Jane Dallaway

Jane Dallaway

Jane Dallaway  //  Service Delivery manager, photographer, dog owner, gardener, reader, learner, software developer and occasional snowboarder

This blog contains all sorts of bits and bobs, from development related stuff, through process and productivity stuff, to photography stuff, and general inspiration things. It's a bit all over the place with no real theme, but then so am I

Email: jane @ dallaway.com
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Jun 5 2011

Article: How To Set Smart Daily Goals

Extract from How To Set Smart Daily Goals

From Mark McGuinness of Lateral Action:

What’s the ONE BIG THING you want to accomplish today? The big danger for hyperconnected creative professionals is that incoming demands and digital distractions get in the way of real productivity - i.e. making inroads on your big, scary, difficult, and (ultimately) rewarding creative challenges. If you do ONE BIG THING today - one draft design, one chapter, one photoshoot, one intensive rehearsal - it feels like a productive day. (Two or more is for superheroes.) But if you don’t nail that one thing, it doesn’t matter how many little jobs you get done, you know in your heart it was a wasted day.

Asking yourself this question first thing helps you focus and prioritize. After that, the only things that can get in your way are emergencies and excuses.

Something to consider as part of my strive to be effective (i.e. longer term goal focussed) as opposed to efficient (i.e. getting smaller and less important tasks ticked off the to do list)

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Jun 4 2011

Article: A Day Without Distraction: Lessons Learned from 12 Hrs of Forced Focus

From my experience writing about productivity, most people will abandon a tactic as soon as it makes their life more difficult. My experience with batching, however, leads me to question whether we need to rethink where we place our emphasis.

via A Day Without Distraction: Lessons Learned from 12 Hrs of Forced Focus

An interesting, if brief, study into "batching". Requires discipline. I'd be interested in knowing if the author has continued using this method

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Jan 22 2011

Are you flagging that email as high importance? Or Urgent?

This quote

Given the choice between working on the important and the urgent, the urgent almost always wins.

from Misjudging risk (and bad decisions) made me realise something about email, and Outlook in particular. When using outlook for email, like I do at work, you can flag an email with an importance level of high, medium or low. This isn't something I usually change from the default setting of medium but others sometimes flag things as high. But do they really mean that this message is really important or do they mean it's urgent? I would suggest it is used to mean the latter, to make it stand out and be attended to. The mac Mail application calls this field Priority - which would seem to be a more correct term.

Additionally you can't change that flag for different people - if you're copying me into your email, then by nature of being copied in there should be no action for me to take, it's for information only - in which case why does it still have a red exclamation mark showing it to be important on it?

Not to mention who is it urgent for? The sender or the recipient? Usually its the former, in which case wouldn't picking up a telephone, or dropping by the office be a much more effective way to elicit the information?

I believe that having good email etiquette is important (I'm still working on it), but having tools that don't support that makes it all the harder to get right.
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Jan 11 2011

Article: The Best Way to Use the Last Five Minutes of Your Day

Every day, before leaving the office, save a few minutes to think about what just happened. Look at your calendar and compare what actually happened — the meetings you attended, the work you got done, the conversations you had, the people with whom you interacted, even the breaks you took — with your plan for what you wanted to have happen. Then ask yourself three sets of questions:

  • How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
  • What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do — differently or the same — tomorrow?
  • Who did I interact with? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question? Share feedback?


This last set of questions is invaluable in terms of maintaining and growing relationships. It takes just a few short minutes to shoot off an email — or three — to share your appreciation for a kindness someone extended, to ask someone a question, or to keep someone in the loop on a project.

via blogs.hbr.org

I read this on Sunday, and it seemed like a good, quick and effective way to incorporate a regular personal review into my life. On Monday I added a 5 minute task into my work calendar with the subject "Daily Review" and popped these questions in it. I took my 5 minutes both yesterday and today whilst still at my desk, and noted down my successes, my challenges, my learnings, my interactions and the thanking I should do (which I followed up immediately with emails to the relevant people (or their managers)). It seemed like a great way to close my day.

What I'm unsure about though, is where to record my answers. Is there ongoing value to my successes, my challenges, my learnings. Should I be reviewing them in order to monitor my progress through the year? Or are they mainly throw away observations with the learnings building up day by day?

Do any of you do anything like this? And if you do, do you record them for review/posterity? Do you use this as a diary/journal activity hand-writing the answers? Or jot them into a calendar item? Or not even note them down at all, using it just as a mental exercise?

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Dec 28 2010

Article: How Analog Rituals Can Amp Your Productivity

By manually bumping a certain task every day, he feels that it is incomplete. He is faced with the reality and forced to either complete the task, delegate it, or bump it again.

(from How Analog Rituals Can Amp Your Productivity discussing why Bob Greenberg, the CEO of the digital agency R/GA writes his tasks every morning despite having access to technical solutions, or probably even a PA to perform this task for him)

When I used to work at Glass's I used a diary to manage my tasks and there definitely is something to be said for the willingness to procrastinate or delay on a task when you know you're going to have to write them out by hand day after day, something which is also covered in the article
Yes, monotony and routine can be truly wearisome. They transform our colorful, over-stimulated existence into black and white. But a task left undone SHOULD be a burden. If you make your system for productivity too productive, you will become anesthetized to your responsibilities.
The 99 percent has been one of most beneficial reads this year. I frequently find something of interest and value in the posts

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Dec 27 2010

Update: Dropbox vs Toodledo notes

I wrote the other day about my quandary about where to store my notes in my blog post
via Dropbox vs Toodledo notes

I decided to move over to dropbox, as it makes it much easier to edit them from a laptop/desktop machine, its just as easy on the iPhone, and they will all be in one place. In the end I simplified my criteria and bought notesy, a nicely designed app, with excellent customer support - I emailed my criteria and within a couple of hours had a detailed list of what it could currently do, what there were plans to do, and the offer to refund if my external keyboard didn't work properly.

