This post is a response to a friends blog post on the subject of time management.

I've found the following items to be helpful aids in maintaining focus and elevating productivity. Before diving into the meat of this post, there is one more thing I wanted to mention. My approach is heavily influenced by David Allen's Getting Things Done Framework (GTD for short). For more information on GTD please check out David Allen's blockbuster book titled Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

1) Own Your Destiny
Be decisive and conservative when determining how to spend your day. Every day presents the same economic challenge: time is a limited resource that must be actively managed or it risks being squandered. To be more specific, if you receive an invitation to a meeting where the topic is not on your critical path, you should probably think twice before attending. Declining is a perfectly acceptable response to the invite. If you want to know the outcome, ask for the meeting minutes once it concludes. Also, you should never get into the habit of putting your goals on hold for the good of someone else's. It will likely be detrimental to your status within the company.

2) High Priority Means High Priority
Make sure you work on the highest priority, highest return items first. Only in very specific cases should you stray from this pattern (industry compliance comes to mind as an example of when it's okay). Marginalizing your time on high priority items so you can exceed expectations on lower priority items will probably lead to your exceeding expectations in a different role or company.

3) Don't Do What You Shouldn't
Are you doing something you should not be doing? I don't mean criminal or unethical, I mean something that you should delegate. If so, you could be robbing valuable experience from your team, which could affect their advancement as well as your own. Finally, if you are using your authority only to delegate mundane tasks that you do not want to do, go ahead and assign yourself an F as a leader. You've earned it!

4) Be Purposeful
Don't end up somewhere. Significant accomplishments resemble marathons not sprints (See my post on The Dip if you would like to delve deeper into this topic). Just like a marathon, you will need to subdivide your end goal into measurable chunks or milestones. Without measurability, you risk getting off track and wasting valuable time and effort. So planning is good, right? It is, but if you are planning out the next 5 years before executing on anything, you might be wasting time also. I'd suggest only performing lower level planning for the next milestone or two. The time it takes to produce detailed long term plans will be squandered if something blindsides your plan at 4pm on some idle Tuesday(Trivia Challenge: Name the song that contains these lyrics?). At each milestone you can always reevaluate your position and correct course if needed.

5) Sharpen Your Tools
Figure out how to process email proficiently in an expedited manner! If you are a slave to Microsoft Outlook, your mind will not be engaged in the next big thing. Tip: If you send less email, you will receive less email. Last time I checked the telephone still works!! If you find yourself frequently sending email for CYA purposes, you might be in the wrong position and/or company.

6) Use The Right Tool For The Job
Your brain, yes yours and mine to, stinks at keeping track of things. On the flip side, your brain is really good more proficient at critical thinking. A supporting example might be this. Have you ever been thinking about a wildly important topic and in from left field comes an idea about picking up milk on the way home(feel free to swap in any arbitrary honeydoo item). If you answered yes, do you know why this happens? It is because you don't have a trusted place to keep track of it. Subconsciously you are worried that you will forget to pick up milk so it will continually interrupt you at the most inopportune time. You could avoid this debilitating context switching by having a trusted storage place outside your brain. Don't steal cycles from higher priority threads any longer. Log these items on your ToDo list, palm pilot, or at an online site like RememberTheMilk.com where it can be text messaged to you at the right time. If you get good at working in this manner , start tagging each item with contextual information so you can squeeze out extra productivity during brief periods of idle time. More details on this can be found in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

7) Organization
Get organized. If your desk is a wreck you will be less efficient. Clear the nonessential items, file what you will need later, and discard what you don't need... Immediately! Every second you spend looking at something you don't need is a wasted second. Looking at that same thing a second time is downright foolish. At first you won't prune enough. With practice you will perfect this skill.

After several years of sporadic work, my Bourre game has been released to open source hosted at Google Code. As it stands it is an engine only at this point. There is no user interface at this point and only a driver program to run it. I have some short term goals listed on the summary page. If anyone is interested in participating from UI standpoint, please step forward. Pie in the sky longer term goals including porting it from Java to Objective C/Cocoa and making an iPhone app. Considering it took me 2-3 years to get this far with the java version, I suspect we will be on iPhone revision 12 by the time I get around to doing anything like this.

For more information on the game, please see the wikipedia page.

Like many of you, I have always wanted to learn how to play a musical instrument.  For me, it has always been the guitar that piqued my interest.  I have no desire to play in front of millions of fans or tour the country, my interest is much more humble.  I want to learn how to read music, understand the theory behind the music, and gain the ability to play that music.  Now fast forward to reality earlier this year. 

