Jan Schulz

Another post about my road to productivity heaven with eProductivity. This time how I plan my next day.

When I've lots of things to do, I like to plan my next day on the evening before that day. For this, eProductivty gives me the possibility to flag action to be done today. The are then visible in the today view (my default on opening the mailfile), which lists all calendar items for today, the due actions for today and everything I've taged as "do it today".

Usually I go through different views to look out for the tasks I want to do on the next day. This involves looking at my current projects ("projects and actions" view) amd the contexts I will "visit" that day. (I would also like to look at my high priority actions, my urgent ones and the actions for the various people I meet, but there are currently no views for that or the view is not compatible to my setup.)  To mark an action for "today", just click the small green flag and it will get flagged:



After that some short quiet time remember everything I might have missed yet and I'm ready to go to bed :-)

The next day I'm greeted by a nice view with all the planned actions on it:



What I'm still missing is a possibility to put this actions into an order or assign them timeslots. No idea if that's actually possible with notes. This would be great to have to implement in full the other time management techniques I learned (privatization with the eisenhower method, doing the time allocating for actions the day before, adding buffers)
.
Somehow this soundes like small weekly review, but just that I do that daily and not that extensive. As far as read the GTD book yet, there were no recommendations or actually tips on how to plan the day, so it seems that I either missed that part (or didn't understand it) or that GTD is missing this :-)

I like ctrl+m: a new mail memo with one key presskeypress even in totally different DBs. Never suspected that I can have Actions (and I suspect Todos in normal Mailfiles, just a different key), too.
This menu is available from everywhere in Notes, so just press alt, c,m,a (one after another) and you have a new action. Great!

Ok, its not Thursdays, but at least "show & tell". :-) Happy weekend!

This is another blogpost about my experience with eProductivity, this time about working with my lists of ToDos.

Your ToDos (or actions in eProductivity speak) can become quite a lot. To get an overview of this pile, there are different ways to divide them or better "look at" them: by context and by projects.

Context is one of the key concepts of GTD: sort your actions by context so every time you have a telephone nearby or a computer or are @Work or @Home, you know where to look for work and it lets you keep an overview over your todos. eProductivity implements that by some categories and views (default and user specified!) , where you can sort in your actions and view them:


Unfortunately I have some problems with that as I am/was a student: my room is my workplace, together with telephone, laptop and online connection. So basically everything is @Home. And most of the rest isn't getting filled up and I felt like I overlook some actions in all my @Home ones. And that was exactly the feeling I wanted to leave behind with my "old style" todo handling. So something needed to be done. First try was sorting "leisure" items into a different box, which helped a lot. Anyway, I still think I have to split up the rest, but currently I've no idea how: there isn't really a hard border between the rest, where I can divide them up. Any Ideas?

Another way to sort your actions is by linking them to a project. A project is defined as something, which takes several actions to get done. This divides most of my actions quite cleanly and is currently my default way to get a grip on the "important" actions. There is also a view "projects and actions", which sorts all actions by projects and so is almost as informative as the context views and I can even drop stray actions into projects. Using the projects itself is also possible (all actions are shown there too), but most of my projects start out with a brainstorming session and a lot of small actions and so the small embedded view does not give the same overview as the view. It's even possile to sort the action, but only in the embedded view of the project, not the view (feature request sent :-) )

[there is another way to look at your actions: usually you fill in the action as "Category - Action title", where category is usually a person you need to contact. If you use advanced settings and subcategories, there is a view, which shows all actions by this categories ("Actions by entity", burried a bit in the preferences in "Navigation -> advanced"). As I only use categories, not subcategories, it only shows "uncategorized entities" and is so unuseable for me :-/ Lets see if the next version makes this view available for category only users :-) ]

What I miss
I use eProductivity as a dumping ground of all my actions (as a "trusted system" and to get them out if my mind) and then sort through them to get to the ones I need/want to do and plan the next day. There is still some lingering feeling, that there is some urgent or important action burried in my pile and I would overlook that. Actions which are due today show up in the today view (if set to advanced and I got a reply to my bugreport, that there will be some more improvements in the next version) and you can sort most views by due date, so that helps already (here is an ideajam for a specific view). Also you can assign priorities to actions, but I haven't found a way to look at them in that way, sorted by priority.

