Dropbox

This is one of a series of posts about time management.

I thought I'd sneak this one in about Dropbox. I work across a  number of computers that, may or may not be connected to the internet or other networks at different times. Here's a quick inventory - I don't think it's anything special - many of you will have a similar list:

Netbook - connected at home, mobile broadband sporadic on train.
My laptop - always connected to home broadband.
Office - always connected to work network. Includes my documents on networked drive.
Enquiry desk - (x2) regularly work on physical enquiry desk and our virtual enquiry service - connected to work network.
Hotdesks - one of any of about 4 desks when at our other campus for meetings etc. - connected to work network.

Until now, file syncing between these has been a nightmare. Even at home between netbook and laptop I've had "issues" - I've got a network drive but getting  it to sync between different machines has proved impossible. From home I can access the work drives to download files but can't save any changes. From work I can't access files on my personal computers. Sod's Law states that no matter what computer I'm on, the most up-to-date version of the document I'm working on is on another machine.

Dropbox is solving alot of this grief. Basically, you register and download the client on to any computers that you use. It creates a folder (the default is within your My Documents folder). Any files that you save within that folder will be automatically updated on the other machines.

The beauty is that the local copies on each machine are updated. This means if I work on a document on my way to work on the netbook, as long as I get a blim of internet connection before I shut it down (which I normally do), I can log into my work computer and start working from the same doc. Without usb sticks, emailing files to myself, or any other shenanigans my files are synced.

Another nice feature is that previous versions are saved. If (and I say if because this hasn't happened yet) you accidentally revert to an old version you can still retrieve the correct version from the web.

In short, I'd recommend Dropbox to anyone working across more than one machine. It's free upto 2gig of files and it just makes life easier. Give it a go!

Inbox Zero!

This is one of a series of posts about time management.

If I achieve just one thing with these posts, I hope that it will be to get some control over my email inbox. I see this as a battle and since I started in this job, my inbox has consistently had the upper hand. In my defence, I think the organisational culture does lean towards heavy email use. Especially compared to other places that I've worked that have been more reliant on voice or instant messaging.

It's reached a point where tackling the inbox is a constant background activity - something that I think contributes to stress. If you're viewing every email as it comes in it becomes distracting to the point that you can't really concentrate on other things.

Somebody I met recently only checks their email once a day. They have the out-of-office on permanently with a message to the effect that they only check their email once a day (it also gives their phone number in case you need to contact them urgently). I did consider this as an alternative to having Outlook open in the background all day. However, this wouldn't work for me as I need to have my Outlook calendar open to tell me where I need to be (I really would be lost without this). Also many of the tasks that I do during the day require me to refer to information sent in emails.

So, long story short, here are a few rules I'm going to try for the week to see if I can cut down on the constant interruption of email.

1) I'm only going to try and only respond to email twice a day (morning and evening).
2) I'm going to turn off the "new email" alert to try and reduce the urge to read each email as it comes in.
3) During spells when I'm responding to emails, those that only require an easy response get done straight away then deleted.
4) Emails that require me to do some work get scheduled into my calendar and deleted from my inbox.
5) Emails for information get filed out of the inbox straight away.
6) Everything else gets deleted.

That's it for now. The aim is Inbox Zero by the end of the week I wonder if I'll get there?

Time management boot camp - Introduction

This week I am mostly blogging about time management. I'm hoping that a few hours spent looking at this is going to pay-off in terms of getting more done, and hopefully with less stress!

I guess everyone goes through a period of adjustment when going into a new job. A lot of the time you're learning as you go so things take longer to do. I'm thinking that - after 10 months in post now - it's a good time to stand back and look at what I do on a daily basis. Is there a better way to go about things rather than "firefighting" from one deadline to the next?

There are a couple of things I'm going to work on:

1) Email - this is the biggie. If I can make any improvement in this area I'll be dead happy. Currently, I have days when I feel I'm ruled by my inbox so I'll be experimenting with a few ways of managing this form of communication.

2) Learning to say no. I'm always going to struggle with this - at the moment I try really hard to accommodate students or staff when they have a need for my time. Currently, I don't have fixed times when I'll see people for 1-2-1's (the school that I work in has alot of students who spent limited time actually at university, and also alot of staff who also work in practice, so I think it's important to be flexible. However, I do need to  find a better way of managing this aspect of my job. Although, 1-2-1's are through appointment only, my door is always open. I think it's good to be open and accessible, but I also need times when I can get away from the interruptions to concentrate on the more difficult aspects of my job.

3) Getting things done. Being a slave to the email (and also having a door that's always open). Means that it is sometimes hard to get a good run at things that take a bit longer (e.g. there's a trolley of donations in my office that's now been there for 2 weeks waiting for me to sort it!). Trying to do things that take a bit of thought or concentration (like planning teaching) tend to get shoved aside for things that can be fit in between phone calls or meetings. Or sometimes get ditched  for last minute tutorials. Starting today, I'm going to start putting aside time to do these tasks - and protecting that time. I think 20 minutes on a Monday morning planning what I want to achieve for the week ahead and when I'm going to do it will be time well spent.

4) Better team working. Having come from a solo-librarian role (where I did everything from acquisitions to shelving) it's sometimes difficult to delegate. I'll be looking at more effective ways to share what we do as a team - and also try to think of our capacity in terms of a team rather than just looking at what's in my calendar.

That's the intention anyway - I'll blog in more detail about some of these in a series tagged "time management".

Doing less to do more with journals

Ok, I give up. After a month of fully indexing the table of contents of all of the journals that the library takes I have come to the conclusion that it can be done. Sort of. It takes too much time to index every single journal but I think indexing about half of the titles will be achievable. The trick is to find the right vehicle for publishing the tables of contents. I'm pretty sure that blogging these would be ideal as it will constantly generate new potential users and provide an easy publishing platform... but, it's also becoming clear that many of the blog visitors aren't in my user group. The key is to use the easy publishing offered by the blog but also feed it back to the library front page to ensure that it's getting out to the right people. This is going to take a fair bit of development time so I've made the decision to stop doing any journal indexing and spend the time developing the new platform. The current system doesn't generate any requests so it will be interesting to see if anyone complains when I stop indexing (and hence the title doing less to do more).

The experience of indexing everything was interesting. It took probably 1-2 hours a day -too long (especially during heavy book cataloguing times) but it did have some side benefits. I've found my current awareness and general subject knowledge (which helps nicely with another of my objectives!) was much improved by retyping toc's. It also forced me to be focused in order to get all of the work in. Really tiring after a few weeks - not sure I could keep that up for ever but it would be good on a limited basis. The next step is to develop the publishing platform and web site then select a few titles to trial. If I find that it works I might be able to get some other librarian's on board so that we can share the indexing workload.