I am try­ing to be­come more or­ga­nized in my work. And it seems to be work­ing.

Things I do/no­tice/try now:

1. There is a tick­­et­ing sys­tem. Use it.

   Re­al­­ly, there is no rea­­son not to. If the cus­­tomer says cre­at­ing tick­­ets is an­noy­ing/­bor­ing/what­ev­er, I do them my­­self.

   It takes very lit­­tle time and it lets me see/de­scribe what I do/­­did in the day. Then, take what's in the tick­­et, clean it up, and...

2. There is a wi­k­i. Use it.

   Doc­u­­ment ev­ery thing I do. No "this is just a lit­­tle thing". There are no lit­­tle things. If it was so lit­tle, I would­n't have to do it. Put ev­ery­thing in the doc­s. The client needs it. I need it.

3. There is an email. Use it.

   I got an email. Then ei­ther it's some­thing that's bro­ken (cre­ate a tick­­et), or some­thing that needs ex­­plain­ing (cre­ate/re­fer a doc), or some­thing that needs do­ing (cre­ate a todo), or a meet­ing (put it in the phone), or a a piece of da­­ta I need to re­mem­ber (archive it, mair­ix will find it when I need it). I have had an in­­box with no mail in it for three days, and it's quite lib­er­at­ing.

4. The phone is the first PDA that ac­­tu­al­­ly work­s.

   I nev­er man­aged to use desk­­top PIM suites or PDAs. I do keep my ap­­point­­ments on the phone. I al­ways have my phone with me. I lis­ten to it when I have an alar­m. I can't say the same thing about the note­­book, or about any PDA I owned. And it's a cheap phone. Us­ing a smart­­phone makes no sense. I lose the things. Now I can sync it via blue­­tooth, too! I still use a Sony CLIE to read ebook­s, though.

5. I like Hive­­Min­der.

   It's to­­do lists I can ac­­tu­al­­ly use. Done? Click, gone. New task? Fill a line and it's there, tagged, grouped, dat­ed, pri­or­i­­tized. Want to do it from the CLI? Yup. I do need to write a Trac plug­in that con­verts my tick­­ets in­­­to to­­dos, though.

   Sure, I don't have it with me all the time (maybe sync it with my phone's to­­do list is pos­si­ble some­how...) but I just need to do one full task re­view a day, add tasks when I'm on a com­put­er, close tasks at the end of the day or while work­ing.

6. Read email/news on fixed time pe­ri­od­s.

   I can't fo­­cus on work­ing for over one hour non­stop. So I stop ev­ery hour for 10 min­utes of news, and 5 min­utes of mail (which is still work­ing any­way, since I need to know about stuff). No mail app run­n­ing in the mean­­time. If it's ur­­gen­t, they have my phone num­ber. If they don't, it's not ur­­gen­t.

It is mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, I am be­com­ing more pro­duc­tive with­out spend­ing more hours at it, which was my pre­vi­ous "s­trat­e­gy".