In 2 weeks time I and the rest of the LDC founders will be pounding out to Florida for the first IBM Connect conference (or 20-something Lotusphere depending on how you look at these things)

This is my 5th time going and the first one where I will be speaking on my own, I suspect it will be chaos, but there will be 5 places I am sure to be:

UKnight (sponsored event)
Monday 20:00-22:00 shulas bar
In which the British companies at Connect attempt to bring their favorite bit of home with them, that is a dark bar stuffed with fun people drinking a serious amount for free
Its invitation only so you have to grab one of us to get your sticker before hand (we have big ugly doormen)

Great geek challenge (sponsored event)
Tuesday 20:00-22:00 dolphin ice cream bar
Each year the nerd girls organise a quiz to separate the geeks from the chaff, we are sponsoring it (more free booze), allow the freaky geek in you out of the can and win prizes

BP203 : Limitless Languages In The IBM Social Stack
Wednesday 17:30 – 18:30 Swan Pelican 1 & 2
My first solo presentation, and one on a subject I’m quite rabid about, learn about all the alternative languages you can use on any prodect that supports java what they give you and why, if you can pull your self away from Paul and Bill’s worst practices session, then let me rant and blow your minds.

SHOW104 : Buried Treasure: Finding the Hidden Gold in Lotus Notes Data
Thursday 08:00 – 09:45 Swan Osprey 1 & 2
Julian Robichaux and I show you how to get all that valuable data that’s in your notes applications and integrate it with every system under the sun, your managers will love you for it.

Gurupalooza
Thursday 10:00-11:00 swan ballrooms
The best practices speakers are forced to sit up on stage and answer to our crimes by answering questions from the ravening horde, I will be trying to keep my mouth shut this year

Matt white is also speaking there , you can see his blog on it here

IBM connect is the main conferences I go to each year, (the others are LUGs and conferences of convenience in London) so there is lots of stuff I have to do while I’m there

• Have a LONG talk to the connections developers, as I have been developing on the platform for the last few months and while I now have a good handle on it and its functions there are a lot of inconsistencies in its interface and I want to feed back to them (or discover if I have got it wrong and need to change how I look at the system)
• Find our clients and buy them drinks, along with the rest of LDC I have had a lot of new clients in the last year as well as more work from existing clients, quite a few of them will be at IBM Connect and I want to meet them in person and have the odd tipple with them.
• Find more new clients, this is a professional conference after all, LDC has a great portfolio, skill set and a proven history of delivering against all the odds, I’m hoping to introduce this to more people. (mind you as a lot of the people there are techs the initial conversations tend to be a bit like a technical interview which wipe you out)
• But most of all there are about 200 named people I need to find, chat to, shake hands with, exchange tech ideas and project plans with and finally catch up and have a laugh with

  IBM Connect 2013…Bring it on.

Well, how long has it been since I have written to my blog?. The answer is bloody ages and the reason is work. LDC has simply been flat out with work. With both day work and all nighters. The months have been stuffed with a mixture of major client work, smaller independent projects and community actions such as presentations for conferences such as UKlug and IBM connect. ( which I will talk about In the next blog entry) in fact I am writing this entry sat in bed as I can’t sleep on my first early night in months which strikes me as bloody dumb.

Anyway this entry is mainly a year in review and a look to the future in case people read my blog during IBM connect and wonder why I have been so lazy.

This year has been quite amazing, with the work I have been doing at LDC really showing me where I want to go in the future. The variety of work as well as the variety of clients has been staggering from hideously complex websites to training, from nasty nasty Java to Amazon Web services consultation

Most of all I have been very lucky with the people I have been working with, its quite the most amazing thing to be the dumbest person on the team as you learn shit loads on each project (although it’s terrifying to see how fast Julian can Code, the quality of Matts design and the fact that that even the bloody wretch Ben Poole is getting even better at UI design) and that’s not even including the partners we have worked with such as Gab and Mike from the Turtle partnership ( if anyone says they can keep up with Gab or know a better project manager than Mike then they are a fibber and need a kick in the fork)