My wonderful wife came home from work one evening with a Godin Freeway Classic Electric Guitar and a Roland 20X Cube that she purchased around the corner from Fazio's Frets and Friends.  Needless to say, I was very, very excited.  The unfortunate thing was that I couldn't do anything with it.  I knew nothing about how to hold the instrument, tune it, or play it.  After reading many reviews around the net, I decided to purchase a 20 DVD set called Learn and Master Guitar by Steve Krenz.  The quality of this set is amazing.  The instructional dvds makes you feel like you are one on one with Steve for an in person lesson.  The part I liked most about this set is that it wasn't put together with the goal of allowing you to play your favorite song.  It is a comprehensive and balanced overview of music theory and hands on guitar instruction.  I chose to go this route instead of face to face lessons due to scheduling.  While I'm sure there are situations when I would save time by having someone provide immediate feedback, overall I feel like I'll progress more quickly being able to practice at my own pace and at times that are convenient to my crazy schedule.  Only time will tell if this is accurate or not. 

Now for an area where lots of opportunity exists.  After cramming over the next several weeks, I made it through lesson 1, 2, and into 3.  My fingers were sore, my head was filled with all the new information, but I hit a spot where I couldn't easily get through and I quit.  I didn't make a decision to quit, it just kind of happened by putting practicing off and doing other things.  I've had visions of picking it back up, but have failed to do so in the last 4 months or so.  I've obviously hit The Dip that I have posted about previously.  Starting this winter, I will be picking back up and planning out a more reasonable schedule to make it through the dip.  I'll give myself two weeks for each of the first two chapters and then reevaluate each chapter independently after that.  Basically i'll take a SCRUM like approach where I iterate through each chapter and chart the details at the end as a retrospective.  I'll keep doing what is working and correct course along the way for things that are not.  This approach should help with motivation and keeping a journal of my progress.  

Just finished watching the last lecture by Randy Pausch titled Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.  Randy was an inspiring lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University.  In addition to teaching Computer Science curriculum, he is also widely known for leading the team of researchers that created Alice, a revolutionary way to teach computer programming.  This lecture is not about computer science, virtual reality, or any other high tech topics.  It's about things that matter to every one of us.  If you have 70 minutes, it's well worth watching.  Given the impact it had on me in only 70 minutes, I can only imagine the impact he has had on his students.  

So this blog has been basically dead for a couple years.  I was average at adding new content when I wore the hat of a software developer.  I used it as a place to collect my thoughts and archive interesting tidbits about what I was doing for future reference(by me or others via google).  If you plug in "Spring Hibernate" without quotes into google you will still find my write ups ranking in a page or two.  Since then, I've moved into managing the folks that do the things I used to write about.  Part of me thinks this is a standard path for many but I see other "coders", as managers like to call them, that I have great respect for still plugging away in their IDE of choice.  From time to time, I sit back and wonder if the path I've taken is the right one.  Their are many perks to each path but how do you know which one is right?  Unfortunately I don't think this kind of decision is black and white.  I'm pretty sure that I fall into a pseudo gray gradient somewhere between light and darkness.  Wow, that's pretty deep for me.  I'll assume that came from being on PTO, sitting in front the 80's music channel(And we danced by The Hooters is currently playing), and just having downed my 5th cup a joe since 8am.  Enough with this unruly rambling, I'll move on to the topic I wanted to write about today.  I may be gone for another two years after this post :)

What added value do you all get from the cornucopia of social networking avenues?  A week or two ago I joined facebook and twitter.  I don't have many buds yet, but I find both very interesting.  The problem is that I don't know why.  I've been a linkedin person for several years collecting acquaintances. I've added every tom, dick, and harry that I've worked with over the years.  I've also added friends of friends, user group people that I recognize, and many others that I probably wouldn't even talk to if I saw them at the mall.  This collection seems to have as much intrinsic value as the rounded edged baseball cards from years past.  Maybe they solve a problem I have stumbled on to yet, maybe they are just a way for people to feel better about themselves since they have 499 friends.  I don't really know but it's quite interesting to me. Hit me with your best shot(it just started playing) in the comments of this entry. I'd love to hear why I'm wrong. 

Here is my one(or 2 or 3) liner on each app.

LinkedIn - A recruiters dream.  Maybe it's useful if you are looking for a job.
Facebook - Myspace for adults.  A more professional place to promote your electronic personality. 
Twitter - Addicting way to keep tabs on what interesting people around you are up to.  Not sure I'll continue updating but I'm loving the iPhone app. 

Gotta run, Air Supply just came on and the channel must be turned NOW!!!!!

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