The struggle towards productivity

Anyone working in the IT sector knows how hard it is to get a flow going without interruptions. Working in a small business and supplying support for everything in IT to our clients, the phone rings constantly (desk and mobile) and email never stops pinging in the background. Add to this our obsession with multiple screens, a billion web pages open, Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram etc and there is a huge amount of data overwhelming us.

We also get jobs logged from our other staff members, clients can create their own and the phone calls / emails generally generate work to be done. Keeping up with all of this is hard, and the hardest part is keeping all the tasks straight and on point. We use multiple systems - OTRS and another, non-cool job management system for our tasks. This is a nightmare too - jobs coming in to both, keeping them updated and trying to remember if you've actually updated the job or not. Plus trying to keep on track with a complex task long enough to get the thing done.

I've been working with my guys on being task oriented and not worrying too much about time. If they are working on a task for a client, and it's all billable, then move onto the next task and do it, then their time is being used productively and everyone is happy. This seems to be the best way to work with tasks.

I have also found that when the pressure is on, I leave my dual monitor setup and take my laptop off somewhere to work, usually the boardroom with no direct extension and leave the mobile phone on my desk. The more I do this the more I wonder if having dual monitors is a hindrance and paying attention to my multiple mobile devices is worth doing. I read research that suggested after a break in concentration it could take up to 20 minutes to get the focus back on what you were doing.

We have been aiming to have 90 min stretches working on a single task, then a break for a bit, then back into it. It's incredibly hard, but getting the other staff around us on board is making it easier. With a bit of luck we can continue to push this forward. Leave a message in the comments if you have productivity tips that work for you!

Privacy in the modern times

It seems to me that with the advent of all our social media applications – Facebook, MySpace, twitter, Flickr, Tumblr etc., the ability for us to get our thoughts out there is the easiest it’s ever been. The detail that this provides to people is remarkable. Ad companies use it for focused advertising, other companies use it for various nefarious means and criminals use it to steal our identities. Less insidious I think is that people can know us in a way they never have before. The cost to our privacy seems to be one we’re happy to bear though – the most popular consumer mobile devices have Facebook and the like built in and integrated with everything – messages, photos, GPS locations etc. Our internal thoughts and feelings are now able to externalised quickly and limitlessly. Nine times out of ten this is incredibly boring stuff (let’s face it, we’re not as interesting as we’d like to be), but the fodder for bullies, abuse and misuse is extraordinary. It’s very much like posting a sticky note to the wall at school with your latest thoughts and opening yourself up to complete, uncontrolled scrutiny. We all know how much impact putting yourself out there at school can have. Now we do it on a global scale and it doesn’t seem to be an important thing to consider the value of our private lives.

Never mind the fact that once something gets to the Net it never seems to leave. Those embarrassing moments, which once passed leaving only an uncomfortable memory, now linger – sometimes that moment makes it to Youtube and it can live forever. These little moments, of often excruciating embarrassment now have the potential to harm us forever. One can make injunction to have them removed, a costly and time consuming procedure which often brings even more attention to the moment and so is only a partial remedy. It doesn’t stop people from downloading and keeping these images and movies for ever on their own personal machines. This is even exploited as people do stupid things for attention (and get it). The slapstick comedy of the Three Stooges seems to have morphed into Jackass and our collective intelligence has taken a mighty hit. But back to privacy.

I see the youth of today posting details, photos and information about themselves that as a young person I would never have done (and as an old person am even less likely). The generation older than mine are so recalcitrant about their personal feelings and life it can be like pulling teeth getting any information out of them even under the best and most appropriate of circumstances. It certainly adds to their mystery – another underrated and mostly lost commodity in the world. Whether it’s the endless tweets of a person summing up their thoughts in 160 characters or their barely there clothing, mystery is a lost art. Privacy and mystery are inextricably linked, and we don’t seem to realise that as you give up one, you give up the other. Potential partners or even potential employers can look into what you are doing, often without appropriate context, and make judgements on you and your behaviour without having other critical information, for while we do tend to post a lot of information to the net, most of it requires a certain amount of local knowledge (i.e. you had to be there type thing)

