Ultimate lightweight blogging

If this works it will be brilliant – a pda, an email service and a little time. Grab a thought and mail it, end of process. I wonder what it looks like at the other end.

Tech and paper – in perfect harmony?

As Management Consultants we are always tuned in to change – that is of course where most of our fees come from.  But just as dogs tend to look like their owners, I find myself in a constant state of change.  The subject of this instability is around working methods and kit.

I suffer the necessity that is imposed by working for a significantly sized company – the company laptop.  It’s a decent Dell, quite small with good battery life and reasonable performance.  Not bad so far, but it is theirs, and subject to a range of limitations on what can I can do with it.  The standard configuration means I can’t add applications that might make life easier or add some light relief whilst out (iTunes is out of the question).  We have some quite tight security controls as well that add to the straightjacket mentality.

It’s difficult to escape from this machine as the working day can be quite long, and I need to maintain a calendar and contact list in the company Outlook.  Recognising all the good ideas of the various productivity sites and blogs, I keep only one calendar as I can’t imagine the confusion of separating personal and business commitments in different media.

Very soon though, I realised that the laptop is not the centre of my universe.  I rebel against those engineers’ meetings where everyone is plugged in to their computer tapping away, not always on the meeting topic, whilst presenters drone on.  I have tried hard to have short meetings with eye contact, discussion and agreement.  That tends to mean paper, so we now have two streams of content.  

In the daily working pattern, the laptop is not always on, or even nearby for large parts of the day, so I use an HTC Touch smartphone to extend the electronic content slightly further afield.  The Touch is brilliant and the best PDA/phone I have ever bought (there are better versions since but this one works well for now, and they are far from cheap).  I know there are many that live entirely by their Palm or Blackberry, but I cannot bring myself to commit everything to a small device that could fall into the Thames in a clumsy moment, and good though it is, it misses that tactile joy of a good pen and paper for jots and doodles and impromptu capture of ideas and inspiration.

So I go back to basics and paper, and this is where my problem lies – settling on a style or form and using it to its best effect has become an elusive ideal.  Not unlike that search for the method and kit to make the best cup of coffee whilst revising at university.

Over the last fifteen years I have been an early adopter of Filofax, used TimeManager, and Franklin Covey, usually in A5 size as I like the more compact and lightweight form (my other quest – to travel light but fully effectively).  I have got into a habit of printing the Outlook calendar each week, cropped it to A5 and used a fabulous Franklin Covey binder as the focus of all personal management actions.  I then made the mistake of experimenting with GTD and found the management actions going back to the electronics.  The A5 is also flawed as I had to spend a lot of time on print settings and cropping paper, and using a proprietary hole-punch that sits in my office at home and is never to hand when I need it somewhere else.

Learning from that, I invested in a Filofax A4 leather binder with four rings – slimmer, and with a twelve tab index keeps limited amounts of current project papers in one place.  I do still like the A5 notepad though – W.H. Smiths do a range of inexpensive wire bound soft cover notepads that I have used for a couple of years and keep coming back to as they are light, small and available at any high street or railway station.  Are they functional? Yes, elegant? Not quite, so I was delighted to receive this Christmas, after a volley of hints, a black leather cover by Franklin Covey, designed for wire-bound notepads.

So I now use four media to manage my life – the laptop, the smartphone, the A4 binder and the A5 notepad.  It sort of works but I’m sure there are improvements that could be made and this is my quest for the coming year.  Alongside the general plan to streamline all I do, make more time for the things I want to do and be generally more productive and effective, the search for the perfect working methods and tools continues.

And of course, in the background is the home computer setup with iTunes and all the other things I can’t use on the company laptop, but that is a different story altogether – Macintosh anyone?

Flying through the Magic Kingdom

Just back from the Gulf tour and wanted to share what a strange place Riyadh is. Any that have visited may recognise some parts.

The hotel schedule runs by prayer times – supper on the garden terrace was after Isha prayers, which are early evening, but you need a local newspaper to tell you when that is with any precision – but then time is an approximate science in Riyadh.

The city is quite intimidating in the evening – after supper I went outside for a walk – all the youth are now adopting western dress styles so assemble as boisterous groups in hoodies outside the shopping mall exit (just like Ealing really) alongside dozens of women in black abayyas waiting for their drivers to take them away. The traffic is very heavy, the whole place is very noisy and it is all in Arabic script, there is no spoken English around and very few other westerners to be seen so there is little to hold onto as a cultural reference point – it all leaves you feeling very isolated. So, back to the hotel and BBC Prime, old episodes of Waking the Dead, a great improvement on what was there twelve years ago on my last visit.

