I just launched PicoWiki, a simple hosted wiki for users of smartphones, including the iPhone, iPod Touch and Blackberry. It’s pretty simple, but that’s what you want with a phone. I started using it for all my notes. I can edit them in any browser so I do most of my editing at the computer, but I love the fact that I can access and edit the wiki from my iPhone or my Blackberry (yes, I am a gadget-freak and I have both).

I use it for all my notes, my diary, and for GTD. My project lists with next actions and inbox are pages of the wiki.

The site is at http://www.picowiki.com

It’s currently supported manually and the service is donationware.

(note: I automated account creation today, so it’s no longer manually managed. Whew!)

I used to spend a few hours a day dealing with email. I’d get about 200-300 emails a day. There was a lot of spam. I installed a spam filter, and that helped a lot, but about 25-50 clever new spammers slipped past my defenses each day. I could delete them quickly, in just seconds per email, so I did. But then I began to realize how much of my attention they were diverting.

A full in-box is a horrid thing. It’s depressing. As fun as it is to delete half of the messages as spam, it’s a distraction. So I did this: rather than spend 2 seconds deleting a spam message, I resolved to never delete one again. Instead, I’d spend 10 seconds creating a filter to ensure that I’d never get that piece of spam again. Then, I’d let the new filter delete the message. Within two weeks, my inbox spam went from 50 a day to 1 or 2 a week. It’s very refreshing to open my email and see only things I actually have to deal with.

Now, let’s take that lesson a step further. . .

Lifespam

My work life was full of distractions. I call them lifespam. Those are all the little things you don’t budget time for but that you find you have to do anyway. A client emails asking for a budget update. You have to answer. Your boss asks for a copy of last month’s expense report. You have to give it to her. Or do you?

So, here I was with no spam in my inbox, but still getting 50-100 requests that I do little things. Read an article, find a report, look up some figures, reset a password, etc. I started applying the same spam filtering technique that worked on email spam to such lifespam.

When I get a request for anything, via email or by phone, I no longer simply make it go away by doing it. I first ask,

Does this need to be done? If not, delete.

Does it need to be done now? If not, postpone (I have a folder for stuff to get around to at my convenience, like sites to read or technologies to research).

If it needs to be done now, am I the only person who can do it? If no, delegate.

Finally:

can I automate a process that keeps me from ever getting this request from anyone again?

That might mean taking the time to teach someone else to do it and then letting it be known that Stan is from now on the keeper of all expense reports. Or it might mean adding a piece of data to the weekly project reports my assistant prepares (like total billed to date), so no one ever asks me about that again.

Two months since I started doing that, my inbox is easy to empty. I get between 2 and 10 emails a day. They are all interesting and important. I can deal with every last one in half an hour or less per day. I do that from noon to 12:30 every day. A quick skim at 4:00 lets me know if anything urgent has turned up in the afternoon.

You can’t imagine the impact that has had on my productivity. I used to plan to do eight hours of work each day, but only do four hours of work and four hours of lifespam. Now, I plan to do seven hours of work a day and I do it all. I’m twice as effective and far more satisfied at the end of the day. My clients are more happy; my employees are more happy. Things get done.

This approach was inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and by Timothy Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. Thanks to both of them for their life-saving ideas.

I’ve been thinking about how anybody who has a job that bills hourly can aspire to the ideal of Timmothy Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek. I’d like to hear what readers think. Leave your ideas in the comments. I’ve  got some ideas of my own, which I’ll write about in next week’s post.

by Paul Klipp

copyright 2007

I’ve read Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek with enthusiasm. I’m lucky to be in a job I love, but I am rather tied to my office and I wouldn’t mind seeing that change. There are many ways that project managers can work remotely and utilize the ideas presented in this book, and most of them have to do with agile development. How’s that for a segue to my blog topic?

I recently worked from Rabka, Poland for a week and my clients were none the wiser. I could never have done this in my early days before I discovered agile development, because most of my time was spent in crisis management. Clients had to be able to reach me at any time and I had to be ready to bound into a programmer’s office or cube and demand explanations or promises. Now, however, all that is in the past, because my customers are always happy.

What makes customers of software upset? Missed deadlines and buggy code are annoying, but that’s not what really causes problems with client satisfaction in my experience. A customer gets annoyed when a deadline slips, but it’s uncertainty and helplessness that make them mad. When a client is mad, they demand, and deserve, immediate action. Immediate action is the anathema to working from the Canary Islands.

Agile projects keep clients from getting mad in two important ways. They avoid uncertainty by involving the client in daily scrums and giving them access to the actual developers. The client knows what’s happening all the time, and that takes a huge weight off. When something does go wrong, the client knows why, what’s being done about it, and most importantly, that it’s well in hand. Contact and collaboration build trust. If the client knows you and your team, and has worked closely with you when all was well, then when a problem arises they are far less likely to assume it’s your fault and worry that your team isn’t competent to deal with it.

I’ve seen many projects and many problems and it amazes me to have to say this, but it’s so often overlooked that I’ll write the obvious. A client who speaks to the team daily is very unlikely to get angry no matter what’s happening in the project because they know and trust the team. I have had some really significant surprises and setbacks on agile projects that have disappointed a client, but never one that angers a client. On the other hand, I have seen clients angry about a project that’s going just fine, but they are mad because no one’s told them that and they’ve been sitting in their office for days getting worked up and fearing the worst.

So, step one to escaping the office is to keep clients happy through regular conversation. If you talk to clients daily, you’ll almost never have to drop everything to respond to an artificial emergency. I’d rather call a client and talk for ten minutes every day, at times I choose, then have to spend an hour responding to emails and inquiries that come out of the blue.

Lesson one for reducing your ties to the office is keep in touch with your team and clients daily and watch your email and voicemail in-boxes empty themselves. Two years ago I had 100-300 emails a day. Now I get about half a dozen and respond to them in less than an hour. I spend one hour a day on the phone to clients, and less than an hour dealing with my email. Before I changed development practices I spent more like four hours a day on email and two to four hours a day taking calls. I almost never take calls now. My phone doesn’t ring. Why? Because all my clients know to expect a call from me and they know when it will be.

Can you imagine how much more time and attention I can give to projects when I don’t get email and my phone doesn’t ring? Yes, 100% of my time is spent on team development and keeping projects running smoothly, and all at the cost of a handful of short, sweet, friendly phone calls a day.

Extrapolate that out a bit and you’ll see how a PM could spend less than an hour a day on their cell phone (or in their hotel room using cheap calling cards from callingcards.com) and an hour on the internet at the cafe, and the rest of the day on the beach. At intervals, you’d still have to engage in iteration planning sessions, but those can be predicted and planned for. It is possible to manage half a dozen projects in two hours a day, only coming to the office a couple of times a month for planning games and retrospectives.

This is an extreme story, and the 4-hour workweek is not really intended for full-time project managers, but the mere fact that it’s possible should give readers cause for reflection. How do you spend your time at work? How many phone calls do you get a day? How often are you in crisis mode?

In my next posts I’ll write more about how agile project managers can get closer to the ideal of the The 4-Hour Workweek.