TimsterC

Using the iPhone application AppBox Lite I’ve managed to calculate that it is 80 days since my BMW 320d touring went bang. I was called on Friday last week and informed by the company replacing the engine that they have a replacement engine that has done less than 10,000 miles and that my car should be ready later this week. I’m not holding my breathe as I’d be blue by now.

On the GTD front I have managed to get to an empty inbox today. YIPEEEEEE. This momentous event occurred on a flight from LHR (London Heathrow, UK) to CPH (Copenhagen, Denmark) this morning. I am in Denmark to present, what might be my last, XPages workshop.
So now I have finally finished the collection phase, it’s time to start on the action phase. Time to start calling people back and using this eProductivity mail template for really GTD (Getting Things Done). I have a huge list of stuff to do so I’d better get on with it. ;o)

On Feb 19th the engine in my BMW 320d decided to stop working. Something to do with a bent crank shaft, 2 bent con rods, cylinder leakage from 1, 2 and 3, a piston loose in the in the cylinder, pitting on all four piston heads, marking and scoring on all 4 cylinder sleeves. So just a couple of minor niggles really. ;o)

The BMW garage said it needed a new engine and the leasing company, naturally, took a very sharp intake of breathe at this point. And I don’t blame them. £9,000 for a replacement engine is a lot for a car that’s just two years old.

After much tooing and froing, and tooing and froing and some more tooing, just for good measure, the car is with a garage that are going to replace the engine.

I rang them just after lunch today to find out what is happening. I remember something about “the engine is out of the car and we don’t have an engine that works yet to put back in” before my brain melted and ran out of me nose.

So it’s not going to be back tomorrow (day 70) and then it’s a bank holiday weekend. So that’s going to be up to day 74 at the earliest and if they work on it over the holiday weekend. (not going to happen)

I think I might get to day 80, but not as far as day 100 before I lose it completely and scream at someone down the phone about this.

Anyone want to guess on the what date I’ll get the BMW back? Day 80 onwards……..

So after a quick flurry of email and a chat with Ian in support I have eProductivity† set up and everything showing as it should be.

Now I can start on the GTD process stage one. This involves getting EVERYTHING into a trusted system, in this case eProductivity, and clearing it from my mind. Then I will be one step closer to David Allen’s goal of ‘mind like water‘.

So I will spend the rest of day and tomorrow collecting everything into eProductivity and then working through what the next actions are for each thing I have collected.

The collection process is made really simple in eProductivity as you can drag and drop any emails into a context (more on these later on) and you can also “MindSweep” and collect your thoughts about projects or stuff that you are thinking about but don’t have email about. My inbox stands at 704 emails right now and I want to have that down to none either by the end of today or tomorrow lunch time.

I’d best stop writing about it now and actually go do some of it.

More updates on the next 4 steps will follow.

So I’ve been challenged in my Open University course to try and understand a bunch more about time management and how it can help me.
Being a Lotus bod I decided to take another look at eProductivity that I saw demonstrated at Lotusphere 2009, but Erick Mack and David Allen of GTD fame.

Having listened to David Allen read his Getting Things Done (GTD) book a bunch of times (I have it as an audio book), I think I get the process. I have no decided to take the plunge and investigate integrating that into my Lotus Notes mail file to get the full effect of what it can do for me. eProductivity is just such an application that will change the look, feel and functionality of my mail file. It’s safe for me as I know how to control the security in Notes (ECL) and I have complete control over my mail file (Manager Access). If after evaluating this on a 4 week trial I discover that it’s not for me then I can revert back to the Lotus designed mail file and nothing will be lost. You have to love Notes for it’s flexibility.

So here goes, downloading the template now and replacing the design of my mail file this morning. Then it’s off to lunch for a stiff drink. ;o) When I come back I’ll start the spring clean with a trawl through my existing inbox and work out what needs to go where.

I’ll post my progress and let you all know how I’m getting on as I get into this. I’ll also share any tips and tricks I find along the way.

