What you can’t afford to waste

Can you tell me something that you never get back? Something that is gone whether you use it effectively or not? If you said time then you’re right. It amazes me these days that people constantly claim they don’t have enough time yet they fill their existence with useless and wasteful activities. In a era when technology is supposed to set us free what people don’t seem to realise is that they are becoming more and more a slave to it.

Most modern technology is designed to be interrupt driven. It is designed to make you stop whatever you are doing and pay attention to it. Don’t believe me? What do you do when your mobile phone rings? Answer it. What do you do when an email comes into your inbox? You stop what you are doing to read it. You allow yourself to be on instant messenger not to keep in touch but to allow other people with nothing better to do to interrupt you. Look at things like Facebook and Twitter (which I have been evaluating recently). Are these productivity tools? In some cases maybe but I can tell you I’m sick of getting poked, asked to play Texas Hold’em poker and fight it out in Dope Wars. Don’t you people have anything better to do?

See what I mean? We are allowing technology to dominate our lives. We are allowing it to dictate what we are doing. How the hell can you hope to produce anything of quality when you are constantly being interrupted? Don’t forget it is not just the interruption that you have to deal with it is the requirement to get back to what you are doing that also takes time. The crazy thing is that technology actually allows us to be in control but we don’t seem to use it. Mobile phones have voice mail, emails get saved until we need them and so does stuff on Facebook and Twitter. We however seem in such an almighty rush to respond to thing immediately.

One of the best books I have read recently is The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. He argues we should be working less and enjoying life more. He argues that most people are simply seeking to interrupt your day because they are bored and need something to do and worst of all they expect an instantaneous response. If you read the book and then step back and think about what he is saying you’ll find it makes a lot of sense. We all have a ‘dance card’ (hours in the day) that only is so big and we can only fit so much on it. You need to decide the highest value items that are going on the card and accordingly the lowest value items that don’t belong on the list. The only way you are going to fit more onto your ‘dance card’ is to be more efficient with your time and guess what? Some stuff just ain’t going to fit on!

My advice is to start valuing your time more, because if it has no value then you’ll give it away for free and people will just keep coming back for your handouts. Focus on what you want to achieve and plan to achieve it. Ask yourself if you are making the best use of your time because, guess what? Even if you aren’t you are never going to get it back again!

Without this you’re screwed

I think that I have mentioned this topic here before but some recent personal experience has brought the issue to the forefront of my thinking again. All the management, how-to and motivation books that you read these days seem to over look on very important aspect – your health.

If you aren’t healthy then you can’t function, you can’t earn a living and you are generally a burden to someone else. Most people skate happily through life not really taking care of themselves until it is too late. Consider if you bought a car ran into the ground. It isn’t going to last nearly as long as one that gets serviced regularly. I doubt there are many people out there who would do that to a car they own these days but many let their health slide in a similar fashion. Sure, regular service costs time and money but over the long run the productivity benefits are HUGE. I think that the same applies to your health.

If you are an integral part of a small business then imagine how that business would operate if you weren’t there? Maybe it wouldn’t be able to generate income, then what would happen? This is not to mention any personal costs that may also arise. The older you get the more chances there are of things going wrong, especially if you don’t take the time to maintain your health. Ever noticed the difference between when you feel run down and when you feel rested? The better your health the more able you are to cope with life’s stresses and strains. Put simply, your constitution is far more resilient with a little care.

Problem is I think that nobody is really responsible for your own health expect you. It is something that is all too easy to neglect. The longer you let your health fall away the harder it is to get it back. It is not impossible mind you but it becomes harder with each day that you choose to neglect it.

My question to you is, have a regular personal health plan in place? Sure, you may have a business plan but do you have a health plan, because in many cases without your health you have no business. You don’t have to train like an Olympian to win a gold medal but you do need to do something on a regular basis to maintain the best health you can. The easiest way is simply to incorporate as a regular part of a day. Sure, doing research on the net for a solution to problem is great but if you are laid up in and can’t do that how does that help you. It is important to see you health as a business asset and continue to work to improve it. If you don’t then probably nothing else is really going to matter is it?