Almost all of my notes are now transferred over, and I'll soon be able to de-install another app. Productivity win!

Filed under  //  productivity   review   tool  

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Dec 22 2010

Dropbox vs Toodledo notes

As a result of reading this article I got to thinking about my notes and where they're stored. I've taken a lot of notes over the years on my iPhone/iPod touch and one of the first apps I bought was the excellent Appigo Notes app as this let me get my notes off my device and on to the internet (at the time the native notes app didnt sync anywhere). This has served me well.

Since dropbox came into my life I've relied on it more and more, storing lots of notes and work on it. Discovering the PlainText app helped too, allowing me to access and edit the text on the fly.  Other notes apps are available which work with dropbox too, and I'm planning to find out a bit more about them.

But, now I've got notes in 2 places. Toodledo notes (synchronised from Appigo Notes) and Dropbox. Both are accessible via the iPhone. Neither has it's content searched by the iPhone search function. Dropbox seems to give me more options, and makes it much easier for editing generally.  If I can track down a notes app which does the following, I'll be moving everything over to dropbox:

  • Search content
  • Launch the editor from within dropbox itself
  • Work offline
  • Work across all the folders in my dropbox - I have notes in quite a few different folders depending on whether they're shared with others or not
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Dec 12 2010

5 Things to beg your boss for this week - Stepcase Lifehack

2. Meeting agendas – If a meeting doesn’t have an agenda, you can argue that you won’t be able to prepare properly and won’t be able to bring your best contribution. In reality, agenda-less meetings tend to be a huge waste of time and using the “I want to give my best” argument is your quickest ticket back to productivity.
via lifehack.org

This is a follow up to the TED talk with Jason Fried I

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Dec 12 2010

Good and Bad Procrastination

Quite an old article crossed my path earlier, Good and Bad Procrastination, which is quite an interesting take on procrastination, reminding me that things can be procrastinated for good reasons as well as unproductive ones

Good in a sense, at least. The people who want you to do the errands won't think it's good. But you probably have to annoy them if you want to get anything done. The mildest seeming people, if they want to do real work, all have a certain degree of ruthlessness when it comes to avoiding errands.

Some errands, like replying to letters, go away if you ignore them (perhaps taking friends with them). Others, like mowing the lawn, or filing tax returns, only get worse if you put them off. In principle it shouldn't work to put off the second kind of errand. You're going to have to do whatever it is eventually. Why not (as past-due notices are always saying) do it now?

The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real work needs two things errands don't: big chunks of time, and the right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during those few days, you will be net more productive.

After reading this article, and especially this bit
There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.
I discover that I am a type B procrastinator - I'm frequently busy, and I do get a lot of stuff done, but often it isn't the stuff that I feel is of the greatest value, it may be the stuff that I do because if I don't, no-one else will, which really isn't good enough to prevent me from doing the stuff that only I am in a position to do and that has larger value to both me, and the organisation.

The portion about 
Hamming's exercise can be generalized to:
What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

reminds me of three questions I wrote down after reading Eat That Frog!: Get More of the Important Things Done, Today!

What are my highest value activities?
What can I and only I do that, if done well, will make a real difference?
What is the most valuable use of my time right now?

I actually have these printed out on the wall next to my desk as a reminder which I do refer to, but I don't live by them.

This week, I'm going to think about all the things I have as recurring tasks on my todo list and see how many of them are in my list because they are high value, or need my skills and how many could find new owners.

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Dec 4 2010

Article: Lab Rat: How Can A Social Media Addict Find Focus?

After experimenting with regaining focus while also performing the more distracting elements of my job, there were a few things that I found worked (with or without a two-screen system):

  • Slow down, and choose one thing to work on at a time. By multitasking to the extreme and constantly switching between projects, you may think you’re being productive, when, really, you’re being frantic.
  • Mimic a “school-day” calendar by creating blocks for different types of work during the day. If you have 2 different projects to work on, block off 1-2 hours for each, with a hour in between when you can catch up on social media and email.
  • Leave your desk. Even if this means simply bringing a pad of paper into the conference room at your office, physical separation from your distractions will help you gain clarity as you start a new project.
  • Consider your old techniques for productivity and carry a few specific ones over to your workday. Even if social media is at the core of your job, don’t let yourself off the hook from remembering how you used to get your work done.

(shared via Instapaper)

(content via Lab Rat: How Can A Social Media Addict Find Focus?) 

Another interesting and timely article about "achieving focus". I found it interesting that my experiences of my recent experiments were similar. I think I may have to do the leaving my desk thing more often. I've found myself using a piece of paper and a pencil to draw mind maps for the stuff I'm thinking about so there is no reason at all why I can't do that from our social room, a coffee shop or even at someone else's desk in the office. I don't need to be tied to email, it'll still be there when I come back (unfortunately) and I'm fully contactable via a work mobile phone.  

And to feed back on my own experiments of commitments -  the switching email off thing failed. It just isn't practical in our organisation at the moment, and my zero inbox policy combined with my Do it tomorrow macro makes me more effective than most in this area anyway. I just have to get better at not checking it so often and controlling my distraction impulse.  The controlling my own calendar experiment has worked better and I've pushed back on appointments which didn't fit in with the other commitments I already had with tighter deadlines or which were of more strategic importance. I also made an effort to block out regular periods of thinking time to allow me a couple of hours of time rather than 15 minutes between meetings.

Progress is being made.
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