Staying Productive
We’re living in interesting times, with those who are lucky able to perform some semblance of their work responsibilities from home. Working from home presents its own challenges, many of which I faced when working as a freelance consultant earlier in my career.
I thought I’d summarize some of the things I’d learned here:
1. Get your work space organized, even if it’s a portable space.
Having a space that’s focused on work is important when you’re trying to keep work and home separate. I violate this rule by using my home computer to access work systems via the cloud, but that’s more of an ergonomic need. If you can use a computer armoire and close it up at the end of the day, even better!
Having a space free of clutter and free of non-work distractions may help you keep focused when you’re working. I use a tried-and-true method of breaking my workspace into A space, B space, and C space.
A space is space in my vision when I’m working, and if I use an item daily, it’s in my A space.
B space is for things I use occasionally. I keep those handy, but not in my workspace. I have an armoire top behind me that I use for those things.
C space is for things that I rarely use. They’re in a cabinet or in my storage space.
2. Get the best chair you can afford.
Bruce Sterling said that you most likely spend a third of your life sitting in an office chair, and a third of your time sleeping. Spending up on your desk chair (and mattress) are some of the best investments you could make when you amortize the costs.
3. Wake up, dress for the part, shave/shower as if you’re going into an office.
I’ve always been lucky to have a partner who went into an office, so I was aligned to a “business hours” schedule. Waking up at your usual time, showering, and dressing for “your” office always helps me remain focused – having video calls helps with keeping up appearances, too.
4. Set a schedule – take set breaks for getting up, lunch, coffee, etc.
We’re all missing elements of structure that commuting, working in an office, lunching with co-workers, and leaving to go home provide. In addition to maintaining my job responsibilities, I’m also managing two kids who are remote-schooling for the rest of the year.
It’s important to me to keep the kids with some element of structure as well. They get up at the same time, shower, clean their rooms, and we all eat breakfast at the same time. That’s time to go over daily plans and spend some time as a family before going our separate ways with work and school. We get back together for lunch together at the same time, and usually eat outside to get a break from computer screens.
5. Don’t eat at your desk!
Your keyboard will love you for it.
6. When you stop working, leave work alone. Make some mental separation between home/work, even if there’s no physical space.
Work/Life balance is important, and harder to maintain when you do both in the same physical space. Some tips that have worked for me:
- There are a multitude of ideas online for ways to hide a laptop/office workstation for people living in small spaces, ranging from screens, to repurposing closet space as a portable work area, and computer armoires. Those are great ways to make work “go away” at the end of the day.
- Setting your out of office reminders on email and out of office statuses on chat/collaboration tools will take some of the immediacy in off-hours requests and notifications.
7. Make the most of your time.
I normally spend 3 hours a day in round-trip commute time. I accept this as the price of doing business where I live, but I used the time to listen to podcasts to make productive use of the time.
Now that I’m not commuting, I wake up at the same time, but spend that distraction-free time in the morning on an online training certification I could never make time for when commuting to work.
8. Not being OK is OK.
You’re not working from home, you’re trying to do your best while working through a global pandemic. It’s OK to be stressed, sleepless or otherwise not feeling your best.
Take time out to recharge. Take a walk. Get some sun, Talk to friends of yours over a video conference. Call your family. Meditate – there are many meditation apps that can help start you on a mission. Here is a good list to start from. I started with Headspace.com and bounce between it, Welzen and Buddhify.
Posted on November 27th, 2021 in blog | No Comments »
Dark Hallways
Posted on October 23rd, 2021 in android, art | No Comments »
Museum Still Life
Posted on October 19th, 2021 in android, art | No Comments »
Back to Outlook
One the benefits of working for a company with a volume license agreement with Microsoft is Microsoft’s Home Use Program. My current employer is a rather large Microsoft 365 customer, and Microsoft offers a generous package – $69.99/year for up to 5 users with Microsoft 365 apps and 6 TB of OneDrive cloud storage. It’s the family package for the price of a single user.
