thecrumb.com

I like to think of myself as “pretty busy”. I have a full time job that is requiring 45+ hours a week. I am in a partnership with a company that is currently requiring 20+ hours a week (meetings, development, etc). I am in the midst of starting another partnership, which I hope to turn into the full time venture … and I try to log 200+ miles on my bike per week.

And my wife is expecting in less than a month :) I can’t wait for downtime with the family and to simply my project pipelines.

I think you have started to answer your own question. Twitter if it is fun. Don’t twitter if it makes the rest of your life not fun.

When I was younger, I had the notion that work was the main thing in my life. It’s so easy to believe that because we are taught in school to work hard and get the best education you possibly can. Success in the business world is absolutely measurable. It’s measured in dollars. However, life is totally NOT measurable. There are so many factors of which some are relationships, happiness, time with family, vacation time, trips… But they aren’t measurable. I think we allow work to dominate our life so much that by it’s very nature, it overshadows our life.

Ask yourself a few important questions. Most probably will answer yes to most of them. If you are one of them, you have to ask yourself why.

Do you have to own a new car all the time?
Does your new car have to be expensive?
Do you have to buy that huge LCD TV?
Do you really need direct TV with every channel on the planet?
Do you really need blue ray?
Do you really need to be a new XBox 360 game every week/month?
Do you really need to buy the bigger house?
Do you always have to have the best of everything?

These are the things that drive us into the ditch. Saying yes to these things require us to work long hours and ignore the things in life that are more important.

I know it’s a bit of a reach but if you wish to Twitter but you don’t have time for it, maybe the first thing to do is make spaghetti and spend time with the family instead of going out to eat tonight. Eventually, you will find you do indeed have the time to twitter if you so wish to.

;)

p.s. I’m guilty of saying yes to a few of those questions still but I’m working on it.

Right, I get your point. I wasn’t pointing to you in particular on this. It was of course just a general comment that I attempt to live by :)

I guess I was trying to draw a parallel between the two. To me they are interconnected and the most important thing to focus on first. At least for me.

To accomplish this, we both own two used cars, own a house that is smaller than we could have afforded…blah blah blah. Thus my wife and I have enough flexibility so that she only works part-time and I am self employed. It’s not perfect but if I want to read blogs for a hour a day, I can. If I worked full time for an employer, I couldn’t. I’d be pulled in several directions every minute I was at work.

Anyway, here is my short list of things I try to practice.

EMAIL:
Open email in the morning, read, reply, and close. Repeat around noontime and again at the end of the day. NOTE: non-work related emails should wait until after you alloted time for work each day. Answer then at the end of the word day or in the evening when you get home.

PHONE:
Let voicemail pick up if you are working on something at the time. If I expect you to pick up your phone when I call you and you do, that means that you have shown that your own work is not as important as theirs. You immediately hand over your priorities to someone else.

IM:
Avoid IM at all costs if you want to be productive. Companies are deploying IM into the workplace which is great for community building and worker relationships but I believe is another example of two folks standing around a water cooler. It’s just harder to police yourself because you are “sitting at your desk working”.

TWITTER:
No thanks. I see the benefits and they are great but they aren’t related to work efficiency.

CELL PHONE:
Don’t give your number to everyone, especially coworkers if it’s your personal cell phone. This way the phone doesn’t ring for silly, non-important things during the day. If you do get a call, have them leave a message. If it’s not important, don’t call back right away.

UNPLUG:
At the end of the work day, I turn off my computer. Yes…off. If it’s on, I’m more likely to quickly check email several times in the evening or jump online and surf.

SOCIAL SITES:
Not related to simplifying or making work more efficient. I generally stay away.

I realize I run the risk of sounding a bit like a curmudgeon, which really isn’t true, it’s just the few things that I do that help me concentrate on the real work at hand during the work days. Weeknights and weekends are all about me, my wife and my two kids. As a matter of fact my wife and I are headed to Vegas tomorrow for the weekend. Wish us luck!

