Tungle and calendar coordination

Setting up meetings with people within and outside your own organization has always been a pain.  Trying to find a common time usually involves a flurry of emails moving around the group and eventually finding that there is NO date and time where EVERYBODY can attend. That takes time.

Personally I don't believe there is a great solution for this problem since it almost requires everyone to be on the same system, on line at the same time and ready to respond.  Right, like that's going to happen often.

Recently I found   and think this has potential.  Jim Courtney's Skype Journal post gave a great explanation of the Outlook add-in product and its value. The great thing about this product is that it is agnostic to calendar systems though the organizer must currently be using Outlook.

The process is to share a set of open times, people select their preferences and finally once everyone enters their preferences, the "best" time is selected.

Try it, you'll like it.

Time, Task, Life Management Pt 2

As it works out there are really only a couple ways of looking at this and I believe David Allen (Getting Things Done) has pretty well summed up what you need to do.

1. Collect
2. Process
3. Organize
4. Review
5. DO

I'll next look at some tools that can be used for doing all this stuff.

RememberTheMilk has a Getting Started site that gives a great overview of the features.  I use this for maintaining a todo list for everything that is associated with my race registration business and personal activities.  I use GMail as my  personal email service.  There is a great add-in for FireFox and GMail that adds RTM as a side window.  This is an add-on from RTM and works well.

RTM has an INBOX to collect all your tasks.  You can put items into the inbox using a number of methods. Entering a task into a form on the website is one way.  The entry gives you options to enter due dates, repeating options, tags, location (more on this), url.  It also shows you information on postponed, notes and sharing options.

One of the novel features is the geotagging of your tasks.  Giving a task a location (even to tie it to a GoogleMap location) gives you yet another way to coordinate your work and plan your work.

Tagging of tasks allows you to tie a task to multiple projects or multiple categories.  RTM gives you a way to build queries and set a query up as a tab within your RTM environment.  Every time I see a new piece of software that is not currently allowing open beta, I enter a task to check on an invitation.  I categorize the software into software and type.  I set a task for two weeks out and check on my invite when that comes up if I don't ge the invite before that.  I then set a task for testing the software and writing a blog entry.  I have a query for software that shows all the open items I have out there.  That query is a tab that I can open at any time to see what is open.

Any tab can be subscribed to as an RSS feed.

These tasks can be shared between people.  Someone else can mail a task into your inbox and you can share a task with someone else who is a subscriber to RTM services.  A team of workers could use these features very effectively.

Another very exciting set of options involve linking new services such as Twitter and Jott to RTM.  I'll talk more about those services in another blog entry.  Twitter is a microblogging platform.  It allows you to send up to 140 characters  to either everybody, to your known friends or direct to a private address.  This last one is how you send a new item to RTM.  Jott is very similar except that you do it with your phone by talking an entry.  I use Jott extensively.

My next entry till be about Twitter and Jott and what they can do for you.

Unbuntu 8.04 LTS

Last night I began the automatic process of upgrading my laptop from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon. It was FLAWLESS. No problems what so ever.

In the process I am now running FF 3 beta 5. Still a bunch of addons that don't work but nothing that is critical. I'll report more later.

Focus, focus, focus

Ok, so I have lost a little focus. From this point on, this blog is going to be solely focused on technology and technology related issues. I'll keep all my personal ramblings over at my new personal blog site: http://daveploch.2wheeltech.com

That site will be simple and a place where I will wax eloquently on life, activities and stuff in general.

Dave

A fine dinner with great friends at American Bounty

Dinner Thursday with our friends George and Maggie at American Bounty in Washington mo. It was great. Beef tenderloin with a basalmic reduction. Grilled salmon with a sweet rub. Apple cobbler for dessert. Sitting on the patio in sight of the river. Now this is living

Gateway to Innovation

Dave Ploch - 2Wheeltech
Great conference today with many of the regions IT leadership in attendence. Reconnected to a number of people from my past,

• Mark Showers / CIO Monsanto
• Errol Sandler / Associate Dean, the Sever Institute of Continuing Studies @ Wash U
• Bob Lozano / Chief Stratigist & Founder Appistry

The day was focused on showing the region to be a rich landscape for information technology. The Information Technology Coalition is looking to market the St Louis region as a rich area for IT professionals . With over 50,000 already in the area it becomes a significant part of the economic growth engine for the future.

Check out the conferenc website

Time, Task, Life Management Pt 1

Time, Task, Life Management

My journey to get organized.

There are many, many ways to organize the project and tasks in your life.  Every individual can find a different way to do this and find that one works better than another for THEM.  I know that I have been through several tools to try to organize myself and keep my todo's and projects managed.  A tool can only help organize, it won't get the things done.  That is the most difficult part of the process for me.

My First Try, a paper based system

I realized a bunch of years (for the chronologically gifted, that is a meaningfull number ;-) that I was extremely disorganized.  I had a ton of ideas, experiments, proof of concepts and real projects.  I also had personal tasks to get done (renew car license, pickup milk, buy water softener salt, etc).  I started using a paper system that was mainly a time management and secondarily an information management system.  Each day had a page where you kept your daily notes on anything you needed to do or anything you did.  Each evening you spent time copying information from the daily pages to contextual pages.  These were contacts, projects, and other categories.

I believe the system was called the TMS (time management system).  Clever name.

It took a lot of time to move entries.  The note book was 0n 8 1/2 x 11 pages and too big.  I used this for about a year before I abandoned it.

Did I mention that I believe I am ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).  This adds to my issues around organization.

Second Try, Microsoft Outlook

Our corporation used Exchange and Outlook for email.  This has a elementary task management tool within the client. It gives you a place to collect ALL the items that you need to do. They have a the ability to categorize entries.  These categories can be for prioritization and context.  Similar to tagging this gives you a way to gather all the pieces within a specific context.

Reminders, due dates and other meta-data can be associated with a task.  This is all great and can give you a great place to get it all together.

What I found was the inability to work my corporate, personal and side business tasks together.  Access was a problem as was the dilemma of using corporate resources for doing personal stuff.  The system itself worked ok but I needed something that was going to be network based.  Heck even then, the internet was becoming an important tool.

Next I'll talk about some of the new tools I've found and used.