OT: Which part of "NO" don't you understand?

Having a Microsoft Hotmail account has a number of drawbacks. For a start, you can't set it up to automatically forward your emails to another email account. I'd guess MS organize it that way so that you can't just do an auto-forward and then let the account just wither away from disuse - which is exactly what I'd like to do with it.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that it has the Microsoft Marketing Team behind it. Have a look at their latest email...

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Dear Windows Live User,

We are contacting you regarding your communication preference settings for Windows Live and MSN.

Currently, your settings do not allow Microsoft to send you promotional information or survey invitations about Windows Live and MSN. We would like to communicate important product updates to you, so if you would like to change your settings, please visit your account profile here [link]to change your preferences.

Sincerely,
The Windows Live Team

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Now how can I set my preferences so MS aren't allowed to ask me to change my preferences?
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eProductivity: Automating a Mess gives you an Automated Mess

I run three email accounts:

• a personal hotmail account that I've had since the Dawn of Email.
• a business hotmail account that I ran for a while until I started ...
• ... a business Notes email account running off my own Lotus Foundations Server.

In my last post about eProductivity I pointed out the difficulty of setting up meaningful Projects when I was working from a disorganized email environment. My attempt to straighten out my business Notes email account led me inexorably to my other email accounts and the painful realization that my lack of email organization included a lack of boundaries between my personal and business email accounts.

So after deleting well over a thousand obsolete emails and sending out a mailstorm of "Please use my other email address" missives I am almost back to Square One of evaluating eProductivity. The setback was painful to fix but a real eye-opener at the same time. This time round I should be able to build on a more solid Foundation (pun intended).

So when was the last time you flushed out your mail file?
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OT: Shoes... who needs them?

I think most men get by on three pairs of shoes. We have the pair that we wear to work, the pair we wear to casual occasions and the pair that we wear everywhere else. Two years ago I replaced my work shoes with a pair of steel-capped black work boots which I keep finely polished. They are comfortable, will last forever and, at the ripe old age of fifty, I don't feel the need to make a fashion statement. When the subject of these boots ever comes up (only by me mentioning them - no-one ever notices them), most women look baffled and most men say "What a great idea! I'll do the same when my current work shoes die!"

This post is about my 'everywhere else' pair of shoes who died completely a couple of weeks ago. Now while I'm quite comfortable in my work boots I don't wear them around the house owing to the overwhelming sound effects when I walk on polished floorboards, and since I had misplaced my casual shoes, I was getting by at home with bare feet or sometimes with socks on cold nights.

My Road to Damascus moment came with an urgent trip to the hardware store. Since I had been working down the back yard in bare feet I just hopped in the car 'sans sabots ' and mentally prepared myself for the outraged stares of the sartorially sensitive members of the community. While standing at the Hardware Store checkout I realized that I was actually enjoying the feel of the carpet on my feet and I began mentally listing the benefits of not wearing shoes:

• Escalators give you a foot massage.
• Puddles of rainwater and flooded drains are irrelevant.
• Grass feels good too.
• My feet don't ache.
• My feet aren't sweaty and toxic after a long day.

I will get another pair of 'everywhere else' shoes soon, but in the meantime I'm enjoying my back-to nature moment. Give it a try and see if you like it.
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What value is IBM Top Gun Virtual Learning?

Yesterday morning was the end of my three-day stint logged in to the IBM Top Gun Virtual Learning seminar and I enjoyed the experience more than I expected. It was the first Virtual Learning I had done in this classroom format, and as I sat at my desk at home, unshaved, wearing trakkies, and drinking my own coffee I thought to myself "All mornings should start like this".

(I listed the curriculum in a previous post so I won't revisit it here.)

eLearning has a number of advantages compared with a regular classroom format:

• It's easier to get international speakers - we had maybe ten presenters logging in from multiple worldwide locations and only one speaker came from Sydney. If I wanted to hear from all of those guys in a classroom format it would have cost IBM a few zillion dollars to fly them in and the event probably wouldn't be held in my town anyway. Sydney might have got the world premiere of the new Star Trek movie but IBM is a little more pragmatic than that.
  
