It Rains In Triplicate

• Review two papers for the upcoming conference (8 total due by end of March)
• Target / Babies R Us / etc run
• Exercise

The rest:

• Determine if I want to / have the cycles to write a paper for an upcoming conference that is willing to give me some schedule relief

More or less I’ll take a swing at it and see what happens.

• Make some progress on some non-work related project

Meh. Not even close.

• Finish up one small piece of data modeling I didn’t get to last week

Know what I need to do, but didn’t get the 15 minutes in xmlspy.

• Clean up my office

• Practice piano

The last two are related, in that my office needs to be clean so I can comfortably access and use the piano, but, didn’t happen. Ugh. Hopefully I can do this stuff on Wednesday (my day home).

However, did accomplish:

• Cleaned out and vacuumed the car (the car collects cruft, which includes sand, pebbles, and baby supplies)
• Made a nice dinner for the wife and I
• Built a new and improved telemetry tracking sheet in Numbers for weight, food, etc
• Did my end of week check out stuff, which is time consuming, but necessary

Next week is going to be busy, I need to build some actual code for my research project (woo hoo!) and spend a lot of quality time in powerpoint preparing for meetings the week after next.

• Review two papers for the upcoming conference (8 total due by end of March)
• Finish up one small piece of data modeling I didn’t get to last week
• Clean up my office
• Practice piano
• Target / Babies R Us / etc run
• Exercise
• Determine if I want to / have the cycles to write a paper for an upcoming conference that is willing to give me some schedule relief
• Make some progress on some non-work related project

Running through today’s review and doing divergent thinking while I was away from the house this afternoon, two items to consider.

1. What is the best way to track / process / be held accountable for behaviors? My big one is the “do three days of cardio and three days of weights every week”. It doesn’t fit into the GTD paradigm, but is an item worth tracking.
2. At least half my job involves cat hearding, ensuring that my team is executing appropriately, tracking items that are / should be / will be delegated, and reviewing incoming products. While I will not micromanage unless I absolutely have to (and perhaps not even then), what is the best method to track these items? My current method is to have a Delegation context with a sub hierarchy based on the team. I’m not quite sure it sufficiently captures the appropriate tasks and effects.

More as I think about it.

So, someday, I’ll post something that involves less navel gazing. However, that’s not today.

The week’s progress and graphs.

Graph 1 is my incomplete tasks:

Obviously, the Friday afternoon task sweep gave me a nice, low, new baseline going forward.

Graph 2 is my change in incomplete tasks:

The effect of the task sweep is also very clear.

So, some interesting numbers. With the task sweep, my incomplete list drops by about 5 per day, without it grows by 2 per day. I wonder if that trend will continue. I continue to average completing (not just deleting) 19 tasks per day on average, but the median dropped to 17. The result of the task sweep was only to complete 30 items, which is not an outlier, as shown on the next graph:

So, what’s next?

I started tracking a few more items at the start of the day, after I select my “today” items and after I empty my inbox, which I can graph next week. These are:

• Tasks marked for today
• Tasks marked for this week (including tasks marked for today, but not tasks that are due this week)
• Tasks marked for next week (but not tasks that are due next week)
• Overdue tasks

What do I want to figure out?

• am I over subscribed on a given day?
• am I over subscribed for this week?
• am I over subscribed for next week (i.e., am I deferring too much?)

Finally, there is an obvious problem that I have too many open projects that will see no change for months at a time. Some of these are vague buckets of “I should get to this someday”. Some metric of project change and using it to determine those projects that should be either revisited for actions or put on hold for the time being would be worthwhile.

Next on the block:

• Think about the accountability issue, and what I’m doing about it (some thoughts, further post)
• Add the project metrics
• Have the script create a CSV or drop data into numbers
• Figure out if I can pull the analytics above out of what I’m collecting

So I’ve uploaded my scripts that I use to manipulate and manage OmniFocus at this link. The files in the zip are:

• OFLib.scpt – a library of various OF getters, filters, and modifiers
• Daily Analytics.scptd – a script bundle that generates my end of day analytics (which get posted to my twitter page, which is here)
• Promote.scptd – my script to promote items to the next highest priority
• Demote.scptd – my script to demote items to the next lowest priority
• Clear.scptd – my script to clear the status (priority and flag state) of an item
• copy-lib.sh – a simple script to put the OFLib updates into the right location in a script bundle

To use any of these scripts, put them in your scripts directory for OmniFocus (~/Library/Scripts/Applications/OmniFocus/) and call them from the script menu or customize your toolbar to include them.

More updates, etc as I get to them. Comments, of course, welcome.

So, another consistent week of task tracking. What does it looks like?

A little depressing, from a pure numbers perspective, the number of tasks I have is constantly and consistently trending up. However, I don’t know that these numbers represent a bad thing. The point is that I dump my list outside of my head, and, therefore, not end up anxious about everything that I may need to do Right Now.

