Tired of ending my workdays wondering what the hell I’d done why I couldn’t even manage to get one of the three things on list for the day completed I decided to take action.

Much of my career has been in tech startups, particularly companies providing various types of Internet services, so I’ve dealt with many customer complaints and done quite a bit of troubleshooting and repair.  So on any problem I would quickly push aside emotional evaluations or irrelevant details to get to and repair the root of the matter.  So when I finally recognized that some of my project completion issues were a problem like any other to be understood and solved by uncovering the relevant data.  I realized I just had to find a way to see exactly what I am doing, because I knew I was doing valuable work for my company, but just mostly not what I had intended at the outset of the day or week.

In my typical fashion I decided I would write a software tool that would be quick and easy to enter tasks, what job that task was related to and how long I’d spent on the task.  Then I realized I don’t have time to do my job every day let alone write some other tool, and this seems like one of those tools that some smart web 2.0 style kids would have built ages ago.  So I Googled time tracking and came up with toggl.com.  It was everything I wanted, from very quick task entry, pie charts showing percentage of time on each project and for my purposes it was free, as I’m not trying to use it to bill clients.

I’ve been using it now consistently for 3 weeks.  I decided for “Project” I wouldn’t try to track my time on projects in the GTD style, but rather against what David Allen calls your Area’s of Responsibility, or in other words the big bullet points in your job description.  After 3 weeks I have 14 different “Projects” on the list and an able to see at a glance where I’m choosing to spend my time.  It has helped me emotionally in seeing that these things are necessary for accomplishing my job, and to be able to block out time for areas that need extra attention, and to know that means that other slices of the pie will suffer and I must account for that.  Also for giving me a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day and a way to sum up what I’ve done.

Also it’s a great tool for driving conversations with my employer.  ”Hey, I’m the only person in the company working on X, that means if you want me to do more of it or move it faster you’ll need to help me obtain resources or reset expectations for W, Y and Z.”

As far as using it, I’ve not spent more than 15 minutes in a day on it.  I’ve tried before to track my tasks but have always failed.  Knowing that I went in determined to record only essentials but get a complete picture of the day.  So I don’t record every mundane task but will record something as small as 10 minutes if it’s on a job that I think will add up over time.  So I’ll typically record somewhere between 5 and 20 tasks on it in a day and be able to then get the perspective I need on my work to make longer range plans and decisions.

A tweet or facebook status update was too short and unformatted to capture this and I had to write it immediately.

Michelle was singing to the girls after the most packed day at Disney. (started at Animal Kingdom around 9:30 and finally got back to the Pop Century resort at 10:50 after seeing Fantasmic).

Ashley stops Michelle singing saying, “Wait! You forgot to put Minnie in my song.”

Michelle: “I put her in, I said Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy and Pluto”

Ashley: “Oh! I thought you meant Pluto the planet.”

Allison: (immediately and with obvious exasperation) Ash, Pluto’s not even a planet!”

Allison sums up this beautiful day.

Quite a robust urinal apparatus. Seen at Stockton College at the
Gaelic Storm concert.

Listening to Leonard Peikoff’s podcast #83 I really enjoyed the closing of his answer to someone who wrote to him, essentially, I agree with many of the principles of Objectivism but disagree with Ayn Rand on two ideas (I think it was architecture as art and something to do with her view on women), am I still an Objectivist?

He said:

So I hope you don’t think of: this and this and this is required for [Objectivism] … I wouldn’t even think about what’s required for Objectivism.

Just think about “what’s true?” And then if Objectivists don’t believe it, it’s tough on them. You could say, Objectivism is good but it has this mistake.

You can’t think, with the idea that the answers are in the back of the book given by Ayn Rand.

Catching up on some of my reading I came across an analysis of a Steve Jobs interview in Forbes. I agree with the analysis especially on Diana’s last point. To succeed you hire the best, the most resourceful people you can find and give them goals to accomplish. You don’t go hunting for those who you think will strictly obey your rules.

To clarify, my point is not to discourage the use of checklists or standard ways of handling requests. Standard processes in handling repetitive tasks are very important not only when multiple members of a team are working together, but to avoid mistakes when doing infrequent or tedious work. It’s the way the exceptions to this checklist are handled that separates the followers from achievers.

Working in small startups most of my career has made the difference between these two types of employees stark and easy to spot. One focuses on what they are supposed to do, the other wants to know what they are trying to accomplish.

If I understood the job well enough to write strict rules I’d just write software to do it, and not waste time recruiting or interviewing. This is the error the big service companies make when they put a 300 layer voice recognition system between you and their customer service reps.

I’ve been using MobileMe to keep some things, including calendar, in sync between my work’s iMac, my macbook and my iPhone for over a year. Generally I’ve been pleased, but after upgrading my phone to 3.1 and my iMac to Snow Leopard I’ve encountered a very irritating problem where my “accounts” in the calendar on my phone had duplicated and seemed to spawn multiple constant synchronization threads, to the detriment of my using the phone or having the battery not drain.

