Jimmy Z

As a manager, I have often found myself at the end of the day having not accomplished anything except having responded to emails. This has felt really frustrating because there are other things that my team and my boss expect me to do.

I’ve recently discovered a FREE e-book called Focus which has some very useful tips on how to avoid the above scenario.

Some of the the insights that I’ve gleaned from this book so far include:

• It’s okay to turn off your email, chat clients, etc. — my responses don’t need to be as real-time as I think they do.
• A lot of my fears around recourse if I don’t respond to e-mail immediately are unfounded.
• Distractions are okay, as long as they are planned.
• The need to stay connected with the constant streams of communication (E-Mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is an addiction.
• There are tools that I can install on my computer to help me avoid distractions during focus times.
• Disconnecting and truly being “home” after work will really help me live a more fulfilling life. I have already found this to be true.
• I get more done if I focus on one thing at a time, rather than hop between the constant streams of interruptions.

I’m about half-way through Focus. I’ll likely be posting more on this as I find more interesting things in the book.

I’ve recently become a manager, which has brought with it a lot of new responsibilities and challenges. I didn’t aspire for the position and I had mixed feelings of letting go of my other responsibilities, but ultimately I welcomed the opportunity.

One thing that has helped me in my new role is the concept of managing process and leading people. Over the past year or so, Brian Corrales and I had been helping the team transition into an Agile software/project management style. We’ve been using Scrum to help us manage backlogs of stories to be completed, track our progress, stay transparent with stakeholders, and deliver early and often.

Our version of Scrum looks a bit different than in other parts of the organization, but it has come from iterative team retrospective. At the end of each sprint, we reevaluate what went well, what didn’t go well, and what we’d like to try during the next sprint to improve. A lot of the “Try” categories have evolved around the processes that we’ve put in place to implement Scrum on our team: for opening up communication, delivering more consistently, estimating better, etc.

At this point, I feel like I have an okay handle on managing process. There are still processes that I’m hoping to improve, such as the way we test and document our products, etc. but those will come gradually over time as we continue to put emphasis on those things and work them more tightly into our team culture.

I’m looking for ways to improve my leadership on the team. I feel like the team is responsive to me, my requests, and guidance, but I’m looking for ways to improve this. I’ve been trying to hold good one-on-ones with my team members, which I believe has been extremely helpful, but I’m continuing to look for more guidance/help.

I’m awake 30 minutes earlier than usual, and I’m trying to figure out what to do with that extra time. I decided that I’m going to try to make this a habit, so I want to make sure that I’m taking advantage of the time and making the best of that extra 30 min. Here’s my brainstorm of things I’ve been wanting to do:

• Write more – blog or early morning “thoughts” notebook
• Coding – I have so many projects floating around in my head that I’d like to work on
• Work hours – getting more work hours in on my second job so I don’t have to cram at the end of the month
• Exercise – make sure I’m getting enough exercise to stay healthy (stomach/core exercises especially)
• Read – I’ve got some books I’ve been wanting to finish for a long time (Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Focus, the management books I’m borrowing from Penney)
• Study scriptures – I usually do my scripture study at night, right before going to bed, but I usually fall asleep a ton while doing this.

Perhaps this month, I’ll make it a goal to focus on one of these things. I’ll probably start with writing.

This is my first post to my blog via the WordPress app for Android. So far, it seems to be a nice app, but I wish it had an undo feature as you are inputting the text because I accidentally selected all of the post text and hit a letter on the virtual keyboard which blew away the entire post.

At times I feel like I’m in the Ellen iPhone commercial. I find myself having a bunch of oops moments. Today I accidentally called somebody unintentionally just because I was holding the phone while it was unlocked.

Anyways, I like my new phone so far.

I’m working on a web application outside of my FamilySearch work that requires a lot of AJAX behavior. I have been using Prototype with Rails’ Prototype Helpers, but this is beginning to become a unwieldy.

The content I load can get very large with TONS of inline JavaScript, so in an effort to trim down the html and improve performance, I’m beginning to use Unobtrusive JavaScript methods. While I do this, I’m also doing a migration to jQuery.