A better place than my inbox

Having recently been working on a section for my Windows Sharepoint Services Operations Guide (sorry, but the more plugs the higher the rating in Google) about Windows Sharepoint Services accepting inbound emails from outside the organization, I was wondering what would be a good application of this feature. BING. I know, how about all those SBS monitoring reports we get sent from customer servers? Not only will they be stored in one location but with Sharepoint they also get index so we can search them.

The more I started to think about this idea the better it became. Normally with SBS server reports (and other monitoring reports we receive) they merely end up in our inbox for review. However, if they appeared in a Sharepoint document library then we could add additional metadata. What do I mean by this? Well, I could add a field that allows me to select whether the report has been reviewed or whether it has errors that require further investigation. It also means that we can sort and categorize the information much quicker. Not only that, thinking about this a little more, it would also be possible to kick off a Sharepoint workflow as each item arrived. This maybe sending an alert to somebody to review the reports, then moving them to an archive location elsewhere in Sharepoint and so on. With Sharepoint the possibilities are really endless.

I think that this is a really good example of how an IT business like ours can use Sharepoint to improve productivity and efficiency. All you need is a little imagination and Sharepoint of course.

The only thing that you need to keep in mind is that if you have installed Windows Sharepoint Services v3 on your SBS server then you WILL NOT have the facility to receive inbound emails to Sharepoint. It is another great reason why a standalone Sharepoint server in a SBS network is a much better idea that one on the SBS server (not always possible I admit but don’t forget Virtual PC as an option). But then if you had my Windows Sharepoint Services Operations Guide you’d know that wouldn’t you?

Book review – "The 4 hour work week"

It isn’t often that a book jumps to the top of my recommended reading list but this one from Timothy Ferriss has. Be warned you are going to have throw away many “traditional” concepts about work, career and life in general but you’ll be better for it.

Too often, as Ferriss says, we make the excuse of working for works sake rather than experiencing life. Imagine how liberating having enough money to be able to take six months off at a time and travel anywhere. The technology to achieve this is available now, the only thing holding you back is you and and antiquated beliefs. Why should you preparing for retirement when you SHOULD be living your life now?

This book will show you how to eliminate the unnecessary, become more productive, challenge your preconceptions and start creating a life that works for you rather than the other way around. It is packed with plenty of great tips and resources that make it easy to get the ball rolling.

All this may sound like a get rich quick scheme and there are many part of the book that are difficult to implement, however if you approach it with an open mind then I’m sure you’ll find something in here that will benefit you by making your life better. Remember, nothing in worthwhile in life comes on a silver platter!

Two ways to boost your productivity

Recently we’ve found two ways to really boost our productivity. The first is using dual screens on our desktops. Our new HP desktop machines not only came with Vista but also came with dual video outputs (digital and analogue). Initially we set up the analogue since it was easier but recently we have finally gotten around to also enabling the digital output. After a little bit of fiddling and locating a suitable monitor we are proud to say that we have it all working. Boy, what a difference extra screen real estate makes. On one screen we have our Outlook open so we can see all our emails and on the other we have all our other applications like web browser, word processor and the like. We can’t tell you how much easier it is to work with two documents at the same time if you can actually view them simultaneously. You can be doing research on the web while remoted into a client’s machine all without having to minimize windows. Totally brilliant and we recommend it to all. We now wonder whether adding more than two monitors to our desktops would increase productivity even further?

The second method we have found of increasing our productivity is by using Microsoft OneNote. Having used OneNote before we found that it really didn’t suit our needs but the new version is certainly and improvement. We have installed the OneNote data notebooks on a network drive and shared it between multiple machines. This now means we can simply cut and paste from one machine and retrieve it on another. Even better we can take ONeNote ‘offline’ and use it stand alone and then have it automatically resync when we return to the office. This make it particularly handy when we take our notebook PC offsite. We can pump all our client notes into it quickly and easily and then when we return to the office it is sync’ed with our other notebooks as well as being backed up. We think that it is a boon that lots of the information we used to jot down in paper notebooks can now be stored in OneNote, allowing it to be searchable.

As with any productivity improvement there is an upfront hit in getting the systems working but both duall displays and OneNote have begun to make a real impact to our productivity and we thus recommend them to all.