After my last post I unplugged…completely unplugged…for three months! I did this for several reasons, but the main one was that I felt the noise to signal ratio I was getting from a number of inputs was way too high. I was overloaded with, what turned out to be, primarily meaningless, unactionable information. I’ve also been moving into a new role at my company, and the demands the role has placed on me requires me to be very efficient with my time. Spending my time sifting through information to separate the wheat from the chaff is a luxury I can no longer afford. To that end, I spent the past three months digesting J.D. Meier’s new book Getting Results the Agile Way and coming up with a strategy for making the best use of my time. There are several practices that I’ve come to rely heavily upon:

1. Daily results The goal is to identify three, AND ONLY THREE, important outcomes that you want accomplish in a given day. Often times we try to accomplish more than we can in a given day, leaving us with a feeling of failure. The reality is that we’re simply failing to focus. By limiting our daily scope we can actually get more done.
2. Brain dumps The goal is to factor your thinking from your chatter and reminders. At it’s essence, you simple take anything, and everything that is on your mind and write it down (either to physical or digital format – I prefer OneNote & Evernote). The result is that you relieve yourself of a certain psychic weight that enables you to focus on the important things.

I also hold a daily personal standup meeting. I know it sound a bit silly, but it helps me focus on my priorities for the day. Spending just 10-15 minutes to plan each day has helped me get a better handle on the day’s tasks.

During this three month period I also had the goal of getting a grip on my email. Like many of you I have a number of email accounts. Between my corporate, client, and personal email addresses, I have over 10 accounts to maintain. That can be a lot of information coming from a lot of different directions at the same time. Unfortunately, due to various, client firewall policies, consolidating these accounts into a unified inbox with something like Exchange Web Services {LINK} isn’t an option. I figured the best approach would be to process messages the same way for each account. I also set a standard of having zero emails in my inbox at the end of each day. To accomplish this, I once again turned to J.D. Meier. In case you don’t know who J.D. is, he is a legend within Microsoft for getting things done. The guy is a machine. He multi-tasks better than anyone I’ve seen. Several years ago J.D. wrote a blog entry on the Zen of a Zero Mail. I took his general approach, made some customizations based on personal work style, and applied to each my email accounts. I’m happy to say that as of today I’ve been experiencing the Zen of a Zero mail for a solid two months.

With all of that said, just because I’ve been silent here and other places, doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. I’ve been spending a fair portion of my time getting immersed in Windows Phone 7 development. I have a couple apps that are near completion, and a couple of more that are in the early phases of development. I’ve also been working with J.D. Meier and the Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft on the following projects:

1. Microsoft Developer Guidance Maps. The Microsoft Developer Guidance Maps Project is an effort to create a model and a map of resources for developer guidance. The goal is to simplify as well as better organize and share our catalog of developer guidance resources. We’re using this catalog as a way to model, prototype, and test ways to find, organize, and share developer guidance in a meaningful way. As part of the exercise we’ll be creating and sharing our maps of pointers to useful code samples, how to’s, videos, etc. for the Microsoft application platform.
2. Windows Azure Security Notes. This is a collection of our notes and learnings from exploring the cloud security space and working through Windows Azure security scenarios.

There are also a couple of projects I can’t talk about just yet, but they bring together Microsoft’s cloud and mobile platforms in some very interesting ways. As these projects progress and clients are willing to share a bit more you’ll be the first to know.

I’ve also been busy prepping content for the following presentations I’ll be giving this fall/winter:

1. Heartland Developers Conference
• Silverlight Bootcamp
2. Minnesota Developers Conference
• Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development
• Tablets: The iPad and the Future of Mobile Computing
3. Twin Cities Code Camp 9
• Multi-targeting WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7
• Getting Down with MEF – Silverlight Edition
4. Twin Cities .NET Developer User Group
• Getting Down with MEF
5. Twin Cities Developers Guild
• Getting Down with MEF – Silverlight Edition
6. Twin Cities Cloud Computing User Group
• Windows Azure Security Guidance

(I hope to see you at a least one of these great events).

I’m also working on a screencast series that I’m tentatively calling "Silverlight Sprints". It’s an adaption of my Silverlight Bootcamp class. The goals is to have a series of episodes (no longer than 10 minutes each) that will get you up an running with Silverlight development (both for the desktop and Windows Phone 7). The content and code for the series is complete I just need to sit down and record it.

Finally, I’ve also been asked to co-host this year’s season of the Spaghetti Code podcast with Jeff Brand. The format is going to be different than in seasons past. Each month we’re going to talk about what’s new in the Microsoft development space. Our first episode is up and you can listen to it here. Let me know what you think!

That’s it for now, but they’ll be a lot more coming soon. Stay tuned!