At New Year, as well as thinking about all the things we should be doing in the year ahead, we should also celebrate what we achieved in the year gone by.
Alongside 'important stuff' like working on a nuclear job, running 10k and going to Santorini I made four big organisational step changes for the better:
- silencing my email,
- filing in the cloud,
- piling in the cloud, and
- getting unlimited broadband at home.
Silencing my email.
I blogged about doing this last year and it works! In my efforts to make sure that I was in charge of my inbox, not vice versa, I turned off all dings and buzzes on my phone and Ipad when emails arrive. I now plan to go to my inbox three times a day - and when I do I don't read, I 'process'.
In particular I make sure everything is read and planned in the evening so I don't need to look in the morning and can drive my own agenda. It's the best time to actually do the work I need to do and my inbox should not be my 'To Do' list.
To be honest, this is still a work in progress, but it is so much better than last year! It was very difficult to keep on top when I was on site and off network.
Alongside my blog, if you want to read more, Paul Morgalla recently sent me this great link.
Filing in the cloud
Whilst 'on site and off network' I needed to edit and send someone a copy of my CV, but it wasn't on my Ipad. It took half an hour of calls from a car park to get one emailed to me; no one was picking up the phone! Aaaagh!!!
But this set me thinking. I had various copies of my CV scattered in various places on drives at work and at home. Many of them out of date and none accessible when I was on the move...... and that was actually true for nearly everything digital in my life.
And since the storage of my (and my family's) data was so complicated, ensuring that it was all regularly backed up was really difficult. With the number of photos my wife has I was one hard drive failure away from divorce.
So I've moved into the cloud and paid for 100Gb of space on Dropbox($99 per year - some free space available). All our home computers now use it as their 'My Documents' and anything you put in there gets back up, mirrored up into the cloud. It is configured so each of us sees only our own stuff, unless you access the whole lot via the web browser.
And I have done the same for 'work-related' stuff and have it as a drive on my work laptop. I need to point out that project data, commercial data and data about our people MUST only be put on our own servers. But I had a load of technical reference, useful spreadsheets, other stuff.... and those CVs. I now have them stored in one place and they get backed up, and best of all, I can get at them from all my devices. Fab!
If you ask me for a CV you get a link to the cloud sent from my Iphone - from a car park if necessary!
Piling in the cloud
Alongside 'important stuff' like working on a nuclear job, running 10k and going to Santorini I made four big organisational step changes for the better:
- silencing my email,
- filing in the cloud,
- piling in the cloud, and
- getting unlimited broadband at home.
Silencing my email.
I blogged about doing this last year and it works! In my efforts to make sure that I was in charge of my inbox, not vice versa, I turned off all dings and buzzes on my phone and Ipad when emails arrive. I now plan to go to my inbox three times a day - and when I do I don't read, I 'process'.
In particular I make sure everything is read and planned in the evening so I don't need to look in the morning and can drive my own agenda. It's the best time to actually do the work I need to do and my inbox should not be my 'To Do' list.
To be honest, this is still a work in progress, but it is so much better than last year! It was very difficult to keep on top when I was on site and off network.
Alongside my blog, if you want to read more, Paul Morgalla recently sent me this great link.
Filing in the cloud
Whilst 'on site and off network' I needed to edit and send someone a copy of my CV, but it wasn't on my Ipad. It took half an hour of calls from a car park to get one emailed to me; no one was picking up the phone! Aaaagh!!!
But this set me thinking. I had various copies of my CV scattered in various places on drives at work and at home. Many of them out of date and none accessible when I was on the move...... and that was actually true for nearly everything digital in my life.
And since the storage of my (and my family's) data was so complicated, ensuring that it was all regularly backed up was really difficult. With the number of photos my wife has I was one hard drive failure away from divorce.
So I've moved into the cloud and paid for 100Gb of space on Dropbox($99 per year - some free space available). All our home computers now use it as their 'My Documents' and anything you put in there gets back up, mirrored up into the cloud. It is configured so each of us sees only our own stuff, unless you access the whole lot via the web browser.
And I have done the same for 'work-related' stuff and have it as a drive on my work laptop. I need to point out that project data, commercial data and data about our people MUST only be put on our own servers. But I had a load of technical reference, useful spreadsheets, other stuff.... and those CVs. I now have them stored in one place and they get backed up, and best of all, I can get at them from all my devices. Fab!
If you ask me for a CV you get a link to the cloud sent from my Iphone - from a car park if necessary!
Piling in the cloud
What do you do with all that 'interesting stuff'? That article from New Scientist. That PDF explaining a standard. Those notes scribbled on a whiteboard. The receipt, guarantee and instructions from those lights you just bought.
If you are like me they are probably tucked away in all sorts of piles and drawers, in places you have to remember - and then don't.
Again, I have moved into the cloud, but this time with Evernote (£35 annually for Premium but you can start with free. There are Limits on how much you upload per month, not total storage). The key thing to realise is that you can search inside every document you put there - inside PDFs only for Premium users.
I now have Evernote on my home laptop, work laptop, Iphone and Ipad and they all access my data in the cloud. I email interesting emails to it along with their attachments. I can drag and drop Office documents and PDFs into it. I photograph papers, receipts and whiteboards with my phone and upload them to it (Evernote is really good at reading handwriting inside photos!).
I started by treating Evernote like a drive and trying to organise it. Now I have realised it is my own personal Google and just shove everything into the 'pile' with a few relevant tags. Minimal effort and I can find stuff by searching wherever I go. It works.
Best of all, those 'that might be useful' things you see.... stick them in Evernote and forget about them. They are there if you need them.
Getting unlimited broadband at home
In parallel with the last two, this one is really important. My BT deal was limited to 40Gb and I was aware we were often close to the limit. Then my daughter discovered the new season of Supernatural online, and we rather expensively blew through that.
However, when I asked it turned out that for £5 more per month I could go unlimited. That allowed me to go Pro with Dropbox - in the first month we used over 100Gb as things went into the cloud and we are regularly over 70Gb now.
Final thought
We happily spend money on hardware - PCs, laptops, monitors, hard drives, smart phones and tablets. As we move into the cloud I think we need to give more thought to spending on the services we buy to store and access our data, and 2013 was the year when I started that move.
And as I said in the title - having everything available everywhere is very, very liberating. Have a cloudy 2104!
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