Quote:
Originally Posted by Milt Schmidt
I try to do as much as possible in plain text, that's the thing that makes the biggest difference for me. I use
http://todotxt.com/ |
I am a huge proponent of plain text. For the life of me, I don't understand why more business people are against it. The amount of time people spend formating internal company .doc files is a huge waste of time. Another thing, you can't use a diff program to compare previous versions of docs, excel and powerpoint (although excel is probably one place where it may be the only option depending on your needs).
If you want to pretty up your text files, consider using markdown. My favourite text editor right now is sublime. Finally made the switch from notepad2 after about six years of using that one.
Meetings: If I am running the meeting I will put the agenda on the white board prior to it starting. It is also on the invite. I write down key decisions and action items with the name of the person actioned and the due date on the white board as the meeting progresses. If we get into something technical or interesting business rules etc come up, that too will be whiteboarded. It is a good way to get consensus on these things and to ensure that what was said was understood. I ask everyone if photos of the whiteboard will suffice for the meeting minutes. Most of the times, especially for internal meetings, no one has an issue with it. I'll store the photos in our source control in a folder that names the meeting date and the title of the meeting. I send the photos out in the follow up email. Saves a lot of time.
This reminded me, I forgot to mention my most powerful weapon. Slickrun - opens any program on your machine. I have a slew of customizations for it. One of them is to type the letter t and then anything that follows gets appended to my todo list. This helps me to not get distracted when something from another project or task pops into my head. I can put it aside very quickly.
Hard Technical problems: get up and walk away from your computer if you are stuck. Take a break, go for a walk, go help somebody with something else. Talk it out with someone competent. You have to do something to take your mind off it. Usually this lets your subconcious work on it and a different angle will force its way back into your brain. Sleeping on hard problems is very effective too. I usually try to start hard tasks that take about a day at noon. I get a basic idea and approach worked out and then go home. Over the evening and especially the next morning, new ideas will surface that really improve the way I solved it.