I had seen a lot of code examples that looked like this:

jQuery(function($) {
  $('a.sidenote').click(function() {
    var href = $(this).attr('href');
    window.open(href, 'popup',
      'height=500,width=400,toolbar=no');
    return false;
  });
});

This seemed to work for event listening on elements that were loaded as the page loads, but I have lots of content that is loaded via AJAX methods after the document loads. I needed something that would bind the listeners not only at the time the document loaded, but would continue to bind event listeners to new content that matched the given selectors.

I later discovered the “live” method. This does exactly what I want it to do. Instead of just registering a click, I call live, so the above example would change to:

jQuery(function($) {
  $('a.sidenote').live('click',function() {
    var href = $(this).attr('href');
    window.open(href, 'popup',
      'height=500,width=400,toolbar=no');
    return false;
  });
});

This doesn’t require a big change in code, but the approach is much more powerful and truly allows you to make your JavaScript unobtrusive.

This is my list of genealogy industry people I follow in Twitter:

• Ancestrydotcom – Ancestry.com
• geni – Geni.com
• familylink – FamilyLink.com
• paulballen – CEO FamilyLink.com
• snickle22 – President of FamilyLink.com
• jkericson – FamilyLink.com
• Yvette_Arts – FamilyLink.com
• whitter1 – FamilyLink.com
• amyrhoads – FamilyLink.com
• radpace – FamilyLink.com
• DavidLifferth – Former President at FamilyLink.com
• rootsmagic – RootsMagic.com
• jslade – Yology.org – Ruby
• illyadaddezio – LiveRoots.com
• hikari17 – CEO/President Genlighten.com
• onegreatfamily – OneGreatFamily.com
• footnote – Footnote.com
• chriswillis – VP of Social Media at Footnote.com
• ellisisland – The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation
• MyHeritage – MyHeritage.com
• runsinmyfamily – ItRunsInMyFamily.com
• ChuckAtLegacy – Legacy.com
• yology – @jslade’s Open Source genealogy tools
• seanomalone – GM of MyFamily.com
• TomKemp – GenealogyBank.com
• familyforest – FamilyForest.com
• lmonson – FamilySearch.org
• eatslikeahuman – FamilySearch.org
• RobertRaymondUT – FamilySearch.org
• fewill – FamilySearch.org
• jimmyzimmerman – FamilySearch.org (me)

Genealogists:

• dickeastman – Genealogy Blogger
• marktucker – Genealogy and Tech
• TamuraJones – Technology and Genealogy
• megansmolenyak
• DNAgenealogy
• geneabloggers
• tracingthetribe
• rjseaver
• footnoteMaven
• kidmiff
• mytwigs
• WollemiPine
• Familytreeman
• LisaCooke
• danlynch – Google Your Family Tree Author
• GetGenInfo
• littlebyteslife
• brophy123
• GenealgyFlow
• Landailyn

Do you know of anyone else I should be following? Please comment.

[Update 3-17-2009]

Individuals and companies listed here were discovered largely from browsing “Follow” and “Follower” lists throughout the Twitter network; and by identifying individuals that I have worked for (paulballen), associated with via the FamilySearch Developers Network, or met during various family history conferences. I also subscribe to a #genealogy hash-tag feed to find other individuals that post about genealogy.

Some Twitter profiles were discovered from TamuraJones‘ “Follow List” based on the following tip: http://twitter.com/TamuraJones/status/1124553358

I started using Twitter on the 25th of November, 2008. Before then, I thought Twitter was an immense waste of time. I finally saw the light, joined, and have become a huge fan.

Here are a few things I did to help me get hooked on Twitter.

1. Used the Gmail address book finder from the “Find People” link at the top. This helped me connect quickly with about 15 friends I didn’t even know used Twitter.

2. Found more friends to follow by exploring my friends’ “Following” lists.

3. Installed TweetDeck and Twitterberry. TweetDeck makes posting updates to your timeline really easy. It also has a handy URL shortener and gives you fast Desktop notification of your friends’ updates. Twitterberry allows you to easily give updates while you are on the go without needing to use SMS.

4. Began tracking my links with Tr.im. Tr.im is a link shortening service that will give you click stats on all of the links you post. These numbers will begin to show you the power of Twitter as a broadcast medium. Think nobody is listening because they don’t reply? Tr.im will show you that people actually do care about what you post.

5. Began posting regularly, although I still go through dry spells at time.

Hopefully this post will help other Twitter newbies more effectively use Twitter.

What have you done to get hooked on Twitter?

Any WordPress plug-ins I should be aware of? Other tools?