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I see a lot of potential around me. I always want to take apart or tinker with some thing or process to improve it. All of these ideas create a growing inventory of things to do. All of that Getting Things Done (GTD) talk that I started to notice couple years ago, was an eye opener. Suddenly everybody had great ideas to help me organize and plan. Now in 2008, armed with A note pad, an Inbox with 0 items in it, and a Remember the Milk account, I am finally starting to get things done.

In the first few iterations of my GTD approach, I would just keep adding and adding things to my ToDo list. When something was added, I would give it a priority and never look back. Inevitably, I would just start ignoring things and move on to the one that I really needed to do when I would look at my task list. Turns out one important thing about getting things done, is coming to terms with the fact that an idea you had last week may not really make sense this week or a priority from last week may not be the same. Now I have modified my process of adding to my list to also include a quick audit of the items on the list. I always end up removing one or two things.

This lesson should not be lost on those of us that develop software when we are at work. There are a lot of ideas that you can come up with that can be added to the idea inventory for your project. What makes this harder is that you have other groups that are hired to add to your inventory as well. QA will keep your inventory full of bugs to fix, Designers will keep it full of crazy new patentable interfaces, and Product Management will keep coming up with more features that MUST be there. Every time something is added to the mix a full audit and re-prioritization needs to be done to keep the inventory manageable.

PHOTO CREDIT: Uploaded to Flickr on May 26, 2006 by kogakure.

I am one week into a new iTunes rating campaign. The idea is that I want every song in my library to have a rating which will add another dimension to my smart play lists. The last time I did this was about 3 gb of purchases ago, so I have a long road ahead. The only way this can be successful is if I work the process of rating into my daily routine. This is both because there is no way I am going to convince myself to just sit down and spend hours rating and I don’t want my ratings to be rushed. Luckily with the iPhone at my side, I can easily integrate this process into my commute. The next step is to commit to a flexible and meaningful definition for the each of the 5 stars provided by iTunes. Sometimes I wish there were just 2 options like in the Last-fm interface (love and ban) because it really makes things simple. Most of the time I will use this system:
• 1 Star - Hate
• 2 Star - Palin ( don’t like )
• 3 Star - Meh
• 4 Star - Digg
• 5 Star - Epic

The best part of this is going through some of the lost hits from the past year.

Heading into San Jose on an early flight along with Dave and Kelly from my team to start the first of the weeks workshops on time. We will be starting on a two day track about site integrity with a focus on client side code. Honestly, I have passed on this class the last few times it came out to my area. I just never thought of Site Integrity being a subject that would be huge concern to GUI types, like me. I expect I will see the error of my ways by lunch time today. Remarkably bad flight aside, I am looking forward to the next few days…