Looking at the offering from Microsoft, I noticed that outlook.com now supports all of the functionality of Outlook, including Notes, Tasks and calendaring. I’ve hosted my email on Gmail for some time and missed the productivity features of Outlook that, until recently, required an Exchange server.
I’m a big fan of Getting Things Done, and the creators of the system wrote a guide to tailor Outlook to GTD workflow. The tasks folder is well suited for getting things out of your head and filing them in a system sorted by context – you want all of your work tasks in one place, personal professional in another and any other “buckets” you can think of – Outlook support that.
I like being able to sync data between multiple systems without issues; Outlook synchronizes well with Nine, a non-free Android email client that supports Notes, Calendars, Tasks, and other Outlook data. Surprisingly, Microsoft’s Android Outlook client is missing notes and tasks.
Having a “real” email client instead of a web browser is a refreshing change. The toolbar UI is handy, the search feature of Outlook is a time-saver for obscure commands and options, and editing is easier.
Outlook.com is a full-featured email client now, and I can use Microsoft’s web apps along with outlook on the web on my Linux laptop with Chrome or Firefox. They’ve come a long way from Outlook Web Access and Internet Explorer in the early 2000s.
I’ve used Outlook for almost as long as I’ve supported email systems in my career, so I know the features and limitations well. We’ll see how this experiment goes.
Posted on September 14th, 2021 in blog | No Comments »
Lights
Posted on July 31st, 2021 in coolpix995 | No Comments »
In the beginning, there was Bare Metal
As a technology consultant, I need a network environment to evaluate, test and deploy a myriad of applications.
In the Beginning, there was Bare Metal. I ran a stable of obsolete desktop PCs in a garage lab, each running an operating system I was working on. That meant running enterprise applications on marginal hardware and inflated utility bills paying to power several inefficient desktop PCs.
Then came desktop virtualization, or what they refer to as a “type 2” hypervisor. With VMWare and VirtualBox, I could run one virtual Linux environment on my Windows desktop, but would need to shut it down when I wasn’t using it. Once desktop virtualization worked, the garage lab went into e-waste.
I needed was a “type 1” hypervisor that runs virtual machines directly on dedicated hardware to support multiple machines running 24/7. At work, I run VMWare’s vSphere platform, a robust environment that provides virtualization, high availability, hybrid cloud/on-premise computing, desktop virtualization and more. It’s a little more than what I’d need to set up a home lab environment and vSphere is picky about what hardware it’ll run on.
I discovered Proxmox – a hypervisor similar to vSphere. Proxmox is open source, and supports any hardware that will run Debian linux and Qemu.
Proxmox does everything I’d need, including network bridges, clustering, support for network storage using NFS, CIFS and Ceph, built-in storage and backup tools. Since the back-end is Debian Linux, I can use tools like Rclone to mirror my VMs to the cloud.
While I could virtualize entire systems with Proxmox, I was more interested in containers. Proxmox supports LXC (Linux Containers), but I was more interested in Docker containers. Proxmox doesn’t support Docker directly, but can run a guest OS that *does*. With a VM running Ubuntu Server 20.04, I had my docker host.
Within my Docker host, I’m running Nginx Proxy Manager to allow me to expose my home lab systems safely to the outside world using SSL encryption. I’m running Pi-Hole as a DNS/DHCP server and blocking ads from all of my PCs, phones and internet-enabled devices. Grafana is monitoring my internet speed, and I have a menu system managing it all – running in its own Docker container.
This solution gives me access to the container ecosystem, lets me spin up and take down containers quickly for testing, and allows me to run home services efficiently while saving a ton on my power bill.
Posted on April 26th, 2021 in blog | No Comments »
Outlook and Getting Things Done
Why Outlook?
The key to an effective task management system is having a system that’s easy to use and available wherever and whenever you need it. Microsoft 365 and Outlook are used by many companies for communication and collaboration. and with a little tweaking, can replace separate project and task management apps and be available on your home computer, work computer, and your phone – seamlessly.
Folders, Not Email.
What makes Outlook a great tool for task management is that task requests come to most people via email. What most people do with Outlook that hampers its effectiveness is to use the Inbox as your collection and task management tool.
