“Bill Westerman has joined the back-to-paper movement. Here are a couple of Bill’s ingenous methods for managing his time and to-do lists in his notebook.”

“When you’re in ‘the zone’ you get your best work done. But how do you get in that ‘zone’ when colleagues, e-mails and IM are vying for your attention?”

“Jerry Madden, Associate Director of the Flight Projects Directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, collected these gems of wisdom over a number of years from various unidentified sources. Rod Stewart of Mobile Data Services in Huntsville, Alabama edited and updated them. I found and kept a copy of these during the early nineties. Over time, the NASA link disappeared, so this version of the rules was posted to make sure that it stayed available.”

“I know new folks arrive here every day, so it seems like an opportune time to look back at some of my favorite GTD posts from the earlier days on 43F. They’ll be familiar to many of you but — as someone who re-read Getting Things Done this weekend — I think it never hurts to go back and review.”

“Have you ever had the experience of looking back on your week with the sinking feeling that you didn’t get as much done as you’d hoped? … Keep a detailed time log. The first step to better managing your time is to find out how you’re currently spending your time. Keeping a time log is a very effective way to do this, and after trying it for just one day, you’ll immediately gain a tremendous amount of insight into where your time is actually going.”

“What other arguments can be made to allocate time and budget for design activities? Unfortunately, there is no single easy-to-compile metric that can tell this story for you. Here are some things you can measure to help you communicate why investing in design is good for your company in the long run.”

“It’s a funny thing. After almost twenty years of drawing a paycheque for creating software, people generally want to hire me because they want me to duplicate the successes I’ve had. The model seems to be ‘do the things you’ve done successfully before, and you’ll be successful now.’ My experience is that this has never worked on its own. Success in software development is at least as much about avoiding failure modes as it is about ‘best practices.’”

“There’s a saying, those who can’t do, teach. Unfortunately, the same can often be said of management. (And those who can’t manage, consult? But let’s leave that for another essay…) In any case, I’ve often complained long and bitterly about software project management, and a coworker once responded, ‘Phil, you’re always right’. I don’t know if he was serious, but in the spirit of that encouraging or sarcastic endorsement, here are my recommended practices for managing software projects.”

“Lately I’ve been trying a promising new method for managing my time. It’s similar to timeboxing, except that instead of allocating a certain amount of time for a specific activity, I divide my total work time between three different classes of activities.”

“The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn’t always bad? Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you’re not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.”

“I don’t feel the need to persuade you that most meetings stink. I am confident that you have passed enough wasted hours in a meeting room to know that painful truth. Sadly, just last week I spent two hours in a confabulation that should have taken 20 minutes. I am in the business of making simple what are complex issues. In that tradition, I have pinpointed two reasons why meetings stink…”

“Everyone procrastinates at some time in their life. As a self employed writer, I am certainly guilty as charged. I have spent many evenings cleaning the kitchen or folding the laundry instead of working on projects with looming deadlines. Through experience I have learned that there are many reason why I, and others, procrastinate and understanding these reasons has given me a new perspective on how to put an end to procrastination. In this article, I will share with you my insight on procrastination including common reasons for procrastination and strategies to eliminate procrastination.”

“Since I’ve been working on how to structure teams to do innovation work, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the basics in the form of The Wisdom of Teams by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith. One point they make is to differentiate between ‘performing teams’ structured in a mindful way and other groups of people merely working together. A performing team has certain characteristics…”

“Convincing cautious bosses of the benefits of a novel approach is a tricky business, but it can be done. Here’s how…”

“Are you in the midst of a traditional development project that cannot take a leap toward Agile, but you know could benefit from being nudged in that direction? Does your project have stakeholders or management who are willing to discuss the merits of Agile development but won’t give you the time to investigate an Agile methodology, much less switch to it? Are you a project manager or team lead who has read or heard a bit about Agile development and wants to experiment with it but are, yourself, too skeptical to make a large upfront investment?”