Simon G's Blog

A colleague was noting that he was wanting a better approach to manage his email so I thought I should document what I have been doing for several years now and has been (mostly) working for me. The general concept is that I aim to have nothing in my Inbox at the end of each day.  The approach I have been using builds on top of Getting Things Done (GTD) , Inbox Zero and the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritise it. Ideally as soon as an email arrives and I get around to looking at, I move it to an appropriate folder to action later, respond straight away, file it away in my archive folders or delete it. In reality I often end up going through what is still lingering in my Inbox at the end of the day and do this.  I have some key folders setup: 1. Action - Urgent and Important 2. Action - Urgent but not Important  3. Action - Not Urgent but Important 4. Action - Not Urgent and Not Important Casual Reading  These are the key folders I use for determining the priority of ac...

I found “Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ” by Daniel Goleman to be quite an academic (and at times scientific) view of emotion that includes some good story-telling. It started very dry but I found it got more engaging about 60 pages in. I found the book to be more focussed on describing emotional intelligence as opposed to providing much guidance about how to improve your emotional intelligence. Despite this, I did however find that it contained a wealth of interesting information. My key takeaways were: We have two minds (rational and emotional) that typically operate in tight harmony. Anger builds upon anger; the emotional brain heats up. Distraction is a highly powerful mood-altering device. This is due to the fact that it is hard to stay angry when you’re having a pleasant time. Thoughts are associated in the mind not just by content, but by mood. People have what amounts to a bad-mood thoughts that come to mind more readily when they are down. While...

A simple approach I have found works well when thrown something to look at and unsure of where to start is to focus on what you are trying to achieve and working back from that. I first had this approach shown to me using post-it notes (aka sticky notes) and have used this approach (albeit usually with Visio) many times. The steps to follow are very simple: Write down on a post-it note what the ultimate outcome is. Write down on separate post-it notes for each activity or output required what needs to occur before you can get to the ultimate outcome, and stick this to the left of (1). For each task that is a predecessor of (2), write it down and stick it the left and repeat until you are back far enough that you have a plan of attack. The beauty of post-it notes is that you can’t write much on them, so write just enough in simple terms so that you know what is required (which may be outputs, tasks, workshops or anything else of value). It is also easy to add missing...

Yet another excellent day of thought provoking presentations.  Big thanks to the conference organisers, helpers and presenters for such an excellent event. For my notes from yesterday check out “ WebStock 2011 - Conference day one ”.  The collaborative note taking effort was also in action again today at http://webstock.waveadept.com/ . Marco Arment @marcoarment Do your own thing Co-founder of Tumblr, Founder of Instapaper It’s never too late to edit for the good of your product What to build o    You don’t need to cater to geeks §   We’re not loyal and will jump to new products §   We’re unnecessary as an audience; we’re very small o    Be useful to non-geeks You don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) rely on another service o    Don’t give your power away. §   E.g. using Facebook for login o    You need them for everything and they use you for nothing o    No service is universal o    You ca...

Photo credit: Jane Gianoutsos A contractor recently gave me some simple pearls of wisdom that are relevant beyond a contracting role and can apply to working on any project: Have 2-3 wins each week. Don't overstay your welcome. Deliver what you say you are going to deliver. Manage your stakeholders. I like the simplicity of these and the focus they drive.

Yesterday I attended my first barcamp / unconference; Barcamp Auckland 2 . Ludwig and his team did a superb job arranging this event. It was well organised and there were lots of great sessions that stimulated lots of thought provoking discussions. A key aspect of barcamps is participation and it is not about 1 person presenting, but more about having discussions and debates. The agenda is created on the day with people putting topics up on the board they are keen to talk about and facilitate and it just flows from there. For further information about barcamps / unconferences, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp I attended a variety of different sessions which covered topics such as IE8, OpenId, Social Graph API, Privacy, Productivity, Mobile, Predictive Markets, ... I used Twitter as my journal for the day, and my slightly edited synopsis of each session is: Tech Productivity Music can help to focus but can also distract; familiar...