The latest Communications of the ACM has a great set of articles on Personal Information Management. I provide a rather detailed review of the collection, as the topic interests me greatly.
All in personal effectiveness
The latest Communications of the ACM has a great set of articles on Personal Information Management. I provide a rather detailed review of the collection, as the topic interests me greatly.
A little entertainment from Paul Graham: "Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work."
Jeremy Hiebert found an interesting article about learning and personal "stuff" management. "Can personal digital knowledge artefacts' management and social networks enhance learning?" by Riina Vuorikari.
Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily writes High IQ: Not as good for you as you thought, in which he discusses research that looked at IQ and "self discipline" as predictors for academic performance. The surprise? Self-discipline was more highly correlated than was IQ.
George Siemens points to an article on Task-Switching, Emotional Motivation, and Reward from Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide. They in turn are writing about a paper on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that studied people who are asked to switch tasks. There might be a connection to multi-tasking.
After posting about SNARF yesterday, and playing with it a bit more and reading through their community forum, it is clearly a research project and expects to have a few rough edges. However, this makes me think about organizing my inbox even more.
A number of people are commenting on Microsoft's newly-released SNARF, an extension of their email triage work. SNARF is an Outlook "plugin" that helps one decide how to deal with incoming email.
Dave Pollard has been thinking about personal knowledge management for a while. "Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) -- an Update" is a nice summary of where his thinking has come from and where he stands today.
Christina Pikas reports on the personal information management session at last week's ASIST conference. The comments about search / finding / re-finding are particularly interesting.
Dale Emery does a nice job of highlighting the assumptions around why we multi-task. And then he shows that those assumptions are misguided.
Kris Olson at Wiki That suggests that "What's Missing Is a 'Home' for Groups" in response to Clive Thompson's life hacking article. I suspect wiki's aren't quite enough, and I don't know where we will end up.
BusinessWeek's Oct 3rd cover story, "The Real Reasons You're Working So Hard..." is an interesting article on the history of long hours and how the problem is spreading outside of the U.S. It also covers a number of possible solutions.
"They Just Don't Get It! (Changing resistance into understanding)" by Leslie Yerkes and Randy Martin is a quick and entertaining read. It is written as a how-to manual, not unlike the top-seller "Who Moved My Cheese?"
Ton Zijlstra has been thinking about his information strategy and focuses on his tools this time. I particularly like that his graphics that show his process.
David Buchan suggests that a group needs to come to an agreement to always respond when asked. People in the group need to have some understanding of everyone's expertise as well.
I came across Itensil 's Teamlines recently, and it appears to be a good process / project management tool. And I see it as having some components of CCPM as well.
David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise has a piece that points to some interesting aspects of knowledge work: "Getting Real: Don't pick the tools ahead of the craftsman."
"Effective Online Forum Usage" by Steve Pavlina. Along with listing the benefits and negative effects of excessive forum usage, he provides a list of suggestions for overcoming the negative effects while still enjoying the benefits.