Scribblings and Geekery

Urgent but Not Important

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

He could have been talking about the Time Management Matrix when he said this. I'm nearly certain that he wasn't, but his quote is no less applicable. Life happens in and around every single plan you've made. It does not matter how much you plan, something else will happen at some point.

"Life" happens: The phone rings. Email arrives. A knock at the door.

Each is an urgent activity that, while bearing some small level of importance, is not important in the grand scheme of things. It must, however, be attended to NOW. This is life and we must grin and bear it.

There are a few strategies for dealing with an interrupt-driven life, but the most effective one (in my experience) boils down to being as flexible as you can with a set of tasks that are each as short as possible. If all of the things you need to do have a short duration, then each interruption doesn't skew your ability to get work done at any given time. One trick to doing this effectively, about which I'll blog another timE, is the philosophy of GTD, on which David Allen makes a living training folks.

The natural path for a Quadrant III activity is for it to end up in Quadrant I based solely on how its level of importance changes over time, determined by one of a few things:

• External Force (customer, supervisor, etc.)
• Internal Force (You decide it's more important)
• Circumstance

On average, I find that my customers (both internal and external) determine the importance of any given activity. For instance, if I need to create a report about the number of wompums per minute that are completed by a given wompumator, this may seem to me to be of little importance, even if it's needed soon. I'd prioritize it thusly and move on to activities of greater importance (Quadrant I). However, if the customer needs this report to be able to complete other, more important, activities, I may find it sliding down into Quadrant I and getting completed NOW as they call and demand ask that it be completed now. This is what I call external re-prioritization. The remainder of these activities are internally prioritized - I determine that they are important enough to be completed now.

On an average day in a previous work life, I was interrupted about thirty times, each for a need that varied in importance, but was almost always urgent. I spent nearly 80% of my time working in Quadrant 3/1 (a set of activities that aren't that important in the grand scheme, but are VERY important to someone else, so they end up being done now). That type of work moves in the direction of burnout quickly, and realizing that I was digging a shallow grave for my career was the first step to manging what time I have more effectively.

The other option is to work multiple 10+ hour days to stay ahead. Don't do that.

I've started playing around with Chyrp, a new blogging engine. The test site is here. First impressions are positive - it seems to deliver what it advertises, though I'm not having any luck with the video posting feather. I'll toy around some more and post any interesting findings.

Not Urgent, Not Important

According to The Time Management Matrix, activities that are neither urgent nor important fall into Quadrant IV, a position that I refer to as "The Procrastinator's Corner". These are the trivial, unimportant things that you do when you don't want to do anything in Quadrants I through III.

This is solitaire. This is reading the news. This is, unless you get paid for it, blogging.

You know you do it. I do it. Everyone does it. We waste time... if we didn't we'd go nuts! Filling the day with high-priority issues without any relief will lead to certain burnout. The human brain can only take so much stress before it pops, so we play minesweeper.¹

This is ok. The TMM's quadrants can also be lined up like a slide, from IV down to I. An uncompleted activity in Quadrant IV will eventually trickle down to either Quadrant III (if it becomes time-sensitive) or Quadrant II (if it becomes important).

Minesweeper is probably the exception and not the rule, of course. I personally handle Quadrant IV by living by a suggestion I read somewhere (probably Lifehacker):

When you procrastinate, don't do nothing, do something else that you've been putting off.

This is somewhat similar to the concept of "Structured Procrastination", though admittedly I only found out about John Perry's essay when trying to find the site that originally gave me said advice. It's also a good read on the concept.

One disagreement that I have with the traditional matrix is that I put Relationship Building activities (Networking, Inter-Departmental mingling) in Quadrant IV instead of Quadrant II. This is a personal choice that really comes down to a simple rationale: I already have strong relationships with most of the rest of my company (I know the names of just about every single in-office employee since a majority of them have been hired since I started).

