Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Scoble just mentioned that he'd fallen off the Getting Things Done wagon. This is dangerous. Since I started last march I have never fallen off the wagon. I have been bad about my weekly review of the task list, and I generally add more tasks to my task list then I complete, but I have stuck to it because I know that my life before it was a stressful mess and I want no part of that. I religiously file things at home, use my Brother label maker to label my manila folders, and keep all unprocessed things in my real "inbox" to be dealt with when I have time.
An inbox full of stuff directly correlates to stress. Stress gets in the way of work, AND life. I don't want to be stressed, so I am religious about making sure that my Inbox is fully triaged by the end of every workday. My inbox is by no means ever empty, cause that's IMPOSSIBLE. My inbox always has less then one screen full of emails in Outlook (translation, under 20 messages). Usually I have 5-10. These are just things that are in the queue. They get dealt with and I don't ever stress about them. Because of ClearContext I know that anything important is red, and catches my eye so I know in what order to deal with things.
I have added one valuable tool to my Getting Things Done system, and that's my 21st Century PDA. I love this thing, and I can't begin to explain how it filled a big void in my life. The Moleskine is like the Brother label maker + Manila Files. Because of its simplicity and ease of use, it's a motivation to write things down. Stuff that I used to store on my scratch disk (the brain) and stuff that I always forgot because I wasn't in front of a computer with OneNote or Outlook. It's made me so happy. I feel even more in control of the things I need to do, and I really enjoy knowing that they are all in one little black book.