The other interesting metric is that I complete about 19 (average = 19.5, median = 19) things every day, with an historical minimum of 12 and maximum of 38. Nine of those items are repeating items that I’ll do every day regardless (triage the day’s work email, for example). So there is good forward momentum.

So, what am I worrying about? The biggest question mark appears to be how is my immediate task list growing, do I have too many items on my plate to accomplish in a given week. Tracking that stat will be worthwhile. Similarly, how does my task list age? What is the average task age, since it was created? Do I have too much cruft?

So, the latter point can be yanked out of my task list, but the former point takes some work. Fortunately, reflecting back to my workflow from a previous post (http://www.landspeople.net/~seth/blog/?p=153), I think it is viable.

To revisit and update, my workflow consists, essentially, of:

1. Items actually due today or tomorrow (has an actual, no kidding due date)
2. What do I want to get done today (which is new to my workflow)
3. What do I want to get done this week (very near term planning)
4. What do I want to get done next week (further planning)
5. What do I want to get done sometime soon (i.e., don’t lose track of these items, intentionally revisit frequently. This bucket may very well be an artifact of the fact that I have a very large set of tasks on my master list)
6. What items am I waiting on input to complete
7. Items to check back on occasionally (tickler list)
8. Everything else

Due date is easy to figure out. Flagged items are “this week.” I have a tag on top of flagging called “@today”, which a simple search will put up, thereby populating a “Today” perspective. Next week is handled by another “@nextweek” tag and perspective, as are the soon items (via “@soon”).

Waiting for items go in their own context and tickler items end up with a note tag. Everything else is, well, everything else.

So, at least some new metrics to track looks like:

• How many items are due and tagged as “today” in the morning, compared to how many did I accomplish? This metric answers whether or not I’m keeping up with my list on a daily basis
• How many items are due and flagged for a given week at the beginning of the week, compared to how many did I accomplish in a given week? Same point, but on a weekly basis.
• What is the rate of change of the size of my “nextweek” list? Am I over committing myself for the next week? At the end of the week, is @nextweek and what I actually completed this week within the same order of magnitude?

Anyway, next on the block are:

• Finish out my OF scripts and post them for the world to see, use, and criticize (once I finish out a build script for them)
• Think about the next major issue, which is accountability for those things not easily tracked (e.g., did I do a cardio workout 4 times this week?)
• Add the next set of metrics
• Figure out graph generation, instead of a lot of cut and paste and manually screwing around with Numbers (all of which should be nicely scriptable)

So at the end of one week of some great experiment, I’ve posted every evening on twitter (http://twitter.com/slandsman) my task status and progress, of the format:

Seth’s daily activity status is 155 active projects, 20 tasks completed today, 18 tasks added today, and 1336 incomplete tasks.

which is generated by a nifty omnifocus applescript I spent a few hours on over the new years weekend.

So, what have I figured out:

1. I’m adding more tasks than I’m closing for the most part. That isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, as a task should be in omnifocus, not my head. I’ve added ~23 tasks this week.
2. I have a lot of “active” projects. It may be worthwhile to prune them
3. My usage pattern, I think, is reflected in the stats (see below)
4. There are more items that are worth tracking than just above (see below)

Usage Patterns:

I have a couple of key usage patterns that should end up being reflected in the data over the next few weeks:

1. In general, every product I produce goes through a two phase commit before it disappears from my todo list. When a product is completed, I run a script that completes the item and creates a new item that is a “Waiting For” task. The idea is that until it receives feedback or acceptance by the customer, I still need to track it. The result is that the majority of items I close result in one item opened.
2. Every saturday or sunday, I do my prep for the week ritual, which involves, among other things:
   • Empty my work (and eventually personal) inboxes, replying and acting on what I’ve deferred and put into omnifocus any items that need to be further deferred (results in a spike of new items)
   • Go through my starred google reader items from the previous week and delete, act, or defer (into omnifocus) every item from that week
3. Every monday, I meet with my team leads and go through action items (probably results in closing a few “waiting” or “agenda” items
4. Every tuesday, I meet with my customer and go through action items (probably results in closing a few “waiting” or “agenda” items but results in opening new ones)

So, my best guesses for what my task list will look like:

• Weekend: large increase in new tasks, closing of a number of house / chore based tasks. Also a lot of close and add patterns as I check off weekly repeating items
• Monday: mostly closing of tasks
• Tuesday: mostly adding of tasks, but a lot of closing
• Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday should be a mix

Data to Track:

So right now I am tracking:

• Active projects
• Tasks completed on today’s date
• Tasks added on today’s date
• Tasks that are not closed and part of an active project

Other items worth tracking:

• Waiting tasks created to track how many two-phase commit items I have, vs new work to accomplish
• Start of day status, including how many tasks are due today, how many are flagged for today, how many items are flagged for the whole week
• Weekly roll ups (including graphing the data)
• How many projects were touched (i.e., had an item added or completed, to figure out how many are really active)

