Entrepreneur Geek

If you haven’t already heard about it, it’s a good time to do so now. Head over to SXSW, and listen to the podcasts that interest you. Here are my picks:

• 12 Values Shaping Technology’s Future
• Web Typography Sucks
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World
• Emerging Social and Technology Trends
• After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration

For more, check out the Technorati tag sxsw.

Solution # 1: Check your emails only twice a day!

Yes, you read it right, “Four Hour” week, not a “Four Day” week. Timothy Ferriss has written a book on how you can work only for four hours a week, yet deliver much more productivity and results. Not all of us may be able to shrink our work weeks to four hours, but the principles he talks about can certainly take off five to fifteen hours off the week, allowing you to do something else you enjoy.

Tim  spoke at SXSW (South by South West) conference, and the whole audio of the session is available for download. Listening to that, I was surprised, curious and inspired. The 80/20 principle was not new, but the technique of elimination or checking emails only twice in the day, was something radical. Tim has a team of MBAs, sitting in Bangalore, doing most of his work, at $4 per hour. He suggests outsourcing everything that’s not profitable for you to do, given your hourly earning rates. Scot Hacker has done a fantastic summary of Tim’s talk. Both the summary and the audio are excellent and recommended to all who want to optimize their work time! Head over to Tim’s blog on how people redesigned their lives, after attending his talk at SXSW!

Over the last 8 years, we have used various systems to manage our software development projects. From paper sheets, to diaries, to home grown task and calendar systems, to activeCollab, to Wikis, to various other things in between. Nothing has worked as desired! As Magnet has grown, we have faced a variety of issues with our project management systems – insufficient or too much details, resistance from the team, chaos once the system has grown etc. So we are setting out (again!) to find out the best project management solution for us. We are tilting towards building our own system, but are looking at various options again to find out what will work best.

• Simple – for the developers, managers, clients, QA, marketing
• Accessible – easy to bring up the app and use it
• Shared – team usage, collaboration, integration with other tools
• Process Adherence – automation as much as possible, workflow templates
• Reminders, Followup – automatic, Escalation
• Email / Thunderbird / Sunbird / iCal Integration

You may be using some project management system. What has your experience been with such? Any recommendations?

Noticed two interesting articles from Sacha Barber on CodeProject.

The first one talks about developing applications using .Net 3.0 and XAML. XAML (pronounced Zammel, as in Camel) is Micorsoft’s language to develop user interfaces in the upcoming Windows Presentation Foundation. To make it simple, imaging XHTML/MXML doing the whole of your operating system UI. The technology is very interesting, and I have been impressed with the work Microsoft has done on it so far. So the article got my attention. Sacha does a good job on explaining how to develop a simple XAML application, using different tools – including the Expression Blend (touted as the Flash killer!)

The second article was about a tool that can generate class diagrams from CLRs. That was quite interesting for me because of two things – one using reflection to find the classes and the structure of the CLR, and two, actually generating a diagram that makes sense out of it. I have seen a number of reflection tools and frankly, it takes a while to get used to them and to actually make sense of the application. AutoDiagrammer makes this job easy.

Good reading for a .Net programmer!

Scott Young wrote about doubling your reading rate. I have tried many practices myself, and they actually make a big difference. I especially liked his 5th point – find your motivation! Over the next five months, I have more than 15 books scheduled to be read, and it’s really important for me to read faster! For anybody who spends a good amount of time reading – emails, sites or books – try these principles out. They work!

via LifeHacker.