New Year Organization

When a new year starts it is time customary to evaluate the year that passed. Looking back I was unhappy about how I was not able to dedicate as much time as I would have liked to programming. My new role as Service Manager of the Machine Learning Platform, even with the help of Nicholas had many burning issues, which have high priority as we need to deliver the new machine. Time for more focused work came up short.

So I decided to try to improve my organization, first by ensuring that I would be able to follow jira and git better, but then also looking at other things. I came across peterakkies.net, his free mincourse on The Essentials of Big-Picture Productivity is nice, nothing groundbreaking if one has already done this kind of things, but a good concentrated set of good practices. I did spam my family with it ;).

I also looked at tools to help me out, I looked at various things, for example Todoist, because I was hoping to be able to share it more. Finally I choose Things because it supports due dates separately for scheduled dates, and looked better integrated with iOS/macOS. To share with others at work we are already using other things (jira, confluence, git), I thought that keeping Things just personal would be fine. As I choose I also did Peter’s course on it which has been useful to get quickly up-to-speed.

Later I also came across Tick Tick which has been endorsed by Marques Brownlee (@mkbhd), which also looks interesting, but managing and changing our own behaviour is one of the core things to increase our productivity, tools can help, but are not the most important thing, and changing tools is a way to at least initially decrease productivity, so I did not really look into it and and did stick with Things. Next year we will se if this really helped.