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Showing posts with the label time management

The Robots are Coming : Life Automation Project : Part 1

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Over the past 12 months or so I have been conducting various experiments with automation in work and at home and thought I would share with you how they have been going and some of the errors I have made. Automation and artificial intelligence are not new things, think about the simple video recorder or the robots in factories, CNC machines, whilst they only go so  far they are part of the story, and it even goes back further than that,  as can be seen in this documentary from many years ago. So my experience of automating my life includes the following tools IFTTT service (if this then that) Microsoft Outlook rules toodledo.com & app Amazon Echo My mobile phones Trello and its app Phase 1 - Email Automation in the Office My first goal was to try to manage the email traffic that I had in my inbox and help me prioritise which ones to look at, this is difficult to do unless you open the email and then decide, which burns up valuable time.  When l

New Year Countdown 266315374264

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So what is this number and how cannot help? Try this one 155274263153. Still not sure? The first one is the first Monday in each month for 2017, and the second? Correct! The same for 2018. So what use is that? Well if you learn this number (or keep a note of it handy) and know the number of days in a month* you can easily work out the dates of any day in any month for that year without needing to refer to a calendar. So when you are stood in front of your whiteboard, marker in hand, with your team trying to work out those pesky milestone dates, BOOM! you can quickly work it out. *If you can't remember the song use your knuckles take a look here . Have a marvellous New Year's Eve and a productive 2017. Nige The Sunday Lunch PM

Been a bit 'busy'

So as you will see I have not posted anything for a while I have been 'busy' and not on any of my book projects. What does busy mean, well we all seem to be busy and wear it a bit like a badge, but as I heard on a podcast called IM Talk if you are too busy to meet any commitments you have made that means you have weighed up priorities and given something else higher priority. We make priority decisions big and small every day. "Shall I check Facebook or chat to my partner", "watch a soap or do exercise"...... Write my book or put extra effort into the job.  I apologise to anyone eagerly waiting for the book, it will come, honest. In the mean time I will finish off the one I started in Jan and publish before the end of the year. You will be happy to hear this one will be a free ebook. Got to go now, bit busy. Nige

Email Tip 3: Do not use the reply all option

Here's the logic,  We all get too many emails! We all send too many emails! We all speak of email as we do about traffic when we are stuck in it! What do I mean? Well when we are in a traffic jam we refer to the traffic being bad as if we are not part of it , but actually we are part of that collective term of traffic, if we were not there ourselves there would be less traffic.  The same can be said for email, if we sent one less email there would be less "traffic" for the recipient. So what's the suggestion? If every email we receive, that we need to reply on, we look at the recipients and the people copied on it and assess whether they need to be copied on our reply. Sometimes people are included by the originator to show that they are doing something, so once copied the goal is accomplished and the copied recipient does not need to see the rest of the conversation because they know the conversation is going on. There is a feeling sometimes that we h