For folks that don't have strong inter-departmental working relationships, getting to know your co-workers should definitely be in Quadrant II! For me, getting to know newer employees might fall into Quadrant II, especially since hiring season is going to be ramping up in another month or so!

Since I'm big on lists, on a particularly slow day in early December, I "procrastinated by thinking about procrastination" - I made a list of several arguably low-effort tasks that can be accomplished when I have free spots of time or need to hop out of Quadrant I and II for a few contiguous minutes. A few examples from this list:

• Tidying up the office
• Processing a list of general task collection triggers (more on this another day)
• Networking (Rocking the LinkedIn, Facebook, Email, etc.)
• Casual, Job-Related Reading

For the most part, anyone who needs to make a list of such things probably does not have to try to make time for them since inevitably they will want to leave Quadrants I and II often enough that these things will get done anyway.

Personally however, I find that having a list of things I could do if I need a break is very helpful. It keeps me from actually playing minesweeper.

My web host, which has a really interesting hosting model, has been beta-testing PHP5 for some time now. I don't have as much time to play with it as I'd like, so I opted to stay out of the beta for now.

However, testing is complete, and PHP 5 (v5.2) support is now out of beta and is the default for all new sites. I just set up a new site not knowing this and everything in my PHP app is functioning as I'd expect. Groovy!

They're also offering a CGI-based version which runs with safe_mode and open_basedir eacg turned OFF, which is huge for some apps like Gallery, which used to be my web-based photo app of choice.

So, I'll just flip the switch and see what happens. Why not, right?

I ran across this simple binder clip hack over at LifeHacker, submitted by one of their readers. I'm humbled by the simplicity and have duplicated these efforts. This is also quite useful for keeping the spare folders sequestered in the back of a cabinet.

Several years ago I was required to take a two-week seminar on Steven Covey's 7 Habits for Highly Effective People. I've forgotten almost all of it, which is what happens when you don't put something into practice and stick with it. Nonetheless, there were a few key points that come back to haunt me now and again.

My company gives managers quarterly training on management technique, skills and habits. Covey would call this "Sharpening the Saw", which is Habit 7. I find these sessions to be incredibly helpful and am very thankful that we spend so much time working to improve ourselves. In one particular session in mid-2006 we spent half of the day discussing time management and Covey's groovy Time Management Matrix. The matrix breaks down all of the responsibilities and tasks which we must do into four areas, defined by two critieria, Importance and Urgency:

1. Important and Urgent
2. Important, Not Urgent
3. Not Important, Urgent
4. Not Important, Not Urgent

Each time I was trained on this topic the trainer would ask us how much time we spend in each quadrant now before telling us how much time they thought we should spend. Invariably, every single participant was spending way too much time in Quadrant I. Each time I completed this exercise I was in a Technical Support role so my Quadrant I number was around 50%, which is sickeningly unhealthy. I won't post what the actual values should be... you should pursue Covey training if you're interested!

The instructive premise is simple: If you don't take the time to do the things that are not yet urgent or not yet important, they will become both at some point. In tech support, everything is urgent in the eyes of your customer, so you constantly feel like you are operating in crisis mode. For adrenaline junkies, this works very well, and explains why I have loved such roles during my career. For everyone else, they burn out.

I really like the time management matrix - it reminds me that every single task falls into one category and should be given a certain amount of time based on that. It's an easy rule that removes (some) stress from planning one's day/week/month/life.

I am going to write a few posts in the coming weeks about each quadrant and what I've found helps me to both keep things in their respective places as well as keep me as sane as possible while managing these tasks.

The image above was mirrored from www.careerdevelopmentplan.net. I didn't ask to use it, rather I found it in a Google Image Search, so if they are annoyed and would like me to refrain from using it, my email address is readily available.

Last week there was a woot-off. I try not to splurge – woot-offs are dangerous – but they put up a refurbished Roomba at a fairly decent price. My wife and I had just agreed days earlier to save up and buy one to alleviate some of our regular vacuuming, so it had to be a sign.