  
• Sitting at my own desk meant that I could multi-task more effectively and I didn't have to close down my business to attend the seminar. While the course was going on I could answer my own emails and phone calls without disturbing anybody. Obviously I only "stepped out" to handle urgent stuff, but it's reassuring to know that I had the option of juggling both balls at once.
  
  
• You can tune out during the boring/repetitive stuff - I probably already knew 80% of the stuff in the course and I'm sure many other attendees were in the same boat. I don't blame the organizers for that - the course curriculum was publicized well in advance. It would have been impossible to persuade myself to attend a three day classroom event covering the same material.
  

Is the course worth attending? It was for me, but I can't answer that question for you. My objective is to position my company (Binary Concepts) with IBM as a skilled and reliable business partner specializing in the Lotus software brand, and doing this course and passing the subsequent exam was one way of showing IBM that they can confidently recommend us to their customers.
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eProductivity for Lotus Foundations - Post 2

The install of eProductivity was fairly painless but the next step was less so. Now that I have modified my mail file to support eProductivity I need to reclassify the data that's already there. Fortunately I don't keep every email I get but until now I've never had a fixed set of criteria for determining which emails I discard. It all depends on my mood at the time.

Now I haven't read David Allen's book but from glancing through other people's blogs about eProductivity I've picked up three principles for dealing with information:

• Write it Down: Information needs to be effectively stored if I want it to be available later. This means make an entry in my EPD ("eProductivity database" - previously known as my mail file).
  
  
• The Two-Minute Rule: If an item (email, task, idea, whatever) can be completed in less than two minutes then do it now. If not, then see Rule One.
  
  
• Dispose, Delegate or Defer: Pick in of these options for each new item in my EPD. In the past I've been heavily reliant on a fourth 'D' word - "Delay". BTW the snailmail in-tray on my desk is about 15cm high (6 inches for you Imperial die-hards) and there are documents in there dating back to mid-2008. I probably need to Dispose, Delegate or Defer all of that also.
  

The new features in my EPD include the ability to convert each incoming (and outgoing) email into a new Project or a new Action within an existing project. That's quite handy because it makes me think whether I need to keep that email. I'm reasonably up-to-date with filing my email In-Box but I still have occasional meltdowns about what folder I should be using to file a particular email. eProductivity allows me to file things where I like but still track them by Project.

After a frustrating twenty minutes of failing to process my mail effectively I had a light bulb moment and realized that I hadn't created a strategic approach to my mail. Let me emphasize the point that this frustration was not the fault of eProductivity - it was my own failing of not having a defined process to deal with email. It's sort of like watching my three year old son sweeping a room. There's lots of activity and the mess sometimes accumulates into little piles (more by good luck than good management) but there is no predefined process to move the dirt from the floor into the final repository. In the past I've been very good at getting email out of my InBox but now I've recognized my system of filing email wasn't tailored to support my business objectives. That Aha! moment alone was worth the effort of installing eProductivity.

So today I'm stepping back from the coal face so I can look at my email from 30,000 feet and ask myself a few questions.

• What Projects do I want to be working on? Have I been letting the quantity of incoming email for each project determine my work priorities for the day? Hey! Who's in charge here? Me, or the people sending me email?
  
• How do I determine which emails I keep?
• How do I determine which emails are assigned to which Projects? Maybe I need to slice and dice my projects under different categories.

Can the Old Dog learn New Tricks?
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eProductivity for Lotus Foundations - Post 1

Like most of the citizens of PlanetLotus I've seen the posts about eProductivity around and even clicked through a few of them when the fancy took me. So why did I take up Eric's offer to blog about it?

Firstly, because I can see a synergy between Lotus Foundations Server and a Personal Productivity tool (be it eProductivity or otherwise). A large segment of the target market for Lotus Foundations Server will be a SMB directed by a single leading individual and it makes all kinds of sense to help that leader get as much as possible out of their day. Gaining an additional 20 minutes a day productivity out of a janitor might save a SMB ten dollars per day in overtime but generating the same productivity boost for the CEO might add another 5% to the bottom line. I'd like to show that kind of benefit to my customers.

Secondly, because my company (Binary Concepts), is a SMB and I'd sure like to add another 5% to my bottom line.

