Personal and Professional Organization

Artifact 1 Mind Sweep

Concept & Illustrating Artifacts

A critical component of a Principal Software Engineer is personal organization. I need an excellent command at organizing information. As a highly technical contributor working on high-leverage tasks within an engineering organization, I will receive a high volume of complex information from various sources. Within the first module of our course, we focus on the critically acclaimed method of getting-things-done (GTD) by David Allen. The actual technique of GTD is beyond what we could cover in the class, we skip over a few pre-requisite topics of Defining our purpose and principles, and Outcome visioning. Instead, our exercise is in Brainstorming part of the natural project planning process. The mind sweep is an exercise where a facilitator reads out words from a variety of different concerns within our lives, and the exercise is to write down without judgement, different tasks or project ideas that for one reason or another you keep forgetting are a priority. This process continues for a period of about 15 minutes where the participant attempts to capture all projects that are holding our attention.

After the mind sweep exercise, we have a list of ideas that we need to Organize. In the GTD method there is a very simple model for task organization, we can store our tasks in a few different places like a Next Action list, Someday Maybe, or a Waiting For list. There are other areas too like a variety of Context lists, for example I may have one called Boss – One on One and it's a contextual list of tasks or projects that I want to discuss with my boss during a one on one.

Reflection on how this knowledge and skills will help you become a good leader

This is the extent of the mind weep assignment from this class, however the fundamental concept that is critical for my career goal of becoming a principal engineer extends beyond this. Task management is a critical skill, it is often a challenge if I am trying track a dozen or so conversations and small one-off ad-hoc requests at work, having a system like GTD is critical to continue to advance my career. I think GTD is a good system, however I have already started to grow beyond this one system, task management is one component of a concept that I would consider knowledge management. There is a concept known as the Zettelkasten Method. The way I view GTD is task management, and task management is a subset of knowledge management. This entire term I have been trying to organize my notes and tasks using an open-source tool called Logseq. Logseq has within it functionality for doing task management, so one could say I have implemented GTD within Logseq and the Zettelkasten method.

As an example of the benefit of a knowledge management technique refer to my knowledge graph from this term. As I'm taking notes and action items, I'm iteratively building out a knowledge graph that I can refer to later. I believe I am reaping the benefits of the personal organization concepts taught in module 1 through this example.

Plan for getting there

I want to continue to use Logseq and the Zettelkasten method to really become an expert at knowledge management concepts. I think this expertise will come with consistent practice, so my goal is to daily have the tool open and capture my notes and tasks.

fig 1. LogSeq task management module where I exercised the GTD method throughout the term to track my tasks.

fig 2. LogSeq graph functionality that shows the structure of the knowledge I have gained over this semester following the zettlekasten method.

Artifact 2 Personal Email Evaluation

Concept & Illustrating Artifacts

We extend the concept of personal organization to professional organization especially in a workplace when the content being organized is collaborative with other individuals. Email is the premiere example of collaborative knowledge in the digital age and therefore we can start our focus with reviewing our organization and approach to email. We can apply the teachings from David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methods to email. In GTD, Allen suggests that we should strive for zero-inbox a goal state where there are no emails left in our inbox. Email is an inbox our goal should be to empty it, but Allen draws a distinction between emptying the inbox and taking all required action within the emails. There is an organization technique where we can separate organizing our inbox and the result will be zero-inbox.

The technique that Allen describes to achieve a zero-inbox is as follows. Delete emails that we don't need, complete any action on an email if you can do so within two minutes. The remaining emails that need to be filed then fall into two categories, emails that require action from me, or emails where I'm waiting for someone or something else to proceed. Here we introduce the GTD folders like @Action, @WaitingFor, and @Context_Topic.

I did follow this process for both my personal and school emails and have achieved zero-inbox

fig 3. personal and school email achieving zero-inbox.

Reflection on how this knowledge and skills will help you become a good leader

Personally, I have extended my email organization beyond zero-inbox. I have devised a system where I can actually block individual senders from contacting me which will protect me from identity theft and spam if my email address is leaked. I have a technique where I leverage email-aliases to give each contact a unique email address to contact me. If a party leaks my email address, I can delete that specific email address, and my inbox will remain clean. I can't realistically apply this approach professionally; however, this is illustrative of the lengths I will go to maintain knowledge hygiene.

fig 4. personal email alias system to mitigate spam email and have better control over how systems can contact me.

In the workplace emails represent people discussing projects. Being responsive to emails where I need to act is critical while approaching the role of Principal Engineer. When someone is requesting my assistance through email I should respond within a timely fashion. I already have a personal goal of responding to any email directed toward me within the same business day and I wish to continue this process going forward. It would be great if I could achieve and maintain zero-inbox professionally.

Plan for getting there

Professionally I have a few unique challenges achieving inbox-zero. The first challenge is automated emails, automated systems can sometimes spam many emails and it's a challenge to deal with. The technique I have always used was to have a rule in outlook that determines the sender or subject line and moves those emails to a particular folder. In our course discussion a classmate gave me an alternative idea that I plan to implement, instead of simply moving these emails to another folder I should have the rule deleting the email. I ignore most of these emails anyway so there is no value in them slowing down my email client. This idea also is congruent with Allen's idea from "Getting Email" a course reading "The ease with which we trash things from our physical mail doesn't seem to translate to the computer for many people".

The next challenge I have in achieving zero-inbox is the volume of emails I do receive professional is large, and even if in the moment I don’t think they are valuable sometimes in the long term they are critical to go back and refer to, to address this I can at least do a better job of filing emails by topic and otherwise archiving potentially useful information into my Zettelkasten knowledge management system.