Writing like a fiend

It may not look like I'm blogging here all that religiously, but I am writing like a fiend these days. It's a productivity habit I picked up last year; I keep journals of most/all conversations and meetings during the business day, sort of like a blog for myself. This began a few years ago, as my contact management database was getting bloated from all of the conversations and meetings I was recording there. For folks I deal with on a regular basis, I needed to move those longer journal entries to something separate ... as long as I could still easily work with the embedded information ...

There are two important tools I use to make this work:

• MS Word: A huge productivity boost comes from the spell checker, making many corrections automatically as I type. My typing accuracy skyrockets when I use Word (too bad I'm having trouble getting the Blogger add-in to work). Also, I wrote (ok, recorded!) a simple little macro to add a date stamp, so each day's notes has a nice identifier.
• Copernic desktop search: This is where it really pays off, when I need to recall any conversation I've had in regard to a general topic. I just use Copernic to search all old documents; it's also going through presentations, old emails, everything. A mini-Google that reminds me of every snippet / contact / chunk of information I've captured over the years on this topic.

Some blogging concepts work for my "personal blog" efforts; things are captured in diary / journal entries format with date stamps, generally written as a report / note to myself, stuff like that. Keyword tagging is not really relevant, because of the full text search of Copernic. One important thing to keep in mind - these are definitely notes for myself; nothing actionable, but some things confidential.

This effort does add overhead to my day - some days, it takes a good hour to catch up on all notes from the day before - but it's really effective way to manage the huge stream of information coming my way. I also leverage this "electronic memory" for conversations with my direct reports - this really makes annual performance evaluations easier (because I remember the good and the bad) and better (because I don't forget the bad and the good).

My somewhat promiscuous electronic publishing output also ties in with my long-established habit of writing monthly status reports; I'm glad/sad I kept this up, because the group I work with now expects weekly status reports (well, at least it's not too big of an adjustment). I've learned over the years that these are best kept to a reasonable length, should not be used for a detailed accounting of every completed task, and get really powerful when we throw in some information / thoughts about what is out there on the project horizon. I'd like to convert the whole internal process to a dark blog, and take advantage of the subscription model for info distribution, but we need to get a few key foundation technologies in place.

There's other writing going on - this morning, I wrote a long email for the guys in my old Fantasy Football league - back in the day, we would write scathing email attacks on each other, part of the whole league experience, and I would liberally borrow from timely CNN articles, changing all the right words to insult as many people in the league that I could. Heck, at this moment, I have three blog posts open and in process - there is a progression of thoughts going on as I'm doing a little surfing, I want to tee them up for posting over the next couple of days, and I've budgeted a nice chunk of time to work on them. One of the benefits of the winter, it's easier to justify staying indoors during the daytime to write; on days like this (sunny and low 80's), I end up sneaking in most of the work at the end of the day ...

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