Effective use of travel time

Like so many people today I am a regular commuter spending time on trains and in cars and I try to spend my time productively. My main challenge is that in the morning I feel bright and alert and want to work on projects that I have running (maintaining websites, writing some code, catching up on twitter, blogging and the like) and in the evening I am pretty much good for nothing.. If anything all I can get the motivation to do is watch a TV series (my train commute is not long enough for a movie).. Although I do think that some TV watching is productive as it allows me to converse with the office in the morning (although often about something that was on TV years ago)..

I suppose the questions comes as to why I am writing about this well, I am fully connected most of the time via mobile broadband. Which leave me the question, were does work end and my life begin?


I have yet to work out how I realistically work in the car !

(Images via wikipedia)

The value of consistent direction

I have decided to name this post the value of consistent direction and to be honest I am sure that there are 101 management principles around this. In recent years I think that I have been lucky enough to have a collection of managers who have understood either consciously or unconsciously that in order to make forward progress you need to be consistent in the direction. Without a common and in many cases a singular vision as to what is going to happen and where a project / programme / department / piece of work is going it is never going to get there.

A term that I am going to use and I am sure I am not the first is the 5 year olds playing football.. Namely were-ever the ball is that is where they all run to and this is often dictated by whichever 5 year old kicked the ball last. Without a consistent management approach that gives clear guidance as to a direction then 3 steps forward 2 steps back is the best you are going to get.

I can almost hear the hecklers in the background saying, what about if the direction is wrong. Well I can see that as well, sometimes the initial direction is wrong, however in many case it might be off the bullseye but if it is on the board then go for it!

The arrival of the Netbook

As you may have noticed from a recent lack of blog activity I have recently changed job. The ramifications of this have been less time to blog and also less Internet time. I did make the IPhone leap recently which I was sure at the time would compensate for this change, however I can say that it didn't quite work out. You cannot beat a keyboard!

And so I decided to bite the bullet and get myself a Netbook. At home I have a 3 year old MacBook Pro, which has been one of the best purchases I have ever made, it still works like a dream. After much research I decided to get a Dell Mini 10v, for a number of reasons.. It is one of the cheapest models, it gets good reviews and it can take without to much effort OS X.

After a little delivery trouble (Dell delivered a week early) I got my NetBook on Friday! The first thing that I did was to look at changing the OS to OSX Leopard, which I did on the train on Friday morning.. Not surprisingly I hit troubles and failed to do an install, in order to ensure that I had a machine for the train home I did a quick Ubuntu (9.04) install so that I could have a browser..

To be honest I have really had my eyes opened I am using the Netbook remix and after only a weekend I have decided to stop with Ubuntu on my Netbook.. It just works (ok apart from the jumpy mouse which after a quick look on the forums I found a fix for)..

To get around some of the OSX compatibility challenges I have put my email onto Google mail and will use Google mail on my Netbook and OSX mail on my MacBook Pro. MobileMe account is going to factor as my 'how to move files' and also backup.

For anyone thinking of Ubuntu, give it a try I have been using a Windows machine and found it quite frustrating in terms of performance and general usability. All I want is a machine that gets my running in minutes on the train (Windows took 5 minutes to boot and be usable!), get onto the Web (via mobile broadband) and allow me to browse, mail and watch the occasional movie.

To be honest with the connectivity that is available today I spend the majority of my time in a browser and after a little research I use Firefox in full screen mode and keyboard short cuts!