Anyway: even if there is still some of this "do I overlook something important" feeling, it isn't as high as with any other system I've used so far. In this regard, in times of stress, eProductivity really took a lot of anxiety out of my life. :-)

Found this on Ed Brills twitter feed:


Is that the famous "Air cover"? Just wondering, because I couldn't find any reference/speculation/blogpostings to this tweet in the yellow bubble.

Ok, seems that I was quite pissed off yesterday. Sorry to anyone who felt offended by it, but it really feels good to "go out and scream" sometimes...

... the problem with notes and opera ...
Anyway, afterwards I tried for some time to get an idea what notes expects as an browser and even compiled a "null.exe" (AutoHotKeys: one line to "run , %1%" -> opens the parameter (webpage) in your default browser. Autohotkeys is a really great tool!), but didn't work.

And then after giving up and working some hours, it magically worked. And I couldn't get an idea "why": ProcMon just didn't spit out anything, just the call to the browser. Until I changed my webbrowser preference in my location document to an invalid value and voila: Notes gave an error. Now I have an situation where Opera opens the page, but with completely the wrong preferences:

Instead of using the operating system preferences, it uses the old style location preference.  Even deleting the "notesdata\workspace" folder and recreating it with one from a completely new installation gives now the same result: it opens the link with that browser.



[UPDATE, an hour later: Now it is back to null.exe and not working at all. &§$&$§! Has anybody of you a switch and tries to make me look stupid and bewildered?]

Notes -  when everyday mysteries (or miseries) are not enough...

... some thoughts about support ...
I got a second email from lotus support (seems to be higher up), saying exactly the same: "Opera not supported". Ok, I give up.

Not sure how to rate this: yes, we have paid only for "supported platforms", but browsers are deeply integrated into my and I think everybodies personal productivity and only supporting the big two and only in certain versions is a pain in the a**. For me it's another small sign that IBM really only cares about big companies, where such a requirement can be satisfied, but not the 30 people startup where "no, you can only use IE 6/7 or F1.5/2" is just not possible. FF is at version 3.5, IE at version 8 and notes8.0.x will be arround for some more years: when will it happen that you can't build a "supported" system anymore, becaus both MS and Mozilla don't support their old browsers anymore?

Having such strange behaviour on "not supported" environments is in my opinion a bug and should be reported to the developers. Just imagine a browser crashing your domino and getting a  "sorry, that browser is not a supported browser"? Even if nothing will happen in the current code stream, such a "put into our bugtracking system" message is better than just replying "not supported", even if it is strictly following what you paid for. "Not supported" without any other explanations is just another way to say "piss off", at least in my mind.

Jan
PS: Not supporting different browsers can cost you some big money, as some hardware manufacture found out the hard way...
 

Ok, I admit, I'm pissed off right now. Big time. This is a rant about "not supported here", operating system defaults, Webbrowsers and making it extra hard to use something else... and IBM Support.

I use the opera webbrowser as a system wide default. I set the notes basic preferences in the location documents to opera and links open beautiful in opera.

Now enter the new standard client, version 8.0.2 FP2. Set "Use the Browser I have set as a default for this operating system" in the webbrowser preferences. Set opera to the "operating system default". Click on link. tata. Nothing happens. Fun, a preference, which doesn't work.

