Icograda Design Week
“Icograda Design Week in Seattle is an international forum for discussion about the role of design in the face of incredible change in the world.” Wow, I’d love to participate in this. Link.
The Post-Summit Blues, or IA Dissociative Identity Disorder
The IA Summit’s come and gone. Now that I’m fully awake (after close to 36 hours of travelling, and therefore little sleep), I can reflect a bit on what I saw / heard, and how I can carry some of it into my day-to-day work.
First off, how wonderful it is to see my good friends in this community. These are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met; it is a privilege to be able to interact and learn from them. It always saddens me to only be able to engage them in person only once or twice a year. (The mailing lists are such a poor substitute to a nice dinner!)
Last year I returned from the Summit physically ill, and simultaneously ecstatic and demoralized. As with this year’s gathering, last year’s Summit gave me more intellectual stimulation than the aggregate of all my other professional interactions throughout the year. I wanted more, yet was painfully aware that life demanded that I get back to business ASAP.
You see, there are two Jorges. The first one is passionate about IA, tries to participate in the international IA community via mailing lists, blog posts, summits, retreats, etc., and learns from some of the smartest people working in this profession. (This Jorge’s mother tongue is English.)
The second Jorge runs a web shop in a small developing country, and struggles to apply Jorge #1’s skills in a Spanish-speaking market where for the most part customers don’t understand, want—and perhaps even need—most of this stuff. (I do get to sneak a lot of it in; I try to avoid the term “guerilla IA” for fear of being held up at the US border. 
)
Intellectually and spiritually, I like Jorge #1 better. However, it is Jorge #2 that puts bread on the table and pays for Jorge #1 to be able to visit places like Vancouver and (hopefully) Las Vegas. Hence, the post-Summit blues: I go back to playing Jorge #2 full-time after a week of being Jorge #1 in person! (“I’m not a real IA—but I play one on TV!”) The challenge is having Jorge #1 help Jorge #2 grow as a professional in an environment that is not as challenging—and where perhaps he can’t contribute as much—as he would like.
That said, this year’s Summit was different. For one thing, I found out that I’m not the only one who’s facing this situation. For another, I’ve realized that it’s possible my current milieu provides opportunities and challenges yet unknown to folks working in other, more developed, parts of the world. My post-Summit challenge this year: to have both Jorges stretch, perhaps to meet somewhere in the middle.
IA Summit 2006
In Vancouver for the IA Summit. It’s great be able to share a glass of wine with the great folks from around the world that make up this community.
Judging from the size of the room where David Weinberger is getting ready to deliver his keynote in, this is going to be a large Summit—expectations are high! (According to Dennis, attendance is 25% higher than last year’s Summit!)
Tips for implementing GTD with Entourage, part 1
Entourage, Microsoft’s alternative to Outlook for the Mac, is a great PIM. The 2004 version introduced a feature called “Project Center” that also makes it a great tool for implementing GTD-type organization schemes. I’ve tried out many different organization apps, from web-based tools such as Backpack to KGTD and Apple’s bundled tools (Mail.app, iCal, etc.) However, I always come back to Entourage: its integration of email, calendar, to-dos, contacts, and projects, works very well for me.
There is a great introduction to GTD in Entourage over on Slacker Manager, so I won’t do that here. Over time I’ve developed a few tips and habits that have made me a better user of Entourage, and, as a result, a more productive person. It is these tips that I will share with you here.
-more->
Projects and Categories
GTD hinges on effectively managing lists: lists of projects, lists of next actions, etc. Most of the information that resides in Entourage can also be represented as lists: lists of projects, lists of tasks, lists of emails in your inbox, etc. The key to effectively managing these lists is to narrow them down (“focus” them) to fit the task at hand.
In GTD parlance, you want to focus based on two dimensions: context and project. Context is the “where” and “when” of an activity. For example, you can only answer email when you’re at a computer, preferably one that has internet access. The project dimension, on the other hand, is the “what” and “why” of an item. What is is leading towards? What is the desired outcome? Why are you doing this? A project view should include all of the information related to a particular project and nothing else; when you focus on the project dimension you do not want to be distracted by items that don’t contribute to it.
