A visual quick reference for moving around a buffer in Emacs.

Coincidentally both in my J-O-B and for a personal project I’ve been doing a little bit of development again recently. I’m not a software developer and spent only a year at the very begining of my career being one. I’m very much the hobyist here so it’s both fun and frustrating to pick it up again.

One of the minor irritations each time is how much EMACS I’ve forgotten. I’m still in the process of reading ‘The Back of the Napkin’ but this seemed like an opportunity to put my new ‘visual thinking’ skills to the test and see if I could make some EMACS commands stick in my swiss-cheese brain.

I’ve just started reading The Back of the Napkin which is apparently about Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, I’m interested in how this can improve my effectiveness so before I get too far with the book I thought it might be worth documenting what I have so far. Basically a personal short hand for taking notes. Not exactly a visual vocabulary for sure but it will be interesting to contrast this with where I end up after reading the book.

Like most people, this has evolved over time for taking notes in meetings, training, when reading, etc. I first noted this down when I covered it in some training I did on effective meetings a long time ago. The image below shows the key aspects of my key for note taking, mostly applicable to meetings. The key objective, of course, is to make sure I end up with a record of who, will do what, by when and also note informational items. All done in such a way that it’s easily extracted later (consistency being key here).

The key then looks like this…

An example of this in use might look like this…

For those that are using them here are the updated 2010 Task / Goal planner templates:

• Weekly Goal Planner
• Daily Task Planner

If you are not familiar then these are described in the EffectivenessSeries.

As the astute amongst you may have noticed I’ve stopped doing weekly reports. A lot has happened since then, I’m working again, we’ve been on a fab holiday, I’ve read a bunch of books and lots more besides. So you can look forward to some interesting updates over the coming weeks, as time permits. For now, I think an explanation about weekly reports is required.

When I published the Effectiveness Series all of the other ideas where tried and tested, the publishing of Weekly Reports was a new idea that, as I stated at the time, I was trying out.

Well I did try it out and while there is a lot to recommend it, I’ve decided against using to going forward. My reasons are thus…

• It didn’t increase my effectiveness. I thought publishing the weekly report would add some gravity to the weekly review and my progress towards my goals. It didn’t. I think that I’m accountable enough to myself and being accountable to nobody-in-particular by publishing didn’t really add anything.

Additionally…

• Some things that would have made nice little short blog posts ended up as line items in the report and then didn’t seem worth a post. So the net effective on blog content seemed negative.
• What I was working on didn’t really lend itself to weekly status updates to the wider world. Either through being personal, actually confidential or simply long timeline stuff that just wasn’t interesting at weekly level.
• I’m now working again and, sadly, that means progress on non-work activities will slow, making it even more difficult to have something meaningful to talk about on a weekly basis.
• While I did get comments, mails and calls in response to the weekly reports, the interactivity doesn’t add enough to really make it worth doing.

So there you go.

This is my brief review of The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, posted to the PMBA Forums.

4-Hour Work Week Cover

I chose to read The 4-Hour Work Week at this point for some specific reasons, beyond the mere fact that it is a PMBA text. I’d just quit my job, moved to a new country and was looking to start a fresh, not with my own business at this stage but with a new ‘corporate’ job. I was not disappointed by the choice to read this book, now.

The greatest value from the book for me was further proof behind the idea that there is another way, beyond the regular approach to corporate life, and that it’s achievable. I found that in this respect the book was inspiring and instructional.

There are some real gems in the book regarding personal productivity, Timothy Ferris has taken this to quite some extremes but there is a lot of food for thought in the book regarding virtual personal assistance, outsourcing, managing inputs, prioritisation of your life goals and more.

The book is organised such that if you want to follow the Timothy’s path fairly closely then it’s a step-by-step how-to, this was done with out detracting from it’s readability by someone taking another route.

I found that the specific ideas around what your business might do or how to go about achieving it (roughly the middle part of the book) not always relevant to my situation or likely projects. It steered dangerously close to ‘get rich quick schemes’ at times which left me a little cold. For me the passing references to ‘information products’ were closer to my likely projects and would have made for more pertinent examples that were, shall we say, for business ventures with more noble aims.

Again, the greatest value of the book was that he promotes an approach to life, and your happiness in it, which resonated with me in quite a profound way. Beyond that there was a lot of practical advice for managing your life and your business in such a way as to maximise your time, hopefully for more fun and happiness.

An enjoyable and useful read. The book is backed up by a great web site with extra material, surely a must nowadays.

Headlines

• Lots of effort in looking for work, as you would expect.
• Ran with the Prague Hash for the first time.

Wealth / Career

• Job Hunting - Good progress on looking for work, meeting with an agency and a few concrete applications made.
• Xing – Created a profile on Xing (a bit like LinkedIn) following a recommendation from a friend that it was more prevalent in Europe. Unconvinced about the platform so far.

Skills / Personal Growth

• Toastmasters - attended and spoke.
• Czech – started labelling everything the apartment, need those nouns.
• Personal Effectiveness Blog Posts - Finished posting this series.
• Started reading and am really enjoying The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss (a PMBA book).

Health / Fitness

• Running – Followed the marathon training plan, though the run with Even If It Rains was cancelled, the name of the club being Even If It Rains, not Even If I’m In Danger Of Being Struck By Lightening.

Enjoyment

• Ran with the Prague Hash House Harriers for the first time. Jolly good fun and a nice run to boot.
• Reading Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami.

