Scott Hanselman: Tips on Managing Your Life

Scott gave the (a?) keynote at Oredev recently, and his talk was entitled “Information Overload and Managing the Flow.” It is heavily influenced by David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Considering the level at which he participates in social networks (Twitter, Blogging, etc), it’s interesting to hear him discuss how too much data coming in can really screw you up and cause you to “thrash to disc.”

What follows is some of the advice he offers to improve your effectiveness and efficiency.

Email Advice

1. Don’t check email in the morning
2. If you respond, they will respond
3. “If you are the fastest responder to a problem, you will get all the problems. Don’t put energy into things you don’t want more of”
4. Use blogging instead of email.
5. Don’t use email for writing a book. 5 paragraphs is too long.
6. Have a separate inbox for mail you’re cc’d on. It’s less important. Likely not urgent or an action item.
7. GTD folders:
   1. @Action
   2. @Blog
   3. @Podcast
   4. @Read
   5. @Reply
   6. @Waiting/Follow Up

(At one point, he says, “Now I can Google . . . with Bing . . .” LOL.)

Focus Techniques

• Use personal Scrum sprints
• Use the Pomodoro Technique: using an egg timer, do only one thing for 25 minutes. Keep track of your own internal interruptions, which allows you to introspect, to be aware of what you’re doing.
• Limit yourself to a single “news” (as in NEWS) feed. If 9-11 happens again, you’ll hear about it.
• Use aggregators: engadget, boingboing, lifehacker. [Ed: and Reflective Perspective]

Finding the Leaks

1. RescueTime will automatically track your behavior (websites mostly) and give you graphs of all the time you’ve wasted. Cool.

Organization Tools

• 43 Folders. Straight out of GTD. Read the book.
• Sync to paper. DIY Planner, Hipster PDA, PocketMod.
• Evernote. Take a picture with your phone, sync to Evernote, search for text in the pictures later.
• Remember The Milk. “The best replacement for todo.txt” That’s a major endorsement.

Summary

• Audit & sort your sources
• Schedule work sprints
• Turn off distractions
• How are you triaging your inbox?
• Consider you personal toolbox

Nice job, Scott. Thanks for the tips.