Reviews and Comments

Chapter 13: Automation I was looking forward to this chapter. I’m always happy to learn about what other people like to automate and project and task management, always happy to see what others are doing as inspiration.

His decisions on when to automate something don’t exactly match my own, but that is partially because I am a programmer, and “Hard Things” / “Done Often” are what automate on a daily basis. However, generally I agree.

One thing he mentions is that he likes to automate hard things done once, which I interpret as hard things done occasionally, and specifically that this is good for documentation purposes. I somewhat agree with this, yes, having a script will potentially explain better what a process is like than anything else, assuming it works. However there is an even better way: Literate DevOps. I’m a fan of literate programming in general, though not necessarily a practitioner, but especially for small-ish scripts. I think that hard things done once, and small things done often, and even small things done once, all benefit from a literate approach. This puts the documentation front-and-center.

Also I think the idea of using make as a sysadmin tool is fantastic! I really like using GNU Make myself, and he has the right idea in this regard.

Chapter 10, Email Management. I think this chapter could've helped me manage my email a lot at my last job.

I already have some plans to improve my email management. I've been using notmuch, but it's not really working out the way I'd hoped, and also I need to start having some email on my phone again too.

I think what is suggested in this chapter is good, though. And I did do some of it already. Sending mailing list emails to separate folders, for example.

I'm big on filtering. I have a sieve script running on my email host that sorts a bunch of different types of email into different folders. I need to work on it a little more, some junk that I get from the last time I bought shoes and such, where the unsubscribe button just doesn't work.

I stopped checking my email on my phone because most of the time it was stuff that I didn't need to look at at all. But if I add a few more filtering rules I should be able to have only important emails ping me on my phone.

I will have to remain vigilant, though. I've had several rounds already of unsubscribing from things I don't want, but I'll have to maintain my sieve script diligently.

Chapter 8, Prioritization. While reading this I felt that while it was good information, this chapter doesn't help me much at the moment.

But I think that might have been me being pessimistic. Just the type of prioritization (effort vs. impact) that he talks about will need me to adjust how I look at projects.

I feel like at work this will be more important, still, but right now I'm not working and all of my projects are personal. There are certain projects that really stand out as important (find a job!), and some that have priority because I've just committed to them. But other than that what I'm struggling with is making time for things like laundry, and where it fits in with the other things I have to do, and keeping track of all the things that are expected of me right now. Also how to stop procrastinating on certain tasks.

The scheme that was suggested in an earlier chapter has really worked well for me so far: - A: Needs to be done today - B: Needs to be done soon - C: Needs to be done sometime

Chapter 7 was about life goals.

I like this chapter. I will admit that when the book told me "go do it now, write some things down... you didn't didn't you? It's ok, go do it now!" I still didn't write anything down.

But one of the things that it suggested that I really like is writing down the goals with time frames. 1 month, 1 year, 5 years.

Getting Things Done also suggests having goals like this, but I don't think they're as clear about the time frames. I have written down goals before, but they really haven't done anything for me.

Perhaps this one will help more.

Although at this point I also feel like there is quite a bit more process to the Cycle System than I expected. Meaning really that I feel like there is a lot of "But don't forget to do X", and invariably I forget to do all those X's.

I've been too busy to write, but I haven't been too busy to read. A few days ago I read chapter 5.

This time we're finally getting at some of the meat of the Cycle System. And while I'm definitely finding the other things in this book very interesting as well, I was particularly looking forward to this chapter and the next 2 that are specifically about the Cycle System.

This chapter left me a bit confused and even uncomfortable. For one this chapter really made me feel that I don't want to do this on paper anymore. I really want to make this work with my phone and PC, so I've been trying that for a few days. But that makes certain other things more difficult.

First off this chapter pointed out to me that I really should be doing the day schedule as well as the list of tasks for each day. Because I'd only read chapter 4 so far and my understanding of this system was limited (well, more limited than it is right now) I didn't really do anything with the hourly schedule. In fact I didn't make any room in my notebook for it either. But it does seem like a really helpful idea to do that. This means that I need to adjust the way I organize my notebook and I don't quite like the new organization.

Second it disappointed me a little. I had given myself a bunch of space to make notes during the day both for tasks that needed to be done today and tasks that didn't need to be done today but did need to go onto my list soon (like the next day), but also for other things that I just need to remember. I was hoping to maintain that, but other than adding tasks for today or a specific other day it didn't really provide much to me in the way of where to jot these down or how to deal with them.

One of the reasons that I feel like I really want to do this on my phone and PC again is that most of what is talked about in this chapter just feels so much simpler to do there than it does on paper. But the problem there for me remains visualization. I use Emacs and org-mode for just about everything I can, and while that does provide me with an agenda view that shows me a bit about the timing of appointments and activities during the day, it's not necessarily set up in such a way that it helps figure out how much time I have during the day. And I think right now that's the biggest problem I have with doing things on my phone/PC, figuring out how much time I have in a day. I can schedule tasks for specific days, I can make agenda views on my PC and also in Orgzly on my phone, but Orgzly doesn't show me the Effort I specify for a task. In Emacs I can do this in several ways, for example the column display.

This might also not really be an issue. Maybe I can just use my PC every morning and plan my day there. Definitely the whole "write everything down when you can't do it right away" has been very helpful.

Finished chapter 2. More about interruptions. Made me think of some of the SAs I've worked with in the past, made me feel that I hope they've read this chapter at least once before.

Some of the things in this chapter (I feel) show their age. This chapter talks about people's offices... people don't have offices, everyone is just out in the open on the floor except maybe the top boss. One suggestion was to call someone on your team, but what good would that do if they're right next to you?

Open office plans are terrible...

Anyway, some of the other things said in this chapter about how to deal with incoming requests sounds a lot like others I've read (like GTD). Delegate it, Record it, Do it is exactly the same as Delegate, Defer, Do. Just the criteria are slightly different. To me this is a good thing.

I'm still working on implementing the ideas I got from this chapter yesterday. This was a good continuation. I'm liking this book so far.