It arrived yesterday, and thus far the pandemonium has been incredible. It took its standard 60 minutes to map the living room / dining room / front hallway and, in the process, spook-out the cats. Watching it navigate around the furniture was like watching my CS 115 professor explain how we were going to write our first somewhat complex recursive method in java - finding a route through a maze.

You know, something like:

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public boolean solve (int row, int column) {
    boolean done = false;
    if (valid(row, column)) {
        grid[row][column] = 5;
        if (row == grid.length-1 && column == grid[0].length-1)
            done = true;
        else {
            done = solve(row+1, column);        // down
            if (!done)
                done = solve(row, column+1);    // right
            if (!done)
                done = solve(row-1, column);    // up
            if (!done)
                done = solve(row, column-1);    // left
        }
        if (done)
            grid[row][column] = 7;
    }
    return done;
}

Admittedly, I'm enjoying SyntaxHighlighter a bit too much. This particular model lets you set a schedule for when it should go about its business, which is very convenient since it means we can set it to terrorize the cats clean the house while we're at work.

It should be noted at this point that this post, now being in an Octopress blog, is no longer relevant. However, I link back to it so many times that it seemed foolish to get rid of it.

This is (mostly) a test post to see how well Google's SyntaxHighligher works. As you hopefully see below (if your browser supports javascript), it works well. I approve!

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function safe($num) {
    // there has to be a smarter way to do this!  
    // make sure that $num is always above 65  
    $diff = date("w",$now) + 65;
    if ($num < 65) {
        $num+=$diff;
    }

    // make sure that $num is in 65-90 or 97-122
    if (($num > 90) && ($num < 97)) {
        $num+=7;
        return $num;
    }
    elseif ($num > 122) {
        // be formulaic rather than arbitrary
        $d = $num-122; $e = $d%7; $f = $d+$e;
        $num-=$f;
        return $num;
    }
    else {
        return $num;
    }
}

I use a combination of plugins that all fight to figure out what to do with PHP soure code. In order to make this work, I used SimpleCode to translate the source into HTML entities so that Exec-PHP wouldn't try to execute the code block.

The default font set for the code display is Consolas, and then the standard Courier New, Courier and then whatever your system's default mono-space or serif fonts are. If you haven't downloaded Consolas, I'd highly suggest it. Scott Hanselman wrote a couple of articles about it, including making Consolas your default Console font, which I do with reckless abandon.

SyntaxHighlighter has a couple of nifty options, such as disabling some extra controls, removing the line numbers and keeping the <pre> block collapsed by default, ideally so that you could have links to expand them as needed. I made one change to the style sheet - making the grey left-hand border 20px thinner. I thought a 45px band of nothing was a bad use of space. The highlighting loads absolutely last on the page so you, the user, don't sit there waiting for it to work in order to begin browsing content.

Sadly, there is currently no highlighting set for Basic, else Tuesday's post would have looked better.

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10 PRINT "THIS IS THE SONG THAT DOESN'T END"  
20 PRINT "YES, IT GOES ON AND ON MY FRIENDS!"  
30 PRINT "SOME PEOPLE STARTED SINGING IT NOT KNOWING WHAT IT WAS"  
40 PRINT "AND WE'LL CONTINUE SINGING IT FOREVER JUST BECAUSE."  
50 GOTO 10

Stuck. In. My. Head.

I'm somewhat of a tools guy when it comes to my computing environment. I like apps that make my life easier and extend my operating environment beyond what was originally intended. In my previous job, I was one of the guys writing little scripts to automate annoying tasks. It's "my thing". The first time I read Scott Hanselman's Tools page, I think I may have salivated just a little. I immediately downloaded about 60% of the list just to see what they each did in greater detail. His list for 2007 included "The Big Ten Life and Work-Changing Utlities", of which with I mostly agree.

