Present Perfect

GTD has saved my professional bacon on a number of occasions. There's lots of reasons why this methodology of handling your tasks has fit me well, and I'm sure they're different for different people. For example, one thing that it definitely has helped me with is helping me make good use of those days where I'm lacking energy, creativity, and/or just generally feel too tired to be productive. On those days, I work through tasks strictly by the book, picking those that even in my lower productivity I can manage just as well. In fact, I tend to save those tasks for those days, making sure I don't waste my high energy moments on them.

I know I could do much better at following the system, but it is definitely something that is already paying off in its current form.

One thing I felt I was lacking though was a way to measure my progress in getting through these tasks, as well as my INBOX. I wanted to add a game element to it that would challenge me to stick to the process. Especially the zero INBOX policy is one that is easy to lose on if you let your guard down.

So, in my little universe, gaming means graphing. After some futzing about with scripts that - sadly - go into Evolution's IMAP cache dirs to count mails in inboxes and folders I specifically keep for GTD stuff (apparently evolution python bindings don't allow you to ask Evolution for mails in your folders), as well as grepping my todo.txt (managed by yagtd), and setting up some RRD files and scripts, I now have halfway-decent graphs:

The first one shows my inbox in my two main mail accounts (work and private). The second image shows how many tasks I have in each 'urgency' level (Urgency and Importance are two concepts from Stephen Covey's book that yagtd incorporates into the GTD stuff). Roughly, for me personally, U:5 is 'today', 4 is 'this week', 3 is 'this month', 2 is 'these 3 months', and 1 is 'this year/this life'. 0 is the next life. (I realize that this may be frowned upon by GTD adepts; feel free to share why if you are doing any frowning).

I had to put the second graph on a logarithmic scale to make sense, otherwise the more pressing tasks (U:5) would hardly show up. It's not ideal; I'd prefer the axis to scale differently somehow but I don't know yet how I want them.

Anyway, these scripts give me a nice goal to work for, and some numbers to fight against and help me decide whether I should spend the next weekend slacking or hacking.

On the bad side, this made me realize I have over a 1000 identified open tasks!
On the good side, when I told a friend about this, he said 'See, there's the difference between men and women. If my girlfriend would realize she'd have a 1000 unfinished tasks, she'd go berserk.' Sexist ? Surely. True ? Possibly, statistically speaking. Motivating ? Definitely - the fact that I actually have all these things identified allows me to sleep at night (I can't believe I used to try and keep all this stuff in my head), and I'm convinced I'll never lack for things to do.

GTD has saved my professional bacon on a number of occasions. There's lots of reasons why this methodology of handling your tasks has fit me well, and I'm sure they're...

It went a little something like this.

I wrote a mail to our internal mailing list saying 'if anyone's coming to FOSDEM, I invite you to my place and I'll make moules frites for you.'

I was expecting, oh, I don't know, maybe four or five people.

After that, Pierre, our development manager started negotiating with our CEO to invite all the developers to FOSDEM. And he succeeded. And then the support team wanted to come too.

The result is now there are 14 people coming over for mussels and fries tonight.

This is what 14 kilos of mussels and 7.5 kilos of potatoes look like before preparing.

By the way, if you like mussels, you like programming (especially Python), and you like Barcelona, we are hiring again. (Actually, we also hire people that don't like mussels). You can also come talk to anyone on our team if you happen to be at FOSDEM so you don't have to take my word for how awesome working at Flumotion is. You should be able to recognize them by their shirts.

It went a little something like this. I wrote a mail to our internal mailing list saying 'if anyone's coming to FOSDEM, I invite you to my place and I'll...

when a meeting with our commercial people energizes me more than a meeting with our development people.

Good to swing to the other side - now to find the balance...

when a meeting with our commercial people energizes me more than a meeting with our development people. Good to swing to the other side - now to find the balance...

Arrived last night, IBC starts on Friday and I'm setting the booth up with Pedro today.

Every time I have a hotel reservation for work for some reason the hotel always thinks the room's not paid for yet and ask me for payment. It's a curse.

On the plane I had a craving to go to the cinema later tonight, and as fate would have it the hotel is right across the street from a cinema. So the choice between a movie and a visit to the Red Light District was easy - I went to see Wanted. Mindless action fun, nicely shot, and ultimately forgettable.

Today, waiting for our cases of stuff to arrive. I'm sure they'll show up around 17.00, an hour before the IBC convention center closes.

In a cruel twist of fate, we have the sewer pipe of Akamai's booth that ends up in our booth and goes in a hole in the floor, so we have one floor tile sticking out. That's where we were planning to put our servers. So it goes.

At IBC we'll be demoing our freshly available commercial version of our Flumotion streaming server (we also have our new website online). A big thanks to Johan Dahlin, who is the only person in the world to have been hired by our company twice, and to Murray Cumming, who wrote our new Flumotion manual, which will be available online for the free version soon.

Maybe we should show some Dirac streaming too, since the BBC, David and Christian seem to be here.

Arrived last night, IBC starts on Friday and I'm setting the booth up with Pedro today. Every time I have a hotel reservation for work for some reason the hotel...

Mariette, our office manager ad interim (our previous one left to go translate) has gone on holiday. She left instructions for the new temporary office manager - three pages of information.

One of the paragraphs reads "Every morning process the mails. Open and read everything except bank documents addressed to Thomas Vander Stichele". Apparently I am the only person who considers it wrong and impolite to have my private mail opened. But I find it highly amusing that I warrant special mention in this document...

Mariette, our office manager ad interim (our previous one left to go translate) has gone on holiday. She left instructions for the new temporary office manager - three pages of...