Continuing on with this theme will be 2013. Keeping up with all the tech and business design that clients seem to need at the drop of a hat, though I’m fairly sure my brain won’t hold much more than it currently seems to be stuffed with but what is life with out the odd challenge

🙂

Now recently there have been quite a large number of changes in the work I do and how I do it, my old system of crazed caffeine ridden keyboard hammering just was not cutting it, and I started detecting in myself the first symptoms of Burnout (but not due to over work, just due to bad organisation), clearly I wanted a very simple system to manage my time, something that just lets me work thought my clients requests in a way that delvers timely responses without waste and still lets me keep a grip on making sure I do not run my self into the floor (which would be no use to anyone)

After a good search round the net I choose the Pomodoro Technique

Which basically consists of:

• Choose a task to be accomplished
• Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)
• Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper (or in my case PomLife for android)
• Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)
• Every 3-4 Pomodoros take a longer break (15-20 mins)

  This looked perfect for me, as I tend to work off a liner task list for multiple clients ordered by if I’m ‘on site’, priority and due date/time, and it does not add any over head to the paperwork,

  In addition there are a number of studies that indicate that the human mind can only REALLY concentrate for 5-6 hours per day ( I don’t have formal references for that), this means that I aim for a minimum of 10 Pomodoro per day and a max of 12, now that does not sound much, a total of 250-300 actual mins work a day, but its not “at work” time but rather “exam level concentration” time, and I’m finding that I am worn out after doing this for a day, managers might want their staff to work like this for 8+ hours a day but frankly the human brain in general is not capable of this day in day out, where at this level I can provide excellent service comparable with a 10+ normal working day.

  I’m finding it also gives you a definite indication of how hard you are working (rather than just pottering around and thinking at the end of the day, “What have I Done?”) as I dont use my Pomodoros for stuff like reading emails, meetings and such, the only down side I have found is clients perceptions, they tend to think “oh, I only need to pay for 5 hours if that’s all your working” or that 5 hours elapsed is the 5 hours of concentration i.e. I should have done a full days work by 1.00pm, but still I’m getting more stuff done than ever before and that is a good thing for both me and my clients

  Update After a few days of using the system in anger, I am now including meetings and normal day to day tasks like email and client admin in my time allocations, but batching them up to into 25 min segments at the beginning and end of the day, rather than the constant interruptions they normally are this is saving me tons of wasted time and meaning that clients can now cope with the system as a method of keeping track of time, all this means I now do between 16 and 20 Pomodoro per day End Update

Old Comments

Andrew Magerman(22/03/2012 13:01:08 GMT)

Hi Mark,
I also use a pomodoro-system and it is unbelievable how more efficient you become when using this.

Another methodology that has worked very very well for me (and de-stressed me completeyl) is GTD, Getting Things Done. eProductivity make a replacement for your Notes Mailfile which I can also recommend. In any case, order the book, it’s one of these rare self-improvement books that isn’t utter nonsense, if you momentarily forgive the american hyperbolae ‘e.g. a dramatic paradigm shift which will revolutionize…’

It’s kind of complementary – one of the messages is that basically, you need to stay on top of the list of things you have to do to be relaxed, and to be able to communicate to your clients what are realistic delivery dates. When asked ‘When can it be by’, I used to be unable to recall all the other things I was supposed to do, then I would give an unrealisically estimate, and then, shock horror, discover other things I had to do.

Regarding your productivity, getting rid of the interruptions is key. And I would never ever go into the discussions with clients about ‘I am paying you only the time you are really productive’. When I look around me when at clients, it’s shocking to see how badly resources are allocated. Just the time spent in meetings is enough to make me cringe. They pay for your presence. The occasional bursts of creativity more than make up for the hours of unproductive scratching.

Heard your taking notes podcast, well done sir!

In my current role at my new main client I am an integration architect rather than the senior developer/architect; the difference sounds small, my deliverables are virtually the same as are the technical skills needed to produce them, but there is one huge difference and that is WHERE I am sitting. Now I am with the BAs and Accenture consultants rather than the devs, where smartness is more important than the spec of your laptop, where consistently being there and typing when your boss arrives and leaves is better than being able to pull an all-nighter to get a problem fixed.