Then there is the airport – again minimum signage in English and a less than obvious route through the procedure. They don’t tell you which desk to check in at , and separate you from the desks by glass panels and a security scanner. So peer at the screens behind the desks and see if you can spot a BMI logo anywhere – or follow someone else speaking English and guess they are on the same flight, have done it before and know the plan…. Through a security scan and then get confused by a young chap pointing at my holdall and saying “chicken bag?” then the other on and “carry bag?” – Ah, check-in bag…..at the fifth attempt. Carry on and there is no obvious way to passport control, which it turns out is back through the security check the wrong way and behind the big desk and panel that was there as you arrived at the terminal.

Passport control and security are pretty easy (so long as your paperwork is in order….not and you could be explaining for ages). And then into departures – I got through easily and so had over two hours to wait in the noisiest departure area I have ever known. Not people, not music – a waterfall…..a thirty foot jet rising from the ground floor through beyond the level of the first floor balcony where departures is and falling back with such a roar it almost blots out the announcements. And all very ornately if not very subtly decorated.

The fountain at Riyadh King Khaled International Airport

The whole thing is set in what looks like a great big bowl. I would have slept a bit (it was gone midnight by now) but the noise and the bustle of a delayed flight to Mumbai kept me awake. Then the fun of the call to the flight – the Mumbai passengers were all milling around the gate and then at some pre-arranged signal there was a giant scrum as more than three hundred people raced and jostled and climbed over each other in front of the door. No obvious purpose or progress for five minutes until they emerged in the neatest single file line along the window wall of the terminal building. Order wad returned and they processed onto the plane in perfectly directed form.

Would we do the same when out turn came? Almost, but without the manic scrum, a little more refined, but no less hurrying to be early in the queue to get on and a symbolic step towards the first gin and tonic for a while.

Then an illustration of improvised airport security at it’s best – on the jetway to the aircraft door is a long table and a dozen security guards lined up to rummage through your carry-on bags. I walk down the table in the cramped passageway, and see a guard halfway down with an empty space in front of him, a cursory fumble and then I’m off, jostling past this knot of people being searched. I get to the end of the table and the last man is also free, he calls me over to inspect my bag, and I tell him I was already done earlier. A shrug and he waves me aboard. Looking back over my shoulder he could have had no idea if I really had because it was impossible to see down the passage beyond the first few people.

The BMI service is good, a decent seat even in economy, friendly service and the drinks trolley shot out almost as soon as we got airborne. Some of the guys must have been in country for a while, as a dewy look greeted their first beer or scotch.

Saudi is a weird place, but much like the other countries of the region, it has a habit of getting under your skin. In spite of the odd things that happen, I’m sure I’ll be back there soon.

Oh Pollock

How fitting to write about misspelt fish in these pages.  But this is more a recommendation for a great midweek social event.

Sam’s in Chiswick – a great place to be shepherded out as the last patrons on a Monday evening.  Champagne tasting is fun, and surprisingly different between types – from the mouthstripping laser sharpness of the Grand Cru Silver Brut (battery acid anyone? good with oysters apparently) to the gorgeous rounded Grand Siecle at 40 quid a pop, but you can see why. 

Thimblefuls are ok, but sooner or later one needs something more substantial – cue the dodgy fish.  Correction, fabulous but simple white fish (the pollock) on top of a lovely vegetable base with new spuds, green beans, olives and tomatoes.  So good I thought I’d copy it, so tried it with salmon – it works, and it’s easy, store that one for again.  Now what am I going to do with half a pot of sun-dried tomatoes?  Challenges, challenges!

Roland opted out of the fish and went for the beef cheek – very tasty, but still not sure which cheek we are talking about here.  Great fun all up, and a reminder to the c-a-b crew that Sam’s wine tastings are a worthy midweek distraction – but care, several thimblefuls, plus a strange cocktail (J&R!) supper and more wine leave you hardly best set for a Tuesday morning.

Roll on Friday……

A busy life…..on a stick

Always looking for ways to travel lighter and still be productive. This post from Lifehack looks like a really good way to move from place to place with a consistent set of applications docs and settings.

Go to http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/put-an-office-in-your-pocket.html#more-4284 for details. I’m going to try it out and see how it goes. It still won’t stop the laptop moment in the airport, but might force me to set aside travel for thinking and reading, now that would be a change….