I perform better while drinking out of a coconut.

Closing out the week is less arduous than it felt last time around. I feel more fresh than last week, despite (or, because of?) more booze being drank this week than last. I did get a full 8 hours of sleep last night, and I’ve gotta say, I’m at a point in my life where I really appreciate sleep. It’s the best.

Today I get my first evaluation from my boss. The timing is pretty good, Nutanix is ready for production as of yesterday and that’s one of my deliverables for the year. There is one more interim evaluation some time in July or August and then the final evaluation in November. I feel like this could put me in a great mood for the weekend, if nothing else. I want to be told I’m on the right track so far. I think that might just happen.

I finished reading Time Management for System Administrators yesterday on the train, hence the no new articles. All in all, I’m not terribly impressed. I thought it was going to be a GTD clone, but it doesn’t do any of the things GTD does as effectively. It boils down to “capture everything, and make a new schedule every day with all the stuff you have to do, then prioritize each item and estimate how long it will take.” The problem with the second half of that is that it doesn’t solve the problem the book set out to do. Limoncelli mentions “The list of doom,” which is a book where you write your tasks in and cross them out when they’re done, and eventually you end up with open issues scattered throughout the book. So instead, you’re to build the list up every day, rewriting the same junk every morning until it’s completed. Also, he wants you to set a finite amount of time aside for “distractions” and tickets. If I knew that yesterday’s distraction would keep me busy from 10 to 3, I’d have planned my day differently. He also suggests writing scripts and programs to automate things. I don’t think the target market really needed to be told about the potential for automation in their job.

I can’t recommend the book.

In honor of it being both Earth Day and Read-Only Friday…

Diana and I are trying out the Wunderlist app, there’s always an awkward wait at the end of the day when she’s asking if I need anything from the store and I’m busy trying to get on the train and might miss the message entirely. With a shared list, there shouldn’t be any need for such a wait.

We’re supposed to get to pilot Google Apps very soon for possible deployment to the agency. I’m pretty excited about that, between the collaborative editing tools, hangouts, and an IM platform we can standardize on, it’s got a lot to recommend for it. It would be awfully nice if we could leverage some of that stuff. I don’t really want to set up an IRC daemon on the network. Well, I do, but I don’t want to have it be the option for people outside of the IT department.

Here’s to a quality Read-Only Friday, everyone. Get some documentation in, testlab some new ideas, and try not to make too much work for yourself.