The Invisible Gorilla
Productivity2023-10-23preparation
In an experiment popularized by the book of the same name, volunteers were told to keep track of how many times a basketball was passed between players. While the ball was being tossed, someone in a gorilla suit walked between them in plain view. Very few people noticed the gorilla because they were so focused on counting the passes. The...
A Better Edit Thanks to WSL
Overview One of the biggest problems I have in wanting to constantly learn new things, is that these learnings sometimes come at the cost of breaking/ruining thins that you’ve previously done that actually work. You learn a new or better way of doing something, like tuning your Apache config file, tweaking a php.in filr or overwriging and index.html file, only...
Running Cron on WSL
Overview So as I begin to teach myself new things such as WSL, the first thing that I always try to do is ensure my work is protected & secured, so as I mess things up (and boy do I..,) my work it’s still protected, making it easy to start over. I’ve created a shell script that I’ve been using...
A Shell Script to Create New Posts for Markdown Blogs
So in the past three months, I’ve been working on converting my my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. Wordpress has so many requirements that I found myself spending all of my spare time managing plugins, interfaces, tables & themes and not writing. In Jekyll, blog posts are managed via Markdown files in a specific directory. Each post has its own...
Building a presentation, pitch or deck
I was once told: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them – Tell them – Then tell them what you’ve told them.” Although this is true, there is so much more to putting together a presentation than just pages in a PowerPoint doc. Most of the steps described below do not involve PowerPoint or any other tool. The steps...
Tracking Performance in Microsoft Project
The ability to measure performance in Microsoft Project is a key element to keeping a project on track. Saving a baseline for a project where your using Microsoft Project is pretty easy to do. but that doesn’t necessarily tell you how on-time tasks are tracking. Although often overused, misused and poorly managed, the concept of “traffic lights” to gauge performance...
Adding Resources to your Project Schedule
Adding resources to your Microsoft Project Schedule the right way can save you time in the long run by making these resources available via email for status and task updates, or for import into Microsoft Project server. Here’s how to do it… From the Task tab, select the View drop down box (which is typically defaulted to “Gantt Chart”): And...
People Need to Finish
The Problem: Every day I’m faced with a new set of things to do, and as a manager, I need to decide who on the team is best to do them. Some things are easy and quick wins, but most are not. Some are area-focused (for example, Business Continuity tasks are given to the Business Continuity manager, and not the...