Third, because in the past I've tended to see these sorts of tools as a commercialized version of one man's desktop. eProductivity is the first personal organization tool I've heard of that is based on a productivity methodology and I want to see how it's different to all of the other PIMs, notepads and glorified calendars I've worked with previously.

The web site for eProductivity lists five activities leading up to installing the software. Now I hate watching advertising as much as the next guy but if I'm going to give a fair evaluation of the product then it's only fair that I RTFM first. Here are the five steps:

1. Listen to a 3-minute testimonial from David Allen.... Well, its actually four and a half minutes, and it expands on the three points listed on the David Allen page.

• eProductivity lets me quickly get things into Notes, into the system I can trust.
• eProductivity, gives me the ability to have both perspective and control,
• eProductivity gives me pretty much every tool that I need inside of Lotus Notes;

You can probably skip it.

2. View some screen shots.... A dozen or so screen shots showing different parts of the application. Move along... nothing earth-shattering to see here folks.

3. Watch the video tour and explore eProductivity.... This is 45 minutes long and is absolutely essential. The video tutorial explains the relationship between the different components of eProductivity.

4. Experience eProductivity: download an interactive demo.... I'll pass on this one. I want to get straight to ...

5. Try it! Use eProductivity for 21 days at no cost.... OK then! Let's start downloading!

The download and installation process was simple enough - basically you are replacing your mailfile template. I dutifully stepped through the documented process but found that the instruction videos all had a common feature ie descriptive text of "Video coming soon..." It was simple enough for an experienced administrator to download and install the template but perhaps it would be better to remove all references to the videos until they are available. I'd say it's a two hour process to watch the video then download and install the template.

The next step is to categorize my mail file into Actions and Projects. Stay tuned.
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Time to drink the Lotus KoolAid!

From tomorrow I'll be joining dozens of other interested people in attending the on-line IBM Top Gun Virtual Learning: Lotus Foundation class. (NB: This course covers the entire Lotus range - the word 'Foundation' in its title is misleading). This is three consecutive half-days of training across the entire Lotus product line. Here's the blurb:

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This IBM Top Gun Virtual Learning class provides a look at the Lotus offerings from a non-technical sales standpoint, focusing on what the products deliver and where they fit in the marketplace. An overview of the Lotus product strategy kicks off the class, building a framework for the more detailed product sessions to follow. Product features are explained and the types of customers to target are identified. This class can serve as a prerequisite for attending a face to face IBM Lotus Foundations Top Gun Class.

Topics include:
* Surveying the Overall Lotus Product Strategy
* Building an Understanding of the Lotus Product Family
* Identifying Target Customer Types
* Previewing Competitive Insights

Duration
The class is held on 3 consecutive days for 4 hours each day.

Audience
Any seller who needs to understand the Lotus portfolio, including Sales, Services, Business Partners, and non-software sellers who wish to enhance their sales by including Lotus Software.

Objectives
This class builds foundational skills and knowledge for enabling students to:
* Gain a basic understanding of the Lotus strategy.
* Understand the Lotus product offerings and their functions.
* Identify the target audience for Lotus products and solutions.
* Recognize potential opportunities for Lotus solutions early in the sales cycle.

Agenda
Day 1
* Lotus Software Strategy Overview
* Lotus Notes / Domino
Day 2
* Lotus Sametime / Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC²)
* Lotus Quickr
* Lotus Connections
Day 3
* WebSphere Portal
* Portal Accelerators
* Mashups
* Wrap-up and Final Test
*************************************************************************************

I've been selling and supporting Lotus software for over twenty years - that's no big deal, so have many other people - and the song sheet has changed a fair bit in that time. Time to make sure that I'm up to date with the current Top Ten Hits. If you sell any part of the Lotus portfolio and you want some street cred with IBM then maybe you need to check in for a music lesson also.

The bit that annoys me is that Day Three of the class is scheduled for the morning of Easter Friday. As an IT consultant I normally don't worry about Public Holidays, but Easter and Christmas carry a special significance far beyond the average Labor Day or Bank Holiday. I do think Lotus could have been a bit more sensitive on the timing.
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