It is incumbent upon IT professionals to help non-technical people navigate this quagmire of what to do. The privacy settings of Facebook (for example) are not clear cut and there have been many times I’ve seen a profile completely exposed to all and sundry – birthdate, address, phone etc. – everything the budding identify thief needs to acquire and then sell your identity with. We need to help people understand what they can and should share to the world. There is a vulnerability to such openness and most lay people don’t understand the potential for harm. IT professionals have an obligation therefore to protect people from their potential loss through education and technical assistance. If you consider your current visibility on the Internet – where are you vulnerable?

IDE Failures and backups

For 80% of people, running backups is a non-event. We simply don't consider doing them, not because we are lazy but it just never crosses our mind. Fortunately I had a happy event last week - I ran a full backup of my beloved D610 Dell Latitude's hard disk and not 2 days later the bastard failed on me. It was then I found out how much harder it is to get IDE hard disks for laptops. The 40GB HDD in it was adequate for my purposes and the smallest I could find was 120GB. Now I know how easy it is to fill 120GB of disk with music or movies or whatnot, but in context, I store very little of such things on this notebook. It's for work, and for online stuff such as Google's services and apps. At any rate, I use the wonderful TrueCrypt (www.truecrypt.org) to create encrypted partitions and then use the equally handy rsync (or in a pinch xcopy) to incrementally back that data up across the network to my servers. 

I thought perhaps I'd share how I do this, using xcopy in a batch file and with the potential of using either an external USB device or whatnot. You can get *very* fancy, but in all honesty, any backup is better than no backup so here is the script (abridged for privacy purposes) that I use:

xcopy "z:\My Documents\*" "m:\My documents\*" /C/D/E/H/Y

You can see that I'm just backing up My Documents from one location to another. The first one, on the Z:\ drive is the source and M:\ is the backup. Easy! 

The switches do the following:

/C: Continues copying even if an error occurs

/D: Copies files changed on or after the specified date. If no date is given, copies only those files whose source time is newer than the destination time.

/E: Copies directories and subdirectories, including empty ones.

/H: Copies hidden and system files also.

/Y: Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an existing destination file.

Pretty straightforward really. I run it manually at the moment, but plan to put a schedule in place once I get some error correction built into it. For example, if the M:\ drive is not available I don't want it to panic and grind to a halt, much better for it to gracefully exit.

Feel free to adapt it for your purposes if any. As I noted, it's better to have *some* sort of backups than none at all. This particular one of mine doesn't catch emails or the like, fortunately for me I use Gmail so it's not really an issue - all my emails reside on the Google servers (bless them!). For everything else, there's xcopy!

Volunteering and the youth of today

Recently I've been involved in a project where significant amounts of volunteer work is required to make it a success. Although the level of help has been enormous, the cross section of ages of people involved has been very interesting. Almost all of the volunteers have been the parents of kids involved in the project and none of the kids themselves. By kids I refer to those with the age group of 30 and under. Many of these people are heavily involved in the sport in question, but very few have turned up to help out - their mothers and father have though. I find this very disappointing - after all, these kids are the ones who demand the best facilities and complained the loudest when the previous facilities were falling into aged disrepute.

I'm not sure if this is endemic across all volunteer efforts, but the ones I'm involved in it certainly seems to be. It's as if the altruism our parents demonstrate, the generosity of their time and effort have not been passed on to their overly spoilt and wilful children. I'm not sure how to combat this, after from charging those who don't help out more than those who do help out. Recognition of the effort being made by these volunteers is important - but they don't help for that reason. As a wise man once said, it's amazing how much can be accomplished when the people involved aren't asking for anything.

