I’ve been meaning to write a post about my organization system for work. I’m not sure why anybody would care, but I’ve mentioned it more than once to Mike and said that I’d write up something about it. It’s based upon Getting Things Done which is apparently all the rage still, and Time Management for System Administrators.
The basic part of GTD is context sensitive TODO lists. I cheat and use software to build my TODO lists, specifically I use Llamagraphics’ LifeBalance. LifeBalance comes in three flavors, Windows, Mac, and PalmOS. I only use the PalmOS version because it’s all I need (currently*). It let’s you input your tasks in a standard tree like fashion (similar to ShadowPlan), but it has a display screen that organizes your tasks by what you should do next (using some fuzzy logic processing to rank what you’ve done recently, how each task important it is.). In GTD your Task list should be filtered by context … if you’re at home you do “Home” tasks, if you’re at a telephone you do “Telephone” tasks. LifeBalance let’s you create “Places” which do exactly this.
Time Management for System Administrators is more about how to accomplish tasks on a daily basis and feel like you’ve actually accomplished something. The piece I was really missing here was a facility for recording what I’ve done. LifeBalance doesn’t do this (yet). To fill in this niche I have found DayzNotes by Natara. LifeBalance can automatically record completed tasks in DayzNotes. While the system isn’t perfect (it would be nice if I could automatically set the Category in DayzNotes or something) it does work well enough for my weekly report to my boss about the things I’ve accomplished this week. Something I’ve thought about doing here to give me something to blog about (but recently it’s been all work).
These are the key bits. The books, the software. The bits that don’t currently work are syndication. I currently haven’t figured out how to stream this data out to the world to subscribe to, and I’ve got no way currently to stream data into my system (like from Jamie’s Palm).
Written on June 1st , 2006 by Chris Prather