After lunch today, I decided there wasn’t much going on in the conference that would do me much good, so I spent my time wisely. I sat there at the lunch table, whipped out the laptop and started to catch up on work email. Two hours later I had made a pretty good dent in it. Usually my coworkers can tell when I do this because I send a “blast” of email messages to respond to those that had been stacking up.
Hmm. Now might be a good time to discuss my email process like I meant to, but that’ll come later.
I thought today about how I’m working with my task system. Right now I’m using Outlook 2007 in a virtual machine to manage my tasks because others on the Exchange environment need real-time access to those tasks. There’s a problem though – it doesn’t work. Apparently using Outlook 2003 on an Exchange 2003 mailbox and trying to view an Exchange 2007 mailbox that is managed with Outlook 2007 just isn’t in the cards. The end result is that having my tasks on the server is buying absolutely zilchero for everyone.
Now I’m thinking about coming back to manage my tasks with iGTD. My only requirement for task management is that I can use the keyboard to interact with it. If I have to move my hand to the trackpad or a mouse and click anywhere to open a new task, the application fails me. For instance, using Quicksilver to open a new task in Apple Mail or iGTD works fine for me. Using Outlook in a VM to click on “New Task” and all that mess just doesn’t. If sharing my tasks isn’t working out, then there’s not much point in them being on the server. Therefore, I’m back to thinking about what to use on the Mac.
Why is my only requirement that my hands do not leave the keyboard to enter a new task? Most of my job entails sitting on telecons and receiving actions from something akin to a machine gun. They come at me so fast that if I don’t have a way to hit a key combination and capture the words as they are fired at me, I have no hope of remembering what to do. That’s just the way my job is – and if I cannot capture those actions accurately, I lose.
OmniFocus won a best of show award here at Macworld 2008 and it looked pretty interesting. One of my idols, Merlin Mann, was an advisor on it, so I thought that maybe he had something good in the final product. We checked it out and it was pretty appealing to me – not so much for my coworker. His requirement is different from mine however. He needs the application to sort by project and subproject; which, it seemed to me, OmniFocus did quite an outstanding job of… but he disagreed. Oh well.
Now I do need the application to file by project and subproject, but that’s just not as important to me as quick entry. I can sort projects later when I have some sit down time.
Oh yeah, you came here to hear about Macworld. That’s the title of the post anyway.
Anyway, so I do my email for several hours, then took some time out to visit Leo Laporte/Alex Lindsay’s discussion section on podcasting. It was informative, but not entirely anything I hadn’t heard before. Leo was somewhat discouraging on podcasting and I don’t think he intended to sound so negative. Alex Lindsay is jazzed on video podcasting and it shows (especially those “How To” videos that he’s not producing widely, but has a strong belief in). Leo made it clear several times he didn’t think anyone was going to get rich off of podcasting, but it’s definitely the future.
I agree with him. Right now, podcasting is a niche market of sorts. It’s for Apple owners and Zune owners, but in reality it needs widespread attention by being integrated into apps like Windows Media Player and other RSS feed masters. I know, but face it, WMP is the de facto for many people out there.
By 6pm we were out and heading off for dinner at Colibri, a Mexican dining joint just up the street. Very, very nice food and lovely women with lovely smiles. Two margaritas later, I’m here writing to you.
Tomorrow I’ll be spending some more time on the podcasting thing as there are some training sessions. I’ll also be searching for more of the Mac IT sessions, especially as it relates to directory integration (Active Directory, that is (banjo)).
Right now I’m chatting it up with Eilla and listening to her work frustrations and soon I’ll be in bed reading a book. Right now I feel like reading a nice book about Taiwan, China or Japan. I don’t know why, just feel like I’d rather be there right now.