Xobni

I’m a tad late to the party with this one, but as we’ve migrated from Lotus Notes to Exchange/Outlook as our corporate email within Orange Business Services, it’s finally given me a change to try out Xobni. So far it’s pretty neat it’s made a difference while on a call, being able to quickly search for somebody and see all the files we’ve exchanged without having to hunt though the files. That’s a great plus as is the automatic transfering of the email you’re viewing moving to the xobni sidebar when you click on the calendar, it means no more flicking back and forth while you jot down details.

I’ve read the comments that it’s slowed people’s outlook down massively, I can’t say I’ve noticed anything as yet. It’s crashed once when I minimized it, it wouldn’t come back.

On the whole, it’s a good aid to productivity and I’d recomemd people give xobni a try.

Are Calendars the reason for poor productivity?

I was just reading this post by JP and found it extremely interesting. I intend to read the concepts behind the thinking when I get some more time.

The theory is that inability to react quickly within large organisations are due to the fact that it’s so difficult to schedule meetings. Meetings are often arrange days, sometimes weeks in advance. Then when something new or urgent is required, it’s delayed as it’s too hard to either move the meetings that have been booked, or that the calendar is already full.

JP has moved to the concept of fixed and variable time. Fixed time is meetings booked 48hrs in advance and variable time allows the greater flexibility to focus on what’s really important and get things done as opposed to waiting for the slot in the calendar to appear.

I’ve seen this many times myself, your calendar is full and someone calls and ask to schedule some time to work on something urgently. The glance through the calendar fails to find a suitable slot and the urgent item is put off till next week.

The challenge then is how to resolve this agility issue within large corporations.

GTD

I’ve been working my way this week through the process of a full implementaion of the GTD methodology and all seems to be going OK. I previously had implemented a partial system, ie. I had a full next action list and projects list but my filing system was shot. So I spent about 7 hours yesterday sorting though all my stuff and I’m now all processed.

I’m really surprised how much extra time I’ve found as a result of the excercise. I think the most powerful part of the system is the "if it’s less than 2 mins just do it". That’s simple but incredibly powerfull, a simple adjustment to, "if it takes less than 10 mins just do it", means that you can crank trough a lot more stuff with only a small change.

Technorati Tags: GTD

inbox after a vacation

Having just come back from a four day trip to southern spain (28 degress…hmm) I know what this post is getting at, how to clean out your red inbox.

My big tip here is to start with the most recent emails and work backwards. That way you can deal with the latest version of a hideous chain email and then just detail all the earlier versions. Secondly it stops you responding to something that may have already been resolved. There’s nothing worse than banging out an email and then reading one a bit more recent that says exactly what you said.

Technorati Tags: GTD,, Email

Email overload

Two reasons for this post. One, an awful lot of people complained about the volume of emails we receive these days.

And secondly to test Technorati tags 🙂

Technorati Tags: GTD

Organise business cards with flickr

what a great idea, take a pic of them and upload to flickr available anywhere..cool.

Presentations

I’ve got two presentations to give over the next three days to the European network teams. So I’m busy writing the material today and reading the tips of giving great presentations such as this and this.

My own tips are, don’t rush through the presentation, take your time. Don’t put all the information into the slides, rather use the slides to back up the information you are giving. And the last tip which makes all the difference, enjoy it put some enthusiasm into it.

Notes GTD Tool

I just made a suggestion to Brett for his Notes GTD tool. I’ve asked Brett to include a task time option so you can assign a time indicator to an action. So when you’ve got 5 mins between two conf calls you can view all tasks that have a task time of 5 mins and get one done.

Procrastination hack: “(10+2)*5”

Following on the idea of the procrastination dash and Jeff’s progressive dash,
I’ve been experimenting with a squirelly new system to pound through my
procrastinated to-do list. Brace yourself, because it is a bit more byzantine than is Merlin 2005’s newly stripped-down habit. It’s called (10+2)*5, and today it will save your ass.

 

Who it’s for

• procrastinators
• the easily distracted
• compulsive web-surfers
• people with a long list of very short tasks (a/k/a “mosquitos”) 
• people having trouble chipping away at very large tasks

[via 43 Folders]

I read this and thought it could realy help. I fall into the not easily distracted category but the allways distracted category. Then maybe the answer is to turn off the Sametime client, Google Talk,  MSN, Lotus Notes, the Mobile and set the desk phone to voice mail and the IP phone to voice mail too and I might get some work done.

Moleskine

My first Moleskine notebook arrived yesterday morning. It’s a peice of art and almost too good to spoil by writing in it.