When you use Outlook this way, you’re reading emails, acting on them, flagging them within Outlook, working on requests in your Inbox, and finally archiving them when complete – which means you’re scanning and reviewing the same emails over and over again – and having to ask yourself what the next action is in each task.
How I set up Outlook
My goal is to have an empty inbox and a neatly sorted list of tasks with contexts, due dates, and specific actions. I want to be able to ask myself “what’s next?” and have a list of next actions readily available.
How do I adapt Outlook for my everyday workflow?
- Go into the tasks folder and create categories @Work, @Waiting For, Agendas, and @Someday-Maybe. When you change the view to category view you’ll see your tasks in GTD categories. These will correspond to the traditional GTD categories. I’m not a fan of the location-based categories like @Home, @Computer, I instead prefer separate @Project-<projectname> categories to more easily capture multiple project tasks.
- To make Outlook tasks work effectively, always use action-based task names and include a logical Next Action in the description. I fall into a trap of naming tasks based on the outcome, not the action needed. You want your tasks list to easily prompt you into action.
- I have a category called @Weekly-Review where I collect planning information I want to review on a regular basis.
- Set your notification period to as long a period as you can practically manage in your organization. One hour is ideal, as you want to minimize interruptions.
- Use the “Delegate Tasks” function in Outlook to delegate tasks to your colleagues and track progress and updates through Outlook. You may want to inform your colleagues of what you’re doing has a handy feature for delegating tasks which I’ve used with varying success in the workplace. Here is a great link showing how to manage tasks – https://www.webnots.com/how-to-manage-tasks-in-microsoft-outlook/
Using the System
- I receive tasks in the form of emails requesting information or services.
- I use a traditional GTD “intake” process:
1. I’ll read an email and complete the task if it’s a quick 2-5 minute task.
2. Move the inbox to a task item with a defined next action and due date.
3. Delegate the task to a colleague if needed.
4. Create a calendar item if I need to block time out to complete the task.
5. Capture the item for future use by archiving the email or copying and pasting text into an Outlook Note.
6. If there’s no future need for the email, delete it.
Microsoft has an IOS and an Android client. I used to use a third-party tool to sync tasks and notes for Outlook, but now I recommend Nine, a wonderful, full-featured groupware client that includes all of Outlook’s workflow folders.
There are other guides to building an effective GTD system in Outlook, but this minimal system works well for me without requiring a lot of maintenance.
Posted on April 5th, 2021 in blog | No Comments »
Glowfari, Oakland Zoo
Posted on February 22nd, 2021 in android, art | No Comments »
Amazfit Bip – First Impressions
Professionally, I work with teams supporting technology in fast-moving organizations. Personally, I’m focused on productivity and organization, regardless of platform. Over the years, I’ve used paper journals, Palm Pilots, standalone desktop programs and collaboration tools for group organization. The tool is just a tool, it’s the habits and disciplines that ensure productivity.
I’ve resisted wearing a smart watch up until now as most of my productivity workflow nowadays is focused on my smartphone, Google Tasks for high-level tracking and a Bullet Journal for day-to-day note taking. I’ve written about using a Fitbit for step tracking, alarms and text notifications, but that was as far as I’d gone.
I ran across an interesting fitness tracker called a Amazfit Bip that intrigued me; it addressed all of the concerns I had about smart watches – and it’s significantly cheaper than any other smart fitness tracker I’d seen..
- Cross-platform? I go back and forth between an iPhone and an Android phone. I wanted something that worked with both – unlike the Apple Watch.
- Battery life? I didn’t want to be tied to a watch that I had to recharge every night. The Bip advertises a 30+ day battery life.
- A watch that you have to press a button to see what time it is? The Bip has an always-on setting.
- Syncing data to the cloud? There’s an app called Gadgetbridge that allows you to sync many types of fitness devices to your phone, skipping any cloud services.
- Extensible? There’s a list of projects on GitHub focused on extending the platform.