Full Disclosure
I feel it only fair to inform everyone that I will not be hiding anything in these blog posts, but if I like eProductivity, they have offered me a free license if I want to continue using it. All I have to do is blog about it. But I want you all to know that if it’s bad, needs changing, crashes my mail file, revolutionizes my life or annoys the life out of me, I’ll be telling everyone.
My thanks go to Erik Mack and Ryan Heathers for offering this opportunity to me.

So I woke up yesterday at 4:30am after finally getting to bed at 1:00am. So that’s a total of 3 hours 30 minutes for Friday night.

Last night I curled up at midnight and then woke up at 3:00am with slides running through my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, back the slides came and that’s the way it’s been since. Do you think I have something on my mind? Possible

So after 6 hours and 30 minutes sleep in the past 48 hours, I get to present at 1:30pm today. Then I’m going to bed. If I don’t see you at the beach party tonight I apologise in advance. ;o)

I have appeared on the “Someone Once Told Me” website. This is a great daily inspiration site where Mario takes pictures or gets them from his flickr group and posts them. They are all black and white and all have something that the person in the photograph has been told by someone. Simple idea and very well executed. It was a pleasure being “shot” for this even if it was bitterly cold, dark and nearly raining. I intend to shoot some of these for Mario at Lotusphere, so if you see me walking around with my camera and have something that you might want to share with the world, then please stop me and ask.

The next big announcement is that I have published my podcast called “The X Cast”. This is all to do with XPages and can be found here. We are waiting for Apple to come back with an iTunes subscription so I will tell everyone when that happens. In the mean time you can listen from the website or download the MP3 file.

Please tell me what you think about both topics.

WOW, I still can’t really believe that my session has been selected to be part of Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando, FL. Out of over 1000 session abstracts that were submitted Matt White and myself have had ours selected.
Can you guess what it’s going to be about? If you can’t then where have you been for the last 18 months?

Here is my abstract.

How to build an XPages Application from start to finish
Join us as we take you step by step and click by click through building an XPages application. Learn the basics and then grow the complexity as you expand the application.
Including; XPages, Custom Controls, server side JavaScript, single UI methodology, using existing Notes data and adding unlisted dojo objects. Watch the application being built live on stage with everything you need to know condensed into 2 hours.

This morning I had chance to get 10 minutes of Bob Picciano’s time at the UKLUG event in Edinburgh.
Bob is the General Manager for Lotus Software and just after he delivered his keynote speech at the Opening General Session I got to talk to him about why he was here, what is important right now to Lotus Software and what he’s going to do while he’s here in Edinburgh.

Here is what he had to say.

p.s. During Ron Sebastian’s demo during the keynote he asked for a show of hands as to who still uses the workspace in Lotus Notes. Bob raised his hand too. ;o)

Mon, 14 Sep 2009, 11:30 AM EDT US/3:30 PM GMT/11:30 PM EST AU. Join Kristen Lauria, Lotus/WebSphere Portal Software Vice President, Marketing and Channels; Sandy Carter, IBM Software Group, Worldwide Sales Vice President, IBM Software Group Channels; and Shaun Jones, IBM Software Group, Marketing Vice President – WW Channel and General Business Marketing, to hear about an exciting upcoming campaign and understand how together we can amplify the “Lotus Knows” awareness campaign within companies worldwide – large and small. We’ll discuss how you can leverage resources from across IBM in your local marketing and social media efforts to drive awareness and results in your market!

Please register here

So Bruce, Gayle and Matt at Elguji have taken another idea and managed to shoehorn it into the JAM format. IQJam is a great looking tool that will allow you to create a question and answer forum. As is synonymous with IdeaJam the community can vote on the questions and the person who asked can mark the question answered. Add to all this that Bruce has decided to openly publish iqjam.net for the benefit of the Lotus community, just like they have with ideajam.net.

Another XPages application from the Elguji stud that looks to be as good as the rest of the stable. It will only run on a Domino 8.5.1 server so we have a little while to wait to try it for ourselves. I’m sure the wait will be worth it.

It’s very rewarding for me to be involved with Elguji and see them working with the new technologies Lotus is creating. Watching the products go from ideas to alpha testing, beta testing and then on release to the market is extremely interesting. I can’t wait to see this product and try it out for myself.