Awesome Conferences

Apple iPhone leaked! Accidentally shipped to customer via FedEx! Pictures!

No, silly. No such thing happened. In fact, I'm betting there won't be an iPhone announced next week.

Apple knows to only make one major announcement per conference. Last year it was the Intel thing. This time it will be iTV, or whatever they're going to call it. He's already announced that he'll be announcing it. Why muddy the message by announcing two things?

This is a lot like the constant theme I make in Time Management for System Administrators from O'Reilly. (Note: to the new readers: this book is useful for anyone in IT, software development, and even non-geeks if you skip certain chapters). The theme of "focus".

"Focus" is concentrated effort. Focus means not trying to do too many things at once. It means using 100% of your brain on the current task so you can get it done efficiently. Nearly every chapter mentions focus in some way. For example, why are interruptions from users and co-workers so bad? Because it disrupts our focus. Interruptions are the national enemy of focus. In fact, the first chapter is all about interruptions: Ways to get fewer of them, how to be better at handling the ones that you do get, how to multi-task more efficiently, and how to sucker your co-workers into taking your interrupts. (Um... I mean, "how to share the joy with your co-workers").

Thanks for reading this blog post. My apologies to anyone that thought they'd be reading about a new product from Apple. I'm a big Mac fan... since they adopted a Unix base for their OS I have owned 2, work has paid for 4 just for me. However, remember to keep your focus: Reading rumor web-sites should be a task on your todo list under the "fun" or "entertainment" category. Otherwise it is basically a waste of time. It's not an efficient use of "work time". Watch the streaming broadcast of the presentation or read the summary afterwords. That's better time management for sure.

And if you have a typepad id, you can post a comment telling me how wrong I was for writing this. :-)

Tom at EverythingSysadmin.com

Posted by Tom Limoncelli in Time Management

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2 Comments | Leave a comment

I've just wasted 3 hours of my precious time again. I tried to find a PAA as described in your great book but it seems like the supply for franklincovey products is not the best in here in Austria.
Shopping online is not always the better way to go.

I have just tried to apply your system to Apple iCal - it doesn't work for me, in fact it felt very unsatisfying. Anyway - I start to like the Idea of using a PAA much more recently.

Relating to your post: I always try to check my rss feeds only once a day but still keep reading for hours and hours if I start. Reading an analog-magazine is maybe still the better solution, even if you are not your own editor and may miss some news..

We're trying to list methods for using The Cycle on various systems on http://wiki.everythingsysadmin.com/twiki/bin/view/TM2SA/WebHome (or just wiki.everythingsysadmin.com).

Please update the wiki with anything useful you find.

As far as FrankinCovey, we have a link to the product that I use, and find it works pretty well. I don't know if they can ship internationally but they do have individual web sites for various countries, so hopefully they can get one to you.

iCal doesn't handle The Cycle very well. Hopefully Apple will fix that in Leopard.

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