An online notebook
Dave Great talk here from the Google Atmosphere conference by Rachel Miller, author of the excellent All Things IC blog.
She talks about the ways social is being used within organisations to transform the way organisations communicate and get stuff done.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lIazuTFOz0&w=560&h=315]
Well worth a watch!
I published a post today on the Department of Health’s Digital Health blog about the work I am doing there building digital capability across the organisation
Here’s a quick snippet:
To my mind there needs to be a three pronged approach to developing an organisation to help it become truly digitally enabled. Those prongs are:
- Strategy – an approach to digital technology and culture that demonstrates a thorough understanding of the opportunities and the risks
- Leadership – encouragement and permission from the top of the organisation that digital tools are important and that appropriate access and learning opportunities are provided
- Capability – confidence, comfort and skills throughout the organisation so that staff can make the most of the opportunities and avoid those pesky risks
The department has a digital strategy in place, and a digital leadership coaching programme is currently ongoing. I’ll leave it to others to blog about those. My job is developing our network of digital champions, who are a key part of our means of developing capability throughout DH.
So who are these champions, and what do they actually do – and why are they doing it?
The champions are enthusiasts for working digitally. This doesn’t mean they have to be experts in any particular technology, rather that they embody the digital mindset of curiosity, creativity and cooperation. In other words, they don’t need to know all the answers, but they do need to have an idea of how to find them.
Do me a favour and go and read the whole thing.
WorkSmart’s digital strategy workshop will help you make this sort of thing happen in your organisation.
I’ve just come across this post from Owen Barder, from back in 2012, providing his tips on managing email a bit more effectively.
Owen has a triage system for email which is based on four D’s:
- Deal with it –
If I can deal with an email in less than four or five minutes, I do so right away. For example, some emails only need a quick, one-line reply. It is better to do this right away than to have to deal with email again later.- Defer it –
There are some tasks which will take longer than five minutes, or which cannot be dealt with immediately because they require additional information or some action by someone else. These I tag with the date on which I want to deal with them – either today or on some future date. That gets the email out of my inbox and ensures that I’ll be reminded of it again when I need to come back to it.- Delegate it –
If I am going to delegate a task, I try to do so immediately when I am triaging emails. That way I can give as much time as possible to whoever I am asking to do the job. I usually then defer the original incoming email to the time that a response is due. When that email reappears in my inbox, it reminds me to check that it has been dealt with.- Delete or file –
If an email does not require any action, but I want to keep it to refer to later, I either delete it or (more usually) file it.
Owen runs through this process only three or four times a day, and has switched off any realtime notifications of new email, so it doesn’t cause an interruption.
Another key part of Owen’s workflow is the use of a folder called ‘Today’ where all the email that needs to be actioned on the current day is kept.
Owen lists the reasons why this system works for him:
- A trusted ‘to do’ list –
There are few things more uncomfortable than the feeling that you may have forgotten to do something. It is very stressful trying to keep everything in your head at once, and it makes it difficult to concentrate on the thing you are working on at the moment. We need to park those tasks somewhere and be confident that they will come back to us in good time to handle them. By putting a particular date on each email, I can get the email out of my ‘inbox’ and off my desk, secure in the knowledge that it will reappear on my screen on the day I need to do something about it.- Zero inbox –
For many of us, it is important to keep an eye on our inbox, and to deal with urgent emails as they arrive. But if our inbox is also our to-do list (and, in some cases, a filing cabinet), this means that every time we turn to our inbox, we are also confronted with an unsorted list of all the things we need to do. With the triage system, the inbox contains only recently arrived, unread emails. There is something very satisfying about having a generally empty inbox.- Avoid reading emails again and again –
Emails used to sit in my inbox for weeks – I wanted to do something about them, but I was not yet ready or they were not yet urgent enough. I would read them again and again – sometimes several times a day – to check what was important or approaching a deadline. With the triage system, I read each email when it comes in. Many of them I deal with there an then; the others are put aside until the day that I have designated to handle it. I still read many emails too many times, but it is much less often than it used to be.- Create space for today –
Because I live mostly in my ‘Today’ box, not my inbox, I have more time to concentrate on the work that I should be doing. I do not anxiously monitor incoming emails, because I know I will look at those later in the day.
