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.

XOBNI

If you are user of MS Outlook, that's too bad.  We have standardized on it within our corporation, as many, many others have done.  Selling our souls to the devil incarnate in Redmond.  Oh well.

Anyway, if you are a user of Outlook and you deal with a lot of emails and  need to find emails, attachments, connections between people and organize around all those things then XOBNI (inbox backwards) is for you.

XOBNI lets you look at your email organized around people, not information.  Use it to see a threaded version of your conversations.  In that thread, you can also see who else participated.

Try it.

MySocial 24X7

I had been using Twhirl and AlertThingy for doing all my Twitter and FriendFeed maintenance  but found that it wasn't convenient for me and there wasn't a lot of extra value in running them on the desktop.  I was able to get all of them running on both my Vista and Ubuntu boxes successfully.  AIR is a good thing !!?!

Then I found the MySocial addin for Firefox.  I ALWAYS have a browser up anyway.  This addin let me have all of my FF stuff viewable.

It isn't perfect by any grade.  It won't remember my FF key between browser starts.  Each time I restart the browser I need to reenter the account and key.  The "remember me" box is visible but not active.  I can't check it.

It also doesn't automatically refresh on some timely schedule.

I am just now getting a grip on how best to utilize the feeds coming in through FriendFeed.  Most of the key players who I use to keep up with technology are publishing via Twitter.  The content is on their blogs.  I could certainly subscribe via RSS to them but watching their twitter streaming is painless.  Now with FF I also have a way to comment via the FF and start another channel of discussion.

Spring hath Sprung

Dave Ploch - 2Wheeltech