After screwing around with it today and finally getting some live chat help from the MobileMe support site I figured out how to clean it up and what is causing it. First the cause is the subscribed calendars I have on my desktop iCal. I have one calendar, but I subscribed to a handful of other calendars so I could quickly look at what a few other persons of interest were up to. I’ve had it this way a long time, but it was just during the last few days I noticed I could see the subscribed calendars on my iPhone. And then everything went wrong, and for every one subscribed calendar I had I ended up with a new calendar account.

The fix was found partially through reading this article the MobileMe support chat rep sent me, iPhone/iPod touch: Resolving duplicates and removing all contacts/calendars/bookmarks with MobileMe or Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, and having the problem resurface once I had “fixed” it once.

First turn off “Push” on my phone, then in iCal remove all subscribed calendars and sync it to MobileMe, this is only a minor annoyance for me as they are all google calendars and I can view them in that interface. And then on the phone toggle the calendar sync setting for the MobileMe account from on to off selecting to “delete” the calendar data from the phone each time, until finally left with a single account.

If I knew an easy way to report this bug to Apple I would, but I wasted enough time on it now and don’t want to go hunting for a way to tell them.

I recently had a shock when my children’s pediatrician announced she was closing her office. We love this doctor, she helped us through scary times and was always there with answers when we had medical questions or even seeking general advice about our children.

She is closing her practice for financial reasons and those who know the philosophy I follow may assume I am going to blame the government or ObamaCare for this. Well I cannot, I don’t have enough information to make that judgement in her circumstance. But I do have two points I’d like to make.

First if the government makes further incursions into healthcare as is proposed under ObamaCare which is currently embodied in the so called Baucus plan physicians will quit or close their practices, they’ve said so (I’ll provide a link later).

Second, on a recent trip to get our daughters a flu vaccine, our pediatrician — upon first facing my wife since making her announcement to close her practice — asked her, “please don’t yell at me.” My wife was shocked, we were of course both saddened to hear she was closing but we would never berate her for it. I was appalled to learn that other parents thought they were right to yell and insult her for a decision that she made which was obviously painful for her. I think the idea that makes people think they were right to yell at this woman is very closely related to the idea that makes them think they are right to force the doctors, insurance companies and ultimately their neighbors to provide healthcare under government coercion. The idea is that the sick are entitled to some sort of medical treatment above all other considerations including who has to go broke or more importantly who has to be forced under threat of violence to provide it.

This all came to mind when I read Dr. Paul Hsieh’s most recent, and quite excellent, op-ed published at Pajamas Media, titled Is Your Doctor getting ready to Quit? I recommend everybody read this as the proposed legislation will impact them.

If you are genuinely interested in the morality and practicality of so called Universal Healthcare — and not just partisan bickering or blatant lies — The Objective Standard has made several of Dr. Hsieh’s other articles on the subject available to read online for free:

• Moral Health Care vs. “Universal Health Care”
• Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America
• How the Freedom to Contract Protects Insurability

I like to think about things. I can spend hours trying to find the right way to solve any problem from serious to silly. This is one of the reasons I’ll let myself get caught up in an email black hole. As I was this morning. Responding to or dealing with the tasks inside each email like it’s the only thing in the world to work on is extremely silly as it takes the email and any embedded tasks completely out of context.

So I am writing this to remind myself, that email isn’t my job, it’s a tool that is crucial in the small part of my job that has to do with communicating with others. And to turn Strict Filtering back on in front of the tasks I choose to work on. Also the strict separation between doing the tasks embedded in my inbox and the task that is processing my inbox.

It really shouldn’t take me more than 15 minutes to empty the email inbox. I should rifle through each message spending about 30 seconds to read, decide if it’s actionable, what I’m going to do about it and file the action reminder appropriately. If it’s an email that is longer than 30 seconds to ready, I can decide if I am ever going to read it and file the reminder to read it somewhere.

I’m in four fantasy football leagues this year.

One is the real deal, the league I’ve been in with my wife for what seems like 3 or so years every year, but undoubtedly it’s been at least 7 years, the TMCFL run by my brother, on a site that is getting increasingly crappy since being acquired by an NBC Sports affiliate.

The other is the John Galt League, where I am the acting commisioner, brought together by the common fact that we all are fans of Diana Hsieh’s blog NoodleFood.

I also have played in Ryan Grier’s league for the past few years where I tend to be terrible.

And finally as always I picked up a Yahoo public league in order to practice drafting before the TMCFL, although given the awesomeness of the ESPN mock drafts I may stop that after this year.

I am currently fantasizing the fame, fortune and prestige of winning both the JGL and the TMCFL as I watched my Eagles whup an overmatched Panthers and noticed my top pick in both of those leagues, Adrian Peterson, racking up the points. I am now convinced that he will score at least 3 touchdowns every week and I will dominate all of the competition.

Stay tuned for too frequent updates of my fantasy prowess or complete silence if my team collapses into disarray.