Ok, I'm nice, I debug this. Using ProcMon from Sysinternals, I get this:

[more successful (!) trys to get the Browser value]
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","RegQueryKey","HKCR\https\shell\open\command","SUCCESS","Query: Name"
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","RegOpenKey","HKCU\Software\Classes\https\shell\open\command","NAME NOT FOUND","Desired Access: Maximum Allowed"
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","RegQueryValue","HKCR\https\shell\open\command\(Default)","SUCCESS","Type: REG_SZ, Length: 62, Data: ""C:\Programme\Opera\opera.exe"""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","RegCloseKey","HKCR\https\shell\open\command","SUCCESS",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\Programme\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp\eclipse\plugins\com.ibm.rcp.j2se.win32.x86_1.6.0.20090219c-200906101703\jre\bin\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\Programme\IBM\Lotus\Notes\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\WINDOWS\system32\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\WINDOWS\system\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\WINDOWS\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
[more tries to open "null.exe" in %PATH%]
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\Programme\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp\eclipse\plugins\com.ibm.rcp.j2se.win32.x86_1.6.0.20090219c-200906101703\jre\bin\null http:\www.xyz.com/something.nsf/0/id?opendocument.exe","NAME INVALID",""
[and again try this pattern in all %PATH%

This smells like a bug: why isn't notes using the default value in the registry? It looks like Notes is actively searching for Firefox and IE, but discarding everything else. And why is it looking for null.exe in several %path% entries? So I'm a goo citizen and open a IBM PMR and putting in all this information.

What do I get as a reply? A nice standard Mail with "Opera not supported".

WTF?

I won't change my default browser, the productivity hit is just not worth it. Also wouldn't matter, as both IE and FF in current versions are not anymore supported. And:

• Why do you name the preference "default browser of the operating system" if you discard the value and only accept certain values? Why make it extra hard to impossible to use something else? There is a difference between "not supported" and "impossible".
• Why don't you just try to send the link to this value: it's an "operating system default" because every f**** browser (even lynxs et al) understands "browser URL". Especially because you just do that in basic mode.
  
• Why don't you handle the situation, when there is no "default browser" and show an error message? FF3 and IE8 get an Error message, but why not Opera?
  
• (Another question is if it is a proper error message if it says "Unable to locate program" like it currently does when I switch to FF3.5/IE8 as default...) 
• Why do you code like this and make it impossible to use current (or at the time of coding: future) browsers?
  
• Why do you search for "null.exe" in the complete system %path%? Imagine someone places a 'del /s /f "%USERPROFILE%"' in such a file... And every user can change the default browser and also the %PATH% values...
  
• Why does the IBM Support only read "opera" and pastes it's default "not supported" text instead of reading the complete PMR and the "null.exe" problem?

Thank you IBM, for giving me another reason to stay with the basic client.

Can someone please tell me this is fixed in 8.5(.1)? Or that someone at IBM makes sure that this will get fixed? And please also in the 8.0.x stream?

Kind regards,

Jan, looking into how to exploit the null.exe to do the right thing...

So, my first days and weeks with eProductivity are gone and here are some impressions:

The Installation gave some hickups because of some errors while replacing the design, but replacing the design on the server (convert -u ) fixed that in the end. Could be related to my frequent changes (ONTF ME releases, Mail8, etc) of the template and having editor access normaly. But this let my discover some really great thing: the support done by the eProductivity Team. The response times to my installation problems were hours and I don't even pay for the license! Thanks to Ian Armstrong and Eric Mack for this great service!


The menu entry "Send Feedback" (opens a dialog, which asks some basic questions -> bug, feature requests, general feedback) is a great idea for such a product! (They might have some different thoughts after my frequent uses of them, though :-) ) Finally some easy way to get in contact with the developers. At least with me it encouraged me to send small things, which I noticed and wouldn't normally bother about, back to the developers. There is also the eProductivty ideajam which I discovered after some nagging from Eric Mack.

Learning my way around the application was easy after the "tutorial" but costumizing to to my needs was an interesting experience: most of my Todos are "@Computer" and after adding my first todos I only added to that context. I finaly settled on several "roles", which I have, when using the computer (as student, as member of my student organisation, as notes programmer), which at least spread that out a bit and made my todos more organiced, at least to me.

