me
I’m pretty busy generally, but this may or may not be a contributing factor to my email response cycle time.
Tag: gtd
Mind Mapping as a GTD Tool
I’ve posted a lot recently about myĀ SharePointĀ development work.
Itās a topic I know quite a bit about (if I do say so myself), but this is not a SharePoint blog and I have no intentions of making it one – itās simply that I blog mostly about my work, of the nine projects and tasks I have on my plate currently five of them have at least some kind of custom SharePoint component to them, and two are full-blown web-apps built on top of SharePoint.
With so much going on how, I hear you ask, do I stay organized and keep on top of things?
(Full disclosure: nobody asked. Iām going to tell you all anyway)
Mind mapping!
I’ve been aware of mind mapping for quite some time, and about a year ago I readĀ a lifehacker articleĀ comparing mind mapping tools. I was interested but I didnāt have a good use-case for them at the time, andĀ I’m not a fan of technology just for technologyās sake.
Whatās changed in the past year is the nature of my work. A year ago a was adhering fairly closely to the title of Business Analyst that youāll see on my business cards – I was involved in a relatively small number of projects at a time, but I was usually only responsible for delivering on a subset of the overall scope.
As my role has evolved, I find myself putting on my project manager shoes much more frequently. I have a larger number of projects, and while I’m ultimately accountable for delivery on all aspects of them, I canāt possibly make myself responsible for every detail or Iād drown in minutiae.
So a few weeks ago I downloadedĀ XMind, asĀ recommended by lifehacker readers, and I fell in love with it almost immediately.
At the centre of my map is a node called āTo Do,ā but thatās probably a bit inaccurate and it speaks to how I thought Iād be using the tool rather than how I actually ended up doing things. Off that I hang projects, initiatives, and tasks, and branching out from those are multiple things.
There are to-do items for myself, often broken down into sub-tasks inĀ a WBS kind of way, questions that need answers, and tasks where I’m waiting on other people. XMind has markers (different types of symbol you can attach to a branch) and I use these to differentiate the types of sub-item I use. I track completion of my own to-do items on an eight point scale, I assign priorities to things, I add notes, and I call drill-down into a view of a single branch in the tree if thatās what I happen to be focussing my attention on at the time.
Thatās all kind of irrelevant, though. The end result is representative of a map of my mind and how I work, and your mind and approach to your work are probably not the same. The point is that the tool is flexible enough to work for you, however you choose to use it.
Regardless, mind mapping helps me keep track of the many things I have going on in a very easy to understand (for me) way. I now have XMind open on my computer more or less all day long, and itās quickly become my go-to productivity tool.
Lessons Learned
Last week I facilitated a “lessons learned” session as part of wrapping a project that I’ve just completed. We gathered a lot of great feedback we can apply to future projects, and a lot of the positive comments around the management of this project were about flexibility.
For some reason, it brought to mind a scene from the movie Broken Arrow.
“This is battle! And battle is a highly fluid situation. You plan on your contingencies, and I have. You keep your initiative, and I will.”
It’s maybe a bit too dramatic to draw too direct a parallel with what I do (my life is not, in fact, an action movie), but the point is certainly transferable between the worlds of nuclear terrorism and project management.
As a project manager you plan. You plan for everything you can think of, and these are often elaborate plans involving resource and people management, procurement, otherwise writing big cheques and spending somebody else’s money, and many other levels of detail. The most important thing you can plan for though is what you’re going to do when the plan falls apart.
You will deviate from your plan somehow. Hopefully it’s not in too big a way, and it may even be to everybody’s advantage to do so. For my project there was no show-stopping issue, just handful of small ones and a couple of details we didn’t foresee.
The positive feedback about the flexibility of the project and the project team was because we had a plan for our plans falling through.
Multitasking
It’s a common belief that women are better multitaskers than men, although I don’t know that’s really true.
For one, for every study (like the one reported on in the link above) that says they are, there are two that say it isn’t. More to the point though, I don’t actually believe that true multitasking exists.
You may well be able to two things at the same time, like talking on the phone while you drive, but I don’t believe anybody has the capacity to think about two things at once. That’s why people talking on the phone while they drive smash into things so often.
Multitasking as we know it, then, is all about switching your brain quickly from one train of thought to another in much the same way as a computer presents the illusion of multitasking by running two things at once. And I like to think I’m pretty good at it. Usually.
Last week I went to work on something I was especially excited about. There was a lot of effort involved, but I got two weeks worth of work done in five and a half days only because I was so enthusiastic about what I was doing – and as a result I didn’t really work on anything else.
So what’s my point? If you’re waiting for the next post in my SharePoint development series then that’s why you’re still waiting. I have some other post topics I have vague plans for too, but for the time being you’ll just have to wait some more. I have work I should have done last week to catch up on.
Google Doodle Honors Grace Hopper, Early Computer Scientist
Today’s Google Doodle honours Grace Hopper, computer scientist, discoverer of the first computer “bug,” and source of one of my personal favourite quotes:
“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission”
Truth. I might never get anything done without employing that kind of philosophy.