10:37 am, 28 Jan 05
regarding managing your time
Robin remarked:
I also have a cronjob generate an HTML version of it that I publish to my intranet website, but I’m not sure that’s actually useful. (But if you do end up using this I’d be happy to send you the code.)
VimOutliner helps by coloring different indentation levels differently and doing outliner-style folding. It also adds some keystrokes. One is simply “append current date to this element”, which I add on bullets like “get so-and-so to do [x]”-style of projects as a reminder to myself to nag them if enough days elapse. Another is “add checkbox” along with “check off checkbox”, which also checks off parent tasks whenever all of the subtasks are complete.
It’s really easy for me to get distracted (by, say, posting to LiveJournal!) so it’s good for me to have a simple list: what do I do now? Just take the top unchecked item off the list and do that.
(PS: I found this after being inspired by
mattm doing a similar thing in emacs.)
I just started keeping logs of what I did every day. I keep it in a personal cvs repository, and whenever The Boss asks, “What have you been up to lately?” or anything of the sort, I whip it out and show it to him. I take printouts to meetings. Pretty soon after I started, other people saw that it really helped, and a few other people started doing it.I have found success along similar lines with VimOutliner. I tend to context-switch rapidly as various things get blocked on various other things, whether it be as simple as a long-running computation or more social problems like needing to get a consensus during an upcoming meeting, so I have top-level bullets that are each of my projects, sorted by priority. Beneath each of these I have a list of what needs to be done to move them forward.
I also have a cronjob generate an HTML version of it that I publish to my intranet website, but I’m not sure that’s actually useful. (But if you do end up using this I’d be happy to send you the code.)
VimOutliner helps by coloring different indentation levels differently and doing outliner-style folding. It also adds some keystrokes. One is simply “append current date to this element”, which I add on bullets like “get so-and-so to do [x]”-style of projects as a reminder to myself to nag them if enough days elapse. Another is “add checkbox” along with “check off checkbox”, which also checks off parent tasks whenever all of the subtasks are complete.
It’s really easy for me to get distracted (by, say, posting to LiveJournal!) so it’s good for me to have a simple list: what do I do now? Just take the top unchecked item off the list and do that.
(PS: I found this after being inspired by
mattm doing a similar thing in emacs.)
In general, though, people tend to be responsible for themselves: I personally just spend an extra [x] hours at work to make up for the [x] hours I "goof off", but there's nobody telling me I ought to do that.
The last few days I've been trying to use the stickies widget in Tiger's "Dashboard" for this. It's handy because I just push F12 and the dashboard drops down over the screen; then I type a note in the sticky and push F12 again and I'm back to what I was doing.
Also, I really like the multi-page notebook metaphor of NoteTaker.
Not surprisingly, I use (a local install) of webnote at work.
Of course, I'm in a support position, so other people send me tickets as well. It wouldn't make sense to install RT3 just for yourself; it's way too big. I still keep a separate queue for my own projects, as opposed to general support requests, so when I have nothing to do I just pick one from the list.
That VimOutliner thing looks rad for document writing, though. I've wanted an outliner utility for *nix for quite a while (it's the one feature I really love about MS Word). AbiWord and OpenOffice don't have one, or didn't last I checked (which was admittedly about a year ago). I write most of my documentation in outline form before flushing it out, and actually keep a copy of the outline at the beginning, rfc-style.
Thanks.