I also started using it as a project management tool for my small projects (so no time plans, only splitting it up into projects). This feels great because finally I've found some way to bring my planing together with my computer and in a way, which does feel natural and not "getting in the way". Before that was either some paper based planning or email/notepad/mindmanger based docs, which got old after the initial planing. If I only had this when I started my diploma thesis... :-)

I also got to inbox zero for the first time in years (although there were never more than two pages full of mails). Yay!

I'm still not sure if I use eProductivity how it was thought to be: using GTD methodology (I started reading some ressource about it). But the greatest thing which eProductivity did for me after only a week was giving me a feeling, that I'm in control of my tasks and that I have one system, where everything comes together. And in the end it is about "getting things done" and that's what this feels like!  :-)

Do you use Sametime Connect 8? Need some Space in C:? Look into C:\<documents>\<username>\<Appdata>\Lotus\Sametime\logs, I had about 10 really big (100+ MB) files in there.

Also another great find: *.msi files in <appdata>\*\backup and so on...

Yikes...

Treesize is a really great tool to find such things (portable too!)

That's at least the impression I get after reading all the blog postings about xPages and the new 8.5.1 client. Forms, Pages and so on are out and the future UI will be done in xPages for both the notes client and web.

(Disclaimer: I've not yet seen the new DDE and xPages as a design element and also not the 8.5.1 closed beta with client side xPages)

I'm in two minds about this development. My only impression of xPages are the webpages, which came to life in the last month and I find them horrible from a technical viewpoint: no valid HTML, no accessible build in, wastefull source code, JavaScript is needed to get basic functionality. Bah! Thats not one step backward in web development, but several miles in my opinion. Something like replacing something horrible with something new and then only getting half the way and getting the buggy alpha version (=80s html coding with tables and without css) instead of something state of the art (clean css layouts, progressive enhancement, accessible).

On the other hand I'm currently trying to build a translated web 2.0 UI for the notes client and that's a pain. You need one hack after another to get the experience right, some things simple don't work, (re)styling the whole UI is tedious at best (even with CSS or tools like NotesHound or Ytrias suite) and you get a lot of "strange" behaviour (or bugs? I'm too tired to reproduce and report all the small things along I discovered while playing with @Elements in HideWhen and uidoc.refresh from "on event postsave" of another document. First would be that the debugger only "sees" one opened doc...). Even translated GUIs are a big hack and not every element is translatable (the "subaction"-action in the action bar always shows the name, not the label -> looks like a bug; View lables not at all, buttons only by using Client JavaScript).

So getting a new, clean and probably proven development model and interface (I guess, that a browser is used to display client side xPages and not another GUI interpreter) is a good thing, even if I would need to start from zero again with Notes development.

Another good thing is, that this way a "hip" technology gets into notes development: web-development with html, css and javascript. This will lower the entry barrier for new developers coming from that direction, which is especially important for my (student) organisation with new people every two years: now someone with some web developer experience can hack together some new feature without getting to learn a complete new technology (and note sis new, because there is no "personal" use for notes). With some luck they wouldn't even need to code twice, as xPages should work the same in the web and in the client.

And it still go all the great technologies like security build in, replication, ... just with new, better and fresh UIs, which do not look like last century anymore. Finally a wiki in the client! Yay! So one reason less to complain about Notes :-)

So I think, that xPages and SSJS will replace LS and all the "old style" design elements or at least put them into deep maintainance mode. Which is itself the second negative point: I don't believe that all the bugs and shortcomings in the old style design elements will be fixed and so the only way going forward is redoing it all in xPages.

But overall I thing that xPages are great news for lotus notes: it gets rids of the weak point while keeping the strong points.

If the resulting html-code wouldn't be so "old style". Please, IBM, fix that! And you, dear reader, go vote on that :-)