bytes 0f life .v2

It’s a beautiful autumn Saturday. A nice breeze. A light rain. The leaves are falling more and more with each passing day. The yard is covered with wonderful oranges and browns. College football is on in the living room.

BAM!

Now, it is time to face the music. My disorganization and procrastination has put me in a very difficult position. I am behind with my work. I am behind with my family. I am behind with my life. I have to tackle this now or something is going to give. What do I need to organize? In a word, everything. I have way too many things going on in both my business and in my personal home life to be able to successfully keep up.

Here is a quick list:

• Projects
• Tasks
• Deadlines
• Team schedules
• My schedules
• Notes
• Ideas
• Code
• News
• Documents
• Syncing all of this between computers

Here are the tools I have at my disposal

• Mantis (Bug tracker that is also overMISused as a project management system)
• File servers everywhere (Yah, just directories full of shit.)
• eTools (Document sharing used by some people.)
• Sharepoint (Document sharing that we are supposed to migrate to at some point.)
• Trac Wiki
• Fisheye / Crucible
• phpbb forums

So far my research has uncovered many different techniques. I am discovering the best course of action is to define what I want. The easiest way to state what I want is: “I want to organize everything listed above (the quick list) in such a way that all of the information I need is at my fingertips when I need it.” That’s not asking too much is it? I should probably just design and build a robot secretary. That’s a separate post.

Bringing a little order to chaos

The first missing piece of the puzzle is something that allows me to organize my projects. My wife created a OneNote notebook for me and it looks like a great way to organize the information I have for my projects. It doesn’t help me with deadlines and planning, though. I may not be utilizing it to its full potential. Here is a link outlining the various project management tools out there. It’s really a desert out there for anything that doesn’t mimic Microsoft Project.

At this point, I do not think adding another piece of software to the mix of tools I have available is going to help anything. I need to figure out how to make the best of what I have. I have to use Outlook, so I should be figuring out the best way to leverage Outlook. You will find no real help with available plug-ins. The vast majority of them are related to spam control or something stupid that doesn’t have any value where organization is concerned.  From the multitudes of available plug-ins I have found the following to be, at a glance, usable:

Don’t get me wrong. I see a lot of plug-ins out there and I am sure they are helping a few people out. For the most part it seems like plug-ins are made for an individual or a small group of individuals and it eventually finds a place on the Internet for the vast anonymous cog to consume it.

My Bottleneck el Supremo

Email is definitely a bottleneck for me. This is a single point of failure in my process because most of my work is born from email. I need to be able to find stuff quickly and right now this is not happening. In order to use Outlook effectively I need to start working with: