Everyday we are bombarded with information. We get online and there are all these great websites with tons of useful information. Some of them very specific to our interest. At work we have to deal with the avalanche of email we all get everyday. There is so much thrown at us from every direction that information overload  in inevitable. It feels like we are trying to Drinking from the Firehose.  Most of us are classified as "Information Workers", which basically means we add value to information we gather and receive.

Let's face it, most people you know work behind a desk in a cubicle. It's very rare for people to work outside and have something tangible to show for their work at the end of the day. A long time ago I had to come to the conclusion that if the electricity goes out, my work simply doesn't exist. Also in software development, to stagnate is to go backwards. Technology moves fast, and that again requires a ton of new information everyday.

So how do we keep up with all this information that coming at us. Well you make the pipe smaller. That sounds good but how do we do that? Yesterday we talked about email so today lets talk about the websites. Most of these websites or blogs have RSS feeds. An RSS feed is simply the content of the website without the wrapper that can used in anyway the reader sees fit. Now we gather a list of the sites we read most often and we pull all of the data together with a RSS Reader. I personally use Google Reader. This lets me access my feeds from where ever I maybe be without having to have a RSS Reader client installed. However as we discussed yesterday we have to limit how often we access this information and how often it access us. I read about 40 sites a day through it. Not a lot by some, a terribly large amount to others. Either way if the reader is open all day long it will take all our attention just like email would.

I personally try to only check it twice a day. I find skimming through the Feeds in the morning while I drink my cup of coffee is a great way to ease into the day. Then in the afternoon, around 2 or 3 when my focus seems to wain I take skim through whatever was updated. So lets talk about skimming for a minute.To steal a phrase from Stanley Spadowski's Funhouse, I'm trying to find the marble in the oatmeal this is what skimming does for me. I find the three or four post a day that really interest me and I find relavent. There is some really great content out there in internet land the secret is make sure you're drinking from the garden hose, and not the firehose.

Happy Hunting

Hi Y'all, it's been a while, you know it, I know it, lets move on. I've been reading a lot of blog post lately that have to do with being more productive. There are a whole laundry list of them, zenhabits.net, lifereboot.com, 43folders.com, Tim Ferriss ..etc. Of course I'm aggregating these sites through Google Reader (an amazing time saving tool if it's used correctly if used incorrect, a time vacuum). One of the common threads that I'm seeing with these sites/blogs is that they are helping Common Sense make a comeback.

Now it seems to me that Common Sense and the business world as we know and work in it have very little to do with each other. For example, lets say your have a company policy that says all emails and calls need returned within the business day. This is pretty typical of most places. In itself this is not a bad policy, but what ends up happening is you have Senior staff that expect instant responses to email. Now email is being used as a poor substituted for Instant Messaging (Which is a whole other subject). So now you have your email client open all day long. You have the little outlook window popping up to say hey look at me, and you are living in this world where you are trying work and concentrate with a non-stop distractions of emails popping up. Whether they be legitimate work emails, spam or bacn.  So we've all learned to live in this haze of email clients flashing message in our face like flashing lights and ringing bells in a casino. Well this makes no sense, no sense at all. Well  there are growing number of people are demanding that Common Sense makes a comeback. And you know what, it is.

So lets take my email example. There is tons of material written on how to handle email, but I think none are quite as good as what Merlin Mann is doing. His Inbox Zero concept is brilliant and is something I think everyone could truly use and gain from. I highly suggest that you watch the video as well.

Lets talk about eating habits. Something I've not been very good about as of late. Well Zen Habits, had a great post on this topic. It's called " A 12-step Program to Eating Healthier than ever before". I high suggest reading it, it's well worth the 15 or 20 minutes it takes to read it. The best part about it, is it reminds you of things you already know. Eat more fruit. Eat more vegetables. Eat at home. This is all Common Sense stuff, yet he softly reminds you that you already know it, and gives you a new way to try it. For example Number 6 of the steps is pizza, who doesn't love pizza, I know I do. So check this out.

6. Make pizza instead of ordering. Homemade pizza is the best, and if you haven’t made it yet, you should. The simple way is to get a ready-made whole-wheat crust, although making your own tastes even better. Start with the simple version, though, as you don’t want to make things too difficult. For the simple version, just add some gourmet spaghetti sauce (not Ragu), cut up some veggies (I like tomatoes and mushrooms and spinach and olives, but you can use anything, even potatoes). Brush the veggies with some olive oil. You can add grated cheese or soy cheese if you want, though it’s not necessary. Bake till it looks cooked. Mmmm.
-Exerpt from zenhabit.net

You can't tell me that doesn't sound better than that greasy delivery pizza that they are pushing on Tuesday nights with their 10 pizzas for 20 bucks deal, and it takes the same amount of time.