I spent a few minutes the other day going through my c:tools directory to see what was actually there. Over the last few years I've just dumped every standalone app that looks interesting into this one directory, added it to my SVN repository so that I can easily populate it onto any workstation, and ignored just how ginormous it was becoming. As a result, I ended up deleting more than half of the apps, a great deal of which I hadn't used since they were downloaded. In the end, I kept only the tools that I use on a regular basis:

• Deep Burner
• DarkRoom - DarkRoom is fantastic for distraction-free writing, but it's not much of an editor, so I tend to only use it in network-free meetings or when I need to have a little mind-dump onto the keyboard.
• Notepad++ - Almost took over as my go-to text editor for a while. It's a pretty powerful little thing!
• Notepad2 - Used mostly when I need a quick editor that's better than Notepad.exe.
• ntouch/dtouch, which I'd link to if I could find their original site. They're GUI file timestamp modifiers
• All of the SysInternals Tools (I use about 50% of them on a weekly basis, especially ZoomIt)
• Various NirSoft Tools
• Random Tools by GP Williams, mostly Kill.exe
• ResHacker
• Some ISO creation utilities from Terabyte Unlimited
• jHead
• Microsoft's Virtual CD Control Panel (this is a direct exe link.. it has no homepage!)
• Various Other cmd-line apps (unrar.exe, par2.exe, diskuse.exe, vnc viewer, etc.)

Of note, I don't actually use Notepad++ or Notepad2 all that often. I've tried many text editors, (perhaps they deserve their own post), and I only keep either of the enhanced notepads and DarkRoom around as once-in-a-while editors. I fell in love with UltraEdit32 about eight versions ago, and have used it ever since as my primary text editor. I like TextMate on my Mac, so I thought I'd enjoy E-TextEditor about as much. For some reason it didn't quite stick, but I may have to give it another shot at some point.

Beyond that, however, I do have some other non-standalone applications that have made my me more productive or equally easy in the past year or so:

• Automatic Wallpaper Changer - Yeah, I just like pretty backgrounds. What can I say. And, like on my mac, they should cycle constantly. Carry on.
• Cygwin - We use this at work on our production systems, so I thought it was worth a shot. I've honestly given up using cmd.exe since I really don't need it anymore. Running tcsh on my Dell WinXP laptop feels dirty, but so good.
• FireBug - I have to agree with Scott, it is arguably the most powerful in-broswer IDE available. I've abandoned every other web debug extension for Firefox... there's simply no need.
• Foxit Reader - I uninstall Acrobat reader on any machine I can and install Foxit. It's so fast it makes me seriously question what Adobe is thinking making a bloated PDF reader. I'm trying to get the systems folks at work to adopt it as the default PDF reader for new hire machines.
• FeedDemon - Still my favorite feed reader. I use NewsGator's Online reader from home.
• PDFCreator - Useful not only for creating PDFs but also for being a poor man's PDF slicer and dicer.
• SpeedFiler - I save bunches of time every day using SpeedFiler to quickly move email from my Inbox to a more appropriate location. Version 2 learns from your habits and quickly suggests destinations. Love. It. (It's one of only two !free applications on this list, and it's worth every penny.)
• TeraCopy - It's overkill as a default copy/move handler, but for big moves to external drives or other machines, it's perfect and fast. It's also very fast.
• Unlocker - How many times has that silly "It is being used by another person or program" message come up? Too many. Unlocker handles this like a hot knife through.. well, something that doesn't actually require a hot knife, but is even more easily cut with said knife.
• VLC Media Player - It's the one media player I can always count on to work. How can you go wrong? I pimp this to friends and family on a regular basis.
• WinSnap - It takes screenshots. Very well.

I wouldn't say any of these (except maybe FireBug or SpeedFiler) are actually life changing applications. They each get a fair amount of use, however, and I'd either be doing something by hand or using a less-functional application in each of their respective places should they not exist.