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I was a Catering Sales Manager for hotels for about seven years, and I managed about 900 weddings during that time. I thought that I had seen everything.

I was wrong.

Please click on the more tag to see what I mean.

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I found this while surfing this morning, it reminds me of an email I received from the IT department at my last job. Something to do with “violating the computer user policy” by downloading web-based e-mail. I had set up Outlook to pull in my e-mail from Gmail. I used Gmail for all of my personal correspondence for 11 months before they caught on and edited my user account to remove the Gmail access.

So I loaded Thunderbird onto a USB flash drive and used that. I suppose that we both had too much time on our hands.

Up to no good at work? Software can analyze your e-mails

BEWARE, very soon big brother will be able to follow you to work. Software is being designed to allow companies to flag up employees who are potential saboteurs, industrial spies or data thieves. It might also flag up whistle-blowers.

US companies surveyed earlier this year said at least one-third of damage to business due to cybercrime was committed by insiders. “Many of the biggest financial losses tend to be due to trusted insiders, individuals who steal or who disable computer systems,” says Gilbert Peterson at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) in Ohio.

Writing in a forthcoming edition of Digital Investigation, Peterson and colleagues say their software is based on an open-source algorithm called Author-Topic. Developed by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, it gauges which topics authors commonly write about. Fed a series of documents, such as academic journal articles, Author-Topic examines the frequency with which words appear in each and uses that to infer which topic that document is about. It then identifies topics that each person writes on most.

[Link to original article]
Contact: Claire Bowles
claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk
44-207-611-1210
New Scientist

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Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint is busy cranking widgets today, so I have stepped up to provide the helpful tips for today’s GTD Cafe -

Change Your Focus for a Change in Result

It is remarkable to me that I hear so many stories about people who are bound and determined to “get organized” and seem to fail so spectacularly. They will clean their house or office from top-to-bottom, without regard to where they are actually putting things, or how they use the “stuff” that was not put away in the first place.

There is a fairly common-sense skill that every person would do well to develop, the skill of being ready to start over. Frequently the people that I have known that need to get organized are focused on the wrong things.

These people are looking at the mess, the physical clutter, and not the processes that created the mess. These processes often look like the tangled cables of a collapsed suspension bridge, and are as effective as the same.

As David Allen says, “Are you ready for ‘Ready’?“:

1. Where is your Focus - When some type of crisis grabs your attention, how long does it take you to get back on track?
2. Where is your Balance - Do you have a system in place for capturing what you are doing right now, so that you can easily come back to it?
3. Where is your Result - Is your result clear in your mind? Is it written down? Has it been communicated to your team?

Having answers (good answers!) to these three questions can allow you to be ready when an emergency pops up, or when someone else needs your help and you need to re-direct your attention. “Can you surrender control at one level, in order to move quickly to [another] one?” [~David Allen, Ready for Anything, p. 61]

Here are a couple of tips for putting these solutions into place:

• Do you have a summary, or progress-so-far-page, for each of the projects that you are working on that you keep updated? This can make it easier to return to something that you have had to put down.
• Be mindful of your work habits and how you actually use your tools and space. Put your phone on the same side of your desk as the hand you use to hold it. Keep often-accessed file folders in your desk drawer cabinet rather than the cabinet across the way, etc.
• When there is an emergency, take 5 seconds to stop, think, and make a note of where you are, what you are doing. No matter what the emergency is, you have 5 seconds to mark your place.(Unless the building is on fire, then scram!)

“Once you shift the image held in your mind, different things will automatically start to happen. Focus on red, red shows up. Focus on a different outcome for a conversation, and different thoughts will come to you.”

~ David Allen

Are you ready for a change in focus?

“…thinking in more effective ways about projects and situations can make things happen sooner, better, and more successfully.”

David Allen, Getting Things Done p.62

I have been working on a long-term project involving planning resources for some time now, a project that deals with real life time management and planning processes. As a very visually-oriented person, I learn better through written aids, such as worksheets, checklists, and especially the GTD Workflow diagram. I have created a few tools for my own use, and shared some of them with my readers.

One of the Best Productivity Ideas

The latest project has to do with the Natural Planning process that David Allen discusses in Chapter Three of Getting Things Done. I believe that this is one of the most useful productivity ideas to turn up in a long time. I wish that many of the facilitators of countless planning sessions that I have had to endure had heard of it!

What I like most about using this process is that no special equipment or expensive training is required. Merely following a sequence of steps can make project planning a joy rather than a modern form of torture. The irony of my own project is that the first time I read Getting Things Done I glossed over the section on planning as I did not think that I had any projects that were “serious” enough to warrant this kind of effort. I did not realize that this planning process is not at all cumbersome. On the contrary - it is straightforward and simple to follow and to implement. It can be used for large-scale, team-driven projects as well as something as mundane as a blog post.

In learning how to use the natural planning process for projects large and small I have learned to simplify my own project tracking and improve the completion rate. One of the most exciting consequences has been to move some of my Long-term Goals into shorter-termed Contexts.

Vertical thinking, really contemplating the issue at hand and how it will get from point A to point B is essential to the success of a project, and the natural planning method is a vertical thinking tool.

The Essential Phases of Natural Planning

There are five basic steps in this planning model, each of which will be examined in turn:

1. Define the Purpose of the project and the Principles to be followed
2. Outcome Visioning
3. Brainstorming
4. Organizing
5. Identify the Next Actions

Following these steps, in this order, may seem like common sense. Yet how many of you have been trapped in “planning sessions” where common sense had apparently been tossed out a window? Where no actual planning got done? Where you left the meeting feeling defeated and demoralized, with less of an idea of what you were supposed to accomplish than when you went in?

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