Brian "Krow" Aker's Idle Thoughts - How I Work: Brian Aker

Greg, a fellow MySQL'er is visiting for the next couple of days and he mentioned an article he read at the airplane in Fortune called How I Work: Bill Gates. It got me to thinking about how I do my own work.

My days are segmented into three parts. In the evening I talk to people in Russia, in the morning I reserve time for people in Europe, and I work with Americans in the early afternoon. My week starts on Sunday evenings, and I try to go walking or sort my notes from the week on Friday afternoon when the work week for MySQL is tailing off.

Today I use Mail.app on an Apple 15in laptop to handle incoming email. I have filters that have been placed on servers using procmail to squelch the incoming email I get on both my personal and work email account. I carry around a Treo and since I use that a couple of times a day, I need server based filtering, not client based filtering. My client retrieves email only every 30 minutes, I do this to keep email from becoming a distraction. I do leave IM open, but its only a select few that I let communicate with me (though I do really like the fact that our Sales department uses this when they must find me, and they have always been good about no introducing constantly). IM works only because the people around me respect my time.

MySQL is one of the few companies that I have ever used my work email address from, and about 99% of my work mail goes into my work account. I did this to keep my personal email account low on traffic. Today I get around twenty or so personal pieces of email a day, and about two to three hundred pieces of work email. Most email addresses are harvested and stored in Addressbook which I use as a contacts database.

I have too much work email and I will look at fixing that in the next couple of weeks. Both work and personal voice mail is emailed to me so I don't have an answering machine to check, and my personal faxes are sent to my personal email account.

Today when I have an idea it is sent to my Livejournal account. These ideas are then harvested and stored in a database at krow.net that I can search via simple URLs (for instance try bread.krow.net). Only email to Livejournal which is tagged with the keyword "mysql" is sent on to planet.mysql.com, which is the main MySQL aggregator for blogs. This system could use some refining but it works for now.

All calendar data is stored in iCal. New calendar entries that are emailed to me are harvested by Mail.app for iCal usage. Not enough people send calendar entries today, but I am hoping that with the growth of Google Calendaring that this will change. Calendaring for the masses I believe could really change how people manage their time, I think it be one of the greatest enhancements we have seen. It may turn out to be more important then email.

My RSS reader of choice is Newsfire. It has an incredibly clean interface and it saves me hours of time. I do not surf the web, I read RSS.

All of my media is maintained via iTunes. It runs on both my laptop and my MacMini. All but a couple of subscribed feeds go through my MacMini. Today my iPod feeds off my laptop, but I need to switch this so that it instead feeds off my MacMini. The theory is to push all storage of subscribed material through the MacMini so that I will leave have more space on my laptop. My Photo collection is in iPhoto, though I do nothing with it today. Images that I put up on the web I just email to Livejournal and let it handle the hosting.

Note taking on projects, people, and todo's are all done via OmniOutliner. When I need to make a list, it is the program I use. I keep track of weekly reports in it, and design entire projects in it. The one big annoyance I have with it, is its lack of ability to share data with others. This isn't a killer issue, but its damn close some days. At some point if I need to present I just export to Keynote (and BTW I have almost switched to using Pages 100% of the time for word processing, the only real usage I have for MS tools now is Excel).

At MySQL we have a Wiki to share data, but the one we use is rather primitive which annoys me enough that I rarely use it. Edevel spoiled me as a tool, so I find primitive wikis painful to use. Chromatic has been working on it again as of late, I need to sit down with him and see what his plans are.

Today I do not have a whiteboard in my office, which is the first time in the last 15 years. I am hoping that when I move offices in the house in the next two months that I will be able to change this. Its frequently an issue but I just don't have space in the library for one currently.

That is about all, there are a few other minor tools I use, and I am not going into how I develop code (it has not really changed, other then the addition of Valgrind, in a dozen or so years).

Tag, you are it! I would love to hear how others work :)