This is the sixth post in a series on Personal Effectiveness, if you want to start from the beginning start here or you view all posts in the series here.

I’ve used weekly highlight reports for work for some time, sometimes submitting them to a manager, sometimes just for my own purposes, they will vary based on the nature of the work but basically include:

• Headlines
• For each project:
  • RAG Status
  • Actions completed
  • Actions planned (inc dates)
• Issues

I think it’s an important reflective step, even if you are not required to do it. I do it before or during my weekly review.

More recently I’ve been experimenting with the idea of doing a weekly report for personal projects and posting it to this blog. You can view them here. I’ve used the categories from the Personal MBA’s Personal Master Plan goal setting advice for the weekly reports, minus relationships (which seemed inappropriate) and with the addition of headlines borrowed from the highlight report above.

• Headlines
• Wealth / Career
• Skills / Personal Growth
• Health / Fitness
• Relationships
• Enjoyment

You may not wish to post it to a blog but it is something that’s worth doing, even if you just save it somewhere or email it to your partner.

Headlines

• Lots of effort in looking for work, as you would expect.
• Good progress on studying Czech this week, helped by a very pleasant and sunny afternoon in the park (and a very patient teacher).

Wealth / Career

• Job Hunting - Yes. Did that. There is certainly no shortage of things I’m interested in across a range of roles / industries.
• LinkedIn – Spent some time looking at how to get the most out of this for both me and my contacts. I’m working on recommendations for some of the people I’ve enjoyed working with over the last few years.
• Designed and ordered new personal cards.

Skills / Personal Growth

• Toastmasters - attended and took a role (somewhat unexpectedly) in a meeting.
• Czech – Little bit of revision to the system I’m using with my Teach Yourself Czech and some good effort on this. Post to come one this.
• Personal Effectiveness Blog Posts - Continued posting this series, it’s even attracted comments which are pretty rare around here these days.
• LibraryThing – sorted out my LibraryThing account, inspired by some clever stuff I’ve read about how other people are using either LibraryThing or GoodReads. Post to follow, can’t finish the process at the moment as most of my books are on the high seas.
• Books – Ordered some more Personal MBA books from Amazon (thanks for the voucher L+M) and discovered a great book shop (Shakespeare & Sons) near our house.

Health / Fitness

• 2 Long Runs – The week started well with two good long runs but then petered out due to an insidious cold.
• Even If It Rains – Week two of our nascent imported from China running club, great fun, lots of ideas.

Enjoyment

• Bought, listened to and very much enjoyed – AfterQuake music by / for the victims of last year’s Sichuan, China earthquake. Musically it stands up on it’s own and it’s for a very good cause so go and buy it now.
• Watched – Ray Anderson give an inspiring and down-right encouraging TED talk on how his old-world business is heading towards it’s zero-impact environmental goal.
• Watched – TED talks from Dan Ariely on the flaws in our cognitive limitations (i.e. we’re all dumb) and testing our intuition and the bugs in our moral code.
• Read – ChangeThis Manifesto from Keith Ferrazzi (Never Eat Alone) about ‘lifeline’ relationships that can help you become the best you can be. Moved to action by this one.

I also enjoyed: ChangeThis:CreativeElegance; TED:Mary Roach:Orgasm; a book written by a friend; RadioThreeSixty; studying in the sunshine and much, much more.

Studying in the Park

This is the fifth post in a series on Personal Effectiveness, if you want to start from the beginning start here or you view all posts in the series here.

Where my system deviates a little, in implementation but not in principal, from the Personal MBA’s Personal Master Plan is at the weekly level. I found that using BackPack or any other online system was too cumbersome for me on a weekly level. What I wanted was a form on my desk, on a single side of A4 that I could scribble on as the week progressed. I’ve created a template that I print off and fill-in when I do my weekly review but can add to as the week progresses if necessary. My check-list for weekly review is here. Download a pdf of the weekly goal planning template.

I personally schedule my weekly review for a Friday afternoon, it’s in the calendar for 15:00 most weeks. The reason for doing it on Friday afternoon is that most of the time I’m able to dedicate to personal projects is at the weekend. My week thus effectively runs Saturday to Friday and I’m front loading it with time for personal projects. I know that anything I don’t get done on the weekend then has to be fitted into ‘the working week’ (or rather it’s evenings). I also know before I finish on Friday what I need to do in the following week. It’s helpful to hit the ground running on Monday AM with a plan, it means in extreme circumstances I schedule time over the weekend to ‘get ahead’. Finally it means I can spend some time on Friday afternoon setting up meetings, etc. for the following week. It’s also nice because it can mean that everything work wise is neatly tied off before 17:00 on Friday.

Where I return pretty much to the PMP (and indeed GTD) is at the daily level. The PMP recommends a template from the printable CEO to use as a daily task planner. This is essentially what I use, though I use my own slightly modified version which removes the boxes related to billing which I don’t need. My template is here, the original is here.

My daily review then takes place in two stages. I review personal email, facebook, twitter and do a quick first pass at the days schedule before leaving the house. I then have 30 minutes blocked off in my calendar at the very beginning of my time in the office for the full review. I do parse email at this time, contrary to the advice but I find it necessary to plan my day. Dealing with email this way is possibly a symptom of having worked in Asia for so many years where the bulk of the email came in during the UK working day, so would be waiting for me in the morning. My checklist for the daily review is here.