Gnubbs Blog

Today I was walking through the halls at my office, asking people if they played any games, when I heard something very foreign to me. One of my co-workers made the statement “It’s not my job to do that.” It struck me as very strange, and something that I don’t think that I have ever said.

Pretty much every job description I have ever seen has a clause that reads something like “…and perform other duties as needed.” This leads me to take a very broad view of what my job is. My job is to help our customers and increase company value for our shareholders.

If something needs to get done at work, it usually falls into that very broad job description. I would never utter “It’s not my job to do that.” I can’t even imagine saying that to someone at work. When someone asks me for help with something outside my normal job responsibilities, my responses fall into one of three categories:

• “Sure, I would be happy to help” - Any task that is easy and fast for me to do will generally get that response. An example would be the other day when one of our designers wanted to make a video from a power point presentation. I didn’t know how to do it but figured it wouldn’t take me long to figure out. She is a great graphic designer, but didn’t have any idea where to start. 20 minutes later we had what she needed.
• “I would be happy to help, but have to talk to my boss about putting it on my schedule.” - These are for tasks that I can help with, but require a bigger investment of my time. I have been asked to create a wiki-like information management system for our mechanical engineers. I have been asked to write perl based management scripts for our production systems. I get asked to help out with web based tools for other groups a lot. It is probably because our IT group is unresponsive and I am a programming resource outside that group. Generally my boss is happy to have me help, but these things need to be scheduled based on overall priorities.
• “Hmm… I have no idea how to help with that, but you should talk to…” - Worse case scenario is that they have come to the wrong person for the job. In those cases, I think about the other people in the business that I chat with around the water cooler and try and point them in the right direction.

With these answers, even if I can’t actually help out, the person walks away thinking that I was helpful. That is vital to my job. A lot of people here can think of times I have helped them out of a bind, and so when I need help they are usually quick to lend a hand.

I am currently writing some new tools for my boss. Basically just a bunch of tools that look at data in a DB and generate pretty graphs for him. You know how bosses like graphs. He asked me to automate a bunch of reporting that is done manually right now, and that is where I am starting.

Basically these reports are running against our online schedule tracking tool for our support folks. All of the data is in a SQL db, so life is good. Looking at the data got me thinking though. If we can get the number of people we have answering the phones for everyday over the past year, what good is that? Not much. What would be valuable is if we looked at the number of people on the phones versus hold times. That is data we could use. It would allow us to pick a hold time that is acceptable and staff to support that time. That would be gaining power from our data.

Unfortunately, our call tracking software doesn’t write it’s info to a standard DB. It is only available through some custom report generating tools they wrote. That might be fine for some companies, but for us if the data isn’t available to other software you might as well not track it.

This is closely in line with a post on Productivity 501: Integration is more important than features. I couldn’t agree more. Going forward, if a piece of software does not provide some sort of API to access the data it uses to generate reports, I am not going to support buying it. As simple as that.

If it isn’t available through an API, don’t waste resources collecting it. It doesn’t actually exist.

It seems like every week that goes by I find a new tool for my mac that warrants inclusion into the menu bar. It is still manageable, but I suspect that some day it may grow out of control.

From left to right, we have:

Quicksilver - no introduction needed
InstantShot! - free, great to use screen capture software
Growl - notifications. I thought this would be stupid until I started using it.
Marco Polo - location awareness. Use it to set different settings for work/home use
Blue Phone Elite - Great integration software for my Moto Razr (worst phone ever btw)
TextExpander - Great tool if you write HTML. Quickly insert snippets into any application.

Thanks to LifeHacker for pointing out basically every one of these apps to me. (Except Blue Phone Elite - thanks Britton at work.)

Today is my birthday. I am turning the ripe old age of 28. To celebrate, I left work today at about 11:30am, went for a couple of hour hike, and am currently drinking PBR number two.

Stephanie and I are going someplace for dinner, but otherwise I am keeping things quiet.

My computer used to run a bit slow at times.

This weekend I broke down and bought some more ram for my laptop. Best Buy has PNY 1gb DDR2 sodimms for $60 so I just popped over and bought one. This brings my laptop up to 1.25gb of ram and it is so much happier.

Before the upgrade, if I launched iTunes the rest of the system ground to a halt. Photo editing and management software was dead in the water - so slow as to be unusable. Now everything is wickedly fast. I managed to convert 1200 images in nef format to dng format in about 20 minutes. That is certainly usably fast. Adobe Light Room is now a pleasure to use.

Life is good. I think next payday I will finish this off and get up to a whole 2gb.

I am not entirely sure where I got the idea but I definitely am not taking credit for it. Where ever I got the idea, I have made a radical change in how I manage me email lately. It has made working with my email a joy.

First, I created three new folders in my inbox - Archive, Respond/Action, and Waiting for Response.

• Archive - This is where I store mail that I don’t wish to delete, but doesn’t require anything more from me.
• Respond/Action - This is where I store messages that require either a response or an action on my part. This is basically a ToDo list. If the task is small I take care of it directly and get it over with. If it is more involved I will create a task/project in iGTD to ensure that I actually do it (and make the right decisions on when and how to do it - and what I am willing to not be doing in order to get this done.)
• Waiting for Response - When I respond to a message in my Respond/Action folder I try and remember to CC myself on the message. Then I will archive the message if I am not expecting anything of value in response, or move the message into the Waiting for Response folder. This allows me to run through this folder once a day or so and make sure that an issue/activity isn’t stagnating waiting on a response from someone.

When a message arrives in my inbox, I immediately sort it into one of these three folders. My inbox generally has zero items in it. This has worked miracles in allowing me to manage, respond, and follow up on my email requests. I love it. So many things that would have slipped through the cracks before are now properly highlighted and taken care of.

It was extreme. It was kinda scary to blow away the email structure that has served/abused me for so many years. However, I don’t regret it at all.

Three folders and search. Perfect. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.“