Hopefully there are some useful tips in here that others can pick up for your own email productivity and workflow.
What’s your preferred system?
Am currently reading, and very much enjoying Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator.
It’s basically lots of interviews with founders of companies that were once startups about what life was like in the early days.
The book’s blurb sells it well:
Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders…tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
It’s an impressive list of people, too, including:
There loads more too. What I like is the mix of new digital startups and some stories from earlier in the story of the technology based startup, particularly around the time of the birth of the personal computer and software industry.
Funnily enough, as I started typing this post, I got notification that Tim Dobson had written a book review post of this very tome! It’s well worth a read through his detailed notes, but his concluding paragraph sums the whole book up well:
As a book, it comes across as well written, and is full of genuinely interesting interviews. If you’re interested in the history, or how some of these companies and startups came into existence, or you’re interested in learning what people feel they did right… and wrong, then have a read through it.
What is always interesting to think about when reading this type of material is what those of us working in larger organisations can learn from startup culture and the way these scrappy little companies work.
A common theme of Founders at Work is the role that luck can play in the success of a startup. However, equally important is determination – a refusal to accept failure – and linked to that, flexibility – so when one route looks like it won’t work, pick another and have another go.
I like to use plain text when I can. Plain text is just text without any formatting, which you edit with an app called a text editor, like Notepad on Windows or TextWrangler on a Mac. It’s pretty much a universal format – it can be opened and edited on pretty much any system or hardware you can think of.
One of the things that makes a simple plain text file useful is the ability to ‘mark up’ text within the document.
Markup languages have been around a long time. Perhaps the most famous one is HTML, one of the foundations of the web. An HTML file in reality is just plain text, with the use of HTML tags to mark up how bits of the document should behave – such as formatting and linking to other pages, for example.
Another example and one I use a lot is Markdown, a simple markup language for use in creating documents of all kinds. By simply using characters such as the hash sign (#), asterisks (*) and so on, a document can be made to include italic and bold text, headings at various sizes and bulleted lists, for example.
The key thing is that the document format can be used on pretty much any device and in any application. It’s just plain text, after all. The use of the markup language however enables that document to do more interesting things.
What’s more, you don’t have to be a developer or anything to start your own markup based project. You just need to define a few rules, and get going.
I’ve just started playing with another great example of this. It’s called todo.txt and is a way of managing a todo list in a plain text file.
The rules are straightforward. Each task exists on a single line of text. Markup in that line can add information about the task, so for instance a word following a + sign is the name of the project that task belongs to (allowing you to group tasks by project, for example). You can also add a context to a task by following the @ sign with a word. Priorities can be added to tasks by using (A), (B) and so on to the beginning of the line.
Here’s an example of what a todo list looks like:
(A) Call Mom @Phone +Family
(A) Schedule annual checkup +Health
(B) Outline chapter 5 +Novel @Computer
(C) Add cover sheets @Office +TPSReports
Plan backyard herb garden @Home
Pick up milk @GroceryStore
Research self-publishing services +Novel @Computer
x Download Todo.txt mobile app @Phone
You could just manage your list in the plain text file using an editor – and many people do. However, because of the open nature of the format, other options are possible.
First, saving your todo list text file in a service like Dropbox makes it available across the web, so you can pick it up and edit it across many devices, which is helpful.
Even better, there are apps for mobile devices to help you manage your todo list. These present your todo list as a more traditional task management app would – but all the time they are just updating the text file using the markup rules.
This means all your tasks aren’t locked up in some database you’ll never get access to. You can take your text file todo list away any time you like and manage it in a different way.
As well as being a neat hack, todo.txt makes me wonder what other applications could be based on the simplicity of a plain text file and a few markup rules.
Any suggestions?