminds me once again that technology per sa is not the most daunting challenge we face.

In this specific case we are implementing MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). While I find some clunky aspects to the platform, overall it provides some pretty slick features out of the box and nice integration with Microsoft Office.

MOSS, much like blogging platforms or other Content Managed Systems, have evolved to the point where rapid publication is quite possible. The tough reality is effective implementation from an information architecture standpoint proves to be the real challenge.

Just yesterday, I was speaking with a friend of mine who is dean of the college of business at a local university. He remarked that they recently migrated their intranet over to MOSS as well. The ability to rapidly expand the site has, in some ways, proved to be to their detriment as it is becoming unwieldy.

As the tools continue to become more user-friendly the need for effective development of information architecture grows in direct proportion to the proliferation of information within a corporation.

There are two basic ways of categorizing information:

  1. Navigational Taxonomy – how the site is structured to maneuver through the information.
  2. Metadata Taxonomy – how the data is tagged for searching through the data.

Seems easy enough.

Navigational taxonomy in many respects proves to be the most challenging from a conceptual standpoint. Thinking of information from a landscape perspective can be challenging as one can only fit so much information on a screen. How do you go about making a large amount of information easily accessible without having to drill-down fourteen layers?

Metadata taxonomy, the basic means by which the web is structure, is much easier to conceptualize as a few descriptive tags to a document returns effective results in search. The major drawback however, is the human factor. People have been trained to stick information in folders, in locations rather than tagging information.

Effective planning and design of a system that’s the hard stuff. And if you are ready for a real challenge, take on training with the hope of behaviour modification of 750 people in how they do their job on a daily basis. Now that’s the tuff stuff.