May/092
Getting Things Done
I've always been a note-taker. I've got a pile of scribbled in notebooks stashed in a drawer to prove it. It's useful I'm sure, but there's always been something missing from my system.
Using those notes to organise myself is what's lacking. An old friend & work colleague got in touch after reading a recent post of mine about procrastination and suggested I had a look at something called Getting Things Done. It's a book by some corporate doofus called David Allen which outlines a system of capturing and organising all the stuff you want to get done in a much better way than just the usual daily to-do lists, prioritising and calendars etc which have never worked for me.
That's EXACTLY what I need I thought & bought the book immediately. Frankly, I feel a little embarrassed to be seen reading such obvious corporate-business rubbish. The same kind of embarrassment you might feel reading a cheesy self help book on a train. But what the hell. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy once helped me to learn very useful methods to get through a particularly nasty bout of depression, so I'm open to learning a new method of organisation and productivity.
The trick is to capture all the stuff that pops into your mind and get rid of it so that you don't have to think about it all the time. That bit I'm already good at. Then you need a solid system of reviewing, filing and acting on all this stuff in the right order. The point you want to be at is to have a have a perfectly clear mind, un-muddled by the multitude of shit you want/need to get done. Then you just look on your clear, concise list of the next things you should be getting on with to be getting things done. No more rabbit in car headlights. Just stress free productivity.
I'm applying the same principle here as I have done throughout my career as a Internet prO. Don't think you're inventing the wheel. Identify the need and find someone who has already done it. Then blatantly copy it.
So of course my first step is to design and half build a crazy-assed piece of web software that I can use via my iphone to facilitate this process. Just kidding.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2446/3544990945_5e0ac4ab77.jpg
May/092
Procrastination or planning?
Erm yeh, so I'm getting back to work and and the usual problems present. Working both for myself and from home means a lack of structure that can pretty unhelpful. There's plenty of work to be getting on with but somehow it's all a bit unplanned, etheral and whenever I sit down to some my mind kind of goes blank and I don't know where to start.
So today, in true Rimmer style, I spent all morning creating a 'Day Planning' document. Down the left of the A4 sheet I'm printing out every day is a an hourly schedule where I sketch out what I should be doing hour by hour - lunch, go for a walk, do a bit on website A, do a bit of gardening, do a bit on website B - that kind of thing. On the right is a daily to-do list. Stuff I need to get done that day.
Ideally I'll be writing the plan for the next day before going to bed, thereby inspiring myself to jump right out of bed early doors and get right on it. I'm hoping over the next 2 weeks I'll form a solid, lasting habit and really start getting things moving forward.
At the moment it feels like I'm just procrastinating - like creating a revision timetable when you're doing exams and then ignoring the damn thing completely.
Feb/091
Mid Season Business
It occurred to me the other day that we're already half-way through the ski season. This is about the time that seasonaires start to suffer a touch of mid-season blues. The young 'uns who work in the bars and chalets have all been working, skiing and partying hard and you can see in their eyes that they're tired and flagging - knowing that they're only halfway through and they're dreaming of the beach.
Not me. I'm a lucky git and I'm only working on my own stuff this winter having put all client-work to one side until the Spring. At the start of the winter I wrote a long list of the things I need to work on once the Spring comes round, thinking that I'd just simply ski all winter. As it turns out now that I live up here in Le Tour and I'm not spending as many evenings drinking in bars I've had more time on my hands than I thought. As it turns out, I've already ticked off most of that list so I'll be going into the Spring with both guns blazing. It's amazing how much you can get done when you're not constantly managing your clients' various demands.
Feb/091
Doing something annoying and stupid
Yesterday I was down the valley at Carrefour nice and early. I had a busy day in front of me. I decided to give the van a clean at the jet wash. It never stays clean for long in the snow, but it's good to wash the dirt and salt off now and again.
So I cleared out the mess of tissues and fag packets in the door pocket and failed to notice as I shut the door that I'd locked the driver's side. There it was. All doors locked, keys in the ignition and even worse, my iPhone sitting on the front seat. The spare key was on my girlfriend's keyring, 40km away and the number to call her on my phone. Merde. How stupid and annoying.
Suddenly stripped of my 21st century toy - my portable brain-replacement - my iPhone, I was helpless. To find the number I needed the Internet, to call it I needed a phone and that's all before I had to explain to my lovely girlfriend that due to my blunder she'd have to take a few hours out of her busy day to come and rescue me.
I did have a notebook and a pen with me. A low-tech solution to a high tech problem is often the best approach and luckily at some point I'd jotted down a number for one of the ski instructors my girlfriend works with. So with a 5 Euro phonecard and a short struggle to re-learn how to use a public payphone, I was back on the grid.
I made a few calls and retired to to the coffee shop to wait for the cavalry which was arriving directly.
Feb/090
Enough Already. There's work to do
Skiing got ditched in favor of keeping warm today. It's very cold up here in the mountains in the winter. -15C at the top of Grande Montets yesterday. That's finger numbingly cold. Not really the time of year for ski touring.
Today was more productively spent making this film. Mark had a journalist from a prestigious UK broadsheet on his course last week, and there's a chance this film or a part of it at least will make it onto the newspaper's website.
Intermediate All Mountain Ski Course 30th Jan 2009 from Chris D on Vimeo.
Now that I've got a Vimeo PLUS account I can upload full High Definition movies to the Internet. That's about 10 MB per minute of film, so it's better than having to pay for the hosting myself.
(The science bit: Because HDTV requires so much more data than normal PAL resolution TV (from the olden days of cathode ray tubes), engineers devised a way to broadcast TV signals as compressed digital information rather than directly over analog waves. They defined two video formats for HDTV called 720p and 1080i, which refer to the number of horizontal lines used to produce the image. It allows broadcast of super-sharp high definition moving images which look great on modern flat screen Televisions.)
In short, I can share large movie files with other people by uploading them to vimeo, which also produces a handy viewing page for my client.
Jan/091
Whatamess
One of my main Achilles' heels in working for myself is the paperwork. I'm just rubbish at getting it done. I quite often have unopened mail going back three or more months. The thing is, once you get into the habit of not doing it and you see that actually, the world doesn't really fall apart if you don't look at your bank statements or (god forbid) HM Revenue & Customs letters. Basically I work with email, instant messaging and the telephone. Paper means nothing to me.
I do actually own a filing cabinet and every now and again I open all the mail and stick it straight into the folders. I don't really read it as I'm doing it of course. By that time, the letters are totally out of date anyway!
So after a few years of renting the Chamonix office, the paperwork was all in a mess. When I moved house I took all the paperwork out to be able to move the cabinet and planned to have one big, proper sort out of all my paperwork. You know.... properly get back on top of all my life admin stuff - make sure all the companies who need it have my new address, have a bit of a purge of old mobile bills from 5 years ago - that kind of thing.
And of course I haven't started it till today. What a chore. And it's been really bugging me too! Stressing me out completely that I've got this massive chore hanging over my head and I haven't done it. Even now I'm sitting writing this blog post, procrastinating rather than getting on with it!
whatamess.