The Bip is a small watch, 38 mm x 32 mm, and weighs 32 grams. It’s a slight watch, barely registering as a watch after wearing a Seiko 5 diver’s watch, a massive chunk of metal for the past 12 years.. There’s one button on the side, and a touch screen interface. You swipe up, down, left and right and use the button as a back button.
On first impression, it reminds me of a Pebble watch; the graphics are blocky, the case is plastic, and the overall feel reminds me of a Pebble – in a good way. I barely notice that it’s there.
Activity tracking is nice, you can track running, cycling, treadmill and walking, and it will calculate the calories burned more effectively than just tracking steps. No swimming, it’s IP68 certified water resistant, but more splashproof than waterproof. What’s surprising for a watch this small is to have a 3-axis accelerometer, GPS and GLONASS radios.
In addition, it features multiple alarms, a countdown timer, compass, barometer, altimeter and GPS displays.
Notifications are nice – the Bip supports text messaging and application push messages.
Phone handling is nice, too – there’s the ability to answer or decline a call from the watch, and ringing is almost instantaneous. With the Fitbit flex, there was a 1 to 2 ring delay.
Battery drain is negligible; I’m on track to get about 20 days of battery life out of its first charge.
Posted on November 27th, 2020 in blog | No Comments »
Photowalk
I hope everyone is staying safe, healthy, and taking time to get out and take some photos.
Posted on November 17th, 2020 in android | No Comments »
Checking in, working from home
I hope this post finds everyone productive and well. We’re coming up on 8 months since my office closed down and sent people to work remotely, and I wanted to share some of my experiences with working through 2020.
Office Space
I was lucky that I have a dedicated space with a well-worn, well-loved vintage office desk, decent networking, and a supportive office chair. Others have made portable spaces, turned unused corner spaces into a work space, or turned closets into workspaces that close up at the end of the day.
Networking:
Decent networking is critical to work-from-home success.
If you own your own wireless router and it’s more than a few years old, consider purchasing a new one. Newer routers support faster wireless standards, have better coverage, and will make your workday easier. You’ll need to ensure that your laptop support the same standard. In a nutshell, 802.11A, B and G are effectively obsolete, N is better, and AC is a good choice nowadays.
Some modern routers come with built-in guest networking, parental controls and easy, phone app-based administration tools.
If you have a large house, consider mesh networking. With a mesh network, a primary router plugs into your internet connection, and secondary units extend wireless coverage to parts of the house the primary router wouldn’t be able to reach.
Printing:
I’ve gotten into the habit of scanning any paperwork and saving it to the cloud. I’ve continued this working from home. I have a Canon Pixma MX920 multi-function inkjet printer. I can print and scan both sides of the page and create PDF files out of scanned pages. You can load up to 50 pages into the document feeder and let it automatically feed pages to be scanned and automatically converted into a single PDF file. You can copy pages when needed, and you can even fax, if anyone still supports fax. For documents that need signatures, you can easily print, sign, and scan documents.
Collaboration:
My company uses Microsoft Teams company-wide and Slack within specific groups for collaboration. Each fits different needs, but the same basic concepts apply.
- Use your presence indicators! If you’re out of the office, change your status. Check your collaboration tool to see if it can update your status based on your calendar or activity. Teams, for example, can mark me as “in a meeting” or “on a call” automatically.
- Respect the working time of others, especially if working across time zones.
- Use video for one-to-one and small team calls, voice and screen sharing for larger meetings.
- Remember to mute your microphone when not speaking.
- Invest (or get your company to invest) in a good, comfortable USB noise-cancelling headset with microphone. It’ll improve meeting experiences, and help drown out that dog next door that won’t stop barking.
Balance:
If you have an office environment that you can close off at the end of the day, do so! I have a work laptop, and shut it down when I’m done working. My phone goes into quiet mode, the only notifications I’ll get after hours are emails from select individuals at my company.
Get outside. If you have a pet, walks are a great excuse to get out a couple of times a day.
If you can, avoid eating at your desk whenever possible. Get up, sit in your kitchen (or outside, if possible!) and separate your meal time from work time.
