Tag: organization

My lists and systems

Posted on by Liz

As I wrestle with my own tendency to goblin mode I have come up with a few systems that may finally be sticking longer than a month or two. It’s been going for 3 years, in fact!! This system is a combination of day planner, a check list on custom printed post-it notes, Google Calendar(s), and a github project board.

The custom printed post-its are crucial to get me to do the basic human tasks one should do in the morning. Yes it’s a little embarrassing that I need a checklist to tell me to floss and put on deodorant and take my meds. But it’s been incredibly helpful! The checklist is roughly in the order that I actually do things. It has blank space to write extra items. A stack of post-its from Vistaprint is something like 10 bucks, and now that I have refined the list to a consistently useful form, I print more at once.

The day planner is a 12-month spiral bound notebook from Rifle Paper Co, and I’ve been using this type for the last two years. It’s not something I normally care around with me – it lives on my desk or the spot I sit on the couch in the morning. Every day gets a new post-it checklist.

So first thing in the morning I can look at my planner, start a new daily post-it checklist, transfer anything I didn’t do from yesterday to today’s post-it, and start checking and syncing things i need to do written on the planner to the stuff that’s in my google calendar.

That already sounds overly complicated but it works ok!

I have at least 3 google calendars I have to make sure are all synced. The 2 contract work ones are hooked into my main (personal) one. But I have to make sure all that stuff is represented in the weekly planner.

The next step is to look at the giant project board. Anything that I think needs to be done I slam into a new github issue and put it into a column like today, tomorrow, next up, backlog. There is also a column for repeating and in progress. Issues have tags, so I can filter on different contracting jobs or look at only creative or domestic tasks.

This board is hard to keep in check. Every day I need to make sure that I clear “today” to a reasonable amount of tasks, and that “tomorrow” has not filled up with 30 things.

It is SO MUCH better though than having 100 tabs open plus a giant email inbox full of things I need to pay attention to.

I have a time tracker, Tmetric, hooked up to the github project board. So, when I sit down to work on a contract job I hit “start” on it and when I switch tasks I hit stop. In practice, I have to correct this tracker a couple of times a day when I forget to manage it. But it helps me track my hours and also to see interesting facts like, Oh, hmm, I spend like 2 hours a day doing domestic chores.

I am never going to do all the things I think of doing.

So, re-prioritizing every few days or at LEAST every week is incredibly important.

It isn’t perfect but it’s helping me a lot!

It also sounds like a lot of overhead, but it is normally 15 minutes to an hour a day, spread out over the entire day, and it’s INCREDIBILY WORTH IT. Because I am getting more shit done and it is more often (alas not always) the correct shit to not fail/disappoint other people or myself.

Elements of this system:

– Routine stuff checklist
– Physical object planner
– Daily sync of checklist, planner, calendar, and project board
– Time tracker on the github board, mainly for consulting work
– Frequent (at least weekly, ideally, daily) comb through of project board to re-prioritize, check of what’s stuck in “in progress”, etc.
– Daily translation of things in inbox to project board tasks
– Sunday evening calendar/planner sync is critical for starting my work week right

It does strike me this is the sort of system everyone was trying to drum into me during my entire junior high/high school existence, but that I absolutely did not master and that I experienced only as horrible torture. Like, I think I spent much of middle school with a weird little planner book that I was forced to get every teacher to initial at the end of every period, and then my parents had to sign it too every night because I would forget stuff. Did i have my book? no. did i have the worksheet? no. did i have the permission slip or wahtever the fuck? no. did i have my 3 week progress report or 6 week report card signed off on by a parent and returned for a grade? No, i forgot it, and fuck you all very much for the useless “study skills” class and endless school psychologists and unhelpful underachieving gifted child label/damage.

Oh, well!!!!! Apparently in my 50s I have finally learned.

drawing of an owl with paper and pen that says make a list

Twiddling my email, calendar, irc, and phone notification settings

Posted on by Liz

Calendar and email notifications may sound very boring but they has engrossed me for at least an hour.

For the first time in life I have a work laptop and a personal laptop. For the last 10+ years I’ve come into a job with an existing laptop which I use seamlessly for work and personal stuff. So far, I like having less “personal” things on my work laptop. It is especially nice not to have the distraction of personal email and non-work related mailing lists. It also feels amazingly luxurious to set aside the work laptop at the end of the day.

I have Zimbra for work email, but prefer to read my email in Thunderbird on my work laptop. Zimbra calendar has my work meetings and Google Calendar has the general schedule for my life. This morning I realized Zimbra was nagging me about missing a meeting. I need to know beforehand in some way that isn’t inside a browser tab!

Instead, I’d like my phone to make a special alert noise for meetings 10 minutes beforehand so I know to open up Skype or Vidyo (what Mozilla generally uses for meetings).

BEEP cover

The last bit of information in this scenario: I didn’t want to install some special Zimbra app on my phone.

Here’s what I did:

1. Set up Zimbra to SMS me at (my 10-digit phone number@tmomail.net) before meetings.

In Zimbra, go to Settings, calendar, set up phone number for notifications.
In each meeting there is a checkbox for email notification. This works for recurring meetings as well.

2. Set up my phone so that gmail notifications only make a noise for priority inbox mail. (I realized that my phone makes a noise every time it syncs email. I normally ignore that noise. )

Open Gmail on the phone, Menu>More>Settings>click the email account>Labels to Notify>Inbox ***>Ringtones (set to silent)

*** Tweak the settings for the Priority Inbox too.

4. Go to gmail.com and set up whatever should go into “priority inbox” i.e. filtered to “important”

google calendar already has its own notifications on android phone if you have its app installed. If not you can set up a forwarding address and make the calendar email to SMS you.

5. make sure incoming SMS messages have a different noise than priority emails
Go to messages, menu, then settings, Select ringtone.

It took a little thought to figure out what to use to get the simple result I wanted. And while most of it happens in web services and phone settings, some of it was in my training myself in a different behavior (paying attention to a particular noise on my phone.)

A final note: Long ago I set up voicemail from my phone to Google Voice. I hate listening to voicemail. It takes a long time. Text is so much nicer, and it helps that I read very quickly. All voicemail interfaces suck. The last time I used one, it had a default menu message that took about 15 years to go through that played after every single voicemail. This resulted in my *never* listening to my messages. (Fortunately I have not had a work phone for years; just email.)

People sometimes leave long messages, but the gist of them is just “call me back”. Google Voice is lovely for this as it sends me an email transcript of the voicemail. The transcripts are often hilarious garbled but it’s enough to get the idea of who’s calling, what their number is, and what they want. If I want to hear them, I can press “play”. Their messages are also nicely archived for me in Gmail. Hurrah!