:)

I tend to dip into email between each “work” task because we use a bug tracking system that notifies us by email when tasks are updated - so I like to stay on top of that.

For my own tasks, I have Mylyn in Eclipse for Trac integration and I rely heavily on EverNote (for capturing basic ideas / information) and 43actions.com (for managing todo lists).

Twitter is always running but I ignore it except for dipping in at lunch or when I’m truly ’stuck’ and need a mental break for a few minutes (I use TweetDeck so I can easily browse / search the last 48 hours of messages).

IM is core to how we work - we’re geographically diverse and IM is faster than email and takes the place of just popping your head over the cube and asking your neighbor a question (since your “neighbor” is in Lafayette or North Carolina or Belgium!). That means Jabber and Skype and we regularly video conference (via Skype or iChat or Adobe Connect - with screen sharing on the latter two).

Cell phone. I never give out my personal number but I do give out my SkypeIn number (which forwards to my cell when I’m away from my desk). I hate the phone but I’m getting more tolerant of it these days since I need to communicate in spoken form more often to handle issues that cannot be dealt with in IM or email (in fact, quite often our IM conversations are “r u available for a call?” followed by a video conference call if available).

Social sites. Only in the evenings / weekends.

Blogs. I treat this like Twitter / Social sites and read / comment when I need a break or in the evenings / weekends.

I should also have mentioned that I use Apple Mail’s Smart Mailboxes to manage email in a way that fits the GTD - Getting Things Done - approach. I don’t use my main Inbox - instead I have a smart mailbox for unread items and a smart mailbox for flagged items from the last week and another for flagged items from longer ago.

I scan unread mail and either:
1) delete it (lots of email is unimportant)
2) file it (if it is useful reference material)
3) convert it to a note or action (by forwarding it to either EverNote or 43actions)
4) flag it for a reply later (if it will take more than two minutes to answer)
5) answer it (if it will take less than two minutes)

This means dipping into email is always a fairly short process - anything that would take time is flagged for dealing with “later”. Once or twice a day I checked the “recently flagged” stuff and will dedicate more time to replies. If stuff slips into the “flagged more than a week ago” mailbox, it mostly wasn’t important enough to warrant any action and can be deleted.

Like Sean, I also follow parts of the Getting Things Done approach: keep inbox clear, use filters to move mail into relevant folders, and create task lists that have specific actionable items associated with the tasks. Tasks also have Contexts associated with them (computer, phone, house, etc.) to easily look for things that can be done at any given moment.

I’ve been using a free program called Thinking Rock that I’ve found very good for helping with the GTD mentality. I even have a CF script that will take the XML of the current Action items in Thinking Rock, convert them into an HTML table (with sortable columns, even), copy it into a folder that EverNote watches for new files, and then FTP the HTML file to my web site for easy reference from anywhere. EverNote syncs my tasks (and other notes) from my PC, Mac, and iPhone instantly. This is really handly.

Work tasks are handled with Mylyn and it’s built-in Context capabilities.

I think Sean and Brian have hit one of the largest nails right on the head: keep that darned Inbox clear, it’s a cesspool of tasks waiting to be forgotten.

I’ve long turned my Inbox into to-do lists, but I’ve recently started using Omnifocus, and I’m hooked. I know there are free alternatives (Thinking Rock, 43actions.com), but Omnifocus gives me an offline desktop client (less temptation to follow a good link), multidimensional ways of viewing tasks (project vs. context), and integration with OS X services like Spotlight.

Besides making sure communication turns into action, I keep social stuff clear of my workspace - I’m too easily distracted by fun things, so I make sure I can’t even see them. I don’t run a Twittr client, making interaction with Twittr an expensive and deliberate task switch. I apply the same approach to other things (reading mailing lists, checking blogs, etc.).

From the development side, I find good tools like Trac or Jira invaluable - anytime I’m doing a project without a ticketing system I feel like I’m just wandering from task to task until I’ll ad-hoc create my own list in Numbers or Omni.

Steve Miller Band - Fly Like An Eagle, right?

Do I win an iPod?