Entourage provides two metadata lists that can help manage these two dimensions: “Categories” and “Projects”. Every item in Entourage—be it an email message, a contact, a task, or an appointment—can be assigned to one or more categories and / or projects. This functionality is very powerful, but it depends on you—the user—being disciplined about tagging items. It’s therefore very important to set up the right category and project lists, and to consistently tag relevant items with both categories and projects. I try to assign a a project to most emails, and a category and project to every task. (Some tasks are one-offs and probably don’t require a project. However, there is no reason why a task shouldn’t have a context.) However, consistent tagging will not happen if it becomes a chore… after all, what you’re trying to do is to be more productive, not to play around with lists all day. One way to make things as easy as possible is to keep your lists—especially your projects list—organized.
Color-code and alphabetize your lists
There are many ways of assigning projects and categories to an item; the fastest for me are the “Categories” and “Projects” dropdowns that appear in most Entourage screens. Although the selection process can be done quite fast, and quickly becomes second nature, I find that efficiency depends on how many items you have on these dropdowns and how they are organized.
My categories list is not too long—it includes the usual contexts such as @phone, @computer, @email, etc.—so selecting the right one is not much of a hassle. I color code these categories so that they are loosely grouped. (For example, all computer-related activities are blue.)
The project list is another matter; it can include quite a few items, many of which have long names. This can make it more difficult to assign a project to every item on the fly. The best solution I’ve found to keeping this list useable is to organize it clearly; I do this by separating and color-coding projects by “class” based on what area of work they are related to. I have three such classes of projects:
- Client projects are any work that I’ve been hired to do for a third party. I color these projects blue, and simply name them after the project.
- Internal projects are projects that are non-paying, but necessary for the functioning of BootStudio. I precede the name of these projects with a plus sign (for example: ”+ bootstudio – Request new land lines”), which makes them all show up first on the list. (The project list is ordered alphabetically.) I also color them orange, which is the BootStudio color.
- Professional development projects are those that I work on even though I won’t get paid for them, but that somehow help me develop professionally. When I edit an article for Boxes and Arrows, or work on a new design for this site, it goes on this list. I precede the names of these projects with an “xxx” to have them show up at the end of the list, and color them green (because they help “renew” me).
The end result is a project list that clearly groups the internal projects first, in a block of orange, followed by client projects, in blue, and professional development projects, in green. This visual grouping helps me narrow down the selection so that I can get to the project I’m looking for much more quickly.
It’s worth noting that colors show up in the Project Center and in the Projects dropdown menu at the top right of every screen, but not in the contextual right click menu that appears on items. Because of this, I don’t use the contextual menu much. However, the alphabetizing trick works in every list, and that helps organize things everywhere.
Next in this series, I will cover tips for using the Project Center for GTD weekly reviews. In the meantime, I welcome your feedback. Do you use Entourage? Are there any tips / techniques you’d like to share with the rest of us?
jarango.com v14
Time for a theme refresh. Notes on the new design:
- Comments and trackbacks are now re-enabled. I’m requiring Typepad authentication for the time being, and am going to be selectively enabling the comments per post. Let’s see how it goes.
- Simplified navigation and visuals.
- Lastly, but most significantly: I’ve decided to discontinue the Spanish section of this site. jarango.com has been bilingual since 1999, but over the past two years most of my writing for the site has been in English. It’s become too much trouble to keep both sites working in parallel, and I find this has hampered my posting frequency in both languages. More on this in a future post. (I’m keeping the old Spanish content online for archival purposes.)
In an interview last year, I said that this site’s redesign would be a radical departure from previous versions. If you’ve been here before, you’ll note that this is not the case with this iteration; page and site structure are very similar to what they’ve been over the past couple of years. Instead of focusing on a major redesign at this point, I’d like to work on producing more content.
