Keep it simple

In my job as CTO and senior consultant the information flow is incredible; there is the overall planning, there are scrum teams, there are incidents in various priorities and there are numerous e-mails. I started four years ago using a number of techniques to control this work. Here is a small summary what I use.

I started with using the Getting Things Done (GTD) method as defined by David Allen. The most important guideline is the idea to reach every Friday (at the end of the day) the same feeling as if you are ready to go on holiday; an empty brain. To be able to do that I have an empty agenda on Friday.

GTD also defines that when you read email, emails that can be answered in 2 minutes, should be answered immediately. I read email 4 times a day and I have no pop-up for new emails. When a really important call comes in (server down for example), I get a phone call.

I also have a number of lists, including a huge list of items to be read, for example all information about the Go programming language. As soon as I have some time I take the list and read something from the list.

From the book Rework by 37 Signals I learned to keep meetings max 15 minutes (it can slip to 30 minutes but longer meetings don't make sense). I learned many more things from that book but that is outside the scope of this post.

I have two agenda's one company and one private. The company one is currently Commence and is linked to the Mobile phone. The private one can be accessed on all my phones, tablets and other computers.

To save time I use automation of repetitive tasks. In Commence that can be done by using agents and scripts.

More software that I use will be disclosed in a next article.