So to recap, Common Sense is making a comeback....Thank goodness!

Happy Life

Hi, my name is Russell Kelly, I'm happily married, to my Beautiful Wife for 7 years now. I have a step grandson who I lovingly refer to as The Little Boy. We live in Southern California, where we get to enjoy hikes and sunshine.

When I'm not in the office, I enjoy spending time with my family and photography. I'm a "hybrid" photographer in that I shoot both digital and film. I have a photoblog please stop by and take a look.

By day I'm a Sr. Web Developer for Lockheed Federal Credit Union and a Microsoft Certified Professional. In this capacity I get to write .NET applications. Some large, some small but all interesting. Which means I've worked on everything from multiple servers, load balanced transactional systems to AJAX enabled web pages. I've recently started implementing GTD (Getting Things Done) in my day to day work.

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Back to the Blog

An article in the LA Times mentioned the unhealthy air quality today. This is something I've been watching closely. I've not been outside since yesterday morning for a very short time. Where we leave is about 15 miles from the Ontario fires, and south west of the Arrowhead fires, so that smoke is going right through on it's way to the ocean. The article titled "Windblown soot, gas, and dust pose threat", says "Health officials urged the young, the elderly and those with breathing problems to stay indoors until further notice as Southern California's wildfires continued to pollute the air with smoke, gas and dust."

So even if you don't live in the immediate area of any of the fires, take precautions and stay safe. For those of you who do, please at least wear a mask, smoke inhalation even after the fire is out is extremely dangerous.

Stay Safe.

Update: Check out this map from flashearth. It shows the smoke really well.

The reports this morning is that more than 250,000 people have been evacuated from the San Diego area, and more than 1000 homes and business have been lost since Sunday. Here is a map of the fires and the evacuation centers.

Update:
Here is an updated sat image of the fires and the smoke billowing from southern california and the San Diego area.




Stay Safe.

Update: 10/24/2007 10:15am PDT: updated the link to the map, the previous version of the map had stopped being updated due to usage, the new map is from PBS.

Being asthmatic, I play a lot of attention to the weather and natural disasters. Well the fires that started yesterday completely fall into those categories. ABC7 has done a great job of keeping us update on where the fires are and where things are at with them. I was very impressed to see that they've added a mash-up map to let you know where the fires are at, check it out here.



The smoke is very very heavy today, I've stayed inside and close to my air filter. To see the path of the smoke driven by the wind, check out this sat image from NASA.

Stay safe.

Lately I've been thinking and spending quite a little bit of time reading about organization. You see currently at work I'm the only Developer. We lost a great Developer (Ed) to a company that offered him more money and the kind of work that he wanted to do (Could you blame him, I sure couldn't). Our remaining Developer who we affectionately call "Eggman", took a long flight across a big ocean to see his family(I couldn't blame him either). However these two events leave me with a lot of little things to get done that will come in  at rapid succession.

 

So I am changing a few things. First Email, well we all know that there is way to much of it. So a good system for sorting through it is required. With a little simple logic and some Outlook email rules this is fairly easy to accomplish but it does take a change in behavior. First thing I had to change, my Inbox is not my repository for email. Its more of my To-Do list. If thinks in the Inbox can't be accomplished quickly they are moved to the @Action folder. Everything in the action folder is something I am actively working on. If it something that needs read, but isn't as urgent as inbox or @Action folder, it goes in the @Review folder. I've also set up a rule that anything that is address to the company wide email group ( theentirecompany@mycompany.com ) is sent to the @Review folder. The Next folder is the @Snooze folder, items that go in here are in more of the back burner project area. I don't want to forget about them, but they aren't as urgent as the previous folders. I have two other folders that I am using that are new to me for managing my email. I have a @Waiting For folder, which are items in which I am waiting for a response before I can move on, and a @someday box, these are the emails which have good ideas that need a safe place to live until I get to them. I do have to say after several google searches, I of course landed on Scott Hanselman's blog, and these Ideas are from his article ZEB (Zero Email Bounce) and a new Outlook Rule.

So far this system has been working fairly well for me. I have added one more folder, that email tasks that have been finished and need put in to our tracking system are moved too. To make sure I have a put in a record for every completed task. So now not am I getting more things done, it looks like it to my supervisors as well.