Now this may sound like I don’t approve of being on the other side of the fence, and historically I have always been one of those who go “What the hell is this?” or “Were they drunk when then wrote this?” when faced with a new spec that rolls down to IT, but after only a couple of months I now have a completely different viewpoint on it. Previously when the business asked for something daft, I would storm up and rant at them and being a senior tech who knew the systems intimately, they would give in to some extent and we would sort it out. But the BAs and PMs are asked by the business to define the impossible and sign their name to it; the business seems to just haggle with the BAs as you would with a used car salesman, and this is a general thing. I checked with other BAs and PMs colleges that I have known throughout my career and all have the same experiences, petty political battles and attempts to hide badly patched systems are jammed into the ring and made the problem of people who genuinely just want to make a single project a success.

Come on business these people are on your side, give them a break !!

Now I’m back from IBM Lotusphere/Connect it’s back to work but just to round it up, here is the traditional review of the last week

General

— The tech was good, real improvements, stuff that I want to use and a worthy opponent to the open source and Microsoft stuff.
— Please finish off killing the Lotus brand, Microsoft’s PR work and the memory of the bad UI have done too much damage, no one will give the new tech the chance it deserves.
— Surprisingly IBM have listened, the Opening General Session was a vast improvement and a lot of other stuff has improved from last year.
— Unfortunately, there are still nutters out there, some members of IBM’s legal team really do need to get out more, and whoever organised the visit to the animal exploitation pond (or Seaworld) combined with “le’ts kill aquatic animals on stage” must be working through some childhood goldfish betrayal issues.
— The session schedule could do with some work, no matter what your interest path was, e.g. Dev/Admin/Manager, there was at least 1 day where you were scrabbling for sessions and another day you could not get to see all you wanted. The sessions themselves on the other hand were very very good.

LDC

— Far better brand recognition this year, which is what we were after and I had a number of very interesting conversations that I am hoping will yield results.
— The T-shirts went down a storm, with Mr Woodward’s designs going down the best.
— We spent more than we have done before on marketing and sponsorship stuff, we will have to see if we can follow it up and see what work it generates.

Personal

— I finally got one of these, for which I am insanely smug

It’s not an individual one (will try again for one of those next year), as I co-presented with the fine Julian Robichaux from whom I learnt how a true pro prepares and presents

— I think I have found the subject that I can expand to bring the most benefit to the IBM community, so if they get accepted you should see a session or 2 at this year’s lugs (fingers crossed that I don’t screw up my abstracts)
— Time to redouble my connections AKA web sphere + Bolt ons work
— I think I pulled a muscle laughing at the great geek quiz, thanks to Gab Davis, Carl Tyler, Paul Mooney, Tim Davis etc etc for organising it.
— Whatever they are called, the Lotus Community still beats the pants of all the other tech communities that I have met, truly, without them it would suck bad.

Misc

— There are people who do the work of 10 people each behind the scenes, people like Gab and Paul.
— For heaven’s sake, open the abstract calls earlier next year, it’s not as if the date is a surprise, you have been doing it for 19 years now!

Old Comments

Mark Myers(23/01/2012 01:13:09 GMT)

Oooo good Idea (s)

Sam(23/01/2012 00:05:43 GMT)

Totally Agree on the scheduling – someone suggested for next year:

1. Open abstracts much much earlier.
2. Include a space for speakers to “Tag” abstracts
3. Once abstracts are chosen, email the registered attendees and have them each select the 40 “top” ones they would like to see
4. Run the data all through Watson and have him/it generate the best possible schedule for everyone with as little overlap of tags as possible.

It seemed like the individual tracks were well managed – but there was little coordination between tracks. Maybe this was a result of the late call for abstracts?

The other issue – wifi. It’s IBM, for crying out loud. Come in and set up a decently managed/monitored service. If a access point gets unplugged, you should have monitoring to know about it – every access point should be accounted for and monitored for problems. If one is unplugged, then you would know, and could go plug it in!