Final thoughts:

• My task list is increasing, not decreasing. On 1 Jan I had 1306 incomplete tasks, and last night I had 1329. This week was, in my opinion, a productive week.
• I have a lot of untouched tasks and projects that I do not want to get rid of, but I know I will not worth through soon. i.e., I have a to-read project with at least 50 books on it.
• I would guess the majority of my tasks are about the same size and scope, in that I won’t have many days where I’ll close out four times as many tasks as another day

More later. I also want to close up and post my scripts, including my workflow script and these analytics scripts.

and I finally have enough surface area in the kitchen to bring the toaster oven out of mothballs. I can start toasting my english muffins, instead of microwaving them like a savage.

So, thoughts and events of the year past, just like everyone else …

Major Events

• Our first kid, Abigail, was born on March 16. That sort of thing makes everything else feel sort of small in comparison. Abi continues to thrive and grow, and everyday, of course, is something new. Fortunately, she is routinely sleeping through the night, which makes everything just a little bit more manageable.

Life

• I’ve shed a fairly significant amount of weight in the last year, becoming more in control of myself (and having significant motivation from the kid). Not done yet, but it is no longer an insurmountable goal. Ultimately, I’m about half way to where I want to be. That said, I was last at my current weight in my freshman or sophomore year of college.
• The Wife and I celebrated 8 years of marriage, 4 years in our house, etc. Everything proceeds in a comfortable and blissful pace
• Getting better at taking non-work, non-frantic time. More reading (yay kindle), more time away from the work computer
• Became better organized, although far from perfect. My work inbox is empty by Sunday evening every week, I have a strong GTD practice in place, etc.
• Started in on getting work done on the house. Home offices were combined so that the kid can have her own room, so spent some time organizing the room, and bought some furniture for it (yay ikea), have a usable dining area in the house and an island in the kitchen (yay ikea), have new windows (in progress) and siding (in progress), and putting up useful shelves and surfaces in the house (in progress)

Work

• Passed 5 years of employment at the same place
• Spent my first full year as a personnel manager, growing my group and doing, so I’m told, a good job. I think I am now part of the lower-middle management.
• Started down the path of project management as a project chief engineer / scientist, another skill I didn’t think I had, but am told I’m doing a good job (having a superb team behind me helps, I think)
• Spending vanishingly little time doing anything hands on, instead doing development through delegation and working from a strategic perspective. Not a bad thing, but different.
• Successes with internal business development, finding interesting work for many people and getting some of my research ideas on large scale collaboration funded
• Spent a lot of time thinking about business, managing, etc. Read all of Jim Collins’ books (Good to Great, Built to Last, etc), and starting in on others. Still formulating my own theories and thoughts on the topic, but am finding reading what others say fairly interesting and helps in my job.
• Gave some good talks on my work, both internally and externally. Attended and was track chair for a conference, which I’m doing again in 2010.

Projects

• Fell down on this topic this year. Wrote some scripts, sketched out some ideas, but nothing really done and worth discussing
• Spent less time than I’m happy with on the guitar, piano, and in DAW software, but my technique is slowly starting to improve again

Goals for 2010

Life

• Lose mumble-mumble pounds (I have a goal in mind, it is actionable)
• Adopt a reasonable and consistent exercise routine consisting of 3 days of cardio and 3 days of strength building
• Get my personal organization in line with my work organization (too many personal emails languish before being answered). Institute a zero inbox policy on my personal email boxes as I’ve done with my work mailbox by end of January.
• Spend more time building and maintaining an online presence, either by twitter, facebook, or reinvigorating my blog. Goal of one meaningful post a week

Work

• Write. I have at least 4 papers that need to be written and published. Got to get them done. Goal is to submit 2 papers in 2010.

Projects

• Spend more time on the piano and improve my technique (precise routine TBD, but on the order of at least an hour a week)
• Complete a project. Doesn’t matter which one, but finish something already. Goal is one project that sees fruition and I can write about here (meaning non-work related)

I have a reasonably old airport extreme base station in the house, which sits in the living room. I had the great idea of moving it to the basement to replace the netgear router (not modem, just the router) that I suspect is getting flakey.

So, after a quick factory reset and putting it through the motions of connecting to the modem, including the power cycling and battery yanking required, it won’t get a DHCP address. I suspect comcast is using MAC address provisioning, so I restored the network to what it was and factory reset the airport and redid the setup so that it would act as the wireless bridge again.

Except it no longer gets a DHCP address from the router.

To be clear, every other piece of equipment, wireless and otherwise still gets an IP address from the DHCP server on the router.

Further, if I set a manual IP address on the airport extreme, it works fine. The only thing not working is that the airport extreme cannot obtain a DHCP address.

Back to square one, I still have a (mostly) working airport and I still have a flakey cable router.

I hate computers.