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:

The tarotwicks.com project has now graduated from a small Mysticwicks.com project to something a bit more grandiose. The Twickster will be an online application that will assist users in guided readings. At first we will base everything completely on the Tarot. I have recruited 3 of the brightest engineers I know to assist me in this venture.

We are using Trac to manage the project. (http://dev.tarotwicks.com)

I need to post my notes on the Trac install. It was actually quite a nightmare because I didn’t want to run the standalone version. Bleh. Anyway, its up and running now and that’s what matters. We are going through some push and pull right now at work regarding project management software.

Anyway, I don’t know if I have a document that outlines the entire Twickster experience from start to finish. I have been writing documentation on the project wiki, but it is not a complete and total view. It also uses buzzwords, which have to be explained. G asked me to explain the project to him on Friday WITHOUT the terms and I almost couldn’t do it. This is my attempt to outline the project using everyday language, not Twisms.

Where did the Twickster come from?

Ok, so my wife asked me if it would be hard to develop a tarot reading generator for the Tarot forum on Mysticwicks.com. I said, not really. And then a few weeks later (yah, I’m slow) I started thinking of the best way to do it. At first I was just going to write a Vbulletin plug-in that would do the job. Then I started thinking it might be fun to have a separate site which Mysticwicks.com users could log in and get readings, even save them. My first notes even required Vbulletin user integration at phase I.

From there my thought started whirring around about how best to build the application to produce the best readings. I started thinking about the possibilities of running information obtained by the user through various routines that would find correspondences via various numerological and modern Kabbalistic. These correspondences could then be used to weight the chances of drawing a particular card in a reading.

This Suggestive Randomness would give the application an edge when producing the right user experience to strengthen the psychological aspects of a reading. This also changes the way one would have to think about divination. The assisted reading is based on you and ultimately done by you. The Twickster is a genius at math and able to perform complex equations that would take us forever to complete in a blink. The Twickster gives us a medium and an opportunity to get the best reading we could ever have. It is the best reading because it is done by the only person that could ever really tell you what is going to happen to you.

You.

So, from the small reading vbulletin plug-in springs the might Twickster which will be a very unique site in the social genre. Next post I will explain just exactly what the Twickster is.