Category Archives: Lifehacks

Lifehacks

Project Management, Priorities, and Office Hours

Recently, a friend emailed me to ask about GTD. He was tasked with a presentation on project management, and had heard of GTD from my writings and from others. I had good and bad news for him.

The good news is that GTD is an excellent system for keeping your tasks organized. The bad news is that it doesn’t do much else. Sure, the GTD books talks about these different altitudes, about taking different views of your goals, projects, hopes, and dreams, but it doesn’t really offer much insight into what you’re supposed to do at those ‘altitudes’.

On top of this, I’ve had some problems recently with becoming sidetracked. I’ve been getting a lot of questions from people in lab lately, I have some exciting side-projects that I’ve been coaxing along, and I’ve not been hacking away at my most important projects with the necessary zeal to really move them forward. Serendipitously, Readeroo recently sent me to an old bookmark on Slashdot — an excerpted chapter from the acclaimed The Art of Project Management. I can see why they sent the chapter excerpt out — it’s Project Management gold in and of itself.

Here are the points that really grabbed me:

  • Prioritized lists at the goal, ‘feature’ (software-oriented, yes), and task level are the ultimate arbiters of what to do next
  • There are really only two priority levels — necessary (or 1) and everything else (2 through infinity or whatever). Priority 1 must be done. The rest is fluff after priority 1 items are accomplished.
  • Rigorous separation of the prioritized lists into priority 1 and everything else, both at the outset of a project and during any reviews and revamping, is essential.

Between managing the cluster, helping lab members with things, and getting caught up in my own little side-projects, I have not been doing these things. Priority 1 items have been submerged below a sea of other things. Yesterday, inspired by that excerpt, I re-focused. I refined my project lists and drew the all-important dividing line between priority 1 and everything else.

In order to help stick to these priorities, I’m enacting “office hours”. I’ve found myself doing this lately anyway, and it’s been working well. I’m declaring before-lunch time my time. If someone comes to me with an issue (other than “there’s a fire in the server room”) before lunch, my reply is now, “I’ll talk to you about it after lunch.” Since I’m a morning person, and most people in my lab are not, this works pretty smoothly. Most people aren’t here in the morning anyway. This gives me a good 4-5 hours of priority-1 time, without neglecting my “team” duties. Perhaps if I do this long enough, people will naturally come to me after noon all of the time.

As a last side note on The Art of Project Management, it unfortunately does not seem to be offered on Amazon directly from them anymore. I have no idea why. Luckily the Hopkins library has it, so I’ll be checking it out soon.

Maintaining My Posting Rate

I had one major New-Year’s resolution (though I had resolved it before then): post to my blog on average once per day. This sounds simple, but I don’t just want one post on each day. I’m happy to let my posting muse cycle between wordlessness and logorrhea. Therefore, if I post three things one day, I’m off scot free for the next two days. In practice, this gets pretty hard to keep track of. I’ve already started to find it difficult 23 days into the year.

However, I was able to remedy this with a little PHP and MySQL code. WordPress (this blogging software) runs on those technologies, and so it was trivial for me to tap into the database and produce this page. It does something very simple. It goes from the beginning of the year to the present day, tallying posts along the way, and dividing by the number of days in the year that have passed. This gives me a total post count and a ratio of posts to days. As you can see if you look at that page, I have been coasting for a little while, but was getting dangerously close to “1”. This post should remedy that, which is kind of cheating, but I’m willing to accept it.

Probably this could be dressed up into a widget or plugin or something, and anyone is welcome to use it to do that, but I have neither the time nor sufficient interest to learn how.
Here’s the PHP code, if you’re interested: postcountphp.gz (1 kB)

ADDENDUM: Updated 2008-01-26 to only count published posts.

Label Your Power Bricks

Once upon a time, AC/DC adapters were special — they were made for expensive devices and were clearly labeled as belonging to those devices. No more. Now, every device comes with an adapter, most of them are nothing special, and the adapters are hardly labeled at all. Furthermore, they have mysterious round plugs that (unless you have calipers handy), you probably can’t tell apart. You could go around trying to match voltages and currents, or you could just label the damn things when you get them.

If you’re part of the GTD cult, you should already have a labeler. Just print out short, simple labels and stick them on!

Managing Your Reading List With Readeroo and Firefox

“I’ll bookmark this to read later.”

Sound familiar? Do you ever actually read it? If you’re like me, probably not. Or, maybe once every two years, at which time you’ve forgotten why you wanted to read half of the things you’ve bookmarked and just delete most of them. Maybe you even put things in Del.icio.us or a similar bookmark manager with a handy “toread” tag, but still never go visit that tag.

Readeroo takes care of all of that. It’s a wonderfully simple plug-in for Firefox that does three things:

  1. Saves pages that you want to read to a specific Del.icio.us tag (default: toread — happened to already be my own to-read tag!)

  2. Brings up your to-read pages either randomly, oldest first, or newest first (FIFO or LIFO for the geeks)

  3. Marks pages read (with an arbitrary tag) or un-bookmarks them after reading

After configuration, all of this is done through two small buttons in your Firefox toolbar. Things like this are why, despite the awful, awful memory leaks, I still can use no browser besides Firefox.

Thanks to Renaissance Man and his source, Pewari for pointing this out.

Using your phone as an e-Book reader

There has been a lot of buzz lately about the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader — new electronic-paper-based e-book readers that have a variety of features and advantages. Great. However, they’re both expensive. More annoyingly in my mind, they are also an additional device to lug around and keep charged. They will let you read all kinds of the latest and greatest stuff, I must admit.

However, what if you already had a good device for reading e-books? What if you wanted to read some classics or books released under Creative Commons licenses on it? Then you would be in luck!

A couple of months ago, Molly sent me a link to a new book released under a Creative Commons license, called Postsingular. A link from the book’s page led me to Books In My Phone. This site takes Creative Commons books and those out of copyright, loads them into a simple and effective e-Book reader that runs on J2ME, and makes it possible to download them directly on to your phone. I have so far read Postsingular, Walden, and part of Moby Dick on my phone, and am happy to report that it was a pleasant and engaging experience.

The reader is fairly well written, except for one thing. If you hit the back key when you have just opened the book, it loses your place and goes back to the beginning. This is not so awful as it sounds, for it is easy to skip from chapter to chapter and from page to page. Aside from that glitch, it’s easy to change the font size, page up and down, and (as mentioned) skip around the book. The reader is entirely self-contained (J2ME aside), and (with a few quirks) remembers your place when you exit!. This last item is overlooked in many readers and prevented me in the past from using my Treo devices to read e-Books.

Therefore, if you enjoy reading while waiting, commuting, or even in a bed or a chair, I recommend that you try reading something from Books In My Phone. If you like sci-fi, Postsingular is not a bad place to start.

Also, let me know if you find any books there that you’d like to recommend!