Posted on November 11th, 2020 in blog | No Comments »
Zeno 34
One of my favorite subjects. Zeno Place, Canon S100 Powershot.
Posted on July 6th, 2020 in digital | No Comments »
Flamingos
Posted on June 25th, 2020 in android | No Comments »
North Beach
Posted on January 19th, 2020 in android, art | No Comments »
OneNote 2016 is back!
Microsoft stated in 2018 that OneNote 2016 would no longer be actively maintained, and that OneNote for Windows 10 would be the supported version moving forward. Users noted that installs of Office365 reportedly remove OneNote 2016.
Microsoft has since reversed their stance, according to The Verge:
“We are literally merging all of our modern code back into the legacy 2016 codebase to create a unified single codebase that we can ship and deliver OneNote from,” explained Ben Hodes, product manager of OneNote, at a Microsoft Ignite session today. “The reason we’re doing this modern merge is to get back to a single codebase and start to deliver these features in the coming year and a half.”
The new features include:
- Modern sync services to sync notebooks faster
- @mentions for OneNote inside of Microsoft Teams
- Microsoft Search integration to find the information in your notes
- New meeting notes features
- Tasks and To Do integration
- Accessibility improvements
- Next-generation canvas
- Dark Mode
Microsoft had been steering customers to the version of OneNote that ships with Windows 10. It’s a slick Windows application with a pen-friendly UI, but it felt inconsistent. Sometimes, for example, the page list would be hidden, and you’d have to click on the categories list to make it re-appear. Nice to conserve screen real estate, not so intuitive.
OneNote integrates with Outlook’s calendar feature, allowing you to open a new page in OneNote to capture notes. Outlook would open the OneNote 2016 application with a meeting template, but OneNote for Windows 10 would open the web app. I find that I either work with web apps or local Windows apps but don’t like to mix the two. I’d rather use all web apps or all local apps. While it worked at first, Outlook’s built-in support for the OneNote web app seems to be conflicting with the OneNote plug-in. All things point to re-installing OneNote 2016.
Why not move ahead with OneNote for Windows? I spent the better part of the year working with Outlook for Windows 10, but over the past several years I’d become too accustomed to the older interface, which stayed relatively stable through OneNote 2010, 2013 and 2016. My Getting Things Done methodology uses tabs on the top, and I’m used to it that way. Hopefully, we end up with a current code base with a flexible UI that works equally well with desktop apps and web apps.
OneNote 2016 is a free download from Microsoft and can be downloaded from this link.
Posted on October 23rd, 2019 in blog | No Comments »
Stairs Downward
Posted on July 7th, 2019 in pentax mx-1 | No Comments »
Stamps
Posted on May 11th, 2019 in android | No Comments »
Oakland Photowalk
Posted on May 10th, 2019 in android | No Comments »
FitBit Flex 2 – Just “enough” Smart
I’ve been a Fitbit user for several years. I started with the original Charge, and most recently a Flex 2. I liked the fact that they were just smart enough — I wear a traditional watch, so I don’t need a smartwatch. I have my phone with me most of the time, so I don’t need the distraction of app notifications on my wrist.
Distractions kill productivity, multiple studies have quantified the time it takes your mind to switch from one context to another and get back on track after a distraction. Smart phones play a significant part in distraction in the workplace, social and family life, and it’s important to manage the distraction that an always-on, internet enabled device provides.
When I wore a smart watch, I found myself paying attention to every email and every notification from every app; it was as if I had my phone on my wrist. With a Fitbit, I’m notified of incoming of text messages and phone calls with a discrete flashing LED and a vibration, nothing else. E-mail and application notifications can wait until I’ve blocked time out for them.
It’s about providing the most focus to the task at hand.
Posted on March 8th, 2019 in blog | No Comments »
Violins, Coolpix 995
Violins at the Dickens Fair, 2018
I found a Nikon Coolpix 995 at my local thrift shop; mint condition, with a good battery, filter kit (circular polarizer, UV, and 2 neutral density filters), wide angle attachment, strap, charger and case – for $10.
Posted on January 3rd, 2019 in coolpix995 | No Comments »
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