My daily scaffold consists of:
Coffee – grinding beans, making espresso, steaming milk – very nice process, good thinking time. Sometimes Radio 4 is on in the background.
Review calendar, the hard landscape, the stuff that I have to do today or at a time today.
Do some work, project stuff – not emails.
I try to put off looking at emails until I’ve done at least an hour’s work.
I then have little bits of time throughout the day for checking my emails and my action folder in my emails.
With emails I:
Scan the inbox for trash, junk and bacon (social/newsletters/stuff I’d like to read but not essential) – I move them to the relevant folders.
I scan the inbox for any very quick to respond to emails – and send responses (trying hard to use these guidelines - http://emailcharter.org/ )
What’s normally left are emails that are going to require more in depth responses, or some project work – 2 ways of dealing with these – first, move them all to your action folder, get them out of inbox – next, book some time in to deal with them as a batch, or put time in for particular emails.
It’s not like this everyday, but, I try as much as possible to keep to this routine.
Some concept stuff on how Microsoft perceives the future of getting stuff done.
As do all of the others in this ten business commandments list.
@simon_kimber just put this beautifully written post up about the difficulties in keeping his dev team motivated when much of what they do is, by definition, repetitive: building on what has gone before. What they’ve built is great but the development schedule is full and there’s no time to do the things they really want to.
Simon’s solution: a leaf out of the Google history book. Fridays you can do what you like.