Personally I've spent several long hard days helping out and I'm exhausted, but I'm also disappointed and a bit unhappy about the lack of help from people my age. Lazy bastards I think while I'm out there working - a few more young folk and the work would go much easier. Instead older men and women are expending their efforts for something they'll only enjoy peripherally at best. Here is my message then, to you young folk - get off your arses and go and help out. Only a couple of hours of your time makes a big difference - you're not just helping yourself, but many others too. I actually feel ashamed of my age group. I'm appalled at the younger people and I don't know where this has gone wrong - maybe those self same parents making the effort now failed to teach those altruistic skills onto their progeny? At any rate, I've got work to do, and sitting here bitching isn't getting it done.

Finishing up a job

Well, I've just resigned from my existing place of employment. Ironically I've done myself out of a job. When I started there was a *lot* to do - the network was a very organic thing, without meaningful or comprehensive backups, there were servers that were rebooting without warning or explanation and the desktops, don't let me start on the desktops!

So I built a new AD domain, put in new servers, replaced all the desktops, got LCDs on all the desktops and implemented fairly comprehensive backup/recovery solutions across the servers. All in all, fair better than when I arrived. Problem is, apart from some desktop support type stuff and the normal server maintenance I don't have a lot to do. The Debian GNU/Linux servers I've installed require minimal attention, while the Windows server (and usually they require a lot more time) are running very happily. I have used defence in depth to protect the network, rather than a hard outer shell and a soft middle as so many networks tend to have.

So why leave? I'm bored to be honest. It's time for new challenges. The lure of new work, new place and people is strong and while I'm not a particularly ambitious person, nor am I driven by money, I am pushed by my curiosity and the environment here isn't that interesting any more.

Often when people leave an organisation they either leave it well or badly. I intend to leave things as up to date and in a good position for the next person to look after it. Having come into organisations and seen the mess that was left by an employee who couldn't wait to go, I refuse to do that to someone else. It's really just wrong. Even though it's kinda boring stuff that remains, I'm working to get it all done.

Something I have noticed is that when you leave a job, or are in the process of doing so, people tend to treat you differently - it feels like you've pulled yourself out of the current that is the workplace and you're standing on the riverbank watching it go by. The busy concerns everyone else has, once so relevent to you, are no longer applicable and you can be much more objective about what's happening. If you could apply this to life in general - this extra awareness of things - I believe it would be quite useful. A detached view can help with understanding and problem solving. I've certainly noticed that a few of the ongoing problems here have become far easier to understand in the last few days. Although I haven't solved those problems, at least I have begun to think of ways to get past them. Sadly though, some people write you out of their awareness and interest once you tender your resignation and I feel sorry for them. Their view of life is so narrow that if you're not part of it, you become like a ghost to them. I realise this is probably their way of coping with change. Others though talk keenly about what you are going to, how things will be different and sometimes ask for advice on where they might go to find something different. These people never last long and move on too - following their dreams for something different.

Ah well, 9 working days to go and then it's off to a brave new (working) world!

The Dawn of a New Time

Have you ever felt a push from the Universe to get moving in a different direction? Everything seems to be going wrong, or difficulties you couldn't foresee become apparent and you have to change direction?

I'm in that zone at the moment. It's a daunting and exciting time and I've learned a lot about myself and how things around me flow as a result. Something I've found that I'd like to share is about doing what interests you. It sounds so basic, but many of us forget that we spend a lot of time at work and a lot of our energy there and if it's being wasted on menial tasks and mindless work then what is really the point to it all?

When I started my job I had targets to achieve - a network to rebuild and systems to deploy to maintain and protect that network. Nearly 2 years on and I've achieved those goals and now I'm tied up in administrivia. I'm really not enjoying it at all. My personal life is suffering too and the relationship between the two is readily apparent. I'm not happy and it's time to change.

The courage to take a major change is not something to scoff at. Give up all that is known and safe and comfortable and go for something unknown, uncertain and unseen? Absolutely! What is there to lose? Nothing! The Universe, or God will look after you. Go with what you truly desire and keep a few things in mind as you go:

• Always be grateful for what you receive - practising gratitude is a great way to raise your vibration and your profile with the universe
• Be aware that only good lies before you - sure there will be challenges along the way, but they only make the rewards that much sweeter.
• Trust yourself and give yourself the best opportunity to go forwards