In the past, I’ve made numerous attempts to pull in the reigns on my email “situation”, but nothing worked. Three months ago, I had literally thousands of emails in my inbox – today I have zero. I haven’t been getting less email, in fact I’ve probably been getting more, but I’ve been handling it differently.
I’m no expert, but I’ve had a few people ask me how I’ve been keeping my inbox empty, so here’s the strategy that has worked for me:
- I check email every 20-30 minutes, and I process it immediately
- processing means reading, determining if an action is necessary, then deleting or archiving
- sorting email sucks, so I use one archive folder and search
- if a follow-up action is required, I a) do it right away if I can do it in less than 5 minutes, or b) star the email for a reply, or move the task to a to-do list (I use Things)
- I don’t go back to my inbox until the email has been archived or deleted
- I set aside time before lunch and at the end of the day to write longer replies
- I write filters/rules for assigning labels to newsletters, digests, cron reports, etc. so they can be mass selected deleted
That’s it in a nutshell. It’s nothing revolutionary, it just takes some discipline, but I promise it gets easy, and makes staying organized much easier.
For the canonical source on email productivity, check out this guy.
DataTO.org is a community website, built as a venue for the users of Toronto’s open data to request and discuss open datasets. On top of enabling conversation, the site also helps users garner support for their request so as to establish a democratic prioritization of requests.
I first became interested in the open data dialogue back in early 2009 at ChangeCamp in Toronto, which was an event aimed at re-imagining government and citizenship in the age of participation. ChangeCamp spawned ChangeEngine, a project where a group of citizens (including myself), imagined a geo-aware issue tracking system, aimed at bringing communities together to solve problems and to provoke systemic change.
As the launch of Toronto’s open data site approached, some of my colleagues at Architech Solutions and I, met with Mark Kuznicki (organizer of ChangeCamp) to discuss the possibility of building a community companion site to the city’s site. We all felt there was a need, and so DataTO was born. Continue Reading
Today is a very special day for me. It marks the end of a very significant period of my life. At the tender age of 16, I started working as a contract web developer, a career, which has now supported me for nearly 12 years.
There have been good times and bad, and many, many lessons learned. Ultimately, I’m proud of the path I took. Through pure stubbornness, I managed to bypass post-secondary education, by working my ass off to learn what I needed to know to get the job done (often after I had already sold it). In many ways, I attribute my success in this business to this fly or fall approach because it kept me on my toes, always learning, always hungry to improve my skills, and always ready to take on new challenges.
Looking back, I know that I went about things the hard way. A wiser, less obstinate person would have gone about things differently, but then I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
For the last year and a half, I have been working with The Blog Studio. My time with them has been very important to me for a lot of reasons. It freed me of my solitary home office, and got me out into the world, working face-to-face with people again. The life of a freelancer, especially in this industry, can be a hermetic one, and working with Peter, Lucia and Mike was a very welcome and necessary change.
Next week, I start a new era of my life as I leave the world of contract work and venture down a new, exciting path. A remarkable opportunity landed on my lap a couple weeks ago, and enticed me to make some life altering decisions.
On Monday, I will be starting work, as an employee (for the first time since directing cars in the parking lot at the Stratford Festival as an early teen), with Toronto-based Architech. Architech builds kick ass software. They are a team of people who are extremely passionate about building amazing applications for business and I could never make the jump into a full-time position like this without sharing core beliefs and passions like I do with Architech. I’m confident we will have a bright future together.
Needless to say, I’m extremely excited, and can’t wait to see where this new direction takes me.
After weeks of brainstorming, domain searching, forceful premature balding and sleepless nights, I’ve finally decided on a name for my upcoming project management app.
What’s in a name?
For the longest time I was intensely frustrated that I couldn’t find available domain names in the project management realm. Before long I found that I was starting to settle for names that didn’t really mean anything, and were hardly memorable.
Then I started to take a more systematic approach to finding a name. Aside from all the standard naming criteria, I decided that I wanted the name to represent:
- More than just tasks. What I’m building is not a to-do list manager, it’s a much more intelligent project management assistant (a lab partner, if you will).
- More science than art. Typically, project management is a lot of guess work. I aim to replace much of that guess work with tangible, data-supported analysis.
- Simplicity & fun. Ok, it’s not likely that managing projects will ever be “fun”, but if it’s not “painful”, that’s a start.
Continue Reading
I try to ask myself this on a fairly regular basis. I feel it keeps me focused on building the right tool for the job, rather than just the shiniest one in the box.
Consequently, the more I’ve thought about this question, the more keep coming back to another question: How long? This seems to be the most prevalent question in project management, and is the basis for nearly every project management decision we make. How long ago did they ask for this? How long will it take to do? How long have you been working on it? How much longer until we’re done? Then, when we’re done, we ask: How long did that take? How much longer is that than we thought it would take?
There are dozens of “how long” questions in project management, and this is simply because managing a project, is managing time. People, budget, service these are all just tangible realizations of time. The distillation of nearly every facet of a project, to its most basic unit, leaves time.
So, it seems clear to me that a tool designed to make project management easier, should place great emphasis on reducing the effort required to answer these “how long” questions. Odd that I’ve yet to see one that does.
What does good project management mean to you?
